A Wish Upon Jasmine
by
Laura Florand
La Vie en Roses Series, Book 2
www.lauraflorand.com
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Ruthless.
That was what they said about Damien Rosier. Handsome. Wealthy. Powerful. Merciless. No one messed with his family, because to do so they would have to get through him. No one thought he had a heart. Not even the woman he gave his to.
Cynical.
That was what they said about Jasmin Bianchi. A top perfumer of her generation, Jess had achieved commercial success by growing a protective shell over a tender heart. The one time she cracked it open to let Damien in, he crushed it—after a night of unbelievable passion.
Lovers.
That one magical night couldn’t survive the harsh light of dawn. When Jess woke up to discover the man in bed beside her had stolen her company, she fled.
Enemies.
Now she’s come to the south of France with a threat to his family heritage. If he wants to reclaim both it and the woman who walked away from him, he’s going to have to fight as dirty as only Damien can.
But Jess knows how to fight dirty, too. And these days, she has nothing left to lose.
Certainly not her heart.
Come explore the south of France, a world of heat and fragrance and tales as old as time, through the stories of the five powerful Rosier cousins and the women who win their hearts. A Wish Upon Jasmine, book two in Florand’s addictive new series, La Vie en Roses. “Explosive, sensual, and utterly sweet” (Eloisa James).
Also available in La Vie en Roses series
Turning Up the Heat (a prequel novella, Léa and Daniel’s story)
The Chocolate Rose (a prequel novel, Gabriel and Jolie’s story)
Once Upon a Rose (Book 1, Matthieu and Layla’s story)
Want to make sure you don’t miss the next Rosier story? Sign up for Laura’s new releases email here.
Chapter 1
The street tried to ease her heart, with its hushed heat and shadowed old stone, and Jess braced warily against it. She never knew what might come out of her heart, when she loosed that stopper on it. Sometimes still it was this great wail of grief. Sometimes it was something even crueler, like hope.
Papa loved this town. He’d carried Grasse inside him all his life, like a knight’s bastard son, exiled from Camelot.
Too late for him to claim a place here now. Could she? Did she even want it?
The iron key refused to turn in the stubborn lock. She pulled it free of the gold-painted oak door. The key had seemed ancient when she first removed it from an envelope in New York. But the streets of this old perfume capital probably remembered when it had been the latest in high-tech security.
She took a breath, rubbing the key, and a sense of quiet grew in her, like the hushed heat in the shadowed old stone street. The scents in this Provençal street were working their way into her braced heart like water into tiny cracks in a dike. She was afraid of all the emotions that would flood out, if she didn’t stop those scents. And yet, at the same time, she wanted to press her face against the stone and just breathe in the scent of baked time. She wanted to press the key to her nose and see what old iron smelled like.
She tried to fight scents and their emotions with briskness, the way she had learned to do in New York, during those two years of her father’s dying. Briskness was a default solution to all problems, in the big city. But here, the attempt at briskness only made her fingers fumble on the key.
What’s your rush? the key’s scent said. The stone of the street said. The bright young sun said, seeking its way onto the color-washed walls through cracks and crannies and shirts hung out like flags between balconies to dry.
I’ve got all day.
You’ve got all week.
We’ve got a half-dozen centuries.
She pushed her phone into her back pocket, tucking away the GPS that had guided her here, and focused. The key slid in, jiggled, and this time turned smoothly. Scent burst out at her as she pushed the door open, rich, thick, old, stirred like dust, layers of it loosening and rising up off the floor.
She grasped the door handle, still on the threshold, staring into the dimness. A gleam of old brown glass here, shadowy bottles on the walls. The scents woken by the door gathered around her in long fingers twining through her hair, settling onto her, some grasping, some caressing, some sighing in relief as they sank down.
She glanced back into the shaded street. Her hair stung, as if the scents trailing through it were trying to pull her head back around to focus on them.
She stepped inside, leaving the door open for light, her eyes adjusting enough to make out old cut-glass bottles decorating shelves like dusty jewels in a forgotten royal treasure chamber. She found a light switch, but of course the electricity had been turned off. She opened the panes on the big windows, found the latch on the shutters, and pushed them wide. Scents swirled and leapt in that great current of air like a joyful fountain. Sunlight crept in, second-hand, and mingled with them, making them giddy.
Now she could make out a counter, with a cash register that could have come from the turn of the last century. On the wall behind it was a great, framed ad from what must have been the 1920s, a lady with short rippling hair and a negligée of a dress, leaning into bursts of violet like a kiss. Eau de Violette.
This had been left to her? She might as well have been walking down the street, had a package thrust into her hand, and opened it to discover she was holding a fairy kingdom. Something stirred in her, so unexpected in a heart used to grief that she didn’t quite know what to do with it.
A strange, archaic, wild and puzzled joy.
She moved through the room slowly, stretching up her fingers to touch one of the old cut-crystal bottles with its silver stopper. It slid soft and dusty under her skin.
An old shop that sold perfumes in the heart of Grasse. God, some people in this city would have a fit when they realized it had been given to the maker of Spoiled Brat. Her mysterious benefactor, Colette Delatour, must have meant it for her father, only…it had been too late.
Grief lanced through her, and she turned away from the shelf, leaving a trail of fingerprints in the dust.
Another old door in a corner past the counter. She tried the key again. Door and key alike seemed to hold still one last second—and then they yielded, in a rush, swinging open.
She stepped into a completely dark room, the only windows a narrow bank high on one wall, all shuttered now. She fished for her rental car keys and pressed her tiny travel flashlight.
Shelf after shelf of brown bottles, yellowing labels curling off them, names written in a firm hand with just here and there a tendency to flare, to soar. Her little light tracked over them, found alphabetical labels like amande, jasmin, rose, violette, and other names only perfumers knew: fructone, hedione, indole. Vials of all shapes and sizes glowed dull with dust under the flashlight, packed into racks of small shelves in the middle of wooden islands. The same handwriting marked cardboard boxes stuffed under shelves: Pompes Or—15mm, Capots fleur. Gold pumps. Flower bottle stoppers.
She caressed the roundness of one brown bottle and picked it up, carrying it with her into the shop, which now seemed almost brightly lit compared to the depths from which she had come.
Setting it on the counter where the best light came from the windows, she rubbed it again, savoring that perfect curved smoothness, fingertip tracing gently the curling edges of the label. Amandes amères, this one said. The hair on the nape of her neck shivered. Bitter almonds. One of the most beautiful scents in the world.
Cares
sing the bottle one more time, she eased the stopper out.
A shadow blocked out the sun. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The voice vibrated through her bones, dark and powerful, and she looked up with a gasp, her hand knocking the bottle.
A dark form lunged toward her, spearing through scents straight toward her heart—
A hard hand caught the bottle halfway to the floor, oil sloshing out. Almonds. Christmas and Easter and everything delicious. The scent of happiness. The scent of…
The shadow straightened, towering over her. “Who the hell are y—” His voice stopped as if it had slammed into a wall.
…him. Oh, good God, it was him.
Black hair, broad shoulders, lethal, fast reflexes, the way he filled and filled the room, seeming to grow bigger with every second that passed.
She reached out suddenly and put the stopper back in the bottle he held. Nothing happened. Too late. He was out.
Gray-green eyes swept over her face. Everything in him went absolutely still.
And it stilled her, too, that much stillness in him, this great, excitement-packed stillness, swelling bigger and bigger in too little space, trying to get out.
“Toi?” he said low. You? But it was more than you, it was toi, this intimate, possessing you that said I already know you. We are not strangers. We can come right into each other’s verbal space.
She took a step back, tugging at the bottle. But her back hit the counter, and he held on, staring at her.
Her breath was coming too tight in her body, and she couldn’t think. She scrambled for that cynical shell that she’d grown for the perfume industry, hardened specifically for people like him. But she couldn’t shake the scents of this place out of her fast enough. She felt stupid and soft and real, like a girl who wore something flowing and romantic to a perfume launch party and didn’t realize until she got there that she wasn’t as beautiful as a princess, she was just naïve and ridiculous amid all the sleek gorgeousness around her.
A girl who still believed in wishes and magic in a world where everyone else knew those were just marketing tools.
He wouldn’t release the bottle, their hands tangling with each other around it. “It’s you,” he said very low.
She shook her head. No, it’s not. I’m not that girl. I’m sleek and cool and successful. I’m not that stupid girl.
His lips tightened. Sensual, firm lips that pressed quite easily into a disciplined line. “Tu ne m’as pas oublié? Tu me comprends?” You haven’t forgotten me? You understand me?
In New York, he had spoken English, this gorgeous British-on-French accent that had dissolved her right down to her bones, turned her to putty in his hands. But her father had always spoken French with her, so of course she understood him now, too, as much as she could ever understand someone like him, all elegance and money and luxury pleasures and bottom line.
Having him appear out of a bottle had robbed her of speech, though. If only he had been a little...bluer. Or tinier in the legs. His broad shoulders did narrow to a lean, hard belly, but the tanned skin and that elusive, magical green hint in his eyes, the faint sun-lines around their corners, the slashing black eyebrows, the straight, hard, elegant lines of his face, and the black hair all added up to something compelling. The scents that had caressed over her twined around him, checking him out, vying to see which one got the right to settle on his skin.
“Certainly.” She tried for that bored elegance with which he could speak, when he wanted. Tried to layer under it that same promise of lethal sharpness, that panther message that he gave out: I am sunning on a tree right now, but if I choose to wake up and extend my claws…it’s all over for you. “Hello, Damien. Rosier.”
Wasn’t stating his name one of the rules for taking control of someone who popped out of a bottle? Such an important name, that last one. She hadn’t known the Rosier part that night, and learning it had ruined everything.
Gray-green eyes traveled over her face—and then down and up her body. That tiny flicker of his lashes packed a wallop. Her body shifted for the look, before she could stop it, asking: Did you like what you saw?
Jess. No. Not again.
“Jasmin Bianchi,” that even, precise voice said, with that latent purr of a hungry panther about to pounce on a bunny. He did it better—said her name as if he was taking possession of her.
As he recovered from his surprise, his game face returned, distant and a little ironic, but a restlessness filled his body, as if a thousand urges to assassinate his enemies rode just under the surface of his skin.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Jess said absurdly. Grasse was a Rosier town. She’d known perfectly well she was going into the heart of his territory. You knew you’d see him again if you came here, a voice in her head said, this painful, stupid hope. What were you thinking, that somehow he would make everything that happened afterward a lie and turn himself back into your fantasy prince again?
Shut up. She shoved that hope back in its bottle, where it kicked and fought to break free.
He switched to English. “The surprise is mine.”
A wave of heat hit her, at that blend of clipped British English with the French accent still clinging to it. It made her skin remember that French-British accent caressing all up and down her length. It made her want to try to capture it like a scent, lure it into that bottle along with hope, so that she could un-stopper it and listen to it in her bed every night. And never take the risk again of letting the source of that accent in her bed be the actual him.
The man before her.
“I, uh…my father came from here,” Jess said. I’m not chasing you. I’m not following you around the world like some groupie, just on the hope I can catch a glimpse of you walking through the streets. “This is my inheritance.”
“Your inheritance,” Damien repeated flatly. And then, under his breath, “God damn it, Tante Colette.”
Jess hesitated, confused. Her whole body felt confused. His arrival had thrown it into a whirl, over-exposed, over-aroused, longing for cover. It wasn’t the type of body made to survive naked in front of that cool gaze, and it knew it.
“This shop,” Damien said, with that crisp, tight, romance-brushed accent of his, “has been in my family since the Renaissance. One of my ancestors had a glove-making shop in this same spot, and she probably inherited it from her father. It’s where our dynasty was founded.”
Oh, crap. Jess’s heart congealed into some unpleasant glop and sank cold and slimy through her body right down to her toes. This magic, special shop, this gift of joy that had shone for a moment like a light at the end of a very long tunnel, was a treasure for which she would have to fight Damien Rosier?
Damien, who’d already stripped her bare and exposed all the writhing, aroused, lost, hungry heart of her for his evening’s casual lay? And who’d capped that off by stealing her company. Her company, that thing she’d held onto with all her might while her father was dying, that great risk and dream, her one chance to make magic and wishes out of perfume again and not some new version of Spoiled Brat over and over until it killed her. Her one chance to be what her father had dreamed she would be. What she had dreamed she would be.
Damien had destroyed her so ruthlessly when he had kind of liked her, or at least thought she was worth a hook-up or two. What the hell would he do as her enemy?
Damien, who right now, looking at her, probably carried super-imposed over the sight a vision of her hot and wide open and reaching for him. Who could probably remember what her sex felt like, flushed and slick and clinging to his fingers as he cleverly, cleverly…
Control, Jess. Make yourself cynical, amused, hard. Like Spoiled Brat. If you can make a perfume that belongs in this world, surely you can fake belonging in it, too?
“I got a letter,” she said. “From Antoine Vallier.”
“I am going to kill that bastard,” Damien said, between his teeth.
Okay, no more names. She didn’t want to expose a hos
t of more innocents to his destruction. She took a step back, but ran into the counter.
His eyes flickered over her recoil and hardened. “I didn’t mean that literally.”
Well, how would she know? He was Damien Rosier. And all her beliefs in his tenderness, in the sensuality and wish and wonder of him that night, were stupid dreams. Trying to catch a prince by singing into a well. God, she hated this industry.
“I had my own lawyer check it out before I came,” she said. “Somebody really did give it to me. She probably meant it for my father, but…” She couldn’t finish that thought.
“My great-aunt Colette Delatour,” Damien said grimly. “That’s your somebody.”
His great-aunt? What the hell was going on? And how had she gotten dragged into the middle of it?
“She made and sold perfumes here during the war.” Damien pivoted away from her, like a man who just had to move before he started taking out the perfume bottles with karate chops.
Or possibly taking out her. She’d already proven what an easy target she was.
“So my great-grandfather deeded it over to her, and they tried to emphasize her different last name, that she wasn’t a part of the family, so that if the Gestapo moved in against the Rosiers and started arresting them all, they might not include her and this shop in the sweep. She was a stepchild—my great-grandfather married her mother when she was six.”
Jess didn’t even know who her great-grandfather was. This man had history.
Damien smiled a little, an up-swelling of old pride. “So she and my grandfather pretended that they couldn’t stand each other, that Pépé couldn’t forgive her for receiving some of his inheritance, and she used her perfume shop to send coded messages in perfume all over Europe. Only another nose could read them, the kind of person who could memorize and identify thousands of molecules on scent alone and never have to refer to notes. The Germans never cracked it. They never even suspected it.”
The hair rose on her arms. She stared around the shop, the power in those bottles now so great it made her shiver. The Rosiers really were a dynasty of power. Influencing the entire course of a war seven decades ago. In a shop that had already been in their family for centuries back then.
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