A Wish Upon Jasmine

by Laura Florand

  “Did he go take over another company?” Tristan shook his head indulgently. “He really is insatiable about that. You wonder how much energy and time any one man can spare to saving the whole world. Which one did he take over this time? Not Laboratoire Lambert by any chance?”

  Jess parted her lips and stopped. “How did you know that?”

  Tristan’s face lit. “Did he really? Hot damn. Uncle Louis is going to be so pissed, but damn I want their hay absolute.”

  “You couldn’t just buy it from them like most people? You Rosiers had to take over the whole company?” Jess asked angrily.

  “Well, yeah. It was going under. Even Damien’s going to have a hell of a job saving it, and his father is going to act hard and impatient over it for months. Uncle Louis hit his business stride in the eighties.” Tristan thought about it a second more and then just grinned and pumped his fist. “Shit.” It was a delighted curse. “And Damien acted so tough when I asked him about it, like he wouldn’t even think of making such a stupid business move.”

  That didn’t even make any sense. “Why would Damien Rosier buy up a company that was a dead weight?”

  “Well…it’s a Grasse company and employs around, what, a hundred people here. Don’t worry, he’ll eventually make it profitable. That’s what he does.”

  Jess stared at him, trying to process this.

  Tristan flung out his hands. “He turned that Amour et Artisan company around for you, didn’t he?”

  “Turned it around? We’d barely gotten started! We had big plans for that company.” I had big plans for that company. Dreams. The only dreams I had to hold onto.

  Tristan snorted. “I’ve met Tara Lee. All charm and conviction, to get people on board, and no business sense. You dodged a bullet on that one. Now you can see what your dream company can become when you have someone with real business acumen behind it.”

  This whole conversation was like looking up at the sky, expecting to see its ordinary blue, and discovering that you were instead staring at the ground high overhead, and the sky was actually what you were standing on upside down. “Except that it’s not mine anymore,” Jess said tightly. “I left. I sold my shares.”

  Tristan’s eyebrows flexed together. “Well…I’m sure you turned a nice profit on them, once people knew Damien was taking over. But it seems kind of an idiot move on your part. No offense.”

  “He would have made me produce the same crap as Spoiled Brat again! I wanted to do niche perfumes. Something good.”

  “Did he actually tell you he expected the commercial stuff? He’s backed quite a few niche perfume companies. And the name Amour et Artisan does wave your niche perfume ambitions like a bright pink flag. Did you talk to him before you left?”

  Well…no. She had just left. And buried her father. And…despaired.

  Yes. Despair. That was the place she’d been in.

  She gazed down at the box of perfume supplies, and then reached out a hand to slowly stroke their caps. Had she finally climbed out of that pit of despair?

  “This is one of my favorite greens.” Tristan touched a bottle at the corner. “The scent is amazing. Like sunlight on grass, you know? And the way it blends.” He kissed his fingertips, in a gesture so French it reminded her painfully of her father. “Let me know what you think of it.”

  “Thank you,” Jess said slowly, still not quite sure what to make of all this. But if Tristan’s own favorite greens were in this box, then he had taken over from the lab tech and selected the essences and molecules himself. So he deserved her thanks. Damn it, Damien deserved her thanks. That really went against the grain.

  “It’s that hay absolute I was telling you about,” Tristan said. “From Laboratoire Lambert.”

  “Thank you,” Jess said again, feeling very stiff.

  Tristan shrugged. And smiled. “Sure. After all, Damien’s my cousin. And I’m very interested to see what you do with him.”

  ***

  “Making yourself at home?” a cool, velvet-dark voice asked, as Jess struggled to drag her heavy suitcase over cobblestones.

  Jess’s head came up sharply. Damien hadn’t come by the shop the day before to harass her. She’d started to wonder if Tristan’s box of supplies had been some kind of peace offering.

  Until the hotel that morning informed her that her room had been booked, in fact all rooms had been booked, indefinitely. It’s the tourist season, the woman had explained with a smile that clearly communicated the real message: No Rosier Enemies Allowed.

  “My idea of a comfortable home includes electricity and running water,” she said sharply. “But since you had the hotel kick me out, I guess I’m going to be camping at the shop and hauling buckets from some of these fountains that fill this city.”

  Damien’s expression turned inscrutable. “I had the hotel kick you out? Is this the same way I had all the local laboratories refuse to supply you?”

  “And I’d started to think I might have misjudged you about the laboratories,” she said bitterly, and yanked at the suitcase, stuck once again on cobblestones.

  He picked it up as easily as if the giant suitcase weighed nothing. “You packed for a long stay, didn’t you? What’s in this thing, your whole apartment?”

  “The length of my stay is none of your business.”

  He said nothing for a few steps, expression impenetrable, except for that little glitter of anger in his eyes. “How long until your water and electricity are turned on? What date did they give you?”

  “They didn’t,” Jess snapped. “Apparently both accounts are in your name, and the only lawyer I know of who might be willing to face off against the Rosiers and get that straightened out, Antoine Vallier, is out of town.”

  “Just as well for that bastard,” Damien said darkly.

  “If you think you’re going to drive me out with discomfort, it’s not going to work,” Jess said. The more he gave her a hard time, the more determined she got. Despair and old grief just faded back into the shadows at that vivid instinct to fight. He’d taken enough from her. Life had taken enough from her. This shop was hers.

  Damien pulled his phone out of his pocket, slid his thumb across it a couple of times, and then spoke into it. “Fréd? You still have the account records for the water and electricity at Tante Colette’s old shop? Get those turned back on for me today, will you? Don’t throw weight around, but you might want to mention that I’m a little impatient to have to intervene to deal with this myself. Maybe throw in a reference to my efforts to turn Grasse into a place where new businesses feel welcome to set up and thrive.”

  Jess blinked as he hung up. Her eyebrows drew together. “Are you trying to place me in your debt or something?”

  He cut her a chilly glance and stopped in front of the old door, suitcase still in hand, and waited while she unlocked it. Then he carried the suitcase up the narrow back stairs to the old rooms above the shop. They were dusty still—she hadn’t even started to clean them—and the mattress on that old dark wood bed probably held mice. Jess cringed to think about dealing with it, or, even worse, trying to sleep on it. But the alternative—making the rounds of the hotels begging for a room—pissed her off.

  “That will be five dollars,” Damien said.

  She stared at him.

  “For the suitcase.” He held his hand out, like a doorman waiting for a tip. “So you won’t be in my debt.”

  His eyes glittered, and she felt her own lips tighten. She had to take a deep breath to get the words out: “Thank you.”

  He just watched her ironically.

  “And thanks for the supplies,” she said stiffly.

  He didn’t say anything. She didn’t know why he had helped her with the suitcase. He looked as if he could barely stand to be in the same room with her.

  “You’ll have to tell me how much I owe you,” she said.

  His jaw tightened. “Don’t worry about it. I may be empty but my bank account isn’t.”

  Shame brushed her. T
hat had been a nasty thing to say on her part. Not to mention that, in her anger, she’d revealed to their audience—and thus to the entire gossip network of Grasse—that she and he had slept together.

  “Why are you fixing my problems?” she demanded, rather than try to apologize for something she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to.

  “Because apparently I’m causing them.”

  Well…he was. Stealing her company, the whole laboratory-supply issue, the hotel, the water and electricity.

  “Just by existing,” he said.

  Yes. Just by existing, he made a tumult rise inside her that made her feel far too alive. Like she could get hurt again.

  But he made her want to fight, too. Like she was a resilient person who knew she could survive a few hurts.

  God, it felt good to feel alive.

  “I don’t owe you anything,” she insisted, folding her arms across her chest.

  “You owe me a damn fragrance,” he said sharply, and left.

  ***

  The water and electricity were on by noon, a rapidity that suggested the mayor might have gotten involved, and Damien himself carried in a mattress right after she got back from lunch. He didn’t speak to her, his expression cool and closed when their eyes met briefly. He and a big man with charcoal-streaked russet hair carried the mattress up the stairs and, before she could even make it to the landing after them, came back down with the old mattress and disappeared with it down the street.

  And Jess lay back on the bare mattress, which smelled of factories and newness, and stared at the ceiling and didn’t know what to think or feel about any of it.

  The new smell of the mattress wasn’t a hospital smell, but it was closer than anything else she had smelled since she got off the airplane. Close enough to take her mind back to a place it didn’t want to go…

  ***

  New York, six months ago

  Her phone was ringing. She shifted on the uncomfortable chair in the ICU waiting room, where she’d gone while the nurses changed her father’s catheter, did those last care-taking things. She should have left him in his apartment, like he’d wanted, but she just couldn’t watch him die without seeing if there was one last thing the hospital could do.

  By now, of course, she realized she’d been wrong. She shouldn’t have done this. Grasped onto him so hard that she hurt him in her fear of letting go. She should have just let him…die.

  She shoved water off her face, yet again, and tried to focus on the phone screen.

  She didn’t recognize the number, but she often didn’t recognize numbers these days. It could be test results or insurance, a new doctor, or, rare-to-nearly-never anymore, someone calling to see if she needed help, could they bring food, do a load of laundry, drive her somewhere.

  She’d read on a website the things people were supposed to do to help someone in her situation. Almost no one ever thought to do them for her. After two years, maybe they’d gotten tired of it.

  She was tired. So tired her hand fumbled on the phone as she answered.

  “Jess.” The male voice was calm, assured, sexy French-on-British. Her heart tightened in this confused, mushy way, like it wasn’t actually a muscle anymore, it had been pulverized too much. She couldn’t deal with Damien Rosier. Not tonight. “How are you doing?”

  She stared at the waiting room television while tears filled her eyes just at the question. She had to hold the phone away from her a second to sniff hard and cram all those tears back.

  For that moment, she wanted to turn to him so badly. Wanted to just fling herself into his arms, make him, through sheer desperation, be that man she had imagined him to be—someone tender and careful and strong, able to hold her through this terrible, terrible night.

  The same way she’d wanted to make her father stay alive.

  “Now that you’ve had a bit more time to adjust to everything, I wondered if we could talk. Could I take you out to dinner?” He named one of the top restaurants in the city.

  Oh, God, of course he wasn’t asking if she needed help. He was bored or something. Ready for another hook-up. He wasn’t the man she had wished he was, that night. He was the man who hooked up with a different model every night, the man who had slept with her while stealing her company, without a second thought.

  Jesus, she must be in Damien’s little black book now. One of his resources of women in New York who might be up for good sex when he was in town and had the urge.

  A wild vision of herself at that restaurant, crumpled and stale from the hospital, no shower in two days. She stank of dying.

  “No,” she said.

  A tightening of frustration in his voice. Women must not tell him no that often. “Jess. Don’t you think this is important?”

  More important than her father dying? How the hell self-centered was he?

  God, of course she couldn’t throw herself into his arms and ask for help. Of course she had to handle this all alone.

  The nurse came to the waiting room door and nodded to her. Jess’s hand tightened on the phone.

  “Jess. I know you have a lot going on right now, but don’t you think it’s at least worth seeing each other again?”

  At least it put things into perspective. Was it important, a hook-up that had seemed beautiful and had turned out to be with one of the industry’s ruthless players? Was it even worth thinking about, right this second? Let alone risking repeating in a desperate grasp after a fantasy?

  “No,” she had said as she shifted her thumb to disconnect. No, although it hurt her heart, added one last Gordian twist to the knot in her stomach. “I really don’t.”

  Chapter 8

  “Nice skirt,” Damien said. It wasn’t. It was a perfect little pencil skirt, featured in the display window of a shop just down the street, which she’d paired with a tailored white blouse, exactly the kind of thing newly hired women at Rosier SA wore to prove how professional they were.

  Of course, they also usually carefully curled or straightened their hair, a step in glossy perfectionism she seemed to have entirely missed in her education in things feminine, and most of the time they remembered to put on their shoes when he came into their office.

  Jess was moving very briskly among the bottles, test blotters, papers, and moleskin journal she had laid out on the counter, but she’d forgotten she was barefoot. She was such a geek. Way worse than Tristan, who’d learned to disguise his own nerdiness with social skills when he was very young. She’d probably played at being Galadriel when she was a teenager. Her perfumes were her magic potions or something.

  “Did you get it just for me?”

  A tiny streak of color on her cheeks. So, yeah.

  Instead of, say, the soft, playful, romantic sundress she’d been wearing the day before.

  He was going to break one of these damn glass bottles around him. Just strike out and slash its head off.

  “I’ve put together a couple of things I want to test on your skin,” she said briskly. Her fingers tightened around one of the bottles. She tried to spear him with a look. “I expect you to stay professional.”

  Hell, he could see why she’d hidden in a perfumer’s lab instead of taking on the business world as a career. She couldn’t spear a marshmallow with that look.

  Which made it all the more pathetic that he, the man whose heart was made out of titanium, felt as if he’d not only been speared but was now being roasted just a little too close to the fire and was about to go from burnished gold to crispy black in a sudden catch of flame.

  “Do you?” he said coolly.

  Her flush deepened.

  So no.

  She didn’t really expect that.

  And yet here he was anyway, instead of knocking on a locked door she refused to open to an asshole like him.

  Interesting.

  He pulled out a checkbook and a pen made out of platinum that had been somebody’s idea of what he’d want for Christmas. “How much did we say?”

  A bottle clicked on
the counter. Suddenly her eyes did spear him. It was the oddest sensation. Where everyone else’s much sharper looks bounced off his shield, hers just sank right through him and held him. “I don’t want your money.”

  It pissed him the hell off when people said money in that tone. He’d made a shitload of it in his life, both for himself and for his family—not to mention all the people who depended on Rosier SA for a living.

  And what he’d spent his entire career managing and growing for his family wasn’t fucking crap. It was what allowed the rest of them to act so precious and entitled over their perfume art and their valleys full of roses. Because somebody wrapped a great wall of money around them and made sure the real world couldn’t penetrate it and get its money-grubbing hands on their dreams.

  “You know what we said.” Jess put her chin up and tried a cynical curl of her lips, even while color deepened in her cheeks. “Take them off.”

  He froze. Arousal and nakedness swelled up through his brain, taking over his thoughts. Removing his coat and cufflinks and watch that morning to disturb her, and wreck himself, had been one thing. Repeating the same striptease at her command turned it into something far more exposed and vulnerable.

  And Damien didn’t do vulnerable.

  Well, he’d done it once.

  With her.

  And the day after she’d…taken herself back. The trust, the sweetness, the magic, the wishing. As if she’d made a mistake, giving it to him.

  As if he couldn’t possibly deserve a handful of wildflowers.

  If it wasn’t hothouse and expensive, he wouldn’t know how to appreciate its worth.

  His fingers were stiff on his cufflinks.

  “Do you need help?” Jess asked.

  “No,” he snapped.

  And then he realized, too late, what he’d slashed back from him—her fingers on his cufflinks, the soft hair just a bend of his head away, as she focused on that first step of getting him naked.