Crown of Bitter Orange

by Laura Florand

  “Lovely,” she said quietly. “It’s like…” She looked around her office, the control center of La Maison de Monsard.

  “We’ll have to run a range,” Tristan said. “Between that and the dustier one I gave you the other day and a few more ideas I want to try. Plus, I have to see how they mature, of course. When do you want to start thinking about bottles and packaging and lining up production? Do you want to use Rosier for production until you bring Monsard’s facilities back on line again? Or do you want to focus more on just being the showplace for the perfumes and maybe think of a long-term agreement with Rosier to make them?”

  Malorie knew perfectly well what he was doing. Assuming her decision was made, that she was going to re-launch Monsard, and that he was going to be involved in it, as a way of directing her down that path. It should have been annoying. Instead, it was profoundly warming. She loved the idea of having Tristan by her side and even often butting heads with her, but either way, tangled up in the bringing back to life of this place. What better person was there, to fill a place with life?

  “I still need to hear back from my sisters,” she said. “Without their cooperation, there’s not much I can do. I can’t afford to buy them out at this point.” And secretly, she’d kind of prefer it if they didn’t want to sell. If she fought for this place for the sake of a family, like the Rosiers did, no matter how much more shattered the family was. The healing had to start somewhere.

  Maybe it could start with her.

  “If you had the majority of shares, would you be ready to commit to it?” Tristan asked, watching her as if he’d like to pierce right through to the center of her brain and figure out what she was thinking.

  Good luck with that. Malorie didn’t even entirely know what she was thinking. And that was his fault. If he hadn’t been around, it would be simple—take back this place and relaunch it or sell it, fish or cut bait. But his existence layered that decision with so many more emotions, delicate silky ones, like orange blossoms she was afraid to crush.

  Or maybe they were powerful dragon emotions she was afraid to get eaten by.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She had made so many life-changing decisions briskly, without ever glancing back. But this one would so clearly dominate the whole rest of her life. The rest of her descendants’ lives. Hell, it would even, to a certain degree, reshape Grasse. The thought of being someone who had consequences again, whose role in her family and in a region’s history might be powerful and pivotal, was terrifying. Her great-grandfather had had that role, and look what he had done with it.

  “Mmm.” Tristan looked as if he’d decided not to say something he really wanted to say.

  “Look, you had the training to be a patriarch,” she said. Training in honor and courage and standing up for what was right. No one ever messed with the girls or the smaller kids in their high school, not with five Rosiers there. That was the kind of influence they wielded. The power they had for good. “If I’m going to become the Monsard matriarch one day, I’ll be making everything up as I go along and trying to get it right.”

  “Like Niccolò and Laurianne,” Tristan said.

  Malorie rubbed the vial he had tossed her, bemused. Had he just compared her to the legendary founders of the Rosier clan? Casually, not as if he was flattering her but as if that was quite simply who she reminded him of. “What, Niccolò the hardened mercenary?” she said dryly, to defend herself.

  “The romantic,” Tristan said reprovingly. “He was the bastard son of a prince and he married a glove-maker. Honestly, Malorie, it’s not all about money.”

  She’d bet it was if you had lost everything and didn’t even have a pair of gloves to your name, as their stories claimed about Niccolò. “I thought he was a mercenary on the losing end of a war in Italy who came here dead broke. Laurianne was a smart, wealthy businesswoman. If he was a romantic, he certainly had a gift for landing on his feet.”

  Tristan frowned at her.

  Seriously? He really didn’t think financial security had been a factor in Niccolò’s choice of wife? “Sometimes it’s more obvious than others that you never breathed a financially insecure breath in your life,” she said.

  There was a little silence. And then quietly, “Maybe he was as capable of forging his own way as you always have been. And so falling in love was extra.”

  Maybe. It was a nice thought. The open compliment of her in it was the kind that worked inside her and made her bones feel stronger.

  Tristan smiled a little. “So then Laurianne, the glove-maker perfumer businesswoman, is the romantic? Willing to risk all her life and fortune on a hardened mercenary?”

  Malorie shuddered. That had been really true back in Niccolò and Laurianne’s day—that if Laurianne married, she yielded control of her entire life and finances to Niccolò. How the hell had she brought herself to do that, instead of staying a widow? “He must have been quite the charmer,” she said very darkly.

  Tristan frowned at her. “He was the one who brought so many perfume techniques here out of Italy. Maybe she was getting quite a lot out of the relationship, too.”

  Frankly, if she lived to be a hundred, she would never understand the risk that Laurianne had taken on Niccolò. Hard to deny it had paid off, though, at least for their descendants. “The sex must have been good,” she said. “That’s all I can figure.”

  Tristan laughed. “Good to know that might be a factor in a tough businesswoman’s decisions.”

  This conversation was brushing close to…something that made her roll her eyes quickly and grow more ironic.

  Tristan tweaked a strand of her hair. “So does that mean you get to be like Niccolò and I get to be like Laurianne? Damn it. And I always wanted to be the tough, cynical mercenary starting over out of the ruins in the story.”

  Yeah, right. “Tristan, I’m afraid you completely failed to get the hardened mercenary part down.”

  “Luckily I’ve got you,” Tristan said cheerfully, and she had to laugh.

  Again, she couldn’t think about the assumption that seemed to underlie their conversation. But she could think that…well, maybe he was a little lucky to have her. He wasn’t very good at setting up his own walls, was he? Or of thinking about things like the bottom line, which were fundamental to a family’s security.

  A reassuring thought. That there really were things about her that the man who had everything needed.

  That too-handsome-for-his-own-good face tilted down toward her. Not too far. She was in heels. Brown eyes turned warm and wicked. “Have I ever told you about all the fantasies I had, when we were arguing about Fugace, that started right here and ended up with you pushed back on your desk with your legs spread while you moaned for more?”

  A jolt of heat and indignation right through her. “No. That’s terrible.”

  “I know,” Tristan said, savoringly, as if the very terribleness tasted delicious. “Well…show is better than tell any day.” He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed.

  ***

  Happiness unfolded for Tristan like the scent of a limestone cliff. A scent he had known all his life and yet never once managed to capture in a perfume in a way that conveyed its beauty.

  Limestone and a man’s sweat, and no sound but the scrape of his own body against rock and the breeze, or in summer perhaps fading below him the sound of cicadas. Familiar and beautiful and it seemed like a good perfumer should be able to do something with it, but he had never before managed to capture it in this form.

  Happiness was like the blank page when he went to put down his first formula ideas for the scent that would capture that limestone hope. That anguish of doubt that he could never let anyone know he had, that sometimes drove him right back away from that page and up the limestone cliff again until he could force himself through the barrier.

  But he had to write the ideas down. Had to start the trials. Would this work? What about this? This idea was promising, but how would it smell two weeks later? How would it
smell on skin?

  Happiness closed around him in a vast embrace like the great walls of a scented orchard where he could roam both safe and free. The happiness was bigger than he’d ever realized it could be—or maybe when he’d first started dreaming of it, it had been smaller and he hadn’t known how much it had grown. She was bigger. He was bigger. Together, they both were.

  He thought Fugace didn’t suit her anymore. If he made it again, he would have to bring a warmer note into the cool green and shadow, would have to capture that heart of orange blossom, rich with sensuality and hope and promise. It would have to be a stronger scent, a scent that had gone on great, long adventures. But a spring scent. Like two people with flowers in their hair, smiling tentatively at a camera, two wood gods who had known each other for all time and still, with the spring, found a new beginning.

  He scythed the great overgrown orchard down so they could move among the bitter orange trees, and he fixed the motor on her grandmother’s old mower so they could more easily maintain it. He helped paint walls in the building in Grasse and scrub clean the old fountain and set it to flowing again. Malorie set orange blossoms floating in it. He dreamed the scents he would make to flow in its waters.

  He discovered that Malorie liked to get up when the stars were still out just like he did. The two of them harvested orange blossoms in the quiet dawn before they went in to Grasse. He dreamed things that he still felt too shy to tell her, like what it might be like to have his perfume lab here in the orange blossom orchard instead of at Rosier SA, or maybe—would he prefer it?—in the Monsard building not far from her office, or maybe in both places, depending on whether he needed quiet or needed people that day.

  And as night fell, he could never resist pulling her down onto one of those drop cloths sprinkled with orange blossoms fallen during the day and catching her body under his. Then the beauty of everything overwhelmed him, and he fell into it, and then later he fell asleep into the arms of this absolutely perfect life and his dreams of it lasting forever after.

  Chapter 23

  “You and Malorie,” Antoine Vallier said, an eyebrow lifting at Tristan over their beer. Around them was the usual happy conversation of the post-work hour at all the restaurants around the place, the fountain rippling softly in the center of it all. “So all this time we thought you couldn’t settle on one woman, but in fact you’re just slow to close.”

  Unruffled, as a life policy, Tristan took a swallow of beer and enjoyed the people strolling by. He didn’t ask how Antoine knew about Malorie. He was used to Grasse knowing more about his life than he did. “Well, it turns out I did ask her to marry me when I was five, but she doesn’t even remember what she said.” He gave a heavy, sad sigh. “Life is tough with Malorie.” But he was grinning. He loved her toughness. Her bones were so strong that he knew exactly what she was made of.

  “So you’ve told her about the shares,” Antoine said. “And she’s okay with it.”

  Tristan looked at his friend blankly. His old classmate and he had lost contact when Antoine went off to university, but Tristan had looked him up as soon as he learned Antoine was now Tante Colette’s lawyer and standing up to Damien and Matt and Raoul as if he was born to challenge arrogance. Tristan deeply approved of younger men who managed to get the better of the more established, more arrogant, older men. Plus, while Damien and Matt and Raoul responded with hostility to any perceived threat and made things worse, Tristan figured he’d rather respond with friendliness and see if he could make things better.

  Antoine had a lean, mean, touchy thing going on, but Tristan was used to that kind of stuff, too, with all the I-am-a-badass-and-emotional-teddy-bear shit he had to put up with from his cousins. In fact, it was amazing how much, when he grabbed Antoine for a drink or coffee these days, he felt as if he was talking to one of his own cousins.

  In a sardonic, blond version.

  “Why wouldn’t she be okay with it?” Tristan said. “I’ve got enough that I can give her the majority. It’s perfect. If she decides she wants that.”

  Antoine gave him that long, ironic green look of his. Tristan grinned at him. When you grew up with Damien, ironic looks lost a lot of their impact. “Tristan,” Antoine said, drawing on the word as if he really needed a cigarette and was only restraining himself for the sake of Tristan’s sensitive nose. “Pretty much no one close to you ever meant you harm, did they?”

  Tristan gazed skyward and asked heaven to grant him patience. “You know, people have no idea what it was like to grow up the youngest of those gorillas.”

  “Real harm.” Antoine’s words sounded crisp, like he was cutting them out of a great block of forbearance with some difficulty. “Not mud-wrestling.”

  “Well, no,” Tristan said, patiently. “If they did, they wouldn’t be close to me.” Sometimes people misunderstood his easy ability to get along with most of the world; they thought it meant he trusted most of the world. “But even though they didn’t mean it, that doesn’t mean they never caused it.”

  Raoul and Lucien.

  “Yeah.” For some reason, Antoine’s voice was so dry it was almost bitter. He reached for his cigarettes, then curled his fingers into his palm just as they brushed the package and brought his loose fist down to the café table. “But let’s just say your assumptions about what people close to you are capable of doing to you are very different than those of people who grew up in a less…happy family.”

  The expression on his face made Tristan worry about Antoine’s family. The two of them had been friendly back in high school, or at least as friendly as Antoine let anyone be to him. But they hadn’t exactly been blood brothers—Tristan had four of those already, in the form of his cousins. He knew nothing about Antoine’s family at all.

  “Have you told her about the shares?” Antoine said.

  Would people quit nagging Tristan about that? “I’m waiting for the right moment. Speaking of surprises, Jess says you’re coming to their wedding?”

  What Jess had actually said, apologetically to Damien who reacted to Antoine somewhat like a cobra reacted to a mongoose, was that Antoine had put her on the spot, congratulating her on the wedding and saying he was looking forward to attending. So she’d felt as if she had to send him an invitation. But Tristan didn’t bring that up, just watched Antoine. “You’re not going to show up like the bad fairy and curse their children, are you?”

  Because Antoine had some kind of thing about Damien. Tristan couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but even back in school, Antoine had closed off if Damien even wandered their way in the school courtyard.

  “I think I’ll stick with a traditional gift,” Antoine drawled, bored. But there was something in his eyes as he looked out over the esplanade toward the sea in the distance. “I must be able to find diamond-studded platinum spoons somewhere.”

  Tristan just laughed. “They’re asking guests to contribute to a scholarship fund for Grasse kids wanting to study perfume in Paris.”

  Antoine said nothing. This time, he drew the cigarette halfway out of the pack before he remembered Tristan’s nose and tapped it back in, putting the pack away. Emotions seemed to crowd under that carefully neutral surface of his, but Tristan couldn’t decipher a single one of them.

  He’d better keep an eye on Antoine at Damien’s wedding.

  “But how did we get on me?” Antoine said, tapping his fingers restlessly against the table as if a cigarette should be sliding through them. “If you’ll take my advice—”

  “Always,” Tristan said, resigned. Take advice from the guy who’d been idiotic enough to skip their group project with Malorie just because Tristan talked him into it? Some days he wondered if he should be a little more upfront with people about how hardheaded he was. He liked for them to incorrectly assume his compliancy, but this was getting ridiculous.

  “—you’ll tell Malorie about those shares before she finds out on her own.”

  ***

  Happiness expanded outward for Malorie
through the streets of Grasse. It warmed the colors of the buildings, made the clothes hanging to dry between balconies wave a familiar welcome to her in the breeze. Welcome home.

  She knew, by the way people reacted to her—curious and bemused and, in the case of quite a few women, jealous—that Tristan was acting differently with her than he did with other women. That the knowledge that she and he were together was rippling out through Grasse society and bringing all kinds of people peeking through the doors of La Maison de Monsard, intrigued to meet her and to see if they could find out more gossip than the person who had passed their current supply of gossip on to them.

  It was the first time in generations that anyone in her family had been at the center of Grasse gossip that wasn’t negative. It was hard to get used to. Sometimes she dreamed of hiking up into the hills again so she could just be herself and not have to think about any of it. When she told Tristan, he said, “That’s why I like to climb so much,” and took her out to build on her rudimentary gym skills so she could climb, too.

  In her grandmother’s and great-grandfather’s old office the next day, she stared at the envelope with the little key, the envelope marked Rosier, and hesitated, and while she was hesitating, Tristan wandered in with a present for her.

  The Lalique bottle of frosted glass amber twin hearts with their frosted, dusky dark centers. “I found it,” he said proudly, and she had to bend her head as her eyes teared up.

  Sometimes she thought she should tell him that her father used to give presents only as manipulation—to get you so addicted to his admiration and present-giving that he could use that need on your part for his own ends. But then she thought she never should, because she didn’t want to put a single dark note into Tristan’s warmth and generosity. It wasn’t his problem, that the men in her family had been such assholes. It was hers, and she’d traveled a long road—literally—to become her own person and not let her father and grandfather and great-grandfather control her future.