Or they could decide where priorities lay.
Funny how exasperatingly delightful that sounded. As if the exasperation was part of the delight. The zing and the arguing and the convincing.
She laughed a little. If their work arguments happened in a situation where Tristan getting his hands on her wouldn’t be sexual harassment, she bet he would win every single time. A woman would have to be very stubborn, to resist Tristan when he could bring his full sensual arsenal into play.
As stubborn and hardheaded as they came.
She considered herself. Well, hell, she was pretty darn hardheaded, wasn’t she?
She rapped her knuckles against her skull. As usual, she could only count on herself to be reliable enough for that job.
***
Dust particles caught in light. That stirring awake of old time. Hope born anew.
Tristan climbed, stretching out his entire being with every reach for the next possible hold, until it felt as if he could stretch his soul from earth to sky. Everything made sense to him, when he was alone on a rock face. Sense, back deep into the oldest roots of the term, when wisdom and feelings were inextricably entwined.
He climbed too much alone, probably—his mother definitely worried about it—but he needed this time by himself as much as he needed his time with everyone else, time with his family, time with fascinating strangers. It was his balance. His time with only him.
Today was an old, familiar climb, one he had been doing since boyhood, on the limestone cliffs at the head of the valley of roses. Every reach of it was imbued with laughter and challenge and solace and escape, pride and accomplishment, solidarity and fun, all those things the cousins had enjoyed together and alone, from the moment they had first set out to climb these cliffs like their fathers and grandfather and great-grandfather had done, all the way back, probably, to Niccolò Rosario himself.
He could climb it more by memory than by concentration now. He knew where each hand and foot should go.
He let the scents and thoughts of scents drift in and out of his mind as he climbed, forming hazy combinations. Dust. Light. Hope. A slim green pride in the middle, standing, turning, wondering. Maybe that green would spread her arms in delight. Maybe she would start dancing.
Atop the cliff gazing out at the valley of roses, he drew all over the pages in his leather bound notebook, in the usual frustrating sense of inadequacy and ever-hovering failure that it was to try to get an olfactory dream down into chemical formulae. He knew that if he listened to that promise of failure—that he could never capture life as beautifully as he imagined it—that he would be paralyzed and never produce anything. So he made a practice of forcing himself to write everything down, even if he had to doodle all around it or write it slanted to prove it was just brainstorming, no commitment to the wrong formulae implied.
Eventually he logged into the Rosier SA system to send the most promising brainstorming ideas to the lab to mix for him. That was one of the good things about being the perfumer and thus being able to send his formulae to the lab to mix—he couldn’t get paralyzed there, too, wondering if the next drop in a trial blend was actually one drop too many and would ruin it.
When he came into his physical office space mid-morning, the trials were sitting in brown vials on his desk, the only labeled, orderly thing there. But they weren’t what drew his eye.
His desk held its usual black bowl of perfumes touches or white test strips, a mill with more strips sprouting out of it like white sunflower petals, papers full of sketches, notes, and formulae spread all over it, multiple small brown vials, some of them toppled over, and, since he was working on a beach floral, some tactile inspiration—a big, polished green-tinted shell and a tray of sand that he had formed most recently into a lopsided sandcastle.
And sitting on the curving butt of a bikini-clad beauty he had sketched while he was brainstorming was a giant box of crayons. Next to it, a black bowl full of orange blossoms.
Staring at them, he felt like one of those children’s tricks, where you touched a few drops of water to a small bit of foam and everything about it started to soften and grow.
Saw these and thought of you, a message said, on a sheet of his own sketch paper. Thanks for all the help with the floor. Malorie.
“One of your women friends stopped by,” his assistant Gaëlle said cheerfully from the doorway.
“Gaëlle, come on,” he said uncomfortably. One of his women friends? That didn’t seem right at all. He ran his finger over the edge of the box of crayons. Then dipped his hand into the bowl of blossoms and brought them, dripping water, to his nose for a long, deep breath of romance and dreaming.
“I have to say, she understands you better than most,” Gaëlle said.
Tristan gave her an irritable glance. At twenty-two and with perfume ambitions, Gaëlle was supposed to be gaining her first grasp of the perfume industry under his wing, but like most twenty-two-year-olds, she already thought she knew everything. Especially about her boss. Gaëlle, brown hair twisted up on the back of her head, raised her eyebrows over the cat glasses she was currently favoring and looked thoughtful, disappearing back into the outer office.
Tristan opened the box of crayons, a smile breaking out at all the colors, lined up, as yet unblunted by use. The wax scent brought with it a flashing vision of spilling them all over the floor. Of the happiness of crawling around under the desks chasing colors with Malorie instead of being stuck in a seat trying to do math worksheets.
It wasn’t that he had found the math hard, exactly—when his father took him outside and asked him to do the same problem with real world examples, he could do it without even a pause, just as he could later in life when calculating parts of a perfume—but it had been really hard to focus on. Colors, now…colors were different. Colors and scents had a lot in common.
He stroked the orange blossoms over his face, turning his head back and forth to feel more texture.
Aww, hell. This was so damn like Malorie. The note, brisk and kind of distant, thanks for the help. And the actual gift it accompanied, that intimate and warm understanding of who he was.
It made his heart all freaking mushy.
He had actually sat down and drawn a heart on the sketch paper, and around it another heart, and then another, going through six colors of crayons, before he blinked to realize what he was doing. He flipped the paper over, but on the back of it, again before he could stop his restless hands, he sketched an orange blossom and a fall of black hair. With maybe just a—he pulled out another crayon—a hint of brown in the dark of it, like his.
And now he wanted to make a scent that was wax and colors and childhood happiness, not nostalgic but all grown up, as if it had never been lost.
That would be an awesome perfume. He wondered if Malorie would want to sell it on the display shelves of La Maison de Monsard. If it would mean to her the same thing it did to him.
That was the fascinating thing about perfumes. They never told the same story to two different people. And yet every time someone smelled your perfume in a store and bought it to wear against their skin, you knew that something about it—something that you felt, something that mattered to you—was universal.
***
“Hey, Malorie.”
Malorie, going through still more of the generations-accumulated papers and small items, barely recognized the voice. It still had that warm, rich, sexy timbre but there was something quiet about it, maybe even kind of shy.
She tucked the little brass key quickly back into its crackling yellow envelope, marked Rosier, and shut the letter box on it. Shut away its cold chill. Please, dear God, don’t tell me we have something else to be ashamed about where the Rosiers are concerned.
Maybe it was something innocuous. Before the war, the families had been frequent business allies, even friends.
“Bonjour, Tristan.” Her fingers curled into her palms surreptitiously. She felt stupid and over-exposed. Leaving him a bowl of orange blossoms
and a box of crayons was the dumbest, most vulnerable idea ever. Sure, she needed to find a way to thank him for his help, but that particular way…showed she wanted to make him happy.
But he seemed kind of shy, too, leaning in the doorway of the office. The brightness of his supreme self-confidence was softened around the edges, as if some film maker had been playing with misty, romantic lighting.
It made him seem infinitely approachable somehow. As if she could walk right up to him, tuck her sense of over-exposure against him, have his arms circle around her, and be home.
The hairs on her neck prickled with a wistful rush of sensation at how good that might feel, to rest her head on his shoulder, and she looked back down at the worn box.
“I, ah, brought you something.” It was so rare for Tristan to show shyness, that she could pick the hint of it out, despite his sexy, gorgeous physicality that made it hard to think about anything but how hot he looked. That blithe charm and confidence made it hard to remember he might be human and vulnerable, too.
Unless a woman had known him most of her life. In which case maybe, if she relaxed her need to to defend herself, she might be able to understand something about him.
“Yeah?” she said. Shyly. People didn’t really bring her presents much. She felt heat trying to climb her cheeks, and she fought it hard.
He crossed the room to her, still that long, easy stride, a man who knew that every single cell of his body would handle exactly what he wanted it to, kissed her cheeks, and stepped back enough to offer her a small glass object on his palm.
An exquisite chatelaine perfume bottle, with a vivid swirl of blue colors in the glass, around its neck a delicate gold and white crystal crown of orange blossoms, like a bridal crown. It looked exactly like the one her great-great-grandmother had had, stolen and sold by her father when she was twelve. And its image had been on one of the pages of missing items she had casually shown Tristan that day in the storage room.
Her eyes started to sting. She bit the inside of her lip, fighting her sense of vulnerability with everything she had.
“I know a guy in Nice who collects that period,” Tristan said. “He, ah, was finally persuaded to part with it.”
Tristan could persuade a rock to sprout flowers for him. Sweetly scented ones, too, to make him happy.
Malorie stroked her finger over the glass, tentatively.
“It’s the same one,” Tristan said. “He had the records, right back to Monsard.”
Malorie curved her fingers under the bottle and lifted it. “My great-great-grandparents went to Venice just after they married. My great-great-grandfather bought it for my great-great-grandmother there as a present to remember the trip.”
“Really?” Tristan sounded pleased.
Malorie didn’t dare look up at him. “That’s the story.” Her voice sounded husky. “Thank you, Tristan.”
“Yeah.” His voice was deep and warm. His hand lifted to curve against her cheek. “Of course.”
“How much was it? Can I pay you back?”
The hand dropped from her face. “No.” The word was flat and hard.
When she looked up at him, so were his eyes.
She covered her face with one hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just—”
“Okay.” He still sounded a little angry, but resigned to it. Patient. Two big, warm hands closed gently over her shoulders. “It’s okay, Malorie. Just…don’t ruin things because you don’t trust them, okay?”
Her eyes filled. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
“Hey.” Tristan’s hand curved warm against her cheek again. His thumb rubbed just under her lower eyelashes, and she was very afraid he might have felt a brimming tear. “I said it was okay.” He smiled at her. “New Yorker,” he teased gently.
She shook her head. “It’s not that, it’s just—” She didn’t know how to explain to him that with her father, gifts were always a Trojan horse—a way to get in past your defenses, then tear down your walls for his own gain. She’d been on the fringes of that kind of attention, fortunately, although she’d suffered from it. Her mother, of course, had suffered the worst—love bombed every time she started to gather up the determination for divorce, dragged back into that craving for her husband’s attention and approval. Malorie had been mostly love bombed by her father when he wanted to use her adoration for him as a weapon against her mother.
So yeah…Malorie didn’t trust people to do things just to be generous to her, to have her back. She assumed she should pay Tristan back, because, well…
“You’ve spent way too much time climbing the rock face on your own,” Tristan said. “It’s like that’s the only way you know how to do it. You need some cousins.”
Malorie laughed with a kind of despairing irony. Trust Tristan to instinctively think of family as a positive. “I’m pretty sure my family is at the origin of my desire to stand on my own. That’s what my therapist in New York said.”
Tristan made a face. “You know what’s sad? I mean, I think it’s probably good you talked about it with someone, but you probably did it with a therapist instead of a friend because you felt safer if you were paying.”
Malorie wanted to fold her arms as a barrier, but the chain of the chatelaine perfume bottle tangled in her fingers, and she couldn’t brace against the man who had given it to her. It was so damn…sweet. This piece of her lost history, from back when that history held honeymoons and happiness. “Also, a therapist has training,” she pointed out coolly, nevertheless.
“So a person has to have professional training for you to let your guard down with them? Hell, you’re worse than Damien. At least he has his family.”
Malorie took a breath to argue…and then let it out, stymied. She didn’t like to show weakness to other people, that was true enough. And other than her grandmother, family had not really been a safe space for her.
When her dad played the good, charming I adore my family man and got his wife and daughters to confide their doubts and fears to him, he was very good at exploiting those doubts and fears to his advantage later.
Sometimes Malorie wondered how much of a mess she might be if he hadn’t drunkenly raced himself and one of his wannabe-glamorous girlfriends right off a twisty cliff road between here and Monaco when she was thirteen. Talk about a guilty thought. Thank God for therapists.
Thank God she’d known Tristan long enough to realize, deep down past her instinctive emotional wariness, that he really was different. If he gave a gift, he meant it to bring happiness. Not as a crowbar to crack open someone else’s soul for his advantage. “Thank you,” she said again. “That was a really, really sweet thing to do, Tristan.”
He shrugged one shoulder, but he looked pleased again. “I didn’t realize it was a part of the collection with such personal meaning. I hope you don’t mind, then—there’s a…something I was fooling around with in it.”
Her eyes prickled again. She darted a glance at him. “Really?”
Even after Fugace?
He shrugged, his eyes on the bottle. And then, just as she looked down again, lifting to focus on her face.
She untwisted the tiny orange blossom stopper.
The scent of dust a sparkle in the light. Dancing like it could float up into the sun. A deep rich floral base, gleaming under it like a fresh-finished parquet floor, an orange blossom with an age to it, as if it had been lying in wait, layered in and packed away, until someone opened a chest full of some great-great-grandmother’s wedding dress and the scent could release again.
“Oh, wow.” The impact was like a punch to the chest. “Tristan.” She looked at him, her eyes full again. She, who didn’t believe in crying before others, who knew much too much better than to show weakness—he kept reaching that strong hand deep into her chest and grabbing her.
Maybe he wasn’t cracking her open for his advantage, but he was cracking her open nevertheless.
“It’s raw,” he said quickly. “It needs a few months to mature. And
I need to play with it some more. But for a first draft…” He let his voice trail off.
Tristan might not be a narcissist the way her father and quite possibly her grandfather and great-grandfather had been, but he was most definitely an artist, vulnerable when he held his art out, craving praise in return.
“I’m really sorry about Fugace,” she said suddenly. It just tumbled out of…who knew where. Her cracked-open chest, perhaps.
His lashes flickered, and his gaze locked on hers.
“I don’t—you shouldn’t have asked me to sacrifice my career for you. You really shouldn’t have, Tristan. But I’m sorry I couldn’t protect it the way you wanted me to, just the same.”
Brown eyes held hers for the longest time. A deep breath expanded his chest and slowly released. He leaned forward suddenly and kissed her cheek. “I didn’t realize I was asking you to hurt your career chances for me,” he said quietly. “I didn’t see it that way.”
Yes. He might not be her father, but, caught up in his passions, he could absolutely, adamantly be focused on getting his own way. Passionate stubbornness and a complete lack of empathy weren’t the same though.
“And this is beautiful,” Malorie said of the perfume. She was still caught in the wonder of it. It was as if he had captured that moment of brightness and hope the day before, when they stood side by side gazing at those parquet floors, and put it in a bottle for them to keep. To wear on her wrists, to surround herself with on darker days, more subtle and more powerful than a photograph of it could ever have been.
Tristan pulled a folded scrap of sketch paper from his back jeans pocket and handed it to her.
She opened it. It was a list of the ingredients with their cost written in black pen, the total production cost per gram at the bottom. Entirely surrounded by curlicues and doodles in multiple bright crayon colors.
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