A Wish Upon Jasmine (33 page)

Her eyes stung. She pressed her head into the stone.

“You
are
very like her,” Colette said, and Jess spun on her, ready to snap if the old war hero put down her great-grandmother’s sacrifice again.

Colette Delatour shook her head. “She never could believe either. Not ever. Never once did she believe she could survive, she could succeed, she could do it. Thirty-six wishes she helped carry through the Alps so they could come true, and she never believed she could be good enough for them, not one single time. Thousands of people today bless that woman’s name because of all the times she kept trying to do what she didn’t believe.”

Jess did start to cry, suddenly, this hard onslaught of tears that made her grip the stone.

“Jacky and I, we had conviction. I had my cyanide, too—I’d be damned if I’d let them have the pleasure of torturing someone else’s betrayal out of
me
—but I never took it, always convinced I could get away, succeed. And I was right. And I was lucky. But she did exactly as much as I ever did. It must have cost her a hundred times more, to do all those things she couldn’t believe she could do. Can you imagine the terror? But one after the other, she did them anyway.”

Jess took a soft, deep breath of that stone, the tears easing out of her. God, what an amazing woman.
I want to make a scent for my great-grandmother.

I want to make a scent for my father.

Hell, I want to make a scent for Colette Delatour. Tough down to the bone but with all these herbs and soups to nurture everyone around her.

“What I didn’t have was emotional courage,” said that forged steel Resistance war hero. “I’m ninety-six. You don’t think I should have looked for Léo’s descendants before this? Tried to heal this family sooner? I could have known your father. I could have known Layla’s. I could have made up with Jacky. He’s an arrogant, annoying, over-entitled brat, but he’s not that hard. I’m only doing those things now, when time’s got its own little cyanide pill waiting for me, so I don’t have to deal with the hurt too long, if things go wrong.”

Tears welled up again. Jess tried to smile through them. “You would have liked my father,” she whispered. “He used to make baby stars. Dragons taking flight. He’d capture them in a bottle for me.”

An old, strong hand closed over her shoulder. “I’ll never know your father. Why don’t you show me what you can do instead?”

***

Damien did
not
get migraines. Migraines shut people down, making it impossible for them to do anything but try to survive the agony. Damien got headaches. Something he could keep working through. Keep making perfume launch party conversation through. Keep doing whatever he had to do, until he finally got to go home and turn off all the lights.

And by Monday, if his head hurt much more, he’d put a damn bullet through it just to improve the situation. He finally even ducked out of the Paris office at noon, to go lie down at his apartment for an hour in the hope that he would die and someone would bury him in a cool, dark place free from the excruciating pain.

He could barely grit his teeth to be polite to the concierge as she handed him an express envelope on his way in. No, he did not need to deal with anyone’s urgent problems right now. And—oh, crap, he could feel the vial shape in it. Some damn perfume he was supposed to give an opinion on, all he needed. Probably from Tristan, otherwise it would have been sent to the office.

He made it out of the elevator to his bed and dropped flat on it, the envelope beside him.

Fuck. He wished to God he had never bought this damn glass-walled penthouse apartment, so that he could at least shut out all the light. If he survived and his head ever stopped hurting, he was buying something in a basement. To hell with the long-term real estate investment and the need to impress everyone with Rosier power.

He rolled to the side, reaching for the nightstand drawer and Jess’s little bottle of Advil, with the memory it held of her handing it to him in the garden, that moment of care slipping through their hostilities, as if he still mattered even when she was hurt and angry and they were fighting.

As he reached across the dropped envelope for the drawer, he saw the return address.
J. Bianchi.

His breath hitched and wanted to stop there, poised between hope and fear. One of his trials? What had she done with it this time? He’d been gone for a week now. There was always so much work to do when he was in Paris, and every single bit of that work felt safer than pulling out his phone and calling Jess. Plus, she could have called
him
, damn it. He was the one who had told her that he loved her and had her stare at him as if he was a member of an alien species who could not possibly have fallen in love.

It didn’t surprise him, though, that Jess would have needed to give her reply with a perfume rather than words. He was just…deeply afraid of what those perfume-words might be.

Had she damned him to hell or maybe…made a leap of faith?

Slowly, not sure he could deal with either possibility right now, he pulled the strip to open the envelope.

A brown vial rolled into his palm, a card sliding after it. It was the first time he had ever seen Jess’s handwriting, other than glimpses of her notes strewn across the counter in the perfume shop. It didn’t say:
I love you, I’m sorry.
It didn’t say:
You jerk for walking off like that right in the middle of an important conversation. Don’t come back.
It didn’t say:
I
was
an idiot, I agree, and so were you, let’s talk.

It said:
If you get a headache, try this.

And for some reason—it must be his fucking head—that made his eyes sting.

He uncapped the vial, and the scent of lavender hit him immediately, spicy, fresh, optimistic. The scent of a bee sting easing. The scent of a field on the plateaus, high up, away from the world, with a wind rippling waves of purple. The scent of an afternoon making love in a small, shadowy room above an old perfume shop.

He held the vial to his nose, his eyes closed, and his breathing slowing and deepening. That tight pain eased the minutest degree at the first breath, and then a little bit more with the second, and a little bit more, like a guitar string close to snapping being slowly, slowly adjusted back to proper tightness. It eased until he almost forgot about it, his lashes growing heavy, his face muscles relaxing.

He actually fell asleep that way.

When he woke, it was pitch black outside and the vial had slipped from his hand to spill a few drops across his sheets.

His thousand-euro silky fine Paris sheets smelled of lavender. Just like the embroidered sheets carefully ironed and handed down for generations back home.

And his head didn’t hurt at all.

But his heart still did, in this anxious, demanding way, like,
Get your butt up and go home.

***

He got back to his Grasse office at eleven that morning, a short flight to Nice and the kind of driving from Nice to Grasse that his Aston Martin had been built for.

He dropped paperwork off with Fréd and stepped into his office, impatient to be gone again. To go see a woman who didn’t believe in him, but she cared for him just the same.
I’m sorry I stayed so long in Paris.
Merde
, that was one of his own father’s techniques for dealing—not dealing—with emotional issues.
I’m back. I’m trying again.

He hung up his coat and turned toward his desk, scrubbing his forehead at everything that awaited him on it. No matter where he went, there work was. “Fréd. What are these bottles on my desk? Did Parfumerie need my opinion on something?”

And could it wait? He knew it was eleven on a Tuesday, but…he had something important to do.

Fréd poked his red head in through the office door. “Jasmin Bianchi said you had commissioned a fragrance from her. She’s been leaving things for you to test when you get back. She finally talked your address out of me and overnighted the last one, didn’t you get it?”

Damien’s heart lightened so fast. Like the whole room had been filled with that lavender oil. He moved toward the bottles as if they’d reached out and lassoed his waist, pulling him toward them. “Did she ask for me?”

He ran his fingers over the stoppers, coming to rest on that exquisite whimsy of a crystal bottle he had once set down on a counter between them just before he walked out. His thumb caressed the bottle. Once, twice, thrice.
I wonder if I ever get to make wishes.

“Of course she did,” Fréd said. “But you didn’t tell me when you would be back.” Clear, subtle reproach. A good assistant
hated
not knowing the schedule. “
I
kept telling her you would probably be in the next morning.”

“Thank you, Fréd,” he said, and Frédéric gave him a stern look just to make sure that reproach had come through properly and then disappeared, pulling the door closed.

Damien gazed at the bottles a moment. Then he slowly removed his cufflinks and turned up his sleeves, unbuttoning a button on his shirt, flexing his shoulders. He brought his bare left wrist to his nose and took a tension-easing breath of lavender. Then he picked a bottle up.

There was no note this time. Just two plain sample bottles and two elegant vintage bottles from the collection in the old shop.

He found some strips—ever present on a perfume executive’s desk—and tested the first one.

Him again. The titanium and hardness. But this core of…what was it? It had this cold, far-off quality that made him think of a star out of reach. His mouth twisted, and he set the strip on his desk and tried the next one.

Him still. Titanium, hardness. The sense of time that relaxed his muscles. The sword plunged in the dirt in the shade. But there was…what was this? In that shade where the sword rested, jasmine was growing up an old wall of stone.

He smelled that one again, and then again, taking a long time before he set it aside to try the next bottle, a beautiful bottle from the Art Déco period.

His head cocked. What was
this
? It smelled…it made him think of impossible things. This clear, glimmering purity of hope, like the birth of a baby star. He loved it. It had this chest-tightening emotion packed into it, like standing beside a cradle in the dark, looking down at your firstborn child.

It took him forever to recover from that one. He couldn’t keep smelling it—it was too much—but he had to pace and pace his office and go stand at the door to his balcony, clutching the jamb and gazing down the street toward her shop, before he was ready to release whatever was held in that last crystal bottle. The one he had once set on a counter precisely halfway between them.

His heart stopped. It was
her
scent. The wishing scent from New York. The almond and vanilla and jasmine, the sweetness, the hope, that naked longing for happiness. His throat tightened. His hand closed around the bottle, and he slipped it into his pocket, where it could be safe.

He went back out on the balcony, gazing toward the shop. And then…he’d been rock-climbing since he was a kid. And for his entire career at Rosier SA, he had taken the stairs inside to his office, cutting up them in cool, long strides, carrying power with every step. He shook his head, and then just went over the balcony, catching the bars, swinging himself down to the street below in one jump.

Bursting free.

So many dusty corners and shelves, in a shop like this. When Jess couldn’t focus, when she didn’t know what to do, she cleaned a few more of them and hoped, maybe, to encounter secret, ancient treasures.

But the magic was all in the bottles. She set a box of dusty ones on the counter and began to wipe them down.

A shadowy shape moved in the doorway, and her heart leapt. But the man stepped forward, and although the lean, muscled body and the bones of his face were the same, his hair was a gold-streaked, sun-kissed texturing of blond to golden-brown.

“You must be Lucien,” she said.

The man checked in the doorway, his face blanking. Then he got control of himself, in a way that reminded her
very
strongly of Damien, and moved into the room with that same prowling grace. He was of a height, with that same long, lean strength and control to his movements.

“Antoine Vallier.” His voice was rather clipped.

Ah. The lawyer behind all the emails and communications and phone calls during the process as this heritage was passed to her.

“I apologize,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were coming at this time, and I was on vacation. Have you run into any problems with the Rosiers?”

“No, they’ve been very kind,” she said, and his eyebrows shot to the top of his head.

“Damien’s been in Paris the whole time, I take it,” he said dryly. “Maybe that latest model of his is softening him.”

A hitch of her heart. “No, he was here until a few days ago.”
Don’t react to the model, don’t react, don’t react.
“What latest model?”

“I can’t really keep them straight. Kendall something, maybe? The one he took to the Abbaye launch Saturday night.”

It felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. For a moment, she could only stare at him. A deep breath. Another. Another.
Think this through.

“He’s not dating a model,” she said. “You must have misunderstood.”

Antoine Vallier looked faintly puzzled as to why she would care, then pulled out his phone, typed something, and slid it across to her. Photos from the perfume launch. Damien, standing beside a beautiful dark-haired woman, his hand at the small of her back, her smiling for the camera and him not smiling, but both of them unreadable in their ways. Giving a surface.

Jess fought physical sickness.
No, but—

No.

That’s not right.

Don’t do this again, to yourself and to him.

Another breath, slow and careful.

“But most of all, I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have thought, ‘What’s going on? Picking up another man twelve hours later doesn’t fit with what I know of her.’ And I would have made sure I did know what was going on, before I made any decisions to ditch you from my life.”