For some reason, Damien looked really, really…struck. By something that didn’t hurt, quite, but it changed something about him. His arm relaxed on her shoulders, and this quiet kind of…thought…seemed to settle over his body. He kept his arm draped over her, fingers playing idly with her hair or rubbing her shoulder, long past when his clothes had dried on his body in the August evening.
And every time they looked at him, everyone in his family grinned like idiots.
Even his grandfather, when he came back out from his nap in the cool of the evening to eat with them under the plane tree, watched Damien and Jess with a faint curve of his lips. “Looks like I’m still the most ruthless man in the family,” he said to Damien with considerable satisfaction.
Damien sighed. But he didn’t look very put out.
Chapter 22
“It’s their way of honoring you for what they think you want to be,” Jess said. She stopped still on the little stone landing, where a fountain trickled, tucked against a wall. The smell of old water, of moss and wet and stone, tucked away in this ancient town of sun and flowers, grabbed at her. She had to breathe it for a moment, resting her hand on wet stone to pull in its texture.
Damien’s warm, strong hand around her other hand anchored her in humanity. Perfect—this fountain made to nurture humans, and the reminder of that human hand. Her brain went off on tangents of possibilities, and she took out her moleskin journal to note down a few words and formula ideas. She’d stopped doing that a long time ago, stuck in that Spoiled Brat rut, in hopeless denial of her own career. But here, in this world, new ideas blossomed in her brain everywhere she stepped. And she noted them all down, no matter how unusable they were, just because they were beautiful anyway. Worth noting. Worth reaching for.
“What is?” Damien asked when they resumed their climb of the street of stairs.
It took her a second to remember. “Oh, the mean thing. The James Bond, panther, ruthless thing. You started it. And I know, I know—it must have been your way of responding to the pressures and expectations on you, of forging your own place. I can see how it would make a cycle. But they’re just giving respect to who they think you’ve chosen to be.”
They came out onto the street and headed under an arch thickly grown with fuchsia bougainvillea. She could feel Damien’s gaze on her head.
“Of course, if you’re forged,” she said, “that sounds pretty immutable. Except under volcanic heat and pressures. Maybe you’re something more human and supple and easier to change, but I don’t know for sure how it works with families. Change might be even harder, because so many people have fit themselves to each other as they’ve grown that any shift affects every single person’s beliefs about who they are and who you are and how you all fit together.”
“For someone who doesn’t have much family, you’re very wise,” Damien said quietly.
She shrugged, her throat tightening again at her lack of people. “I like to watch them,” she said softly. “And see what they’re like.”
For some reason, that made him pull her in to his side for a strong hug. “You have family now,” he reminded her.
Not like he did. Not solid and impossible to lose, so stuck to him that he couldn’t even stretch out his arms and take a deep breath without running into family and all their expectations. But…a vision of Layla’s bright, happy face flashed through her mind, and of Colette Delatour’s old wisdom.
Maybe she had the beginnings of a few people. She looked up at Damien, and behind him danced little images of grinning, intrigued family members, all watching them.
Maybe more than a few. If she could figure out how to keep them, to make the relationships solid like his were.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been stuck by Spoiled Brat for years—by people’s expectations of me, my expectations of them. But I was just realizing how much looser its hold is on me than all the expectations are on you. I really can just…change. Just do it. Because I want to do it. Nobody is affected by me at all.”
His hand flexed on hers. “I am.”
She looked up at him quickly as they came out on a terrace. He had brought her to a small town on a cliff above the sea, with a promise to show her the sunset. A minor traffic accident on the road before them had slowed them down, and now night was falling. A softer beauty than the sunset, but it filled the town everywhere.
Damien leaned his forearms on the old parapet of the terrace. “Jess. I don’t know quite how it feels to be on your own. I’ve never done that. But if it feels…rootless to you, or risky, to give up your career in New York and try to make a go of that shop, to do your niche and custom perfumes. If it feels financially insecure, like you could lose everything and have nothing to fall back on, I just wanted you to know—that’s what I’m good at. Making sure my—people—can do whatever their passion is and not have to worry about the money. I can help you with your business plan and the investments. I know how to make sure that part works out for you.”
Was she one of his people? She looked down at her hand, covered by his, her throat tight. Had he just raised that financial shield of his in front of her and promised to fight her battles for her, too?
“Damien. You’re already dedicating every ounce of energy you have to making sure everyone else’s wishes come true. You don’t have to take on mine.”
He closed his eyes a moment. “You’re like my mother, aren’t you? You think that business and making money are bad words. I’ve gone down the dark path or something.”
“No,” she said. “I actually…” kind of find it erotic. That power and discipline and willingness to fight on the terms of the world to which he had been born, and to win. “I kind of like it.” That was so tepid she could barely count it as the honesty she had promised herself to give to him. “It’s sexy,” she made herself admit.
His eyebrow went up a little, and he turned toward her.
“And when you do that thing, where you take off your cufflinks and your watch, that see all this money and power? I’m taking it off for you act…that’s really hot.” His eyes lit so much at that she just kept going, lifting her hands to her head to flick her fingers out. “Like, explode my head hot.”
“Really,” he murmured, reaching for her hips to pull her to him.
It felt hot to have admitted it, too. Like stripping herself a little bit more naked, in this awkward but determined striptease.
“Every breath you take is explode-my-head hot,” he said, nestling her hips against his. “When I’m around you, there’s this part of me that feels like an animal, all the time.”
Wow. Talk about hot.
“I like the fight and the power and the money and winning,” he said. “I love it. I want to stay the strongest and the most ruthless. I like it. That’s who I am. It’s just that—you know that shaded, quiet space you put at the heart of your last trial for me? I think I need that. That something special just for me, private, away from the battle, just mine. I need that, or I’m all empty.”
She was unbearably touched and proud that one of her fragrance trials had managed to help him understand something he needed. It made her even more determined to give him that something special just for him. The right fragrance, the one that really got him. That showed him that someone understood him.
She turned away to lean on the parapet. They’d always had good luck understanding each other, when they leaned side by side on terraces. This time, the sea tossed against rocks below them.
“That time you fell in love,” she said quietly. “What was it like?”
For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. His arms braced against the terrace wall, and he gazed at the shallow waves below. “It was as if I was a falling star,” he said finally, a hushed, infinite depth to his voice like the sea itself. “And she caught me.”
Oh. Oh.
Jess stood perfectly still. It hurt so much. That someone else had made him feel that way, the way he had made her feel.
“Do y
ou—do you still run into her?” she asked, her throat tightening as if someone had just grabbed her by the neck and tied a knot with her. “Is she from around Grasse?”
He cut her an odd glance, arrested. He didn’t say anything.
She tried to swallow past that knot. “It must be painful,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t always feel good, no,” Damien said. His eyebrows drew together. He slanted her another glance.
“What—what ended it?”
Damien stared at the sea. Past his head, the first star of the evening shone small and bright. “She dropped me,” he said abruptly, voice clipped. “She just turned her hand upside down and let go.”
Oh. It hit her like a punch in the stomach, which could be only a hint of how much worse it must have hit him. She closed her hand over the back of his. “I’m sorry.” God, that must have hurt.
Damien turned his head and stared at her, his eyebrows pleated. “Yes, so you’ve said.”
What?
His eyebrows slanted sharply together. “You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you?” he said suddenly, harshly. “You can’t even guess.”
No. Maybe not. She hadn’t been dumped by someone she loved. She’d had them die on her, though. “I know what it’s like to lose your heart.”
His voice grew deeper, harsher. “Do you know what it’s like to lose it because the other person didn’t think you were worth it? She didn’t trust you with it?”
She slowly shook her head. “No. In my case, it wasn’t their choice.”
He stared at her, as if she had blocked him into some kind of impasse. No outlet for him anywhere.
“She sounds like an idiot,” Jess said. “And a coward.”
“Jasmin. Who the hell do you think I’m talking about?”
Now it was her turn to stare.
“For God’s sake, Jess.” He shoved himself away from the wall. “Idiot about sums it up.”
Her heart pounded so hard.
“Fuck.” He closed his eyes and stood very still a moment. “Fuck.”
No, don’t say that. Let me figure out first what you’re trying to say. I didn’t—
He opened his eyes and gave her a flat, dark look. “You make me feel so easy,” he said despairingly. “You make me feel as if everything that matters is right here.” He touched his hand to his heart. “Inside me. That I’ve got it. I’m not empty anymore. And no matter what I do, or how far down I think I’ve stripped myself, you can’t even tell. Like everything that seems so good to me can’t even be detected on one of your chromatographs. I’m that inhuman.”
Wait! Wait, wait, wait. Don’t blame yourself for me.
His voice sounded stifled, almost extinguished. “You make me feel like a wish that can come true. But you’ve never believed in me at all.”
So many things packed into his words that she couldn’t gather her wits to answer. I’m sorry, she wanted to say. I’m trying. I don’t—it’s hard for me. But I didn’t mean—
“God damn it,” he said bitterly, and shoved his hand through his hair once, turned, and walked away.
Chapter 23
“What are you doing to my nephew?” Colette Delatour asked.
Jess gave her newfound adoptive great-grandmother an anxious, frustrated look at that blunt beginning to the conversation and shifted away from her, pacing around the garden. “Nothing.” He’d been gone to Paris “for business” for two days now. His ability to walk out had slammed across her self-confidence like a lethal blow, knocking her out of that tree with her mirror shattered around her.
But it still had some starlight in it, that mirror. And she’d be damned if she’d let it lie there without picking up the pieces. Not this time.
“So you didn’t inherit Élise’s courage,” Colette said, disappointed.
She was using her courage right now. Couldn’t someone as brave as Colette even tell? “It’s not that! I’m working on it. I just need to get him. If I can get this scent for him right, that will show him.”
“Or alternatively you could just tell him,” Colette said.
Jesus. Some people had so much courage it gave them a completely unrealistic idea of other people’s potential. “I can’t do that. You don’t understand.”
Ninety-six-year-old eyebrows rose faintly. “Try me.”
“He’s too special.” He’s that star in the sky that you wish for but you know you can never catch. Not without ending up on the ground with your chin cut open on a mirror shard.
(It was as if I was a falling star. And she caught me.)
“I can’t just say it,” she said. She’d tried. That might even be the problem. When you said a wish out loud, it could never come true. “I have to show him. That I get him. That’s what he wants. Something tangible. Proof.”
And he was going to get it, too, if she had to die still trying. Sixty-some years from now.
“Did he say that?”
“Yes,” Jess said defiantly. “He asked me to make him a scent. The first day he found me in that shop. It was a challenge. It was really important to him.” Watch, cufflinks, coat, expensive piece of armor after expensive piece of armor, all put on her counter in the determination to get that scent.
The scent that understood him.
“But I can’t get the damn heart note right,” she said.
“You’re nowhere near the right track, if you’re looking for his heart note in my gardens,” Colette said.
“This is where I came the closest!” Jess pressed her face into stone, taking a deep breath. Yes, that was part of it. And the fig tree. And the lemon balm. But… “Here. When I was talking to him here.”
Colette folded her arms over her pale green blouse and sighed. “You know, there’s a part of you that is very like her. Willing to take cyanide and die rather than believe in yourself.”
Hey. My great-grandmother took cyanide to escape torture, to save you, and you’re calling that a weakness? Jess started to throw the words at Colette Delatour and then stopped.
The old woman did have a way of putting things in perspective. In my day, we had to worry about being tortured to death, failing to resist, and betraying everyone we loved. What’s your excuse for cowardice, exactly?
Which pissed her off. I am trying, thank you. Damien’s the one who ran away.
This time.
“There are only three important words in your last sentence,” Colette Delatour said. “I and talking and him. And you chose here. Because it was easier than all the others.”
Jess closed her eyes a moment. And then she rested her forehead on the stone wall. A great sense of fatigue ran through her muscles, as if the stone had offered itself in their place to hold her up.
“Mémère,” she said, and Colette Delatour made a little sound as if someone had hit her in the belly.
“What did you just call me?”
Grandmother. “I’m sorry. That was presumptuous. I just—”
“No,” Colette said sharply. She was staring at Jess, her hand pressed to her stomach. “No, it’s all right. That’s what I am.”
Jess’s fingers curled into that stone. An almost weepy sense of gratitude ran through her. That the stone was there. That it was holding steady at her request for support.
Her throat tightened, and she fought that urge to tears as hard as she could. One could not show tears to Colette Delatour. Stone was a good thing to have. But it didn’t always understand softness. “Mémère,” she said again, and Colette’s breath drew in. “I try to believe. I wish for it. And then right at the wrong moment, the doubt comes back. I just can’t. I can’t believe that I could have someone so special, and him not go away.”
Her eyes stung. She pressed her head into the stone.
“You are very like her,” Colette said, and Jess spun on her, ready to snap if the old war hero put down her great-grandmother’s sacrifice again.
Colette Delatour shook her head. “She never could believe either. Not e
ver. Never once did she believe she could survive, she could succeed, she could do it. Thirty-six wishes she helped carry through the Alps so they could come true, and she never believed she could be good enough for them, not one single time. Thousands of people today bless that woman’s name because of all the times she kept trying to do what she didn’t believe.”
Jess did start to cry, suddenly, this hard onslaught of tears that made her grip the stone.
“Jacky and I, we had conviction. I had my cyanide, too—I’d be damned if I’d let them have the pleasure of torturing someone else’s betrayal out of me—but I never took it, always convinced I could get away, succeed. And I was right. And I was lucky. But she did exactly as much as I ever did. It must have cost her a hundred times more, to do all those things she couldn’t believe she could do. Can you imagine the terror? But one after the other, she did them anyway.”
Jess took a soft, deep breath of that stone, the tears easing out of her. God, what an amazing woman. I want to make a scent for my great-grandmother.
I want to make a scent for my father.
Hell, I want to make a scent for Colette Delatour. Tough down to the bone but with all these herbs and soups to nurture everyone around her.
“What I didn’t have was emotional courage,” said that forged steel Resistance war hero. “I’m ninety-six. You don’t think I should have looked for Léo’s descendants before this? Tried to heal this family sooner? I could have known your father. I could have known Layla’s. I could have made up with Jacky. He’s an arrogant, annoying, over-entitled brat, but he’s not that hard. I’m only doing those things now, when time’s got its own little cyanide pill waiting for me, so I don’t have to deal with the hurt too long, if things go wrong.”
Tears welled up again. Jess tried to smile through them. “You would have liked my father,” she whispered. “He used to make baby stars. Dragons taking flight. He’d capture them in a bottle for me.”
An old, strong hand closed over her shoulder. “I’ll never know your father. Why don’t you show me what you can do instead?”
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