A Wish Upon Jasmine

by Laura Florand

  And that did not make Damien feel wistful at all, damn it.

  “Plus, she’s a perfumer,” Colette said. “I see you with someone more…business-like.”

  Damien’s mouth set hard.

  “Or someone long and cool and sleek.”

  Since old photos indicated that Colette had been long and cool and sleek herself as a young woman, this shouldn’t seem like an insult. But somehow it did.

  “We seem to have gotten off the subject, Tante Colette. We’re not really talking about whether that woman is my soul mate. We’re talking about the fact that you gave away a vital part of the family’s heritage.”

  Colette gazed at him for an enigmatic moment. Take a woman who could outsmart the Gestapo when she was only twenty-three and give her seven more decades of experience, and God, but she was a hard read. “Well. If it bothers you so much, Damien, maybe you should get it back.”

  And she returned to her gardening.

  The fig fell off the tree, and his hand whipped out and caught it before it could hit the ground. He stared at it until all he could do was eat it. The sweet pulpiness yielded to his teeth and burst in his mouth as the scents of jasmine and almonds and all the herbs and sun and stone of Colette’s gardens crowded in the air around him, as if those scents wanted to eat him, too.

  ***

  Jess stood in the middle of the laboratory, her head tilted back, her eyes almost closed, breathing in its past. Daddy, make me a cloud.

  And he would bring home the scent of a cloud in a bottle.

  Make me a dragon flying. Make me a baby star, that I just picked up and am carrying back up to the sky.

  In high school, she had wanted different things. Scents that would make her the most popular girl in school, scents that would make the boy she had a crush on dream only of her. Her father shook his head at those, so she tried to make them herself, experimenting with all the power of the perfume molecules her father let her play with.

  He’d warned her that the best scents really only helped you be…you. It was hard, as a teenager, to accept that, when she didn’t like her and wanted to be someone more glamorous, someone fabulous. A female version of the elegant Damien Rosier, perhaps—cool and collected, her heart impenetrable, always in control. Jane Bond.

  She was an idiot still. And she missed her father.

  Missed someone who would make baby stars for her.

  She rubbed a small bottle wistfully. Jasmine.

  She’d made her own wish for happiness once out of jasmine and almond and vanilla. A simple, silly wish no one could ever have believed came from the maker of Spoiled Brat. She’d been so tired of being sad. So she’d snuck a spray of it at the door onto the terrace of a glamorous party, like some stupid child blowing bubbles and hoping they’d bring magic. What kind of magic had she really expected to find at a party like that, full of the image-obsessed luxury crowd, all gathered for the launch of a perfume?

  Yeah, it was a dumb place for a woman to try to find happiness, but it was hard for her to figure out where else to hunt for happiness in a big city. Bars? Nightclubs? Bookstores? Parties were where friends pushed introverted people like her, so they would meet people.

  She’d sprayed a tiny bit more into the air around her as she tucked herself into a corner of the terrace, her quiet space in the night away from the headache of the party.

  She knew that happiness didn’t work that way. She knew it didn’t follow a woman down elusive trails until it found her. She knew you built your career out of being tough and cynical and that no one cared about your perfumes that smelled like baby stars. But her father had been dying, and she’d felt so incredibly lonely, as if all the baby stars were going to fall from the sky and never be picked back up again.

  When a black-haired prince of a man with a fine, ironic pair of lips and an elegant assassin’s way of moving had appeared in the terrace door, she hadn’t asked too many questions. When he’d gazed at her a moment and then moved slowly over to her, his eyebrows drawn faintly together as if something perplexed him, when he’d leaned beside her against the terrace wall to comment on the view of the city in the night, she’d…let herself believe in wishes.

  Just for a little while. Wishing on a baby star.

  Her thumb circled against the small glass vial wistfully, once, twice, thri—

  A shadow darkened the door between the shop and the back room.

  And a long, lean form filled it, the grace and economy of muscle veiled in a business suit, a man who would probably assassinate baby stars if he found them, if they stood in the way of his family’s empire building.

  Her whole body tightened against the memory of his hands on her, that intent absorption on his face as they stroked down her body, and she set the vial down. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” she said.

  One eyebrow went up. If ever a man had been born to raise one eyebrow it was Damien Rosier. Except his eyes were so…not hard, on her. So searching and intent, and so deceptively not hard in that hard, controlled face. The color of his eyes was just criminally misleading.

  “Doing what?” Damien said coolly.

  “Nothing.” She shoved the bottle away from her. And bit her tongue on the urge to say, I wish I had a… and see what happened.

  I wish you would kiss me. I wish I hadn’t seen you with that supermodel the next day. Or on all those celeb websites with other models and actresses. I wish I was someone different, the kind of person who could wrap someone like you around my little finger.

  I wish you were my happiness, the way I thought you were that night.

  I wish that so bad.

  Damn you.

  “You’re in my shop,” she said. Mine. My space. Not yours. This is one thing I’m going to keep.

  His lips took on that lethal line that made them seem so sensual she wanted to take every Disney film and beat it to death to teach that damn company not to make a girl dream of Prince Charming. “Do you really want to push that right now? I can guarantee you that I can get a court to revert this property back to my family.”

  Oh, yeah, of course. Just as her father said—everything had to belong to the Rosiers. She put her hands on her hips. “Then why don’t you?”

  He turned and moved restlessly through the workshop, his strides slicing too quickly to the end of the room where he paused like a race car on a short street with no outlet. He pivoted back. “I’m not looking forward to hiring a psychiatrist as an expert witness to my aunt’s dementia.”

  “She has dementia?” Jess asked uneasily. That would explain this gift, at least. Maybe, like that night she wished her very own dark-haired prince to her, the shop was just an illusion of happiness that she’d have to give back.

  “No,” Damien said. “Thus the reluctance.” Something brooding and dark shifted over his face. He shoved his hands into his pockets.

  “Wow,” Jess said wonderingly. “You’d actually hesitate to groundlessly call a family member’s sanity into question just to get what you want?” She was intensely proud of her light, ironic tone. Yes, see? I am tough and cynical, too. I’m the kind of woman who can handle a hook-up just fine and never fall into any trap of dreaming for more.

  A slicing, dangerous glance. His hands closed into fists in his pockets.

  “Don’t let it get out,” Jess said. “It would ruin your reputation.”

  “Don’t let it get out that you play with almond and jasmine oil like a kid at Christmas,” Damien retorted. “It would ruin yours.”

  Their gazes locked. Jess fought down the sick sensation in her stomach. She could handle this. She could. Maybe she’d go buy a bottle of her own Spoiled Brat and spray it into the air every time he came near her, to prove that she was not the girl who’d worn a flowing romantic dress to a perfume launch party and believed, right up until she got there, that she was as pretty as a princess.

  Damien’s hands flexed in his pockets. “Jess—”

  She turned toward one of the work counters, pretending to
organize bottles. “I suppose if you do decide to go after me and destroy me, I’ll know. Once it’s too late for me to do anything about it, of course.”

  He gazed at her. A little muscle started to tick in his jaw. “I didn’t know it was your company. Jess.”

  “I didn’t know you were a Rosier. Damien.”

  He shifted away again, gazing at old dusty bottles on a shelf, their labels peeling. “I know.”

  “What?”

  “I know you didn’t know who I was. It was…obvious.”

  She stared at him, not understanding how it could have been obvious or what that hint of brooding around his mouth meant. “And you didn’t think it would have been at least polite to correct that?”

  “You didn’t tell me your last name, either. You didn’t even tell me your proper first name.”

  She tightened her stomach muscles and lifted her chin. “What, if you’d known I was the one who made Spoiled Brat, would you have held your nose while we made l—?” She bit the word back. Stupid, screwed up vocabulary, always letting slip her secret wishes.

  “Had sex?” Damien said flatly.

  Yeah. There was the right vocabulary word. She swallowed, trying to force the sickness down into a tight ball inside her where no one could find it, particularly not herself.

  “I don’t know what I would have done.” Damien picked up a delicate perfume bottle—this fantastical romantic whimsy of crystal and fragility—and stared at it in his masculine hand. “Perhaps worn armor.”

  What did that even mean? Was he talking about condoms? “Good God.” She pressed a horrified hand to her belly. “You didn’t wear—yes, you did.” She definitely hadn’t gotten that stupidly romantic.

  He gazed at her for a blank second. And then, very ironically: “Don’t worry. I remembered that kind of armor. Jesus.” His hand closed hard on the little crystal bottle.

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “You must be in the habit.”

  He’d been gazing broodingly at his fist around the perfume bottle, but his head turned and he stared at her. “What?”

  “I mean, it must be an automatism. Otherwise, you’d have a disease by now.”

  That muscle started to tick in his jaw again, just this fine, subtle proof of tension. “Well. Sex ed in the States must be better than its reputation.”

  She was growing so sick to her stomach she was afraid that any second she might do something horrible, like cry. She pressed her hands into the counter. “I need you to leave now.”

  He made an abrupt move toward her, stopping on the other side of the counter from her. “Jess—”

  She fisted her hands on the counter. “This is my space.” She asserted it adamantly. Damn you, I don’t care what you do, there is one good thing in my life I’m going to keep. A magic little shop where she could hide away and make scents out of the world. Dream. Wish again. “I know you don’t like it, but until you bring that court case, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. I want you to leave.”

  She couldn’t make him, though. Hell, she didn’t even know what number to dial for the police in this country.

  Black eyebrows drew slowly together. “Jess—”

  “I wish you would leave,” she said desperately.

  He stilled, taking a deep breath. Slowly, he released it, searching her face. And then his fist unfolded from that delicate crystal bottle, and he set it down in the middle of the counter. She caught a glimpse of red indentations from the pointed facets before he slipped his hands in his pockets. He nodded briefly and was gone.

  She stared down at the counter, his big handprint in the dust pressed just across from her two small ones. And the exquisite, fragile, gleaming perfume bottle, polished by the grip of his fingers, set precisely halfway between them.

  Chapter 3

  The morning started soft, dew on the jasmine, the first day of the harvest. They really didn’t need all hands on deck in this way, but all the Rosier cousins always turned out the first day, the same way everyone always turned out for Christmas and the harvest of the roses. It was special. It reaffirmed who they were.

  Damien’s hands moved automatically, a pinch of a jasmine flower, dropped into the wicker basket. The jasmine that they harvested from August into October was more delicate than roses. It required care not to damage the fragile, precious petals. It was also backbreaking, because the plants were so low you had to bend or sit on a stool all the time. This should have been familiar, reassuring work to him. They’d been working these fields since they were children, when they’d been the perfect height for the jasmine and too small to properly reach the roses.

  But he couldn’t calm down. Tension ran through him, this tight, angry urge to fight a battle, this incipient headache, as if someone had locked him in a room not with fresh jasmine but with that damn Spoiled Brat.

  He lifted a handful of his flowers, breathing deep to clear his head, and a bee stung him on the knuckle.

  Aïe. Damn it. He went to the truck for some spray.

  His grandfather snorted. “Still say lavender oil works the best. Smells better, too. Sure you don’t want some?”

  With a wry smile, Damien held his burning knuckle out to his grandfather. Pépé dabbed lavender oil on it, and he brought his hand to his face a second, breathing in the blend of jasmine and lavender, tension unknotting all down his back. Sometimes you didn’t even know you were tense until the first day of the jasmine harvest, when that smell hit you and everything loosened and the world made sense again.

  Even down to the bee stings.

  All the battles for dominance with other businesses around the world, all the boardrooms and meetings and accounts…it all comes back to this. These petals sliding over my fingers, this scent in my hands. This is where it all started. And this is what it’s all about.

  Even if his job was always the boardrooms. The business. Taking out family enemies, building empire. While Raoul and Lucien ran off to explore the world, while Tristan spent his life sunk in perfumes, while Matt pretended this valley was what the family could depend on for centuries more, Damien did what had to be done: fought the business battles and won them.

  That was his job. No threat to Rosier SA got past him.

  While other businesses shrank and closed doors, left their empty, broken windows in the heart of Grasse, he spread the power of Rosier SA to every continent on the globe, anchoring not only Grasse’s economy but local economies everywhere. While fragrance producers in the valleys around Grasse gave up, sold out to real estate developers because they had no other economic choice, Damien gave his family choices. Power. Wealth.

  He, like his father before him, froze his heart and got it done.

  And no one, no one in this world, believed he had any softness or warmth to his heart. He looked down at the jasmine flower, delicate and scented against his tan hand. White as his sheets, across which soft, pale brown curls had spread like a gift. As if she trusted him with sweetness and softness, vulnerability and hope.

  Raoul came up to them with a basket of jasmine on one arm, his fingers running gently through the flowers before he emptied them into the larger basket at Pépé’s feet. The expression on Raoul’s face was profoundly eased, like a man who had just sat down in an old comfy armchair in front of his own fireplace after years away at war. Since there was no urgency to the first morning and they weren’t getting paid by the weight of what they picked, the other cousins drifted up with their jasmine as an excuse to join the social gathering, the way some men might show up with a couple of extra beers in one hand.

  Matt, big and growly, turned to watch his fiancée who was incompetently picking jasmine flowers at the end of a row, picking one or two, then pausing to bury her face in her basket and breathe the scent, obscuring the basket so completely that it looked as if her basket had turned into a hedge-hog of bronze-tipped curly hair. Across from her, Raoul’s fiancée Allegra picked, and beside them, a couple of bushes farther down the row, Léa and Jolie. The four wom
en had hit it off so well that they turned just about every event into a social occasion, where they talked about anything from careers to politics to silliness and occasionally the men.

  Damien looked down at the jasmine in his basket. No woman was over there gossiping about him.

  And that didn’t bother him in the slightest. Of course not.

  Tristan held a single jasmine flower in his hand, twirling it, breathing deeply of its scent, then lifting his head to gaze across the fields and up into the hills. Tristan swore that if he could ever manage a scent that captured, truly captured, the jasmine harvest and not some weak, bloated version of it in a bottle, he would have made his life’s contribution to posterity—bottled happiness and strength to pass on to the world.

  But even Tristan hadn’t managed that. No one had—the ephemeral gorgeousness of reality in a bottle. These days, it wasn’t even fashionable to try—perfumers focused on creating works of abstract art, and striving to capture reality made it seem as if your art had been stuck in the Renaissance.

  Hell, in the current state of the industry, Spoiled Brat could hold the damn number three spot on the bestseller lists. Clearly, some people’s definition of art was more abrasive and shudder-producing than others.

  “I don’t understand why Tante Colette is doing this to us,” Damien said abruptly. “I mean, what the actual hell? Okay, fine, so Jasmin Bianchi is presumably another of Léonard Dubois’s descendants. That doesn’t excuse…” disinheriting her own family, he’d been going to say. Except, fuck, maybe it did excuse it. After all, maybe the grandchildren of her adopted son, even if she did have him for only eight years before he ran away, did count as much as the grandchildren of the stepbrother with whom she maintained such a combative relationship. Except that both the part of the valley she had given Layla and this shop were Rosier heritage. From centuries past.