A Wish Upon Jasmine (31 page)

“Well, if you want it to sound like a proper whistle, stop hiding it under your breath. Put some umph into it.” Raoul let loose a wolf whistle that would have gotten the attention of every woman within a half-kilometer radius. Then grinned with wolfish smugness when his fiancée Allegra poked her head in through the great factory doors to see who he was whistling at. He blew her a kiss.

She rolled her eyes and laughed and blew one back, disappearing back outside. Jess stepped into the doorway with more reserve, less sure of her welcome than Allegra.

Damien gave a long, slow, low whistle, the kind that went beyond the average catcall to an awe-filled
ho-ot damn.

Jess colored but came into the factory. She’d toured the production facility the other day, with great fascination, but Tristan had noticed she was much less confident of her place in his big family than Allegra or Layla had been. It was kind of cute to see how irresistibly she was drawn to Damien, enough to overcome all that reserve and move toward him even when all his cousins were watching.

Even difficult, saturnine Damien had found someone before Tristan did. What the hell was up with that? Tristan was the only one of the cousins who was
good
at women. Well, except for accountants. But female accountants weren’t actually women, they were succubi who came to earth to suck a man’s soul out of his body, and the fact that one of them wore those little pencil skirts while she did it was just further proof of evil.

“Is anybody else here actually going to help us put this damn thing in place?” Matt growled. “We’ve got three of these to get in. Tristan, this was your damn idea.”

“The scent is much rounder coming through copper, Matt. You should be grateful to me that I pointed it out to you.” For two years. Constantly. Until Matt had finally agreed to order the copper-lined vats this year, but of
course
(as Matt grumbled) the vats had gotten to the valley a month later than promised, right in the middle of the harvest, the absolute worst time to make such a switch.

Matt growled louder.

Tristan grinned—being growled at by Matt was kind of like being growled at by a big grumpy teddy bear who was terribly afraid someone would realize he was a soft, cuddly toy rather than the grizzly bear he pretended to be—and strolled over to help hook the new vat up to the overhead crane. The vat was big enough around that a fourth hand would have been helpful holding it while Matt got the hook in, but Damien had forgotten all about them. In fact—

Tristan jabbed Raoul hard in the ribs.

Over there by a stack of burlap sacks, Damien—the tough, impervious, cool, ruthless one—had lifted a hand and was letting jasmine blooms drift from his fingers all over Jess’s upturned face, his expression so tender and so exposed that Tristan and Raoul immediately jerked around to put their backs to it. Then they abandoned the vat to find some excuse to stand between Damien and the factory doors, so that anyone who poked a head in wouldn’t see Damien stark naked like that.

Tristan peeked over his shoulder to see if it was safe yet, and—shit. Jess had caught some of the flowers as they fell, and now was curving the handful of them against Damien’s cheek, so gently that the flowers themselves rested uncrushed between her palm and his skin. Damien’s expression was so—

Tristan snapped his eyes back around, horribly embarrassed. Raoul cleared his throat. Tata Véro poked her head in, and Tristan sprang forward immediately. “Tata!” he said loudly, grabbing her arm and pulling her back outside the factory. “Just the aunt I wanted to see!”

He glanced back. Raoul’s body blocked Damien’s mother’s view of him.

“Any time on the hand with this vat,” Matt growled, and Damien barely pulled himself together even with all
that
help, moving toward the vat with this slow, daydreaming step.

Tata Véro, catching sight of his expression, stopped stock still, her lips parted, the gold bracelets on her arms jingling faintly as she brought a hand to her mouth in a cross between delight and
but-is-she-good-enough-for-my-son
.

Tristan bent his head to his aunt’s ear. “I think she’s a little afraid he’s too wonderful for her. That she can’t keep him, that he’ll evaporate into thin air. He might have to be careful that she doesn’t try to put the memory of him into a bottle instead of holding on tight to the actual him. But she really likes him, Tata. Anyone can tell.”

“Oh, that poor girl,” Tata Véro said, instantly won over. “I’m sure having her father die so recently must make her insecure.” She brightened, as vivid as her jewelry. “I can shake some sense into her.”

“Tata.” Tristan meant to be a good cousin, he really did. Deflect Damien’s mother, help a guy out. But the temptation was irresistible. “You should show her some of the old albums from when we were kids. You know. So she can see how adorable he was.” He grinned as Tata Véro lit up with greedy delight and headed for her potential future daughter-in-law like a duck toward a crumb cast carelessly on the water.

Bracing the vat, unable to release it without it toppling sideways on Raoul’s foot, Damien looked from Tristan to his mother and Jess as Tata Véro claimed Jess’s arm, leading her out of the factory. His eyes narrowed.

Tristan sighed blissfully.
Remember that time all our favorite toys disappeared and we found ransom notes in their place? That’s the beauty of family. Never too late for payback.

***

“Childhood photos?” Damien’s fingers tapped once against the teak table under the old plane tree, a table currently spread with the multiple family albums his mother had dragged out from the old
mas
, the big stone house that had seen generations. Like all the other men, he had a sheen of sweat on him from the extended vat wrestling in the factory. “That was all you could think of to show her while we were working, Maman?” He gave Tristan a filthy look.

Tristan grinned.

“What’s wrong?” Jess asked. “They’re cute.”

Damien’s glare at Tristan should by rights have cut him into small pieces where he stood.

“This alien one is
adorable
,” Jess had to admit, and there were multiple muffled chortles from the other women. Tristan looked as if he was about to burst. Raoul and Matt looked torn between the urge to tackle Tristan themselves and their own glee at Damien’s expression. “You’re covered in blue paint. Even your hair.”

The photo was of five young boys, ranging from Tristan age four to Raoul age nine, all of them naked except for underwear, each painted in a different color. Apparently they had been playing at alien invasion and tried to invade their parents’ lazy afternoon at this very table, one summer afternoon twenty-five years ago.

She bit the inside of her lip to keep her expression innocently goo-goo eyed. “And look! Matt is wearing Superman briefs. Aww.”

Matt lost his sense of humor and glared at Tristan, his cheeks flushing. Layla covered her face with her hand, tilting her head forward so that her curls helped hide how hard she was struggling with laughter. Matt growled.

“Who’s this one?” Jess pointed at the boy painted in orange, as skinny as all the kids in the photo were but one of the tallest and presumably therefore one of the oldest.

Wistfulness passed over multiple faces. “Lucien,” Damien said, and rested his hand on her shoulder.

Right until that second, she had never known that a hand on her shoulder might not just give support but also ask for it. What a wonderful thing the human body was, to let people seek and give comfort without ever having to admit even in their own heads that they needed it. She covered his hand with hers. “He doesn’t look as much like the rest of you. Did he take after the other side of his family?”

No one said anything at all. Damien’s hand tightened a little on her shoulder.

Okay, wrong track. She took a breath. “Purple is an interesting color choice for you,” she told Tristan.

She would have named herself the woman least likely to start teasing a pack of strange family members, but sometimes a woman had to do what a woman had to do. This was Damien’s world, and he seemed to need someone on his side in it. Big families were weirder than she had quite realized. Because everyone here so obviously
was
on his side, and yet there was this great tangled mass of rivalries and pressures, too.

“I was four years old and greatly abused by my elders.” Tristan folded his arms and took a deep, luxurious breath, as if smelling something beautiful. “And right now, it’s almost all worth it. Did you notice what’s on Damien’s underwear?”

“All right, that’s it.” Damien’s hand left Jess’s shoulder as he dove straight for Tristan.

Jess, Layla, and Allegra all leapt to their feet in alarm as the two bodies collided.

Damien’s mother calmly petted the photo album page, beaming at it, and barely raised an eyebrow.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve thrown them in the pond,” Raoul told Matt.

“The alien photo,” Matt said. “Tristan told Tata to get out the alien photo.”

“You’re right. We can’t let him get away with that.”

And then, just like that, there were
four
male bodies wrestling. “If any of you end up needing the hospital, I expect you to drive yourselves,” Tata Véro said, flipping a page. “I’m retired.” She winced a little at a particular thudding sound, peeked at her son in the mass, and then looked immediately back at the photo album.

Jess didn’t mean to be rude and interfere in their family dynamics, but this was a lot more male violence than she was used to seeing on any given day. Or in her whole life. It wasn’t that there was any punching or anything—they were wrestling and didn’t seem to have any intention of actually
killing
each other. They actually seemed to be having a very good time. But still. They were at a fully operational center of agricultural production, and right there was a faucet with a hose attached.

She got up, turned it on, angled carefully so that she wouldn’t hit the table with its precious family photo albums—she was
so jealous
of all those family adventures—and just aimed the hose all over them.

The men fell apart, spluttering, while Layla and Allegra fist-pumped encouragement to her.

“Fuck, that’s cold,” someone said, and Damien turned toward her.

He looked so damn good wet, half laughing and all menacing, that she aimed the nozzle at his chest full blast.

His grin lit his whole face as he lunged into the force of the water, straight at her, grabbing the hose. He held it up out of her reach, angling it threateningly close to her, laughing, and she ducked into his chest, scrunching her face as she braced herself and tried to make sure at least half of the spray got on him, too.

Of course, she’d kind of forgotten in that instinctive move how
wet
she had gotten him.

He laughed out loud, dropped the hose, and hugged her in hard to him, soaking her front and half her back.

“Hey!” She struggled.

He laughed and held on. Until she was laughing, too, enjoying his strength so damn much. It was a hot day. It was good to be held ruthlessly by a wet, laughing man.

His family beamed, and just as Tristan got hold of the hose and lifted it in promised revenge on her, Matt yanked it out of his hands from behind and turned the faucet off. “Wasting water in August,” he grumbled. But he was grinning.

“I just want you to know,” Damien said, “that
my mother
was the one who bought that damn Disney underwear. And then didn’t do the laundry so that it was the only thing left in my drawer to wear that morning.”

“Am I your maid?” his mother asked supremely.

“I was six, Maman!”

“You were capable of unearthing cans of paint and covering yourself and your cousins in it and organizing an alien invasion. I don’t see why turning on a washing machine was so hard.”

Damien sighed.

“Besides, you loved that underwear. You were always going around declaiming you were the ‘never duplicated Genie of the L— ’”

“Maman!”

His mother shrugged and opened innocent hands, then winked at Jess.

Damien sighed heavily and draped his arm around Jess’s shoulders. “My family is a curse.”

She slipped her arm around his waist and hugged herself to him. “Oh, no,” she murmured, for his ears alone. “They love you so much. You’re
so
lucky.”

For some reason, Damien looked really, really…struck. By something that didn’t hurt, quite, but it changed something about him. His arm relaxed on her shoulders, and this quiet kind of…thought…seemed to settle over his body. He kept his arm draped over her, fingers playing idly with her hair or rubbing her shoulder, long past when his clothes had dried on his body in the August evening.

And every time they looked at him, everyone in his family grinned like idiots.

Even his grandfather, when he came back out from his nap in the cool of the evening to eat with them under the plane tree, watched Damien and Jess with a faint curve of his lips. “Looks like I’m still the most ruthless man in the family,” he said to Damien with considerable satisfaction.

Damien sighed. But he didn’t look very put out.

“It’s their way of honoring you for what they think you want to be,” Jess said. She stopped still on the little stone landing, where a fountain trickled, tucked against a wall. The smell of old water, of moss and wet and stone, tucked away in this ancient town of sun and flowers, grabbed at her. She had to breathe it for a moment, resting her hand on wet stone to pull in its texture.

Damien’s warm, strong hand around her other hand anchored her in humanity. Perfect—this fountain made to nurture humans, and the reminder of that human hand. Her brain went off on tangents of possibilities, and she took out her moleskin journal to note down a few words and formula ideas. She’d stopped doing that a long time ago, stuck in that Spoiled Brat rut, in hopeless denial of her own career. But here, in this world, new ideas blossomed in her brain everywhere she stepped. And she noted them all down, no matter how unusable they were, just because they were beautiful anyway. Worth noting. Worth reaching for.