A Wish Upon Jasmine (3 page)

From the man who had fit a night with her in between all the supermodels he hung out with. Yeah, he probably thought his own tastes had sunk to new depths, didn’t he?
What in the world was I thinking when I slept with
her
?

He’d probably been drunk. God, in that milieu, he might have been drugged.

She hadn’t been. She’d just been…sad. And so eager to grab onto happiness.

Such a stupid, female thing to do, to let that wish for happiness latch onto the nearest hot guy and imagine that happiness was bottled up in him. That all she had to do was rub it a few times to set it free and let it wash all over her.

And yet, for just that night, that happiness had seemed so damn real. Sometimes, even today, if she didn’t pay attention, hope snuck out and she still wanted to believe in that happiness again. Wanted to follow it to France and see if she could wish so hard she could make it come true.

But she was paying attention now, and she shoved that hope down
hard.

“I really think it was the marketers who proved how low people’s tastes can go.”
AOS sent me the brief. I was fresh out of perfume school, and ready to prove myself in a cynical industry that had eaten my father alive. So I did it. And did it so damn well I cemented my reputation forever. Nobody believes I can do anything else. Not even, sometimes, me.
She bared her teeth at him. “
I
was making a little industry commentary.”

“Congratulations. The industry is suitably destroyed.”

Temper flared. Why was she letting him get away with this? She was a perfumer, an
artiste.
He was a moneyman.
She
was supposed to be looking down on
him.

“At least I don’t kick kittens into traffic if I need to, to expand my family’s business empire.”

His face closed immediately. He stepped back from her, with a tight curve to those fine sensual lips. “Only puppies and baby strollers. I draw the line at kittens.”

She wished his eyes matched that ironic expression. That they didn’t keep flickering over her and searching her face, as if he couldn’t forget what she looked like when he was making her come.

God.

Suddenly she hated everything about the way men and women worked, that no matter how much a woman might try to fight it, somehow it remained true: he had been inside her body, but she hadn’t been inside
his.
No matter what now, no matter where, whenever they met, he would always look at her and think about the ways he had owned her, taken her, and she would never, ever own any part of
him.

She folded her arms. “You know, you can go back into your bottle.”

“What?” He blinked.

She reached out again to take the
amandes
bottle from him. His hands tightened on it, the edge of his fingers pressing against hers. “Now that we each know who we really are, I would like you to hand my property back to me and leave. I own this place now.” A space. A magic. Something that had lasted for centuries. Something that could be
hers.
As long as she held on tight to it. “Which means that, contrary to what you Rosiers like to assume, you can’t possibly.”

Their eyes locked a long moment. “You don’t think we have anything else to catch up about?”

What, was he bored and thinking another quick lay would be fun?

“
No,
” she said between her teeth, her own lip curling in revulsion. He could take that disdain and arrogance and shove them where the sun didn’t shine.

His lips pressed tight together, and it was ridiculous how that hard line emphasized their sensuality. All the things that mouth could be disciplined to do. The scent of bitter almonds rose between them like a physical force, a battle of wills. The glass curved cool under her hands, his warm, taut fingers pressed against hers...

“As you wish,” he said finally, with that gorgeously sensual-on-crisp accent of his that seemed to reach right into all her pink parts and tickle them unmercifully. With a tiny ghost of a bow, he loosed the jar, turned around, and walked out.

Wait. “That did not count as one of my wishes!”

He paused at the doorway and glanced back, his eyebrows raised again. His gaze skated up and down her body once, leaving her head to toe in flame. With a shake of his head, he was gone.

“Tante Colette.” Damien paced, which was a damn hard thing to do in that garden. The August sun of Provence warmed it all through, so that even the great medieval walls could not keep it cool, and bees buzzed in rosemary and lavender and every other possible herb a ninety-six-year-old woman could grow in her garden in Provence, the heat releasing the familiar blend of scents into the air.

His family was always doing that to him. Surrounding him with silk and scent and sensory pleasure and expecting him to be the hard one, the merciless one, the one silk slid right off without touching. He made a sharp motion of his hand, trying to slash that warm scented air away from him, but it only waved the scent of bitter almond into the mix. He couldn’t get that almond scent off him.

Idiot. You didn’t even try.
He stopped under the fig tree and stared up at the big brown fruit, just splitting to allow its red richness to peek out. He smelled like the damn Feast of Kings. Like somebody should combine him with those figs and make a tart out of him.

“Did you have something to say, Damien?” Tante Colette asked coolly from her stool in front of the jasmine growing up one wall. Ninety-six, and she was weeding.

They’d tried
to do the weeding themselves, but Tante Colette had kept weeding anyway. Until they finally realized that by doing too much of her gardening for her, they were stealing something essential to her happiness. She was exactly like Pépé, their grandfather, who needed to be present at the harvests, who did not want, while living, to yield all the usefulness of his life into younger hands.

Damien hardened his heart. That was his heart’s job, right? To stay hard. Untouchable. Every member of a big family had to make his niche for himself, and ruthlessness was his. “Yes. You’ve crossed the line here, Tante Colette. You gave away
Laurianne’s old shop
? To the perfumer who made
Spoiled Brat
?” He knew he was supposed to be the cousin who only cared about money and the bottom line, but, God…Spoiled Brat. It made his skin cringe.

“She came?” A leap of light in those old eyes.

“What is she, another of Léo Dubois’s descendants? Or did you decide to give away our heritage to every descendant of every child you rescued during the war, or…what the actual hell?”

Tante Colette’s brow wrinkled still more. “And…
you
were the one to discover her first? Not Tristan?”

Damien stiffened, his chest tightening around his heart to keep it still, that old, ulcerous knot lodging in his belly. “Tristan?” His matchmaking aunt had planned Jess for Tristan?

Who, by the way, had a fit and died every time Spoiled Brat was even mentioned.

“Well, I just thought…” Tante Colette searched his face, perplexed. “She seems so…soft for you. At least in her photos.”

Damien wasn’t his cousin Matt. He didn’t have a soft heart, and he didn’t need to cover it with folded arms and growls as if it was vulnerable when it clearly wasn’t. But sometimes it hurt anyway, as if his family had stabbed him in it, and he couldn’t even explain why. “Soft for me?”

Maybe she’d thought so, too. That he was too hard for her, too cold, something. He’d thought…well, yes, that she was all softness and he was all hardness, that night. But it hadn’t been a
bad
hard, had it? It hadn’t felt that way to him—hot and eager and hungry hardness and wondering, at how much she smelled like happiness to him, at how her pale brown hair lay in such soft, loose curls around her head and slid through his fingers, as if softness and happiness could be real, could come true, could belong to him, too.

Not just the expensive pleasures that money could buy, but real, down deep, utterly free happiness.

He sure as hell hadn’t felt
cold
that night, or thought he had been cold to her.

But if she’d agreed on the way that night felt to him, then she would have…wanted to see him again, right? Instead of shutting him away with that cynical mockery, as if he couldn’t be trusted in that close to her and she’d made a mistake, letting him get near. It had been like trying to get inside a mirror, when he’d found her again after that night. As if, instead of all that wistful, hopeful sweetness into which he’d sunk that first night, he kept hitting instead against a reflection of himself, of who she saw when she looked at him, until her irony defeated even his.

He reached up and touched the split fig, with just one fingertip.

“I just thought you needed someone more…sardonic.” Tante Colette waved a dirt-stained old hand in the air. “Cooler. Tougher.”

“She made Spoiled Brat when she was barely out of perfume school,” Damien said. “Trust me, she has a strong sense of satire.”

Wait, what were they arguing about, exactly? That Jess Bianchi was a better match for him than for Tristan? How did Colette manage these things? They were supposed to be arguing about her insane urge to give away parts of the family inheritance to random pseudo-descendants who had no idea of their value.

And unlike Matt, he was
not
too soft-hearted to fight off threats to his family. His aunt, clearly losing it at last, had given away part of the valley to a rock star semi-descendant of hers only a few months ago, and instead of fighting that threat off, Matt had gone and gotten engaged to the rock star instead.

And that did not make Damien feel wistful at all, damn it.

“Plus, she’s a perfumer,” Colette said. “I see you with someone more…business-like.”

Damien’s mouth set hard.

“Or someone long and cool and sleek.”

Since old photos indicated that Colette had been long and cool and sleek herself as a young woman, this shouldn’t seem like an insult. But somehow it did.

“We seem to have gotten off the subject, Tante Colette. We’re not really talking about whether that woman is my soul mate. We’re talking about the fact that you gave away a vital part of the family’s heritage.”

Colette gazed at him for an enigmatic moment. Take a woman who could outsmart the Gestapo when she was only twenty-three and give her seven more decades of experience, and God, but she was a hard read. “Well. If it bothers you so much, Damien, maybe you should get it back.”

And she returned to her gardening.

The fig fell off the tree, and his hand whipped out and caught it before it could hit the ground. He stared at it until all he could do was eat it. The sweet pulpiness yielded to his teeth and burst in his mouth as the scents of jasmine and almonds and all the herbs and sun and stone of Colette’s gardens crowded in the air around him, as if those scents wanted to eat him, too.

***

Jess stood in the middle of the laboratory, her head tilted back, her eyes almost closed, breathing in its past.
Daddy, make me a cloud.

And he would bring home the scent of a cloud in a bottle.

Make me a dragon flying. Make me a baby star, that I just picked up and am carrying back up to the sky.

In high school, she had wanted different things. Scents that would make her the most popular girl in school, scents that would make the boy she had a crush on dream only of her. Her father shook his head at those, so she tried to make them herself, experimenting with all the power of the perfume molecules her father let her play with.

He’d warned her that the best scents really only helped you be…you. It was hard, as a teenager, to accept that, when she didn’t like
her
and wanted to be someone more glamorous, someone fabulous. A female version of the elegant Damien Rosier, perhaps—cool and collected, her heart impenetrable, always in control. Jane Bond.

She was an idiot still. And she missed her father.

Missed someone who would make baby stars for her.

She rubbed a small bottle wistfully. Jasmine.

She’d made her own wish for happiness once out of jasmine and almond and vanilla. A simple, silly wish no one could ever have believed came from the maker of Spoiled Brat. She’d been so tired of being sad. So she’d snuck a spray of it at the door onto the terrace of a glamorous party, like some stupid child blowing bubbles and hoping they’d bring magic. What kind of magic had she really expected to find at a party like that, full of the image-obsessed luxury crowd, all gathered for the launch of a perfume?

Yeah, it was a dumb place for a woman to try to find happiness, but it was hard for her to figure out where else to hunt for happiness in a big city. Bars? Nightclubs? Bookstores? Parties were where friends pushed introverted people like her, so they would meet people.

She’d sprayed a tiny bit more into the air around her as she tucked herself into a corner of the terrace, her quiet space in the night away from the headache of the party.

She knew that happiness didn’t work that way. She knew it didn’t follow a woman down elusive trails until it found her. She knew you built your career out of being tough and cynical and that no one cared about your perfumes that smelled like baby stars. But her father had been dying, and she’d felt so incredibly lonely, as if all the baby stars were going to fall from the sky and never be picked back up again.

When a black-haired prince of a man with a fine, ironic pair of lips and an elegant assassin’s way of moving had appeared in the terrace door, she hadn’t asked too many questions. When he’d gazed at her a moment and then moved slowly over to her, his eyebrows drawn faintly together as if something perplexed him, when he’d leaned beside her against the terrace wall to comment on the view of the city in the night, she’d…let herself believe in wishes.

Just for a little while. Wishing on a baby star.

Her thumb circled against the small glass vial wistfully, once, twice, thri—

A shadow darkened the door between the shop and the back room.

And a long, lean form filled it, the grace and economy of muscle veiled in a business suit, a man who would probably assassinate baby stars if he found them, if they stood in the way of his family’s empire building.