A Wish Upon Jasmine (7 page)

“You’re the nose,” Damien said dryly. “I’m just the man who makes money off people like you. What do you think the first step should be?”

Her first step should…should probably be to touch that wrist. To smell his skin. To close her eyes and relax her brain and let herself sink into him—into who he was and who he wanted to be to the world. To understand both the deepest heart of him and the face of himself he preferred to show, and to make from that understanding the perfect blend that would allow him both to be true to himself and yet only give what he chose of himself to the whole wide world.

God, that sounded dangerous.

“Put your wrist down,” she snapped. “You make me feel like a damn vampire.” Except…not. He made her want to lower her mouth to his wrist and…not bite. Not take. Instead of fangs, she wanted to stroke that vulnerable, strong wrist with the softness of her lips, wanted to close her eyes into the sensation of his skin against hers, wanted to steal a little taste with her tongue…

Heat burned in her cheeks and in her breasts.

“You don’t need to revisit my scent, then?” Damien lowered his hand. Ruthless eyes locked with hers. “You can work with it from memory?”

She glared at him. “No.”
Yes.
Her face was so pitifully hot, exposing all her vulnerability to him. “It’s not as if you’re going to wear it on your wrist and wave it around for everyone to smell.” Women did that, so desperate to change what the world thought of them by the perfume they sprayed on their wrists.

“Suit yourself.” He slipped his hands into his pockets. And she felt bereft, as if she’d just lost a precious chance. “I want you to fail.”

What? Her spine straightened against the words, and she didn’t even know what he was talking about yet.

His mouth curved faintly, a smile that could strip a woman naked and toss her out in the snow. “You think you deserve
this
shop? In my family since the Renaissance? Where one of the greatest fragrance dynasties on the planet was founded? Just because your father told you poor-pitiful-me stories about how tough it is to make it in our world? Then you’d better show me what you can do. Before I have you kicked out of this shop and out of this town so fast your head will spin.”

His tone froze her skin. Her heart panicked, as if she’d just broken through ice and plunged into the deathly cold beneath the surface. When she’d just been twirling in her skates across the surface. Oh, yes,
that
was why he didn’t have ice-blue eyes. Because that gray-green water under the ice was much, much more deadly.

Damien Rosier.

She’d bought that reputation of his. She’d believed it. She’d pulled back from him and his business takeovers and different-model-a-night life, and she’d thrown up every barrier she could to protect herself. But she hadn’t realized that somewhere, deep down, she still believed in that dream of his gentleness and sweetness.

Because that was all that she herself had truly known.

“You think I
can’t
come up with a scent for you?” she asked between her teeth. “That’s why you asked? So you could set me up?”

His eyes were so cold, uninterested. He ran his gaze over her, checking for weak spots and finding so many she bored him. It was barely worth his time to take her out.

“
I made the number two perfume when I was only twenty-four years old.
And it’s still at number three!”

He shrugged, this panther’s move of
God, this mouse is dull.
“That’s why I bought out your little start-up. So I could have you and you could make that kind of fortune for us.”

Yeah. Shutting off her bright, daydreaming path away from her reputation, ending her great, financial gamble that was supposed to allow her to make
art
again, perfumes that made her proud, that made her happy. Baby stars.

He’d stolen that from her.

And
hell.
Was it really her name that had attracted the sharks like blood would and brought that dream of theirs down?

“I sold my shares! You
don’t
own me!”

“So you got away.” He opened one hand, a glimpse of calluses through the elegance. “And now you’re right here.” He didn’t have to add what rang through every street in the town and echoed in the valleys all around:
In Grasse. In the heart of my power.

Her fists clenched. Ghosts of her father danced in her head—how he’d had to leave Grasse to even have a chance of finding a place in the perfume world when he wasn’t part of a family like the Rosiers, how he’d always felt like an exile.

“And if you want to stay here,” Damien said, with the bored ease of a man who knew she didn’t stand a chance against him, “then you have to make a scent that
I
would wear.” His lips curled faintly, pure disdain. “When you don’t even know your art well enough to smell my skin.”

She reached across the counter to grab his wrist in both hands and yank it to her.

He locked his arm, making it clear that if he didn’t want to give her a second chance at his wrist, then she wouldn’t get one. And then he relaxed his muscles and let her pull his hand out of his pocket to her.

The counter lay between them. Thank God.

When she bent her face to his wrist, her heart beat so hard in her head that she could barely even
smell.
His palm was right there, big and warm as it had been that night. With the slightest move of her head or his hand, he could cup her cheek.

But he didn’t.

And she didn’t.

She closed her eyes and took a slow breath of his wrist. “Cheap citrus. You must have washed your hands last at a restaurant or something. You can’t tell me Rosier SA stocks that in their restrooms.”

He said nothing.

The back of her head, where his gaze must rest, burned. The whole line of her back burned. Her butt even burned, and he couldn’t possibly see that from his angle.

“Lavender,” she said curiously, turning his hand over to follow it to his knuckle. “Under the citrus. A nice lavender, too bad you had to wash most of it off.”

“It’s good for bee stings,” he said, and she opened her eyes to note the red swelling over one knuckle. Ow. That must have hurt.

A sudden urge swept through her to kiss that spot to help make it feel better.

She turned his hand back over quickly, to hide the sting from her lips, and angled her head up his wrist, away from the distraction of that soap. A smile wanted to cross her lips at the faintest wisp of scent that she caught, that scent of happiness, and she fought it back. “A little almond, still.”

A vision of him in the shower, quick and indifferent to himself, in and out so fast that he hadn’t really soaped his arms, so that the scent of almonds from the day before still clung wherever he hadn’t rubbed.

Oh, damn, that vision of him in the shower. All that lean, hard body of his…

She swallowed and angled her head up the veins and tendons of his forearm. Such a strong forearm, and yet if she cut him there, he could bleed his heart out just like any other human. A leap of sensual curiosity. “Jasmine?”

He wore jasmine?

Fresh oil, unadulterated, as if it came straight from the plant or somebody’s wishful thinking. She’d made her wish for happiness once out of almond, jasmine, and vanilla.

“I was helping with the harvest this morning,” he said.

“The harvest?” She lifted her head to look at him. His face was too close. As close as it had been that night just before he kissed her. There had been so much…courtesy in that kiss.
I want you
, that kiss had said.
But let me know if I’m going too fast.

“That’s how Rosier started,” he said in that ironic way, as if nothing he said could give his auditor purchase on him. “With a glove maker in this shop who needed scents to perfume her gloves. And with an Italian mercenary who got her a valley and filled it full of flowers. We still have that valley. We still harvest those flowers.”

And, yes, August would be the start of the jasmine season here. She tried to wrap her mind around Damien Rosier, the cool, lethal businessman, carefully picking the fragile white jasmine and laying it flower by flower into a basket, so that its precious petals would not be harmed. She could only imagine it if…she remembered the way he had treated her, that night.

Believing that he could pick jasmine was kind of like believing…that night had been true.

Her heart seized, terrified.

“She made him the most exquisite pair of scented gloves as a wedding gift,” Damien said. “The family preserved them forever, until they got lost in the war. Or until Tante Colette stole them, according to my grandfather. Which would be better—at least she wouldn’t have let them get ruined.”

Scented gloves. Jess knew the history of perfume, of course, knew how the power of Grasse in the perfume world had grown out of its tanning roots, the hunger for the Renaissance world to find ways to sweeten the scents of leather gloves, knew the vital status symbol gloves had been. But it was still odd to hold Damien’s very masculine hand in hers and imagine a similar hand, an Italian mercenary’s, and scented gloves.

“I wonder how Niccolò felt,” Damien said, unexpectedly low. “When Laurianne took that hard, mercenary hand and slid over it that softest kid leather that she’d embroidered with silk and scented with ambergris and roses, just for him.”

Jess looked down at his hand in hers. A line of calluses showed subtly at the base of his fingers and more visibly at the tips.

“They must have been scarred everywhere, his hands.” Damien’s voice dropped to a pitch that made her very skin vibrate for it. “From fighting everyone’s battles for them. For money. And she gave them warmth, and softness, and sweetness, and beauty. As if they deserved that.”

Jess couldn’t stop looking at his hand. The
beauty
of that masculine hand, of that strong wrist, of the way the rolled sleeve contrasted with the tanned skin that grew paler there at the inside of his wrist.

That hand fisted slowly in her hold, tightening the tendons and muscles of his forearm under her fingers, and he pulled his arm away from her, stepping back from the counter. When she looked up at him, his face was completely closed.

Only those gray-green eyes looked as dark and brooding as the sea.

“Sit down,” Jess said.

His eyebrows shot up. Apparently people didn’t give Damien Rosier orders that often.

She pulled a folding chair away from the wall, an old thing made of wooden slats, leaning on top of a little round table also folded against the wall. Once Colette Delatour or some employee of this place must have set this chair and table out in front of the shop every day to eat or take the air and chat with passersby, just like everyone else in this town seemed to do.

“Sit,” Jess said. “If I’m going to make you a scent, then I need to get at your skin.”

“Or under it?” Damien said ironically.

She looked at him quickly.

He looked away. And then sat, still not looking at her. Was it her imagination, or did he not like letting her stand above him? His self-control gave so little purchase on him that it was hard to tell.

Her heart beat so hard she felt light-headed. It was all she could do not to reach out and grab one of those straight shoulders for support. Or at least just rest her hand lightly there, caress the shape of muscle and strength through that fine veil of white.

She moved behind him, where at least he couldn’t see the flame in her cheeks.

He held still. The tension in him as she came behind him and he refused to turn his head grew palpable.

“Are you wearing any scent now?”

“
Non
.” His word came out too crisp, bitten off.

“This is where you would wear it, if you did.” She bent.

Mistake. Coming behind him had seemed safer than approaching from the front, turning
him
into the vulnerable one. But now, to reach the open collar of his shirt, she had to bend her head past his shoulder, until her hair spilled over it, until her face was essentially nuzzling the side of his neck and hollow of his throat. Her hands pressed against his shoulders to keep her balance. They were steady as steel under her fingers, but warm and resilient.

The shirt got in her way, despite the open collar. His fingers shifted against her hair and a knuckle brushed her cheek as he undid another button.

And then another.

She kneaded her hands into his shoulders, trying not to fall into him. Her brain fogged, lost in this warm, human maleness of his scent that held a hint of…citrus again. Lemon verbena maybe. A much nicer quality than the scent that had been on his hands.

“What soap do you use?”
In the shower.
All over your naked body.

“My Tante Colette makes soaps for us for Christmas.” His voice sounded rough.

There was something oddly sweet about his words. This wealthy, ruthless businessman…who got homemade soaps from his old aunt and used them.

She pulled back before she could just bury her nose in the hollow of his throat and maybe even nibble at it. See how rough his voice grew when she did…

“Okay.” She moved away quickly, back to the other side of the counter. “I’ve got it. I’ll have to start running some tests of things today.”

Damien didn’t move. The small chair emphasized his size—tall, broad-shouldered, almost lounging. A panther. Even to the green in his eyes as he pinned her with them, just waiting for weakness to show. “That was fast.”

“I’m just getting started,” she said brusquely, spreading papers and bottles in pretense of work.
Please go away now. Let me pull myself together.

“And here I thought you were a trained perfumer,” he said, so infuriatingly she clutched a bottle and pressed it hard onto the counter to keep from throwing it at his head. “Men have layers.”

“Like onions,” she agreed solemnly, flexing her fingers on that bottle.

He checked, and then laughter flashed across his face. He tried to catch it back, but it curled up the corners of his lips. “Like parfaits.”

Laughter.
That leaping, hot humor, as if he held so much of it he could barely keep it down. Or as if
she’d
woken it up in him. She wanted to wake it again. But her brain had frozen in utter delight and arousal as she stared at that laughter, and she couldn’t come up with another clever thing to say.