Crown of Bitter Orange

by Laura Florand

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No.” Pépé’s voice was clipped.

  “Then why don’t you tell her who it was? It’s not like anyone could be hurt by it.”

  Pépé said nothing.

  Granite. You could climb it, but you couldn’t really tear it down.

  Tristan frowned at him.

  “I said maybe,” his grandfather said. “I’ve never found any good to come of spreading rumors.”

  Yeah, when Pépé was a teenager, rumors got people killed. Rumors that some child recently moved here from Paris was really Jewish. Rumors that so-and-so had been out all night the night a German supply depot was blown up. And in the first year after the war, rumors that so-and-so had maybe managed to survive the Occupation by letting a German soldier in by the back door.

  Pépé might absorb rumors, but if he released one back into the world, it was a verified fact, and you were in the need-to-know.

  Tristan looked across the gathering at Malorie. She had about climbed out the passenger window of his car and thrown herself off the cliff they were edging when she realized where they were going. Then she’d muttered bitter comments the rest of the way about, “Fool me twice, shame on me,” as she slouched against the door. But once they’d arrived, she’d pulled herself together, of course—tall and cool and proud. So he’d put her with Layla and Allegra, who could make friends with cliff faces. Layla, in fact, would go down in history as the only threat to this valley his grandfather had ever smiled at. Jess had joined the three of them, possibly not realizing that Malorie was a perfumer’s most-feared creature—an accountant.

  Malorie laughed as he watched, and Tristan felt smug. He’d known he could count on Layla and Allegra. Plus, Layla had busked and small-gig performed her way through Europe when she was about the same age as Malorie had been when she hiked off on her own to make her fortune, so Tristan figured the two would find they had more in common than one might at first assume between a musician and an accountant.

  He smiled at his wine and took a sip of it in a very counter-productive effort to cool his head. There was one way that letting Malorie assume this social event was just a perfume industry party had come back to bite him. She’d worn a silky, nearly nude sheath that would have been glamorously simple and appropriate in New York or Paris and was a bit much for a local extended family birthday party, and also for his entire body. Merde but that dress looked strokable.

  Just all over slipping and sliding and stroking and—

  A big arm draped around his shoulders. “Tristan,” Matt said affectionately.

  “No,” Tristan said immediately, stiffening. Damien and Raoul were strolling up to join them, herding him in and blocking his view of the rest of the party, grinning as if they lived in one great, glorious world.

  “Isn’t life beautiful?” Matt sighed and toasted the sky.

  Tristan slipped his arm around Matt’s waist, leaned his head against his shoulder even though that was an awkward bend, and sighed romantically. “The sun setting. The stars coming out. La vie est belle.”

  “Will you get off me?” Matt pushed him away, and Tristan stood free, grinning and smoothing his clothes.

  When you grew up with four older cousins who loved to pin the youngest and tickle him and engage in various other demonstrations of how much bigger they were—back then at least—then you learned more methods than tests of strength to break free and control a situation.

  “You boys behave,” their grandfather said with no particular firmness to it. Tristan had often suspected that their grandfather would have found good behavior on their part much less interesting to observe and ultimately bad for them.

  “What, you don’t think it’s beautiful, Pépé?” Matt asked, gesturing expansively. Get one glass of wine in him and growly Matt turned into the guy who wanted to hug everybody. Tristan gauged him to be at about half a glass now.

  Pretty soon, he’d be all cuddle bunny with Layla. On cue, Layla looked across the gathering at Matt with a kind of affectionate warmth that made Tristan wish someone was looking at him with affectionate warmth, but Malorie just gave him a cool, you-have-messed-with-me-one-last-time look. Which, to be honest, was hot in a whole other way. Made him want to mess with her more.

  “I mean, twenty-five years,” Matt said. “And finally, finally Tristan gets the girl.”

  “That’s devotion for you,” Damien said mildly, twisting his glass so the wine could release its scent.

  “Oh, is devotion what we’re calling it?” Raoul said. “Not desperation?”

  Tristan slanted him a dirty look, but he still got kind of a kick out of it when Raoul teased him. As if the oldest cousin and prodigal grandson was solidly back in the fold and no longer distrusting of his welcome.

  “I was thinking it was more like incompetence,” Matt said cheerfully. “I mean, how long does it take you to get a girl to pay attention to you, Tristan?”

  See, this was why he never brought anyone to meet his family. Well, that and…his family was forever. You didn’t want to introduce someone into your forever space too easily.

  “She needed to grow up first,” he said coolly.

  “Or one of you did,” Damien told his glass.

  Talk about the injustice of that blow. Of course, Tristan was the youngest. If he hadn’t also been an only child within the confines of his own household, he never would have gotten a respite from unjust blows.

  “I seem to remember,” Matt said. “I don’t know—Damien, let me know if I’m confusing Tristan with someone else—but I seem to remember someone acting as if I was a total idiot about women. Yeah. Either of you two remember anything like that?”

  “Well, in Tristan’s defense, you are a total idiot about women,” Raoul said. Rule of thumb among the cousins, never let the fact that you were living in a glass house prevent you from throwing stones. All that glass was going to get shattered one way or another anyway.

  Matt looked indignant. “I grabbed my fiancée as soon as I saw her.”

  Yeah, and he meant that literally. “Some of us prefer not to behave like apes,” Tristan said.

  Mistake. All three of his cousins looked at him with a glint in their eyes.

  “Okay, one of us prefers not to act like an ape.” Tristan gestured to himself with his glass. “I can’t speak for the rest of you.”

  Lethal, urbane Damien raised one eyebrow, gray-green eyes glinting. Generally speaking, people didn’t associate Damien with apes. Damien had grabbed his fiancée the first time he saw her, too, pretty much, although he’d been a little more refined in the grabbing at least. Hell, so had Raoul grabbed Allegra, come to think of it.

  And those women had let them. More or less.

  They hadn’t coolly sat on the male ego, every single damn time.

  Tristan frowned in the direction of Malorie, currently hidden from his view by Raoul’s big head. “You know, this story about my twenty-five year crush has been greatly exaggerated. I’ve hardly been mooning over her my whole life.”

  “Bravely pretending to live his life without her. Making do,” Matt said sadly to his other cousins.

  “Okay, that’s just insulting to any other woman I’ve been out with. Making do. Come on,” Tristan said. Their grandfather stood just a tiny bit removed from their group now, listening without looking at them, his lips compressed into that aged hint of a smile as he watched the extended family chatting and laughing before him.

  “Hiding his fragile heart,” Raoul said solemnly as if Tristan hadn’t spoken. Tristan glanced at him suddenly, feeling as if Raoul had touched far too close to something that was almost…true. Raoul’s amber wolf eyes met his in surprise, and then a flicker of thoughtfulness passed across his face.

  “Probably desperately hoping his cousins would watch his back,” Matt said.

  “Fight for him,” Damien agreed.

  “Help him out,” Raoul said.

  All the hairs on the back of Tristan’s neck rose. “Oh, no,�
� he said. “No, no, no, no, no. I definitely wasn’t hoping that.”

  “He’s the youngest,” Damien said, looking to Raoul. “I mean, we’re supposed to watch out for him, right? That’s what the moms always said.”

  “I like that,” Tristan said indignantly. “I’m the one who always looks after all of you.” Made sure they functioned together, that none of their fights ever got so serious they couldn’t come back from them, that none of his cousins ever got so drowned in a well of their own emotions he couldn’t reach down a hand and haul them back up and make them laugh at themselves and see more clearly.

  And no one even noticed.

  “Ingrats,” he said darkly.

  “Yes, that’s why I feel so obligated,” Damien said. “I owe you.”

  Merde. Tristan scrambled through his memories, trying to think what he might have done.

  “A lot,” Damien said.

  You know, sometimes it would be helpful to have a grandfather who actually did make the older cousins behave, instead of standing over there to the side looking as if he’d be laughing if that wouldn’t betray his dignity.

  “Forget it,” Tristan said. “I did it out of the goodness of my heart. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “He doesn’t think we have hearts,” Matt said sadly, deeply wounded.

  “We don’t,” Raoul pointed out.

  What was Damien holding against him anyway? Tristan was probably the reason he and Jess were together. Using humor to plant sense on one side and the other, getting his aunt to bring out old photos to show Jess Damien’s soft sid—oh, yeah.

  His cousins parted, revealing Malorie and the gathering of women again. Tristan’s mom was just reaching them with a big photo album in hand.

  Ha.

  Was that all they had?

  “You damn jerks,” Tristan said agreeably, just to give them the impression they had succeeded. Had he put enough heat into that? He didn’t want them so disappointed that they tried to come up with some other way to drive him crazy.

  Matt, Damien, and Raoul exchanged faint, smug smiles.

  Tristan raised an eyebrow. “Glad to see you three are accepting your colorful past so well these days.”

  If anything, the three of them looked smugger.

  Seriously? They really thought this would get to him? Tristan sighed. “You do know Malorie and I were in school together when we were four, right? One time the teacher even let me play with finger paint.” And play he had—he’d covered his face and arms and clothes with all the colors of the rainbow, then cupped his hands to Malorie’s cheeks to give her rainbow splotches, too.

  He was pretty sure she’d liked it back then. In the picture his teacher had given his mom, they were both laughing.

  His cousins exchanged slightly discomfited glances. As if they’d forgotten that part.

  Tristan took a smug sip of his wine.

  Across the way, over there under the blooming almond trees, his mother gave a shriek.

  Tristan’s eyebrows shot up. His brisk, competent, I’ve-got-everything-but-my-son-under-control mother did not shriek.

  She used to, once in a while. Like that time he’d covered a whole wall in their home with more “finger paints” he’d found in a shed and that, it turned out, were regular adult paint and not washable, or that time he’d left a snake on her pillow as a present to surprise her when she woke up. She’d screamed pretty loud for that one.

  But after twenty-nine years of that kind of thing, plus her share of handling whatever trouble the five of them got into together, she was pretty hard to get a shriek out of.

  Now Damien’s mother, Tata Véro, was looking over his own mother’s shoulder at the album, and uproar was ensuing.

  “Okay, what did you do?” Tristan set his glass on the nearest table and jogged across.

  Malorie was laughing by the time he got there. That was probably a good sign. But all the other women were glaring at Matt, Damien, and Raoul as if they’d just massacred a herd of kittens. He got the photo album away from them.

  It was the alien photo, exactly as he’d suspected.

  Edited.

  So that Tristan stood naked all by himself, entirely covered in paint, while his cousins had been digitally cut from a formal wedding line-up of the five of them and pasted behind him, all in their little tuxes looking long-suffering while Tristan grinned in purple paint, arms raised up with a wooden spear in his hand. (Alien technology having apparently been focused more on developing space travel than a weapons system.)

  “Hey!” He turned on his cousins, outraged. He loved that alien photo. It spoke to everything happy about their childhood, before things started to break apart and he developed that sense that he had to learn a strong and supple grip to keep them all together. “What did you do with it?”

  A flood of indignant female exclamations overwhelmed his, Tata Véro, Layla, Allegra, and Jess all landing on Matt, Damien, and Raoul until pretty soon those three were swearing on their lives they hadn’t destroyed the original and humbly apologizing for having ever tampered with the sacred albums.

  Tristan relaxed and glanced at Malorie, a little space of quiet now cleared around them.

  She raised one eyebrow at him, but there was laughter in her eyes. “Do you ever get in trouble?”

  “Hey, I didn’t do this one! Why should I be getting in trouble?”

  She grinned at him, her eyes alive with humor. Oh, wow, that was a great look on her. It got right down into his middle and warmed him from the inside out. She tapped the photo. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you?”

  Tristan considered the image of him naked and covered in purple a moment. “My dick’s bigger.”

  Malorie burst out laughing. She laughed so hard she nearly choked and Tristan had to put his arm around her to help support her, while she buried her head in his shoulder and laughed and laughed.

  The women re-converged on Malorie with phones out to show her the real photo, so that Matt, Damien, and Raoul had to suffer through her seeing them naked and covered in colors, too. The three of them squirmed. Some people were so insecure about their masculinity.

  His arm around Malorie, his cousins writhing in embarrassment, Tristan grinned in triumph, all right with his world.

  Chapter 16

  “Plotting your takeover?” an old, dry voice said from a little behind and to Malorie’s left, and her hand tightened around her wrist behind her back. She’d stepped away from the gathering to stand at the edge of the fields, gazing out across them and up at the hills. And she knew without looking exactly who had come up beside her.

  “Of this valley?” she said dismissively. “I’m not sure the money in this industry is in agriculture.” She refused to indulge Monsieur Rosier in a belief that she was jealous of what the Rosiers had.

  Even if she was.

  Oh, not of the land, per se, although there was a sense of peace and security in this valley that filled her with wistfulness. But of that happiness in Tristan’s family. That solidarity. Hell, the worst his cousins could think to do to him was edit a photo of him standing in his full Tristan glory—naked to the world around him and thrilled to be in contact with it with every bit of his skin, and colored in purple paint to celebrate. They weren’t hurting him with that, they were showing him off.

  She’d never seen so much love in one place anywhere as in this family, and they didn’t even know. They took it for granted. They probably doubted it sometimes and wondered if their family really loved them, like idiot teenagers.

  Well, except…maybe Tristan didn’t take it for granted. She had a sense that Tristan nurtured it and grew it, tending to his family happiness as if he was its gardener and he liked the sweet scent when it bloomed its fullest.

  Oh. And Damien went out and fought the corporate world for it, and Matt growled and tried to hold together the heart of it, this valley, and the old man beside her paced the family territory and still to this day fought all comers. Maybe they didn’t take it f
or granted. That just made what her own family had become hurt worse.

  “You sound like your great-grandfather,” Jean-Jacques Rosier said, and her nails flinched into her wrist. “He never cared about the land either.” Except in French, the word he used for land, le pays, also meant the country.

  Malorie tightened her jaw. Kept her shoulders straight. Said nothing, because what could she say?

  “And I’m not sure there was anything your father cared about. Besides himself.”

  True enough. Malorie’s eyes burned. “Bon anniversaire, monsieur,” she said flatly, as respectful a slap back as she could possibly make. She’d told him happy birthday twice already—when Tristan introduced her and over the dinner table when they sang it. But it still made her point—I’m just trying to honor your day. Leave me alone.

  “I suppose it makes sense you would go for someone like Tristan,” Jean-Jacques Rosier said. “A charmer just like your father.”

  Malorie’s head whipped around in pure shock. “Tristan is nothing like my father!”

  Oh, Tristan would be so hurt if he knew about this conversation. He adored his grandfather.

  Malorie, on the other hand, thought he was a ninety-one-year-old bastard. She glared at him.

  Monsieur Rosier just raised white eyebrows faintly, studying her. “You don’t think so?”

  “They’re as different as two people can be!” Malorie snapped, fed up with trying to be respectful to Tristan’s arrogant elders. Okay, fine, they’d saved the world. Maybe resting on those laurels for the last seventy years had stagnated their brains.

  “How do you figure that?” Monsieur Rosier said, as if the matter was of academic interest only.

  “How do I figure?” Malorie threw up her hands. “He cares about people, that’s the big difference. He tries to charm them into doing what’s best for them, not what’s best for him.”

  “Trust me.” Jean-Jacques looked ever so faintly amused. “Tristan is very effective at getting his own way.”