Crown of Bitter Orange

by Laura Florand

  “Don’t say I never did anything for you, Malorie,” Tristan said, and she started to laugh and cry a little, too. Her hands lifted to her face before she remembered the open chatelaine bottle, and a little of its perfume spilled onto her wrist.

  “Oops. That’s going to be a bit strong,” Tristan said, catching it and capping it, even as the scent surrounded them.

  The hope of old time.

  His hands framed her face, her laughter and her crying, and he studied her, looking entirely pleased with himself.

  Malorie managed to point to one of the ingredients on his list, right by a doodle in yellow. “I’m sure the synthetic version would do just as well here, and be a lot cheaper.”

  Tristan’s eyes narrowed. “If it would have done just as well, I would have used that.”

  Malorie sighed a little in relief at his exasperation, so much easier to handle than his sweetness.

  His eyes narrowed just a tad further. And then he laughed suddenly. “Living in Paris and New York certainly taught you how to fight your corner, didn’t it? In high school, you were mostly quiet, like this walking refuge you wouldn’t let me into. But by the time I ran into you again as an adult, you had sparring skills to defend it.”

  “I certainly hope so,” she said, with a lift of an eyebrow. New York and Paris would eat you alive, if you didn’t know how to spar. “Wait…I was what?” A refuge?

  “You helped me focus,” he said. “You didn’t realize that?”

  Tristan had focused? She stared at him.

  “Allez, Malorie.” He looked a little frustrated. “Since we were four years old, teachers would sit me next to you because you were supposed to help keep me focused. Teachers would actually openly say that was what they were doing. When we were old enough that teachers stopped assigning seats, I would sit myself near you. And you never figured that out?”

  “I didn’t realize it was true,” Malorie said, stunned. “I just thought—you know how teachers are. Always making it the girls’ responsibility to behave well, while the boys—you—get away with murder.”

  “You had this space around you.” Tristan shaped his hands, something supremely tactile about the way his fingers cupped around empty air, as if he wanted what he imagined to come alive, to be touchable. “That was so…quiet. Clean. I felt like a dog distracted by every single noise and scent around me and you carried with you a purity of air. I never could understand why, the older we got, the more you locked me out of it, when I needed it so much.”

  She couldn’t even figure out what to make of that. School had been a place where she felt good, where the expectations tended to be consistent. The teachers had liked her, a quiet, disciplined, smart little girl who never caused trouble no matter how much a certain classmate tried to drag her into it, and that liking had felt safe. No teacher had ever used her reciprocal liking and respect against her, except insofar as always putting their most distractible student in the seat beside her might have been a bit of a use.

  And it was true that she’d always tried to keep herself kind of…clean, yes, of the noise of other people, because she’d seen too clearly what her father’s clamor of me, me, me did to her mother, and, well…to his daughters. She’d felt the multigenerational societal consequences for choices made by people before she was even born.

  Don’t let anyone else get to you, she’d always told herself. Keep your center. Keep your focus.

  But…a purity of air? A quiet?

  Tristan’s tone, his words, the way he shaped that empty air with longing hands, made her sound kind of…wonderful.

  “I was just trying to keep that space safe,” she said, muffled. Herself safe. Free to become herself.

  Tristan turned his palms up and held them out to her. Callused and strong. “It’s not safe with me?”

  Malorie thought she was going to strangle on her own emotion. It swelled up in her, so clogged and thick and wanting, like some sluggish, old liquid just before the clean fresh water welling behind it broke through and washed it all free. “Tristan—”

  His hands did look safe. As if she could put herself right in them, and he would hold her. And never use that trust against her ever.

  Even though she knew, right down to the bottom of toes that even now tried to grip harder to the floor in her defense, that she was better off standing on her own two feet.

  The longing grew painful, so dammed up by her need for self-protection.

  Tristan took her hand, set it in one of his hard palms, and cupped his other palm over it, closing it and the bottle she held in, snug and sure and warm. “What about this much?” he said gently. “Maybe this much would be safe?”

  Her eyes stung again. He was killing her.

  “As a trial,” Tristan said. “If it turns out your hand is safe, maybe we can go a little further after a while. Maybe I could keep your elbow safe, too.”

  Her lips twisted in a smile that didn’t offset the prickle in her eyes.

  “Or just…this much.” Tristan turned her hand over, exposing the paler skin of her inner wrist. Then stroked his top hand over it, fingers curling loosely around most of her forearm. The hardness of his palm combined with the gentleness of his touch sent shivers up her arm, curling over her shoulder, sliding down her nape, and melting all through her.

  “I keep myself safe, Tristan,” she said with difficulty.

  “Yes, I got that, Malorie. You’re queen of your own castle. But if you ever open up and let someone inside your walls, I think that person then has a responsibility to help defend those walls, too. You can’t really open up walls to someone who’s just coming inside them to use you or is planning on letting the enemy in while you’re asleep.”

  Yes. Exactly. Just as you couldn’t venture out in the world to seek your fortune if you couldn’t manage to successfully defend yourself when fortunes went wrong.

  It was perilously reassuring that Tristan understood that. The man who didn’t really seem to have walls against anybody.

  Oh. Oh, right. That was why he’d said he’d always wanted inside hers.

  She laid her free hand on top of his suddenly, closing his in warmth, too.

  His lashes lifted. Their eyes held for a long, sweet moment of clarity that seemed to grow clearer and sweeter the longer it went on.

  And then his hand ran up her arm and around her nape, pulling her toward him as he leaned in. Her breath caught just before his lips touched warm and firm to hers.

  The sensation that jolted through her was nothing like that vague peck in the tunnel at five. But all around her, color seemed to fragment in great glowing yellow panes, the sun shining through them, and the scent of orange blossom and dust-gleaming sunlight rose around them.

  He lifted his head just enough to take a breath, his eyes searching hers once from centimeters away before his lashes fell to his cheeks and he angled his mouth over hers, his lips parting this time, exploring. A breath moved hard through his body, and his fingers flexed on her nape. It was as if he squeezed sweetness through her from that point, sweetness and arousal that had no outlet but her lips. Her hands caught his shoulders as her lips parted under that wave of sweetness, as she kissed him back.

  Tristan half sat on the desk and pulled her onto it from her side, their bodies twisting into each other across its awkward barrier, his hands rubbing hard down her back to pull her in tighter and then gentling, one hand rising to cup around her head. He kissed her with wonder, and passion, and a strange and heady comfort. He kissed her as if they had known each other all their lives…and he’d been wanting to kiss her all that time.

  God, he was good at it.

  She’d known he would be. Not known in high school, when she hadn’t really understood what good kissing was. But when they’d run into each other again in New York four years ago, it had been clear that he’d spent that gap from nineteen to twenty-five learning everything his body enjoyed and everything women enjoyed, too.

  Tristan liked kissing. He liked kissing
her. He took his time, shaping, exploring. Textures first. Lips brushing. Firming. Sliding and changing angles. Parting. And then tastes. Him. Taking more and more of her mouth as she gave it to him, his fingers kneading into her body, rubbing, stroking her closer.

  The heat of his body. The muscles of his shoulders and chest...and arms…and abs, under her hands as those hands strayed farther and farther. That sound he made deep in his throat, that vibrated in her breasts and deep between her legs and made her ache.

  Orange blossom might not mean safety to her any more. It might mean sex.

  She twisted into him, fighting the awkward position to try to get closer, and knocked the letter box onto the floor.

  It fell with a thump and a scatter, and she broke away from him, breathing in deep expansions of her lungs. Her lungs, her whole torso felt as if she had just been released from a corset—as if she was expanding everywhere, seeking, stretching, wanting all this new range of motion.

  Her hair spilled around her shoulders. Tristan’s fingers tangled in it, flexing still against her head. He stared at her, eyes dilated, those sensual, supple lips of his flushed and full.

  They stared at each other, Tristan’s eyes wide and almost wary, as if the world had turned upside down and neither one of them knew how to approach it from this angle.

  Malorie broke free abruptly, crouching to gather the spilled papers, pausing long enough to rub her hands once hard over her face and through her hair. She felt so shaky. She felt so wide open.

  Oh, crap, the old yellow envelope with the word Rosier written on it was visible. She flipped it over and dropped it back in the box, glancing up at Tristan.

  Maybe he hadn’t seen it. His eyebrows had drawn ever so slightly together, but he, too, ran a hand over his face and through his hair, looking dazed. Looking much more overwhelmed than she had ever imagined Tristan could be from a kiss.

  Of course, he did always live on all his senses. Could easily be subjugated by them.

  The idea drew her in, fascinating. So if she touched him…was it possible he might actually be even more vulnerable than she was? At least for as long as that touching lasted?

  She stood slowly, setting the letter box back on the desk. Her thoughts were a disorganized tangle, as if she was a ball of yarn and Tristan had just batted her all over the room.

  It was pretty, though, that yarn. All rainbow colored.

  “I wasn’t planning—” She took a breath and tried again. “When I came back here, I didn’t mean—” Re-started. “Tristan, you’re really complicating my homecoming.”

  He shrugged one shoulder, but the intensity of his eyes didn’t match the carelessness of the gesture. “So why don’t you stay long enough to figure all those complicated things out?”

  She gave a half-laugh, frustrated and despairing. “That would probably take a lifetime.”

  If it was possible, his gaze pinned her even more intensely. “Last I checked, you had a lifetime. Why not spend it on something that matters to you?”

  Arrested, she stared at him. What mattered to her. She had done what she set out to do in Paris and New York. Made it. Succeeded. Become herself.

  But now that she was all become, was succeeding for other companies in a world full of skyscrapers and people she barely knew really what mattered to her? Mattered enough for a lifetime of it?

  “You’re not complicating my life, Malorie.” His hand closed around her chin and pulled her toward him as he leaned in. “You’re making everything feel simple.” He hesitated, and his voice went absent, as if he was trying to understand it even as he said it. “As if you cleared all the other half-assed ideas off the page and left the only formula that was true.”

  She took a long, sweet breath, staring at him. What a beautiful thing to say. To be.

  Tristan took a deep breath, too. Then he kissed her again, a kiss that started out firm as if it was meant to be short and then melted into something longer, deeper. He pulled her in suddenly to his body, his hands running up her back and down to her butt, driving her closer until she was pressed all against that lithe hard muscle.

  He kissed her greedy. Like a thirsty man gulping water before he got dragged away from it.

  A long, hot, intense kiss, while his arousal pressed harder against her, and his fingers dug more fiercely into her butt, until finally he broke apart and fell back a step, breathing hard. His hands flexed by his sides like they were still craving more texture.

  Malorie pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and stared at him over it.

  He closed his hands into tight fists and took a hard breath. “Still not bringing back any memories of that tunnel,” he managed.

  Malorie had to laugh, a tiny, choked laugh that struggled to get past all the other, bigger emotions. But it was nice, to have that little spurt of laughter in among them. It made the size of them seem less overwhelming and scary, like a ray of sunlight breaking through huge trees you were lost among.

  “What did you tell me?” Tristan said abruptly.

  Just now? Malorie looked at him, confused.

  “When I asked you to marry me in that tunnel. What did you say?”

  Malorie pressed her hand through her hair. “I don’t remember.”

  Tristan reached behind him and gripped the doorframe. He had incredibly strong hands. Her gaze traced the tendons and muscles of his forearm and the tendons of his hand, all delineated by the tension in his arm. “I think I need to go now,” he said. “I mean…unless…” His gaze went to the big desk behind her. His eyes went darker still.

  Malorie folded her arms across herself and nodded rapidly. “Um-hmm. Yeah…okay.”

  “Right.” From the looks of his grip he literally pulled himself backward through the door. Took one stop out of sight. Silence in the hall. Then he leaned back in. “Doing anything tonight?”

  Malorie stared at him while a huge sense of being a snowball about to start rolling downhill grew in her. Dating? Was he going to ask her out?

  “Want to come to a party?” Tristan said.

  A—oh. Malorie’s snowball flattened out. “A perfume party?”

  “More like an important local social event.”

  Malorie took a breath, held it a moment, and then let it despondently out, staring at the painted toenails that peeked from her pumps. Maybe they could go back to kissing instead.

  “Be a good chance to network,” Tristan tempted.

  Trust Tristan to think that was tempting.

  “Youpi.” She sighed.

  “Allez, Malorie, you’ve been out of the social loop around here for ten years. If you want to make a go of this place, it’s a good idea to start making contacts with people.”

  “I never was in the social loop, Tristan.”

  He hesitated. “Well, you were a teenager when you left. Of course you weren’t.”

  “Monsards weren’t.” She had been to a few of the larger perfume-related events around here—the ones so big everybody got invited to them. Even them. And when that happened, her grandmother made them go, determined they not lose that little bit of entrée into Grasse society, as if she still dreamed her granddaughters…would be able to stand on her stubbornly unbending shoulders and one day make something of this place again.

  Malorie frowned a little, looking around at the high-ceilinged office, the arches that no fifties and sixties remodeling could conceal.

  “Anyway, I know you,” she said after a moment. “You’re like a one-stop essence of human contact all by yourself.”

  At those parties where she stood awkwardly with her sisters off to the side, Tristan, even at sixteen and seventeen, had moved through talking to everybody. Even powerful people fifty, sixty years older than he was, he could talk to with a kind of respectful, friendly confidence. Which just went to show the social advantages of being born a prince. Meanwhile she and her sisters didn’t talk to anybody at all, beyond the awkward introductions her stubborn, proud grandmother insisted on making no matter how much it co
st her to do it.

  And well, of course, to Tristan. Who was so sociable, he even made sure to chat with them.

  With her. She’d always thought he was just taking pity on her, when he came to chat with her off in a corner by herself. Nice guy Tristan. Or in her more cynical moments that he needed the adoration of every single last one of the people at that party, even hers. It had never occurred to her that he just needed her ability to stand separate sometimes. Needed her.

  “Well, then.” Tristan extended a hand. “Don’t say I never gave you anything important.”

  Chapter 15

  “Interesting choice of a woman to bring to my birthday party,” Tristan’s grandfather said, with a level of dryness only he and Tante Colette could manage. Malorie and Damien both had a nice way with a dry voice, but Pépé’s dryness had been aged. Laid out under the sun and just desiccated for nine decades.

  “I certainly thought so,” Tristan said cheerfully, grinning at his grandfather.

  Pépé gave him one of his looks. Tristan just smiled. Pépé’s looks weren’t for the faint of heart, but somehow or other they always just made Tristan feel…loved. Like Pépé thought he could stand up to them.

  “Pierre Monsard’s great-granddaughter.” Pépé shook his head. “Have you lost your mind? Her father was a piece of work, too. Not to mention her grandfather.”

  “You knew her grandfather?” Tristan searched Pépé’s face quickly. Malorie didn’t know her own grandfather. Of course, Malorie wouldn’t have been born.

  “Maybe.” Pépé’s face went its most unreadable, the man even Gestapo couldn’t get an indiscreet slip out of. And he had the scars to prove they’d tried. He glanced across the outdoor crowd to Tante Colette.

  The two nonagenarians practiced so much acerbic stubbornness that they could never really manage to speak to each other, kind of like the same pole of two magnets couldn’t be forced together. The closer they got to each other, the stronger the repel force, but add family to the mix to keep them slightly apart, and it kept that repel force down to manageable levels.

  Plus, it wasn’t as if they actually had to talk to each other anymore. They both had smart phones these days. They could text each other to coordinate strategical victories over their wayward descendants.