Crown of Bitter Orange

by Laura Florand

  “How about Monsard-Rosier?”

  “Tristan. It’s La Maison de Monsard.”

  “I am not changing my name to Monsard,” Tristan said, and Malorie gave one great, big blink, as that sentence went bam right through her.

  “Well, I’m not changing my name to Rosier,” she said. What the hell were they discussing?

  Tristan folded his arms and frowned at her. “Why do you always have to be so difficult?”

  “Why do you always have to be so patriarchal?”

  He frowned at her another moment and then made a flick-the-water-away-from-the-duck’s-back motion with one hand. “Fine, we’ll work that out later.” He turned his palm up so that her hand rested in it and ran this thumb over her ring finger, a little smile on his face. “But that’s a yes otherwise?”

  She had the sudden impression that she’d been lured down a funnel path until he’d landed her right where he wanted her. And she hadn’t even realized that was the direction in which he’d been luring her.

  “What was the question?” Malorie meant to sound her usual tough self, but her voice came out husky and wispy, as if she’d lost all her air.

  “If you hadn’t waited twenty-four years to answer it, maybe you’d still remember it.” Tristan turned their palms up, pressed together, and linked his fingers strongly between hers. “This was the question,” he said, and kissed her ring finger, right at the base.

  Malorie ran her free hand through her hair and actually pulled locks of it across her face, to half hide herself as she gazed at him. It was so disorienting how wonderful he made her feel. She could not get used to it. Dizzy and wandering in a fairy world and not sure where her cardinal points were anymore. “Can you actually marry someone you’ve known your whole life?”

  “Who else would you marry? I’ve never understood my cousins, falling for people they barely know.”

  Yeah. She couldn’t get that either. It seemed as if love took a long time, to establish its roots, to grow so big and take up so much space in your life that you couldn’t imagine that life without it.

  She couldn’t imagine life without Tristan. Even when she’d been living her life on the opposite side of the ocean from him, she’d made him up at night to pretend he was in it anyway.

  She had to clear her throat, and even so, her voice came out barely more than a whisper. “So you’ve…fallen for me?” She peeked at him.

  Tristan flexed his fingers into hers and was silent for a little moment. “It doesn’t feel like falling.” His free arm stretched up and expanded, like a tree spreading its branches. “It feels like growing up into the sun.”

  He did it again. Brought this sudden sting of emotion to her eyes, made her chest swell.

  “It feels like finding this quiet place to walk in, where the white flowers are falling, and the sun speckles through the shade of the branches. Or the stars come out.”

  Malorie covered her eyes with her free hand.

  He hesitated. Then shrugged. “It feels like happiness. To me.”

  She looked at him over her hand, her lashes damp. “To me, too.”

  His smile broke out. “Oh, that’s all right, then.” His voice was deep and rich and warm as he pulled her into his body, hugging her tight.

  Malorie squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her face into his throat. “Sometimes I think you’ve been driving me crazy and I’ve been in love with you my whole entire life.”

  “Like a seed.” Tristan drew a small circle on her lower back. “In a rock. That just kept growing.” His fingers spread and stroked up her back. A growing tree, perhaps.

  They were both silent for a long time, just holding on.

  Until Tristan finally made a nudging motion into her back with his knuckles. “You going to answer this time?”

  “What?” She felt almost sleepy with happiness, secure in a way she had never felt in her entire life.

  “The question.”

  She considered a moment. She felt so dreamily happy that she wanted to just say yes to anything, but it might be about using some outrageous component in one of his perfumes, so she finally had to sit back a little and admit, “I don’t remember what the question was.”

  A little hint of color started to show in his cheeks. “The tunnel. That question.”

  “Oh!” A happy sound that startled out of her, a burst of joy in her middle. All that glowing yellow light. But she hesitated, and then bit the inside of her lip, smiling a little. “I don’t remember it exactly. Can you spell it out?”

  Tristan’s eyes narrowed. “You know, for someone who complains so much about patriarchy, you sure do leave a lot on the guy’s shoulders.”

  Well, that was a fair point. Malorie considered it.

  And then she actually tried. She definitely could be the cool, confident person who took charge of this situation and asked him. She told herself that, and then she tried it, and the words strangled in an embarrassed, frantic knot in her throat. A tiny bit of them actually came out as a tangled, suppressed sound. She brought one pair of their linked hands to her forehead and pressed it there, her face flaming.

  Tristan smiled a little, as if her emotional tangle fed his own confidence and certainty. He kissed one of her fingers where it linked between his, the gesture bringing his face in close to hers.

  “How about this question?” His voice had gone deep and easy, that warm, rich timbre that always made her want to either press herself against him or just take off all her clothes. He turned their linked hands until the back of his hand was facing her and touched his ring finger. “Do you like it?”

  Malorie had to smile. He had the sexiest hands. Long fingers, tanned, small scars from rocks and probably agricultural work, so damn strong, a relentless grip. She nodded.

  “Do you want to put a ring on it?”

  Her flush deepened again. She looked up into his eyes—brown and sure and inviting. “Yes,” she said quietly and definitely. She’d love to have Tristan for the rest of her life. If she could get him.

  He broke out into that beautiful smile of his. “And I want to put a ring right here,” he said, rubbing her ring finger, his hand tightening hard on hers. “So we’re okay, then. We’ve got that figured out.”

  His hand was so firm on hers, like he was never going to let it go. Like she might have to dress one-handed for the rest of her life. “Yes,” she said again.

  It didn’t even feel that brave to say. It felt like putting the last piece into a puzzle the two of them had been building for a long, long time.

  He swept her into his arms again. “Oh, good. I never know with you,” he said into her hair. His arms tightened on her once spasmodically, as if it was slowly sinking in, and then neither said anything for the longest time, just held on.

  Chapter 28

  “I found it,” Tristan said. “No fair. I want to turn the key.”

  Malorie knew he was halfway teasing her and halfway just that enthusiastic. “Are you sure you didn’t already peek? I can’t believe you resisted this.”

  “I waited for you, because it’s yours,” Tristan said virtuously. He had brought the box he’d found in the storage room in his backpack, still locked. The stars were starting to come out over the sea, a scattering of evening-fallen blossoms around them. “But merde, you are slow.”

  She slid the little key into the small box. The wood was cedar, the box simple but nicely carved, with elegant curves at the corners and a curving marquetry design on the top that made her think of Art Nouveau again. “It belongs to my family,” she pointed out.

  “Maybe,” Tristan said. “The envelope had my family name on it.” He closed his hand over hers to make her turn the key faster.

  Because Malorie was still afraid of what might be inside, and Tristan was just eager.

  The key turned. Tristan pushed the lid up.

  Linen cloth wrapped a rectangular shape. It parted to reveal cracked, scarred reddish leather. One part of the cover folded over the other, still dangling on
e leather tie, its mate long since broken off.

  Beside her, Tristan took a rough breath. His hand pushed past hers to touch the leather, and he peeled it back.

  Niccolò Rosario. A strong, authoritative pen stroke, in bold black ink that time had only partially faded.

  Under it: Laurianne Manosque Rosario.

  Tristan made a sound, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Malorie looked at him. He was staring. “Quivi s’incomincia,” he whispered and she looked back at the motto under the date. Old Italian. It all starts here. “It’s their perfume book.”

  It thrust right through her. The Monsards had one of the most precious heirlooms of the Rosier clan.

  That sick, sick sinking in her stomach. Oh, hell. How had her great-grandfather gotten his hands on that? During the Occupation. While he was helping the Nazis.

  Tristan was muttering. Soft, reverent swear words. He scooped the book out of the cedar box, holding it through the linen, his hands so careful.

  “Malorie.” He turned the page and stilled. Then looked up at her, his face as suffused as if he’d had a visit from God. “It’s their perfume book. Niccolò and Laurianne. Tata said it was lost in the war.”

  It had been.

  Tristan didn’t notice her reaction, absorbed as he turned another page. “And all this time I thought she was lying to me. That she had it hidden somewhere. I worried like hell she had it up in her attic, I wanted it somewhere more climate controlled.”

  “You should allow the museum the loan of it, to exhibit,” Malorie said. Her throat felt strained. The museum had no exhibits from the Monsards. None. They’d been erased down to meager mentions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cut from the circle of donors who had made the museum possible. And having this book in their possession wasn’t exactly going to win the Monsards any historical points. “They’ll know how to preserve it.”

  “I know.” Tristan still focused on the pages he was turning. “Just on loan, though. We’ll always keep this in the family.”

  Malorie looked at her fingers, wondering what in the world that could possibly mean. Hadn’t they just been talking about making their family be the same one? She was pretty sure no one would want to pass that book on to Tristan if that meant he would pass it on to Monsard kids.

  And he had dreamed of that book most of his life.

  She stared at his dark, wavy hair. “Tristan—”

  “We have to tell my aunt and my grandfather,” he said. “They’ve been fighting over this thing forever. I wonder if they’ll be thrilled or annoyed that they can’t blame each other for its disappearance anymore?”

  Oh, hell, yes, she would have to face them. “Tristan—”

  “What’s this?” He picked up a letter from the box that must have lain under the linen.

  Malorie grabbed it from him. If it said something horrible about her people, she wanted to see it first and not have to watch his expression and wonder.

  It was her grandmother’s hand. A short letter, only a paragraph.

  “Oh,” she said very low. “L…Léo Dubois gave it to her.” Élise Dubois’s son. The son of the woman Pierre Monsard had gotten killed.

  Tristan blinked, visibly taken aback, and then looked over her shoulder to read the letter, too.

  “I guess…it was in lieu of child support,” Malorie said, dark and rough, full of visions of her grandmother alone at sixteen and pregnant, with a book and no idea what to do, troubles piling up on her. “Oh, God.”

  In the letter, her grandmother didn’t use the expression child support, she just explained that…well, a week after she told Léo Dubois about her pregnancy, he brought the book to her. And then he ran away. Malorie wrapped her arms around herself, in lieu of hugging her sixteen-year-old grandmother.

  Tristan put his arm around her. Warmth and support. He looked incredibly puzzled by the letter, which he would be. Tristan didn’t run away. “Did he think she could use it to leverage support out of the Rosiers?”

  “Maybe.” Malorie shook her head. Her grandmother would never have done that, unless her child was actually starving. “Can you imagine the shame?”

  “Yeah.” Tristan’s voice was rough, too. “I kind of can.” His hand flexed into her back.

  Of course the empath could. She bent her head, overwhelmed by all of this. It was all just too much. The shares, the marriage proposal, now this, all in one day. God, life in New York had been simpler. For a second, almost with craving, she thought of that hike up toward Paris when she was nineteen, the clean, pure wind and only herself to deal with.

  But she hadn’t had Tristan. Merde, Tristan must have to deal with family complications constantly. As a given.

  “So the book is yours,” Tristan said oddly. “Niccolò and Laurianne’s perfume book.”

  Malorie was taken aback. “How do you figure that? It was stolen from you!” Even if, thank God, her own family hadn’t done it.

  Still, her own family had been responsible for how messed up Léo Dubois was.

  Tristan spoke slowly and carefully, as if he was picking out the right words—the right choice—with great reluctance from the much more compelling wrong ones. “Tante Colette adopted him. I guess he had as much right to this book as I do.”

  From his tone, Malorie wasn’t sure he truly felt that deep down. But he was trying to feel it. Trying to do the right thing.

  “And if this was all her child support for all those years,” he said and let his voice trail off. He looked at the book one long moment—and then handed it to her.

  Malorie crossed her hands and refused to take it. “It’s your heritage, Tristan.”

  “Those shares I obtained in Monaco were yours. I gather your father didn’t have much right to sell them either.”

  “Fine,” she said. “If it’s mine, I give it to you. There. That solves that problem. It’s yours.”

  Tristan gazed at her a long moment. Then a little smile crept onto his face. “How about ours? You can be Niccolò and I can be Laurianne.”

  Niccolò the romantic or Niccolò the hardened mercenary? It wasn’t clear anymore.

  She stared down at the book. Then looked at Tristan.

  Did he realize what he was offering? Shares could be sold and traded. People who got married got divorced and their rings pawned.

  But this book was the priceless, irreplaceable heart of his family patrimony. He couldn’t inherit the valley, he was the youngest. This was his heritage.

  You couldn’t share something like that with someone else, unless you were absolutely sure her children and yours would be the same. That the two of you would last, that together you would pass this on for generations.

  If she cried one more time today, she might have to turn in her credentials as a tough woman and resign herself to being a watering pot. “Madame Delatour and Monsieur Rosier might not agree,” she managed huskily.

  He kissed her quickly. “Let’s go tell them.”

  ***

  They took it to his Tante Colette first, since Sainte-Mère was on the road from Vallauris to the valley of roses.

  Plus, as Tristan said…they had to talk to her about the contents of the letter.

  “Mémère wanted you to know she didn’t steal it,” Malorie said carefully, watching the old woman. Afraid to hurt her. She knew very well how much a tough exterior might protect a vulnerable heart. “She—Léo Dubois gave it to her when he left. Maybe some part of her thought for a long time that he would come back for it. Or for her.”

  Colette Delatour covered her eyes with her hand. Tristan immediately put his arm around her.

  “I’m sorry,” Malorie said, distressed. She didn’t know what this made her to the old woman. The granddaughter of a boy Colette had adopted after the war and who had caused a lot of trouble and run away only a few years later. But she knew it must hurt the older woman. “I thought you should know.”

  She checked with Tristan. He, too, had thought his aunt should know. That she was st
rong enough to handle anything but being kept in the dark. Tristan gave her a little nod and reached out his free hand to squeeze hers.

  “I suppose this explains a lot of things,” Colette said quietly, lowering her hand. Her face was sad. “I wonder if he loved all of them, or just wanted to be loved by all of them.”

  Malorie looked at Tristan. He’d already told her about Layla and Jess. Which made the two women cousins of hers, a surreal thought.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that he hit puberty and found girls, girls, girls. And that it’s probably a good thing Maman was always after me about condoms,” he added ruefully.

  That was so like Tristan—comprehension, no judgement, and a little thread of humor, to try to make this more manageable.

  “You were just supposed to not do it, back in my day,” Tante Colette said. “We thought about sex differently then. We thought if you weren’t married, only bad people did it. And the fathers were supposed to keep an eye on their daughters, protect them from the boys. But of course, there weren’t as many fathers, for a while.”

  All those destroyed, disrupted families. People killed. Léo Dubois’s own father had died on the front in the initial invasion and his mother had been killed before his eyes, and then he’d been, until the end of the war, turned into a kind of pet by the SS troop that had killed her. Tristan had explained everything to Malorie in the car.

  “So he ran wild with the girls.” Malorie swallowed the vulnerable before girls. But she was pretty sure that was what it had been. Maybe everyone in the situation had been vulnerable. They’d needed his masculine attention, and he’d needed to fill a hole inside him. “And when he woke up to a mess of three pregnant fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t be that bad in your eyes, maybe, or what he imagined you would see as bad.” This was a boy who had been initially “adopted” and turned into a kind of pet by the men who had killed his mother when he was eight, after all. He must have been all kinds of messed up inside already, about whether he was a good or bad person. “So he ran away.”