“Tristan can pay attention to bottom line?” Damien said blankly. “Even for a girl?”
“You do know that my computer program automatically shows me the cost of every single ingredient I plug into a formula as well as the total production cost at all times, right?” Tristan pointed out.
“Oh, is that still working on your computer?” Damien said. “I couldn’t tell.”
Tristan narrowed his eyes at him.
“And the best part of it is that Tristan used to have the worst crush on her in high school,” Matt said.
Tristan controlled his urge to snarl. He’d spent his entire life practicing unflappable amusement as a way to deal with four older cousins. The last thing he wanted to confirm was a weak spot.
“Ah, the girls in high school,” he sighed dramatically. “Which one was Malorie now? The one who favored those little pink skirts?”
That had actually been one of Matt’s high school girlfriends, and Matt stiffened in alarm, glaring at him at the threat that Tristan might bring up some of his old ridiculous relationships in front of Layla. Tristan smiled at him sweetly.
“The one you followed around like a puppy,” Damien said, unfazed; even in high school, Damien had not acted ridiculous. His ball arced precisely and thumped to a stop a few centimeters from the cochonnet. The Rosier cousins had competitiveness down to a fine art. Damien added to his fiancée Jess, “He used to bump into her just so he could pick up her books when he knocked them to the floor. Smooth. Very smooth.”
Jess, a sweet-tempered perfumer who had produced one of the most ghastly bestselling perfumes of the decade, laughed, staring at Tristan in amazed delight.
It was possible he shouldn’t have showed such open amusement when Matt and Damien were bumbling around in their own relationships. But he could hardly have just watched them act like such idiots and not point it out. He’d been being helpful.
The guys would sink in the morass of their own emotions otherwise. What was he supposed to do for an encore, watch kittens drown without helping?
“Wait.” Layla held up a hand. Her extravagant corkscrew curls were held back in a wide headband today, but they still escaped out all around the edges of it. “Tristan had an unrequited crush? Tristan? Whom girls fall all over just because he winks at them?”
“In contrast to these guys, any man looks good,” Tristan explained modestly.
“Desperately unrequited,” Damien said.
Matt snickered. “And then when he met up with her again in New York, she just—grrm.” That gobbling motion with his hand again, as if Tristan was some helpless warm-blooded mammal to a cold-hearted T-rex.
Tristan picked up his own ball and knocked Damien’s a full stride away, his own settling in to nestle cheek to jowl with the jack. “What she did was swap out your own jasmine in Fugace for cheaper stuff from Egypt. Among other crimes she was too damn pigheaded to understand she was committing.”
Matt looked indignant. Finally. “What, she thought that stuff from Egypt was just as good?” he demanded, outraged.
“More likely she just wanted to do as much damage to the Rosiers as she could,” their grandfather said coolly, coming up on them. “She’s a Monsard, after all.”
Tristan slid a glance at his grandfather. Despite the compression of age, the old man was still nearly as tall as his tall grandsons, able to hold their eyes with those faded blue ones, able to demand great things of them with the absolute confidence that they would achieve them.
Pépé made Tristan feel grounded, the same way a cliff face made him feel grounded—like he could climb to the top of the world, but with his fingers gripping granite all the way. He was a very great man. Tristan had always counted himself one of the lucky ones, to be born his grandson.
But there was a darkness in his past that Tristan had never known. He had killed people. He had seen friends killed. Three of them thanks to Pierre Monsard, who had betrayed them to the Germans. And sometimes he judged people through that darkness, a lens that had changed his perception of the world forever.
Or maybe it was the extraordinary acts of heroism and courage he’d witnessed and performed that had changed his perspective. Which was harder? To be judged by a man who believed that humans were capable of great evil or to be judged by one who believed that humans were capable of exceptional feats of greatness?
“I don’t think Malorie’s busy fighting her great-grandfather’s battles, Pépé,” Tristan said carefully. “She’s busy fighting her own.”
All on her own.
His eyebrows knit. Because there was something he’d never understood about Malorie, not since that day he’d learned that she’d hiked all the way to Paris by herself and set up a life there. When she was fighting, who had her back?
And if no one did, why had she never taken him up on his tacit offer to let that person be him? Didn’t she trust him to be good at it?
Chapter 4
The fountain was dry.
Once this fountain had run with orange blossom in April, rose-scented water in May, jasmine in August, all the scents of the seasons of flowers around Grasse. That was what Malorie’s grandmother said, dreamy-bright fairy-tale memories of her childhood before the war.
Now it had fallen silent, sticks cluttering the basins. Mary Magdalene, patron saint of perfumers, did not weep anymore, and no scented water ran through the carved marble of her hair nor spilled from the urn she tilted. Early Christian iconography had made of Mary Magdalene the closest the Church had to a sacred erotic figure, and the Art Nouveau sculptor of this fountain had delighted in that sensuality, until it was almost impossible to stand near the fountain and not reach out to touch its curving lines.
City officials had already contacted Malorie and her sisters, urging them to maintain it, so fine an example of Art Nouveau work that tourists went out of their way to see it. Malorie looked from the fountain’s courtyard space to the museum and beyond it to the city’s fountain of iron flowers at the main roundabout by the great terrace space of the esplanade.
La Maison de Monsard really had been built in the prime location in the city. It was the ideal place for a grand, elegant perfume house with a proud, ancient name. It always had been.
She looked up at the MONSARD graven in elegant capitals above the doors, the beautiful lines of the Art Nouveau façade, lines that, like the fountain, spoke of another time, when buildings themselves could be erotic, full of curves and flowers and balconies, like an invitation into Eden. She could sell the place, of course. Her grandmother had been approached by one of the major international perfume houses, which had fancied the idea of having such a symbolic showcase here in Grasse.
Hell, the Rosiers would probably take it. They liked owning everything in Grasse. Tristan would probably take it. He’d love having his own personal perfume playpen, where he could make whatever the hell crossed his fancy and no accountant would force him to make it financially viable. But they’d cover up that Monsard name with their own. Call it Parfums Rosier or something.
The grand set of double doors was not as flagrant in its design as another by the same architect in Paris, but there was something profoundly sensual about the flowing lines of iron and wood and glass, and the artist had engaged openly and playfully with that sensuality. Carved among the wealth of stone vines that framed the doors, Adam on one side was giving an astonished look to what was happening under his fig leaf while a completely naked Eve at the other corner beckoned, amused, curvaceous, inviting.
The open celebration of the sensual was perfect for a perfume house. Sensuality captured, distilled, spread forth again, via perfume.
Malorie pushed open the double doors. To either side were beautiful, huge windows that should have been displaying bottles like precious jewels. Bones of an older building still stood here, but the façade, the windows, and the interior had all undergone a major remodel just before the First World War, when La Maison de Monsard was at its most glorious height, one of the most powerful nam
es in the Grasse region and one of the most influential in the entire perfume industry.
Her grandmother had photos of the beautiful Art Nouveau interior, but then in the 1950s, there had been a desperate second remodel, a greater paroxysm of a mania that had swept much of the country, an attempt to hide the past with everything new. And then Monsard had sold soaps and lavender sachets and perfume tours to tourists for a while and tried to pretend that still let them call themselves perfumers, until they discovered her father was siphoning off assets to support his I’m-still-from-a-rich-family pretense in Monaco and everyone in her family just lost heart. Her siblings never even looked at the perfume industry for a career.
After their father died in the fast car he’d sold part of their heritage to afford, and after the girls left and their mother could finally wash her hands of the whole mess a Monsard had made of her life and go teach on a remote island in French Polynesia, their grandmother, Chloé Monsard, had retired, shutting the place down.
Malorie ran a finger along the dust of a long display counter, looking around at the space. To think this had once been the most glamorous place in the city. Rich women from all around the world waltzed through here in their flapper dresses and cloche hats and tried on perfumes or, sometimes, retired into a second room for their special, hours-long, multi-session creation of a bespoke perfume.
The Monsards had worked with the Rosiers back then. Only the best went into Monsard perfumes, and the best meant roses and jasmine from the Rosier fields. The Monsards couldn’t trace their history quite as obviously to the Renaissance, having risen to power in the second half of the nineteenth century when the Grasse perfume industry really took off. Both families mixed in multiple aspects of the industry, but the Monsards had focused more on the glamor, the perfumes, the shops, while the Rosiers had anchored themselves into the land. The things that grew.
La Maison de Monsard had opened a great store on the Champs-Elysées in the twenties, too, with a beautiful Art Déco look that Malorie had seen in photos, but it had long since been sold. Always a privately held company, just under half the shares had been sold too cheaply in attempts to earn money in the second half of the twentieth century. But the majority had come to Malorie and her two sisters in their grandmother’s will.
Now the question was…sell it? Shake the dust of Grasse from their feet forever and go their separate ways? How long would the Monsards hold together without this anchor, how long would visiting each other in odd parts of the world at Christmas be enough, before they lost that sense of family that held the Rosiers together through all the storms that had hit them?
Malorie had been forging her way alone since she was nineteen. She’d felt the solitude. When she’d run into Tristan that first time in New York, she’d wanted to throw herself at him and sink herself into the sense of home that he carried with him wherever he went. He belonged. To a place, to a family.
But despite that loneliness, she’d never realized how much her grandmother had been the port for her brave little ship out there—the sense that she did have a place she could go home to. That she wasn’t just adrift on a great big sea. She was more like…oh, an explorer. With a place to come back to, when she had the holds of her ship full of spices to sell and make her family’s fortune.
She had never even realized how important that port of anchor was until she lost it.
Now she was anchorless. If she sold this place, the name Monsard officially meant nothing more, ever again, than a way for government officials to distinguish her from every other Malorie out there.
“It used to be a beautiful place, didn’t it?” a voice said from behind her.
Tristan. She knew the deep, warm timbre, with a little edge to it that was only there for her, without even having to turn around. But she did turn and look at that long, pseudo-lazy masculine shape lounging in the doorway, silhouetted by the near-noon sun. She pretty much always did look at Tristan when she got the chance. The same way she looked at éclairs in the bakery window when she was hungry or watched beautiful sunsets—who could look away?
“Oh, for God’s sake, you again?” she said. New York might be a bit safer for her emotions than Grasse. In the Big Apple, a casual stroll down the street wasn’t all that separated her from Tristan. “Don’t you ever work?”
A little glint of annoyance in his eyes as he strolled forward into the middle of the great show space. “I get that a lot.”
The thing was, she knew perfectly well that Tristan had not gotten to be one of the top perfumers of his generation by shirking his work. Not even with the Rosier name behind him. But he made it look as if he was playing all the time. Never had she seen a man just reach out and embrace life with so much pleasure. He loved the world.
“How was the rest of your hike? No trouble?” Those brown eyes did a surprisingly comprehensive scan of her body, head to toe, as if trying to penetrate right through to the sore muscles in her calves. A flashing vision of Tristan’s strong, rock-climber fingers sinking into her calves, massaging the soreness…
Hey. Those fantasies are only for when he’s not around, you idiot. “Well, I did keep an eye out whenever I went through any gorges, in case you were lurking up there ready to dislodge a boulder.”
His eyebrows went up a little. His smile faded. “For someone who has known me all my life, you never chose to know me very well, did you?”
“We weren’t exactly friends in high school, Tristan.”
He cut her an odd, dark glance she couldn’t quite interpret. Sometimes it kind of bothered her that Tristan didn’t smile at her like he did at every other woman. He used to. In grade school, he’d been an utter pain in his need for her attention—or for anything else to keep his energy occupied. And in high school, he’d always been utterly charming to her. Not that they were friends, but it was a small high school, and they ended up in a lot of the same classes.
So of course they crossed paths. She’d felt more awkward around him, in high school, all her hormones waking up and noticing he was turning into a really hot guy even as her own body transformed itself in ways she wasn’t sure she liked and which made her not even sure who she was anymore. But he clearly hadn’t felt the same self-consciousness.
It seemed as if he was always having to squeeze himself down beside her for the last spot on a bench, apologizing for crowding her. Or apologizing when he bumped into her, which he did a lot—a little clumsy for his height, still, perhaps, and for the crowded hallways, and anyway he was almost always surrounded by friends and not paying attention. Kneeling to pick up her books as he smiled into her eyes and made jokes about learning to watch where he was going. Reaching over her shoulder in the library to get a book he needed for some assignment. Teasing her in a friendly way when a teacher assigned them to the same group and sometimes, during that group work, just meeting her eyes with that gift he had for making a girl feel as if she was the most fascinating girl in the world and he’d love to know all about her.
The one time they had ended up on a project that had required the two of them to meet after school had been the worst. Antoine, the almost ruthlessly driven classmate with whom she competed for premier or first in class, was also a friend of Tristan’s—who wasn’t?—and supposed to be one of their partners, but bizarrely, he never showed. The only time in their entire school career when she had ever known Antoine Vallier to blow off schoolwork. So it had just been her and Tristan.
And Tristan would talk to her and smile at her and try to get her to talk to him, all that easy charm of his, and she always felt only one careless breath away from just falling so hard for him she’d never recover. She’d just be another one of the many, many girls at school who must have already found out how pleasurable it was to fall over backwards for Tristan and let him get everything he wanted.
“And we definitely weren’t friends in New York,” she said.
He said nothing for a moment, and then: “I was happy to see you.” Flat and a little crisp. “At first.�
��
Yeah, but Tristan was always happy to see everybody. Yes, he’d clearly been thrilled to run into her on the sidewalk as they were both heading into the same perfume launch party. And he’d been equally delighted to see all the beautiful models and actresses who had surrounded him before she even managed to check her coat and rejoin him. In fact, the sight of them had stopped her, and she never had rejoined him, never yielded to that homesick urge to cling to his arm as if he was home. He hadn’t had an arm left free to cling to.
That moment—the surprised joy in seeing him and then turning around to find him thronged with women far more beautiful than she could ever hope to be—had been a brutal little reminder that Tristan’s delight in most women could lead her down a very painful path. He could become someone so special to her that he drew her eyes no matter where she was, and she, on the other hand, wouldn’t even be visible in the crowd around him.
Making him mad, now, that was a feat. She might be the only woman who had ever managed it. It gave her some secret, perverse sense of accomplishment. At least she stood out.
But sometimes she missed Tristan’s smiles. Sometimes she missed those times when they worked on that history project and his friend Antoine never bothered to show up.
It had been a ghastly, horrible project to have to work on with a Rosier, too. It had to have been pure cruelty on the teacher’s part that had put a Monsard with a Rosier for a project on the Occupation.
Or maybe everyone in the area didn’t remember what her great-grandfather had done as much as she thought? “I thought we were natural enemies,” she said, watching Tristan.
He snorted as he turned slowly in the middle of the room, looking at the high ceiling and the beautiful arches. “You’re the one who decided to become an accountant.” She was fairly sure his lips could not curl more on her choice of profession if she’d chosen to kill endangered species and hang their body parts on her wall. “You can’t blame me.”
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 3