A Wish Upon Jasmine (4 page)

Her whole body tightened against the memory of his hands on her, that intent absorption on his face as they stroked down her body, and she set the vial down. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” she said.

One eyebrow went up. If ever a man had been born to raise one eyebrow it was Damien Rosier. Except his eyes were so…not hard, on her. So searching and intent, and so deceptively
not
hard in that hard, controlled face. The color of his eyes was just criminally misleading.

“Doing what?” Damien said coolly.

“Nothing.” She shoved the bottle away from her. And bit her tongue on the urge to say,
I wish I had a…
and see what happened.

I wish you would kiss me. I wish I hadn’t seen you with that supermodel the next day. Or on all those celeb websites with other models and actresses. I wish I was someone different, the kind of person who could wrap someone like you around my little finger.

I wish you were my happiness, the way I thought you were that night.

I wish that so bad.

Damn you.

“You’re in my shop,” she said.
Mine. My space. Not yours.
This is one thing I’m going to keep.

His lips took on that lethal line that made them seem so sensual she wanted to take every Disney film and beat it to death to teach that damn company not to make a girl dream of Prince Charming. “Do you really want to push that right now? I can guarantee you that I can get a court to revert this property back to my family.”

Oh, yeah, of course. Just as her father said—
everything
had to belong to the Rosiers. She put her hands on her hips. “Then why don’t you?”

He turned and moved restlessly through the workshop, his strides slicing too quickly to the end of the room where he paused like a race car on a short street with no outlet. He pivoted back. “I’m not looking forward to hiring a psychiatrist as an expert witness to my aunt’s dementia.”

“She has dementia?” Jess asked uneasily. That would explain this gift, at least. Maybe, like that night she wished her very own dark-haired prince to her, the shop was just an illusion of happiness that she’d have to give back.

“No,” Damien said. “Thus the reluctance.” Something brooding and dark shifted over his face. He shoved his hands into his pockets.

“Wow,” Jess said wonderingly. “You’d actually hesitate to groundlessly call a family member’s sanity into question just to get what you want?” She was intensely proud of her light, ironic tone.
Yes, see? I am tough and cynical, too. I’m the kind of woman who can handle a hook-up just fine and
never
fall into any trap of dreaming for more.

A slicing, dangerous glance. His hands closed into fists in his pockets.

“Don’t let it get out,” Jess said. “It would ruin your reputation.”

“Don’t let it get out that you play with almond and jasmine oil like a kid at Christmas,” Damien retorted. “It would ruin yours.”

Their gazes locked. Jess fought down the sick sensation in her stomach. She could handle this. She could. Maybe she’d go buy a bottle of her own Spoiled Brat and spray it into the air every time he came near her, to prove that she was
not
the girl who’d worn a flowing romantic dress to a perfume launch party and believed, right up until she got there, that she was as pretty as a princess.

Damien’s hands flexed in his pockets. “Jess—”

She turned toward one of the work counters, pretending to organize bottles. “I suppose if you do decide to go after me and destroy me, I’ll know. Once it’s too late for me to do anything about it, of course.”

He gazed at her. A little muscle started to tick in his jaw. “I didn’t know it was your company. Jess.”

“I didn’t know you were a Rosier. Damien.”

He shifted away again, gazing at old dusty bottles on a shelf, their labels peeling. “I know.”

“What?”

“I know you didn’t know who I was. It was…obvious.”

She stared at him, not understanding how it could have been obvious or what that hint of brooding around his mouth meant. “And you didn’t think it would have been at least polite to correct that?”

“You didn’t tell me your last name, either. You didn’t even tell me your proper first name.”

She tightened her stomach muscles and lifted her chin. “What, if you’d known I was the one who made Spoiled Brat, would you have held your nose while we made l—?” She bit the word back. Stupid, screwed up vocabulary, always letting slip her secret wishes.

“Had sex?” Damien said flatly.

Yeah. There was the right vocabulary word. She swallowed, trying to force the sickness down into a tight ball inside her where no one could find it, particularly not herself.

“I don’t know what I would have done.” Damien picked up a delicate perfume bottle—this fantastical romantic whimsy of crystal and fragility—and stared at it in his masculine hand. “Perhaps worn armor.”

What did that even mean? Was he talking about condoms? “Good God.” She pressed a horrified hand to her belly. “You didn’t wear—yes, you did.” She definitely hadn’t gotten
that
stupidly romantic.

He gazed at her for a blank second. And then, very ironically: “Don’t worry. I remembered that kind of armor. Jesus.” His hand closed hard on the little crystal bottle.

“Well, yeah,” she said. “You must be in the habit.”

He’d been gazing broodingly at his fist around the perfume bottle, but his head turned and he stared at her. “What?”

“I mean, it must be an automatism. Otherwise, you’d have a disease by now.”

That muscle started to tick in his jaw again, just this fine, subtle proof of tension. “Well. Sex ed in the States must be better than its reputation.”

She was growing so sick to her stomach she was afraid that any second she might do something horrible, like cry. She pressed her hands into the counter. “I need you to leave now.”

He made an abrupt move toward her, stopping on the other side of the counter from her. “Jess—”

She fisted her hands on the counter. “This is my space.” She asserted it adamantly.
Damn you, I don’t care what you do, there is one good thing in my life I’m going to keep.
A magic little shop where she could hide away and make scents out of the world. Dream. Wish again. “I know you don’t like it, but until you bring that court case, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. I want you to leave.”

She couldn’t make him, though. Hell, she didn’t even know what number to dial for the police in this country.

Black eyebrows drew slowly together. “Jess—”

“I wish you would leave,” she said desperately.

He stilled, taking a deep breath. Slowly, he released it, searching her face. And then his fist unfolded from that delicate crystal bottle, and he set it down in the middle of the counter. She caught a glimpse of red indentations from the pointed facets before he slipped his hands in his pockets. He nodded briefly and was gone.

She stared down at the counter, his big handprint in the dust pressed just across from her two small ones. And the exquisite, fragile, gleaming perfume bottle, polished by the grip of his fingers, set precisely halfway between them.

The morning started soft, dew on the jasmine, the first day of the harvest. They really didn’t need all hands on deck in this way, but all the Rosier cousins always turned out the first day, the same way everyone always turned out for Christmas and the harvest of the roses. It was special. It reaffirmed who they were.

Damien’s hands moved automatically, a pinch of a jasmine flower, dropped into the wicker basket. The jasmine that they harvested from August into October was more delicate than roses. It required care not to damage the fragile, precious petals. It was also backbreaking, because the plants were so low you had to bend or sit on a stool all the time. This should have been familiar, reassuring work to him. They’d been working these fields since they were children, when they’d been the perfect height for the jasmine and too small to properly reach the roses.

But he couldn’t calm down. Tension ran through him, this tight, angry urge to fight a battle, this incipient headache, as if someone had locked him in a room not with fresh jasmine but with that damn Spoiled Brat.

He lifted a handful of his flowers, breathing deep to clear his head, and a bee stung him on the knuckle.

Aïe
. Damn it. He went to the truck for some spray.

His grandfather snorted. “Still say lavender oil works the best. Smells better, too. Sure you don’t want some?”

With a wry smile, Damien held his burning knuckle out to his grandfather. Pépé dabbed lavender oil on it, and he brought his hand to his face a second, breathing in the blend of jasmine and lavender, tension unknotting all down his back. Sometimes you didn’t even know you were tense until the first day of the jasmine harvest, when that smell hit you and everything loosened and the world made sense again.

Even down to the bee stings.

All the battles for dominance with other businesses around the world, all the boardrooms and meetings and accounts…it all comes back to this. These petals sliding over my fingers, this scent in my hands. This is where it all started. And this is what it’s all about.

Even if his job was always the boardrooms. The business. Taking out family enemies, building empire. While Raoul and Lucien ran off to explore the world, while Tristan spent his life sunk in perfumes, while Matt pretended this valley was what the family could depend on for centuries more, Damien did what had to be done: fought the business battles and won them.

That was his job. No threat to Rosier SA got past
him.

While other businesses shrank and closed doors, left their empty, broken windows in the heart of Grasse, he spread the power of Rosier SA to every continent on the globe, anchoring not only Grasse’s economy but local economies everywhere. While fragrance producers in the valleys around Grasse gave up, sold out to real estate developers because they had no other economic choice, Damien gave his family choices. Power. Wealth.

He, like his father before him, froze his heart and got it done.

And no one, no one in this world, believed he had any softness or warmth to his heart. He looked down at the jasmine flower, delicate and scented against his tan hand. White as his sheets, across which soft, pale brown curls had spread like a gift. As if she trusted him with sweetness and softness, vulnerability and hope.

Raoul came up to them with a basket of jasmine on one arm, his fingers running gently through the flowers before he emptied them into the larger basket at Pépé’s feet. The expression on Raoul’s face was profoundly eased, like a man who had just sat down in an old comfy armchair in front of his own fireplace after years away at war. Since there was no urgency to the first morning and
they
weren’t getting paid by the weight of what they picked, the other cousins drifted up with their jasmine as an excuse to join the social gathering, the way some men might show up with a couple of extra beers in one hand.

Matt, big and growly, turned to watch his fiancée who was incompetently picking jasmine flowers at the end of a row, picking one or two, then pausing to bury her face in her basket and breathe the scent, obscuring the basket so completely that it looked as if her basket had turned into a hedge-hog of bronze-tipped curly hair. Across from her, Raoul’s fiancée Allegra picked, and beside them, a couple of bushes farther down the row, Léa and Jolie. The four women had hit it off so well that they turned just about every event into a social occasion, where they talked about anything from careers to politics to silliness and occasionally the men.

Damien looked down at the jasmine in his basket. No woman was over there gossiping about him.

And that didn’t bother him in the slightest. Of course not.

Tristan held a single jasmine flower in his hand, twirling it, breathing deeply of its scent, then lifting his head to gaze across the fields and up into the hills. Tristan swore that if he could ever manage a scent that captured, truly captured, the jasmine harvest and not some weak, bloated version of it in a bottle, he would have made his life’s contribution to posterity—bottled happiness and strength to pass on to the world.

But even Tristan hadn’t managed that. No one had—the ephemeral gorgeousness of reality in a bottle. These days, it wasn’t even fashionable to try—perfumers focused on creating works of abstract art, and striving to capture reality made it seem as if your art had been stuck in the Renaissance.

Hell, in the current state of the industry, Spoiled Brat could hold the damn number three spot on the bestseller lists. Clearly, some people’s definition of
art
was more abrasive and shudder-producing than others.

“I don’t understand why Tante Colette is doing this to us,” Damien said abruptly. “I mean, what the actual hell? Okay, fine, so Jasmin Bianchi is presumably another of Léonard Dubois’s descendants. That doesn’t excuse…”
disinheriting her own family
, he’d been going to say. Except, fuck, maybe it did excuse it. After all, maybe the grandchildren of her adopted son, even if she did have him for only eight years before he ran away, did count as much as the grandchildren of the stepbrother with whom she maintained such a combative relationship. Except that both the part of the valley she had given Layla and this shop were
Rosier
heritage. From centuries past.

“Spoiled Brat.” Tristan clutched his head. “She gave
Laurianne’s shop
to the perfumer who made
Spoiled Brat.
”

“I told my father,” Pépé said. “I
told
him not to trust any of the family heritage into her hands.”

“Laurianne’s perfume shop,” Tristan said. “
Spoiled Brat.
” He yanked at his own black hair.

“She gave away a chunk of my valley,” Matt grumbled. Damien’s big bear of a cousin was supposed to be heir to all the valley around them, the family patriarch in training, and he practiced for it by growling all the time. “We need to sit on that damn Antoine Vallier until he learns to quit doing this shit.”

Antoine Vallier was the new lawyer in Grasse who kept helping Tante Colette deed over her property to random strange semi-descendants from the other side of the world. Every single one of them—besides Tristan, who had gone to school with the guy and anyway didn’t do that kind of thing—had gone and threatened him personally with the consequences of making enemies out of the Rosiers.