A Wish Upon Jasmine

by Laura Florand

  When her father used to warn her about the Rosiers, he hadn’t even been exaggerating.

  She rubbed the goose bumps on her arms.

  His gaze flickered down over her again and back up to her face. His lips pressed together. “Jess—”

  “Well, maybe it’s time to shake things up,” she said suddenly, lifting her chin. Just because she was shy and wistful and romantic, just because she was lost right now and vulnerable, didn’t mean that he had to know it. Not again. This time, she could fake that tough, sophisticated shell.

  She could.

  Just spray on your own Spoiled Brat and wave it under his nose. That will help.

  She’d do it, too, if the damn perfume didn’t give her a migraine.

  He stared at her. “…Shake things up?” His voice sounded odd, compressed.

  “Stir things up.” She made a gesture with the hand that had gotten splashed, and the scent of Christmas and happiness washed all around them again. Rich and sweet. Somebody needed to take control of those bitter almonds and bind them down with other molecules, moderate that blithe happiness with a little hardcore sense. Civet, maybe. Something pissed off and ready to fight back.

  He folded his own arms across his chest, gazing at her. His eyes really should be black. Merciless. Instead they were this beautiful gray-green, like a deep sea in the quiet privacy of early morning, when no one was around to disturb her peace and all that sea was for her.

  Those eyes tricked a woman in all kinds of wrong ways.

  “I prefer the situation as it is,” he said coolly. “Not stirred.” But his gaze flicked up and down her body once.

  “Of course you do. You’re a Rosier. The aristocrats always hated it when the starving peasants rebelled and overset their world order.”

  Those sea eyes could be as cool as…well, the sea. “I come from a long line of peasants.”

  She snorted before she could stop herself. Yeah, right. The Rosiers’ nepotistic perfumocracy held sway over this region as if it was their own city-state and they the Borgias. Her father had talked about it some, when she asked him if he ever wanted to return to France to escape the American perfume industry he had had a tendency to curse. And Damien Rosier was the heir apparent to Rosier SA, their Chief Assassin, the one who took out his family’s rivals without a second thought.

  Heartless. She’d been a tiny, tiny fish in the school he ate for breakfast. She’d had that one bright dream to nourish her through a dark time, and he’d gotten bored one day and had the munchies.

  “So did the kings of France if you go back far enough,” she said. “Let’s get real. My father warned me about you.”

  A faint narrowing of his eyes. “Warned you? About me?” He searched her face. “Was that before or after—”

  “About the Rosiers,” Jess said quickly. “You probably weren’t even born when my father left Grasse.”

  His face closed, once again a perfect shield over his emotions. Never play poker with this guy. Except she already had—strip poker. And she’d lost the last of her heart, while for him it had been a casual game.

  “I already knew about you,” she said recklessly. Or she should have. Who didn’t know about Damien Rosier? Nobody wanted to mess with him. No woman should blithely let him pick her up at a party as if he was going to save her heart.

  The corners of his lips tightened. He dropped his hands in a slashing movement that took them to the pockets of his suit. God, he looked like such a prince in that suit—so elegant and so masculine, the lack of tie and the buttons undone at the throat the only indication that he, too, could get a little overheated sometimes.

  “And what,” he said precisely, “did you know? Already?”

  Keep it cool, Jess. Don’t flush. Don’t let him see that it mattered more to you than it did to him. Don’t let him see your wounds, don’t let him see your hurt, don’t let him see anything that would make a predator go for the kill. God, she wished she wasn’t so frizzed and stale from the international flight. She’d kill for a little supermodel gloss right now.

  She shrugged, trying for his tough cynicism. “All I needed to. You took over my company. That same weekend.”

  Too bad her father hadn’t raised her in France, so that her lips could make as tight and sensual a line as his did. Instead of her own stupid poetic bow that made her lips look vulnerable when she least wanted it. Of course, if her father had raised her in Grasse, she’d probably never have gotten her big break in the perfume industry, either, not even to make perfumes like Spoiled Brat. You had to be a Rosier, or from one of the other big perfume families, to make it here.

  “And that told you all you needed to know about me?” He picked up the bottle of bitter almond oil and gazed at it.

  “With the help of a little bit of research.” Which had produced photo after photo of him, handsome, cool, wealthy, a different beautiful model or actress beside him in each one.

  So that the discovery of him at the next night’s perfume event, less than twelve hours after she’d left his New York apartment, leaning over supermodel Nathalie Leclair, her back against the wall, her beautiful, sexy face turned the few inches up to his that was all her height needed, had just slid its knife so deep into Jess’s gut she still got sick from the wound.

  So get over it. This is the industry. Tough the fuck up. He sure as hell hadn’t been so affected by her. As he’d proven conclusively that Monday, when she’d walked into her little dream company to discover he had taken it over.

  Lines of tension showed at the corners of Damien’s lips. He was too young to have those lines, but that was what a man got, when he devoted his entire being to cutthroat, heartless business.

  “I didn’t know it was your company,” he said abruptly. “When I took it over.”

  Oh, yeah, right. As if he didn’t know the name and important information on every single person who had a stake in that start-up artisan perfume company before he bought it. “Ignorance isn’t your reputation.”

  Those lines at the corners of his mouth hurt her, deep down. They hadn’t been there, that night. Without his last name to anchor her in reality, she’d been totally lost in his sensuality, in that quiet, courteous romance of him leaning beside her against the terrace wall, talking, in that curious fascination in his eyes as he looked at her and lured her in closer to him. The way he seduced, as careful of her as if he was being seduced, too. She hadn’t seen any lines at the corners of his mouth that night at all.

  “I knew Jasmin Bianchi held ten percent of the shares,” he said tightly. “I didn’t know you were Jasmin Bianchi. The same woman who made Spoiled Brat.” His gaze ran over her again, as if trying to unravel her.

  No. No more unraveling. “A full name changes everything, doesn’t it?” She tried for ironic, a little dangerous, like him.

  God, the shock of it, when she’d realized he was Damien Rosier. That her wish-on-a-star Prince Charming was an actual prince, at least as far as the perfume industry was concerned, and way the hell out of her league.

  Why hadn’t she let herself realize it before? It wasn’t as if there were that many thirty-ish, black-haired, sardonic, elegant, French-accented Damiens likely to be running around a perfume launch party.

  “I still can’t believe you’re the woman who made Spoiled Brat.” His lip curled involuntarily over the name of the perfume, and it felt as if he was curling his lip over her. After the way his hands had been all over—and inside—her body, that curled lip made her writhe. “You did?”

  “I was being sarcastic at the time.” And she’d never again been allowed to be anything else. Every brief that demanded romance, sincerity, dreams, wishing—those went to other perfumers. She got the briefs for perfumes that were supposed to pitch temper tantrums or rake beautiful, polished nails down everyone else’s chalkboard.

  Until by the time her father died, she hated her career so much that the death of the man who had inspired her into it, coupled with the loss of that dream of a company, had
left her huddled on the edge of a precipice, staring into a great void.

  “Sarcastic.” That fine masculine mouth of his, which gave such a lovely tightness to his vowels, could also form the subtlest, most expressive moue, when it didn’t like the flavor of something. She loathed being the distaste in his mouth.

  Damn Rosier snobs. Her father’s stories should have warned her. “Jealous?” Rosier SA commissions were solidly at number four and number seven in perfumes this year, while four years after its release, her Spoiled Brat had only dropped from number two to number three.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Well, you’ve successfully proven that there are no depths to which people’s tastes can’t sink. I suppose that’s a feat to inspire some kind of envy.”

  From the man who had fit a night with her in between all the supermodels he hung out with. Yeah, he probably thought his own tastes had sunk to new depths, didn’t he? What in the world was I thinking when I slept with her?

  He’d probably been drunk. God, in that milieu, he might have been drugged.

  She hadn’t been. She’d just been…sad. And so eager to grab onto happiness.

  Such a stupid, female thing to do, to let that wish for happiness latch onto the nearest hot guy and imagine that happiness was bottled up in him. That all she had to do was rub it a few times to set it free and let it wash all over her.

  And yet, for just that night, that happiness had seemed so damn real. Sometimes, even today, if she didn’t pay attention, hope snuck out and she still wanted to believe in that happiness again. Wanted to follow it to France and see if she could wish so hard she could make it come true.

  But she was paying attention now, and she shoved that hope down hard.

  “I really think it was the marketers who proved how low people’s tastes can go.” AOS sent me the brief. I was fresh out of perfume school, and ready to prove myself in a cynical industry that had eaten my father alive. So I did it. And did it so damn well I cemented my reputation forever. Nobody believes I can do anything else. Not even, sometimes, me. She bared her teeth at him. “I was making a little industry commentary.”

  “Congratulations. The industry is suitably destroyed.”

  Temper flared. Why was she letting him get away with this? She was a perfumer, an artiste. He was a moneyman. She was supposed to be looking down on him.

  “At least I don’t kick kittens into traffic if I need to, to expand my family’s business empire.”

  His face closed immediately. He stepped back from her, with a tight curve to those fine sensual lips. “Only puppies and baby strollers. I draw the line at kittens.”

  She wished his eyes matched that ironic expression. That they didn’t keep flickering over her and searching her face, as if he couldn’t forget what she looked like when he was making her come.

  God.

  Suddenly she hated everything about the way men and women worked, that no matter how much a woman might try to fight it, somehow it remained true: he had been inside her body, but she hadn’t been inside his. No matter what now, no matter where, whenever they met, he would always look at her and think about the ways he had owned her, taken her, and she would never, ever own any part of him.

  She folded her arms. “You know, you can go back into your bottle.”

  “What?” He blinked.

  She reached out again to take the amandes bottle from him. His hands tightened on it, the edge of his fingers pressing against hers. “Now that we each know who we really are, I would like you to hand my property back to me and leave. I own this place now.” A space. A magic. Something that had lasted for centuries. Something that could be hers. As long as she held on tight to it. “Which means that, contrary to what you Rosiers like to assume, you can’t possibly.”

  Their eyes locked a long moment. “You don’t think we have anything else to catch up about?”

  What, was he bored and thinking another quick lay would be fun?

  “No,” she said between her teeth, her own lip curling in revulsion. He could take that disdain and arrogance and shove them where the sun didn’t shine.

  His lips pressed tight together, and it was ridiculous how that hard line emphasized their sensuality. All the things that mouth could be disciplined to do. The scent of bitter almonds rose between them like a physical force, a battle of wills. The glass curved cool under her hands, his warm, taut fingers pressed against hers...

  “As you wish,” he said finally, with that gorgeously sensual-on-crisp accent of his that seemed to reach right into all her pink parts and tickle them unmercifully. With a tiny ghost of a bow, he loosed the jar, turned around, and walked out.

  Wait. “That did not count as one of my wishes!”

  He paused at the doorway and glanced back, his eyebrows raised again. His gaze skated up and down her body once, leaving her head to toe in flame. With a shake of his head, he was gone.

  Chapter 2

  “Tante Colette.” Damien paced, which was a damn hard thing to do in that garden. The August sun of Provence warmed it all through, so that even the great medieval walls could not keep it cool, and bees buzzed in rosemary and lavender and every other possible herb a ninety-six-year-old woman could grow in her garden in Provence, the heat releasing the familiar blend of scents into the air.

  His family was always doing that to him. Surrounding him with silk and scent and sensory pleasure and expecting him to be the hard one, the merciless one, the one silk slid right off without touching. He made a sharp motion of his hand, trying to slash that warm scented air away from him, but it only waved the scent of bitter almond into the mix. He couldn’t get that almond scent off him.

  Idiot. You didn’t even try. He stopped under the fig tree and stared up at the big brown fruit, just splitting to allow its red richness to peek out. He smelled like the damn Feast of Kings. Like somebody should combine him with those figs and make a tart out of him.

  “Did you have something to say, Damien?” Tante Colette asked coolly from her stool in front of the jasmine growing up one wall. Ninety-six, and she was weeding.

  They’d tried to do the weeding themselves, but Tante Colette had kept weeding anyway. Until they finally realized that by doing too much of her gardening for her, they were stealing something essential to her happiness. She was exactly like Pépé, their grandfather, who needed to be present at the harvests, who did not want, while living, to yield all the usefulness of his life into younger hands.

  Damien hardened his heart. That was his heart’s job, right? To stay hard. Untouchable. Every member of a big family had to make his niche for himself, and ruthlessness was his. “Yes. You’ve crossed the line here, Tante Colette. You gave away Laurianne’s old shop? To the perfumer who made Spoiled Brat?” He knew he was supposed to be the cousin who only cared about money and the bottom line, but, God…Spoiled Brat. It made his skin cringe.

  “She came?” A leap of light in those old eyes.

  “What is she, another of Léo Dubois’s descendants? Or did you decide to give away our heritage to every descendant of every child you rescued during the war, or…what the actual hell?”

  Tante Colette’s brow wrinkled still more. “And…you were the one to discover her first? Not Tristan?”

  Damien stiffened, his chest tightening around his heart to keep it still, that old, ulcerous knot lodging in his belly. “Tristan?” His matchmaking aunt had planned Jess for Tristan?

  Who, by the way, had a fit and died every time Spoiled Brat was even mentioned.

  “Well, I just thought…” Tante Colette searched his face, perplexed. “She seems so…soft for you. At least in her photos.”

  Damien wasn’t his cousin Matt. He didn’t have a soft heart, and he didn’t need to cover it with folded arms and growls as if it was vulnerable when it clearly wasn’t. But sometimes it hurt anyway, as if his family had stabbed him in it, and he couldn’t even explain why. “Soft for me?”

  Maybe she’d thought so, too. That he was too hard for her, too cold,
something. He’d thought…well, yes, that she was all softness and he was all hardness, that night. But it hadn’t been a bad hard, had it? It hadn’t felt that way to him—hot and eager and hungry hardness and wondering, at how much she smelled like happiness to him, at how her pale brown hair lay in such soft, loose curls around her head and slid through his fingers, as if softness and happiness could be real, could come true, could belong to him, too.

  Not just the expensive pleasures that money could buy, but real, down deep, utterly free happiness.

  He sure as hell hadn’t felt cold that night, or thought he had been cold to her.

  But if she’d agreed on the way that night felt to him, then she would have…wanted to see him again, right? Instead of shutting him away with that cynical mockery, as if he couldn’t be trusted in that close to her and she’d made a mistake, letting him get near. It had been like trying to get inside a mirror, when he’d found her again after that night. As if, instead of all that wistful, hopeful sweetness into which he’d sunk that first night, he kept hitting instead against a reflection of himself, of who she saw when she looked at him, until her irony defeated even his.

  He reached up and touched the split fig, with just one fingertip.

  “I just thought you needed someone more…sardonic.” Tante Colette waved a dirt-stained old hand in the air. “Cooler. Tougher.”

  “She made Spoiled Brat when she was barely out of perfume school,” Damien said. “Trust me, she has a strong sense of satire.”

  Wait, what were they arguing about, exactly? That Jess Bianchi was a better match for him than for Tristan? How did Colette manage these things? They were supposed to be arguing about her insane urge to give away parts of the family inheritance to random pseudo-descendants who had no idea of their value.

  And unlike Matt, he was not too soft-hearted to fight off threats to his family. His aunt, clearly losing it at last, had given away part of the valley to a rock star semi-descendant of hers only a few months ago, and instead of fighting that threat off, Matt had gone and gotten engaged to the rock star instead.