A Wish Upon Jasmine (9 page)

***

“You won’t work with me.” The muscle in Jess’s jaw felt very like Damien’s looked, when his lips got that line.

The thirty-something commercial director, a lean man in glasses, gave her a cool, assured look of dismissal. “I’m afraid we just can’t provide small samples to every perfumer who comes by.”

“I’m
Jasmin Bianchi
.” If she specified any of a laboratory’s products in one of her fragrances, and it went on to sell anything close to her Spoiled Brat, she could double a laboratory’s revenue for years.

“Yes, so you’ve said.”

She resisted picking up some of those bottles off his desk and throwing them at him, at that tone.

“Unfortunately, we can’t sell in smaller amounts than five kilos.”

“Five
kilos
?” The man had lost his mind. “That’s 150,000 euros, if I want Grasse jasmine.” Not to mention, what the hell would she do with five kilos of jasmine absolute? Those were production quantities. No independent perfumer could go through that much during concept phases.

“
Je regrette
,” he said, immutably polite.

Jess put her hands on her hips. “You’re a Rosier SA subsidiary, aren’t you?” she finally realized. Damn it, she should have done more research before she came out here.

“Yes, we are,” the commercial director said coolly.

And so they wouldn’t even let her smell samples, let alone take some with her. It was just like her father had always said—the Rosiers and the other big fragrance families held a lock on this town, and screw anyone who wasn’t part of them or who made them her enemy.

She pivoted and strode out, yanking out her phone.

She’d be damned if Damien would beat her this way. Worse,
block her from access to scents
. Drive her back to New York and the bowels of some giant company that could make sure she was provided with everything she wanted, as long as she worked on commercial caricatures for the rest of her career. The Rosiers may have shut her father out of this town, but they could not exile her.

There had to be some small laboratory trying to make its way here. Or a subsidiary to one of the rival families. The Rosiers couldn’t own
everything.

***

The metal steps gripped at his shoes as Damien climbed up to the platform five meters above the concrete floor, huge machines all around him. Hell, the equipment needed an upgrade. And—“Where are their protective glasses?” He pointed at a group of three workers.

Cédric Lambert, the very young and working-on-a-dream CEO, looked guilty. “It’s hard to get everyone to wear them. They’re, ah, not very stylish.”

Damien cut him an incredulous look. “Oddly, the French government is not going to take that into consideration when they fine the hell out of you. Bureaucrats. And, you know, we are entirely surrounded by corrosive chemicals being processed at high pressures and with extreme heat sources. So those bureaucrats
might
have a point.”

“If only they weren’t so
big
,” Cédric said, pulling his own glasses down off his head. Where they did, indeed, look ridiculous.

Damien knew he was a hypocrite for not wearing his own protective glasses while he gave this lecture, but it was true that they were the nerdiest looking glasses known to man, and nobody could sue him for not protecting his
own
eyes.

He slipped his hands in his pockets and gazed out over the factory, thinking about its profit-loss statements. Although why Lambert put the word
profit
in the name for those statements was beyond him. Optimism?

He glanced sideways at the twenty-five-year-old CEO. But then, that was what the region needed, wasn’t it? Sheer, blind, stubborn optimism.

With that and a dose of actual business sense, you could possibly save an economy.

Unfortunately, Cédric, like his recently retired parents, had been determined to make a go of it without any of that actual business sense, just conviction and his training in chemistry. Laboratoire Lambert had been floundering along that way for years. Until Cédric faced facts and came to see Damien in his office in Grasse and essentially begged for a takeover. Well, Cédric had tried to put a good face on it, as if he was offering Rosier SA the opportunity of a lifetime, but since Damien already knew all about Laboratoire Lambert, that hadn’t really worked.

“A hundred and three employees?” Damien said. Local people. Who passed him on the street, whose kids bought ice cream at the stand just down the street from him and made
that
business possible, who bought houses and filled schools.

“Possibly a hundred and seven,” Cédric said. “We have four women on extended maternity leave.”

French law required that positions be held for three years for any woman who took time off to have a baby. It was one of those many laws that sounded great in some ideal world in the Assemblée but put a hell of a burden on a company.

One hundred and three. Or seven. And a profit-loss statement that had not actually seen the word
profit
in years.

His grandfather wouldn’t have done it, when he held the reins of the company. His father wouldn’t do it. Hell, given their father-son communication skills, this was going to mean another damn fight and then a month or two of the cold silent treatment, everything between them reduced to crisp one-sentence emails. His father had long since dismissed the previous generation of Lamberts as “idealistic hippies with a chemistry degree”.

“We have this new hay absolute we’re working on,” Cédric said, with that same light in his eye that Tristan got over one of his damn thirty-thousand-euro ingredients. “You have to smell it. It’s like grass and gold, all in a bottle. Liquid sunshine, fresh-cut.” He pulled a small brown bottle out of his pocket, clearly having carried it this whole time as his
pièce de résistance.

Artists. God.

Or chemists. In the perfume industry, the line between the two was never very clearly drawn.

Damien accepted the bottle and smelled it. He had to agree it was nice. Tristan had raved about it.
Damien, if you let that company go under before they can go into proper production of it, the world will be a darker place.
And, with that wink of Tristan humor,
Or at least my world will.

“And it’s got fantastic staying power,” Cédric said. “We’ve been testing it. It’s not one of those absolutes that smells good early but breaks down in a few months. And we’ve just started working on this absolute of narcissus that is going to be stunning. Wait until you smell it!”

“Right.” Damien rubbed the bridge over his nose. But his head didn’t bother him, right this second. No vice tightened over his forehead, no screws into his temples. One hundred and three—or seven—people. Living on a dream.

Sometimes, it was really nice to give a dream actual substance. He started to smile as he extended his hand to shake Cédric’s. “Let’s get some paperwork started.”

***

“I think you would have to talk to Monsieur Lambert,
mademoiselle
,” the assistant said nervously. At least Jess assumed the young woman was an assistant. Surely a commercial director would have more assurance? That said, the way this operation was run and given the younger woman’s white coat, she might actually be a chemist who had happened to be standing closest to the door when Jess buzzed for entrance.

“Fine,” Jess said with great patience. When she had been working for AOS, supply issues had never been her problem—reps brought her samples, and an assistant placed her orders—but when they’d been setting up Amour et Artisan, she’d been the one who visited laboratories to talk about supplies. She had been the only one on their start-up team who could properly evaluate whether she thought a laboratory’s products were good enough for her. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Well,” said the chemist-assistant-student-intern-whatever-she-was uneasily, as she led Jess between massive machines into a meager office area, “it’s just that right now, he’s a little busy.”

Jess stopped stock still as she spotted a black head through the glass walls and cheap blinds of the office. Damien, pen in hand over papers, glanced up at the movement.

For a second, their gazes locked through glass. Then he came to his feet just as she yanked open the glass door. “What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

The chemist-intern-whatever gasped behind her.

“Working,” Damien said crisply. How could eyes that cool hold that much heat?

“This is the one laboratory in Grasse that the Rosiers
don’t
own!”

Damien capped his pen with a thin smile. “Past tense.”

For a second, fury strangled all speech. And then she exploded: “What is
wrong
with you?”

That mockery of a smile faded away. He just looked at her, his lips that straight, hard line. “Doubtless infinite numbers of things.”

“Are you just so damn empty inside that you have to buy up everything that
matters
to other people to try to fill yourself up? Like some damn vampire, sucking all the blood out of everyone else to see if you can find out what life tastes like?”

Damien’s expression went grim and blank. He stared at her, the only motion in his body the twisting of his pen in thumb and forefinger.

The nervous assistant hugged herself in embarrassment, and the other man in the office stood awkwardly to the side, looking between them.

“My father was so right about you people,” Jess said bitterly. “One freaking perfume shop in Grasse escapes your grasp, and you tell all the laboratories around town to refuse supplies, just so you can freeze me out. What’s wrong? Did I insult your pride by not staying to kiss your feet the next day? Was I supposed to beg you to marry me and let me have your babies?”

The corners of Damien’s lips were white. His hand closed around the pen. He didn’t say a word.

“You
bastard
,” Jess said viciously, bitter and hopeless and caught. By cutting off her supplies, he might as well have bound her in duct tape in a dark room, all sensory input cut off except the struggle against the bonds that held her. It was an incredibly effective way to destroy a perfumer’s ability to work. She turned around to stride away.

“What supplies?” Damien’s abrupt voice cut like an ice shard.

“My
perfume
supplies!” She spun back around on him, outraged. “You know damn well what I’m talking about! You told every laboratory around this town to shut me out!”

He gazed at her, eyes narrowing, for a long moment. And then, flatly, “I’ll have to deal with this later. I’m busy right now.”

Oh, that bastard. The dismissal, firm, from a position of power, was like a dash of acid from one of those machines. She had to make herself stride out before she started breaking things in impotent fury.

“Where should I put them?” a cheerful voice asked, and Jess looked up and started at the juxtaposition of the cheerfulness and the black hair and long, lean, male body. Then her eyes focused, and she realized that this man who looked very like Damien also looked nothing like him at all. The eyes were brown, the smile too amused, his way of moving too relaxed and easy.

Jess straightened from the lower cabinet, where she’d been trying to see what else this place might have that she could work with. She’d have to beg a friend in New York to overnight her collection of materials, there was no help for it. Her father’s were boxed up in New York, too. Not that she wanted to waste her father’s ingredients on someone like
Damien.

“Where should you put what?” She eyed the giant cardboard box the man carried. “You’re Tristan Rosier, aren’t you?”

He beamed at her. “My reputation precedes me.”

“Indeed,” she said dryly. Tristan Rosier’s star reputation drove the average serious perfumer crazy—the way the media honed in on him just because he was hot, flirted well, and was a Rosier. Making perfumes was geek work, might as well face it, and Tristan refused completely to fit into the introverted social expectations of his colleagues. He acted more like he belonged with the models and actors, the marketing team and executives, at those blasted perfume launch parties. All perfumers thought they were the real star of the show—they were—but Tristan actually got everyone else to treat him like one.

He gave a little bow. “Yours precedes you, too.”

Touché
. She narrowed her eyes at him. “What’s in the box, stink bombs?”

He looked delighted. “While that is a
brilliant
idea for driving an enemy out of territory, and I once did it to my cousins when they tried to claim I was too little to join their pirate club, no. Well…I’m not saying it wouldn’t stink if I dropped these things, but that’s not the goal.” He advanced into the room and forced space for the box on a counter.

Jess looked into it at the tops of very familiar brown bottles, packed in tight and several layers deep. Wariness grew. “What is this?”

“A present.” Tristan smiled at her.

“Why would you be giving me presents? Those look like perfume supplies.” And if they were quality perfume supplies, as she must assume they were coming from the Rosiers, that big a box of them was a very expensive gift.

“Well…I
am
the good cop, but as a matter of fact, just to keep you confused, the bad cop sent these.”

Her eyebrows drew together. “You mean Damien?”

Tristan looked smug. “It’s funny how when I say good cop, bad cop, people
always
know which one is which.”

“Why should Damien tell you to bring me these?” Jess asked, increasingly wary and also annoyed. Because if Damien started making nice gestures to her after she had yelled at him in public like that…well, that made her seem like a pretty crappy person, didn’t it? And she was already well aware of how bad a start she had made in this tight-knit perfume community by yelling at one of its scions in public. That little display was going to have a ripple effect, and she’d started to feel sick to her stomach as soon as her temper had died down enough for her to realize it.

“Well, to be precise, he didn’t ask
me
to bring you these. I am under strict orders not to get anywhere near you. However, I am quite terrible at obeying orders from my cousins, and when I caught one of the lab techs in our perfume division packing these up to bring to you at his orders…obviously I couldn’t resist.”