Fresh oil, unadulterated, as if it came straight from the plant or somebody’s wishful thinking. She’d made her wish for happiness once out of almond, jasmine, and vanilla.
“I was helping with the harvest this morning,” he said.
“The harvest?” She lifted her head to look at him. His face was too close. As close as it had been that night just before he kissed her. There had been so much…courtesy in that kiss. I want you, that kiss had said. But let me know if I’m going too fast.
“That’s how Rosier started,” he said in that ironic way, as if nothing he said could give his auditor purchase on him. “With a glove maker in this shop who needed scents to perfume her gloves. And with an Italian mercenary who got her a valley and filled it full of flowers. We still have that valley. We still harvest those flowers.”
And, yes, August would be the start of the jasmine season here. She tried to wrap her mind around Damien Rosier, the cool, lethal businessman, carefully picking the fragile white jasmine and laying it flower by flower into a basket, so that its precious petals would not be harmed. She could only imagine it if…she remembered the way he had treated her, that night.
Believing that he could pick jasmine was kind of like believing…that night had been true.
Her heart seized, terrified.
“She made him the most exquisite pair of scented gloves as a wedding gift,” Damien said. “The family preserved them forever, until they got lost in the war. Or until Tante Colette stole them, according to my grandfather. Which would be better—at least she wouldn’t have let them get ruined.”
Scented gloves. Jess knew the history of perfume, of course, knew how the power of Grasse in the perfume world had grown out of its tanning roots, the hunger for the Renaissance world to find ways to sweeten the scents of leather gloves, knew the vital status symbol gloves had been. But it was still odd to hold Damien’s very masculine hand in hers and imagine a similar hand, an Italian mercenary’s, and scented gloves.
“I wonder how Niccolò felt,” Damien said, unexpectedly low. “When Laurianne took that hard, mercenary hand and slid over it that softest kid leather that she’d embroidered with silk and scented with ambergris and roses, just for him.”
Jess looked down at his hand in hers. A line of calluses showed subtly at the base of his fingers and more visibly at the tips.
“They must have been scarred everywhere, his hands.” Damien’s voice dropped to a pitch that made her very skin vibrate for it. “From fighting everyone’s battles for them. For money. And she gave them warmth, and softness, and sweetness, and beauty. As if they deserved that.”
Jess couldn’t stop looking at his hand. The beauty of that masculine hand, of that strong wrist, of the way the rolled sleeve contrasted with the tanned skin that grew paler there at the inside of his wrist.
That hand fisted slowly in her hold, tightening the tendons and muscles of his forearm under her fingers, and he pulled his arm away from her, stepping back from the counter. When she looked up at him, his face was completely closed.
Only those gray-green eyes looked as dark and brooding as the sea.
“Sit down,” Jess said.
His eyebrows shot up. Apparently people didn’t give Damien Rosier orders that often.
She pulled a folding chair away from the wall, an old thing made of wooden slats, leaning on top of a little round table also folded against the wall. Once Colette Delatour or some employee of this place must have set this chair and table out in front of the shop every day to eat or take the air and chat with passersby, just like everyone else in this town seemed to do.
“Sit,” Jess said. “If I’m going to make you a scent, then I need to get at your skin.”
“Or under it?” Damien said ironically.
She looked at him quickly.
He looked away. And then sat, still not looking at her. Was it her imagination, or did he not like letting her stand above him? His self-control gave so little purchase on him that it was hard to tell.
Her heart beat so hard she felt light-headed. It was all she could do not to reach out and grab one of those straight shoulders for support. Or at least just rest her hand lightly there, caress the shape of muscle and strength through that fine veil of white.
She moved behind him, where at least he couldn’t see the flame in her cheeks.
He held still. The tension in him as she came behind him and he refused to turn his head grew palpable.
“Are you wearing any scent now?”
“Non.” His word came out too crisp, bitten off.
“This is where you would wear it, if you did.” She bent.
Mistake. Coming behind him had seemed safer than approaching from the front, turning him into the vulnerable one. But now, to reach the open collar of his shirt, she had to bend her head past his shoulder, until her hair spilled over it, until her face was essentially nuzzling the side of his neck and hollow of his throat. Her hands pressed against his shoulders to keep her balance. They were steady as steel under her fingers, but warm and resilient.
The shirt got in her way, despite the open collar. His fingers shifted against her hair and a knuckle brushed her cheek as he undid another button.
And then another.
She kneaded her hands into his shoulders, trying not to fall into him. Her brain fogged, lost in this warm, human maleness of his scent that held a hint of…citrus again. Lemon verbena maybe. A much nicer quality than the scent that had been on his hands.
“What soap do you use?” In the shower. All over your naked body.
“My Tante Colette makes soaps for us for Christmas.” His voice sounded rough.
There was something oddly sweet about his words. This wealthy, ruthless businessman…who got homemade soaps from his old aunt and used them.
She pulled back before she could just bury her nose in the hollow of his throat and maybe even nibble at it. See how rough his voice grew when she did…
“Okay.” She moved away quickly, back to the other side of the counter. “I’ve got it. I’ll have to start running some tests of things today.”
Damien didn’t move. The small chair emphasized his size—tall, broad-shouldered, almost lounging. A panther. Even to the green in his eyes as he pinned her with them, just waiting for weakness to show. “That was fast.”
“I’m just getting started,” she said brusquely, spreading papers and bottles in pretense of work. Please go away now. Let me pull myself together.
“And here I thought you were a trained perfumer,” he said, so infuriatingly she clutched a bottle and pressed it hard onto the counter to keep from throwing it at his head. “Men have layers.”
“Like onions,” she agreed solemnly, flexing her fingers on that bottle.
He checked, and then laughter flashed across his face. He tried to catch it back, but it curled up the corners of his lips. “Like parfaits.”
Laughter. That leaping, hot humor, as if he held so much of it he could barely keep it down. Or as if she’d woken it up in him. She wanted to wake it again. But her brain had frozen in utter delight and arousal as she stared at that laughter, and she couldn’t come up with another clever thing to say.
That laughter of his seemed to catch on her face and hone in on it. The laughter faded, leaving only a trembling in her stomach in its wake. He stood, stepping toward her. “Layers.” His voice dropped into that dangerous purr. “We heat up, for example.”
His finger rubbed the hollow of his throat, where her nose had been, drawing her eyes back to that strip of flesh and the four undone buttons.
“We sweat a little. We get dirty.”
Holy crap, would her mind stop taking his words as verbalized sex. Gets dirty…playing rugby! Or something! Not as in dirty sex.
“We have sex,” he said, and her brain fried.
Stop. Stop. Stop. And for God’s sake, quit saying all this in that French-on-British accent. I can’t take it!
“You can’t make a scent for a man unless
you take into account how his own body scent is going to change through heat and arousal.” His finger drifted down his chest to a still-fastened button. “After all, when else should a woman even be able to smell a man’s body, except when she’s in close enough that he’s aroused?”
Thank God for the counter between them so that he couldn’t smell her arousal. She hoped. Oh, God. “So when I test the scents on you, I’ll make you do fifty push-ups to warm up!” she snapped.
“In your professional opinion, there’s no difference between the scent of sweat and the scent of sex?”
Oh, God, yes, there was. Sweat was part of arousal, but there was so much more. The scent of his arousal, the scent of hers, the way they had blended together on her hands, on her body…
“Well, maybe you could see if one of your models could accommodate you for a quickie just before you come by,” she shot at him. The words cut across her own skin, they hurt so bad.
He drew back.
His face shut down.
And that fast, he was impervious, dangerous Damien Rosier again. “I could do that, yes.” He rolled down his left sleeve. The deft move of his fingers rubbed over all the points of arousal in her body and drove her out of her mind. “Or I could use you.”
She jerked back.
“Just in fantasy, of course.” Such a clipped, perfect voice, with that sensual brush of French that drove her skin mad. “Dreams. I wouldn’t want to sexually harass someone who’d taken me on as a client.”
Not sexually harass her? He wasn’t her employer. She’d quit any possibility of that position just as fast as he’d taken over her company. And they’d already had sex.
“But I could think about you.” He rolled down his other sleeve. “Just to get in an aroused state.” He gestured downward and…oh, lord.
He was aroused.
Like…it was…he was…
She couldn’t move.
He—
“For example…” His gaze traveled over her leisurely, as if he held the mouse’s tail firmly under one paw and could take his time. “I could imagine pushing you back on that counter. You’d probably say no, of course. But this is my imagination. So I could just cover your mouth with my hand until you couldn’t say a word.”
He rolled down his right sleeve. “Your eyes would be so big just above my hand, and you’d try to grab my arm to push me off, but it would be too late. Because you can’t fight a man off in his imagination. And I’d already have my other hand sliding under that pretty white skirt of yours. And then you wouldn’t want to fight anymore.”
He buttoned the fourth button of his shirt. “But I’d hold you down anyway. Maybe I’d let go of your mouth to hold your wrists, so I could hear all the sounds you made while I played with you any way I wanted to.”
He buttoned the third button. “And I’d make you come,” he said softly, viciously, “until you couldn’t take it anymore.” The second button. “Until you begged me to stop.” The last button, the collar snug around his throat. “And I still wouldn’t stop. Until you were so weak from coming that you couldn’t even pull your thighs together when I finally let you come back down. You’d just lie there, with your skirt all up around you and that counter damp with you, while I did this.”
He picked up his coat and slid it back on.
“And this.” He picked up his watch while she stood frozen and fastened its armor back around his wrist.
“And this.” He picked up the cufflinks and neatly threaded them through his cuffs, not even fumbling.
“And walked out.”
He turned and walked to the door of the workshop and paused to look back at her. “Want to see what I smell like?”
She could only stare at him, aroused and slapped and utterly undone.
“Well.” A crisp tug to adjust his sleeve. “I suppose I could always come up with another fantasy tonight, when you’re ready to test your first blends.”
“Get out!” she yelled. “And I don’t have to work on a damn thing for you! You just took back all your down payment!” She gestured wildly at his suit coat, watch, cufflinks. Somehow, of everything that had just happened, that hurt the worst of all—that those superficial parts of him that he had given, he’d taken even those back, too.
“I’ll pay cash,” he said evenly. “It’s cheaper.”
And he walked out.
Chapter 6
Damien had barely gone halfway down the street when he met Tristan coming up it.
Fuck.
“Are you okay?” Tristan rocked to a stop, brown eyes searching. “You look kind of…emotional.” His voice on the last word was dumbfounded.
Imagine that. I had an emotion. Don’t have a heart attack.
“I’m fine,” Damien snapped. He felt hot all over. He wanted to hit someone or something, slam his fist against glass to see it shatter…and here was one of his cousins. So convenient.
Tristan leaned to the side to peer past Damien up the street. “Did something happen?” he asked. “I mean, you act…” He waved a hand to try to capture the implausibility of the way Damien was acting. “…upset.”
“I don’t get upset.” Damien adjusted his cuffs. Tristan, of course, was in a T-shirt on this hot day and eating a damn ice-cream cone. Damien had business meetings. “Don’t you have work to do?”
“I’m stuck. I need to go windsurfing and clear my head. Want to come?”
God, it was so hard not to hit Tristan right this second. “I’ve got work.”
“Plus, I wanted to see this Jasmin Bianchi Tante Colette gave her shop to. You think Tante Colette might have given her Niccolò and Laurianne’s perfume recipe book, too?” Tristan’s tone grew hungry. That missing perfume recipe book from the founders of their family had gotten them into all kinds of escapades as children and teenagers, as they thought of ever more dangerous places to hunt for the war-lost heirlooms. But this past year, Tante Colette had given both Raoul and Matt family treasures that proved she had had at least two of those missing heirlooms up in her attic all that time. Either they had been really crappy at hunting in the attic when they were kids or else their Resistance-honed aunt was wilier than five wild boys raised in peacetime had ever started to imagine.
“I’m taking care of Jess Bianchi.” Damien used his mean voice. You’re the mean one. “If she has anything else that belongs to this family, just leave it to me.”
“Yeah, but I want to meet her.” Tristan angled to see beyond Damien again, up the street to the shop. “The woman who single-handedly destroyed an entire art form. Spoiled Brat.” He shuddered.
“It’s an industry, Tristan,” Damien said, annoyed for no reason he could define. Heat and frustration still wanted to explode out of him everywhere. “And she makes money.”
Tristan rolled his eyes. “You would say that. She’s probably just your type.”
Damien’s fingers curled slowly into a fist on the far side from Tristan. “I’m in the middle of—negotiations—to get back that shop. Stay away from her. I don’t want you to screw anything up.”
Tristan’s eyebrows went up a little. He flicked a glance over Damien’s face that made Damien tamp down on his expression all the harder. Of all his cousins, Tristan was by far the most difficult to beat in poker. Matt he could completely fleece, and with Raoul he was pretty evenly matched, but Tristan saw things, even when Damien didn’t have one single damn tell.
“I can play good cop,” Tristan said. “Hell, if she’s been negotiating with you, she’ll probably throw herself into my arms as soon as I walk in the door. I bet you I can have her selling it back to us by the time I finish this ice cream.” He took a step forward.
Damien blocked him. “I said leave it, Tristan.”
Tristan’s eyebrows flew higher. He savored his ice cream, gazing at Damien. The two were the same height, both black-haired, both with a similar long, lean strength, as they’d grown up doing the same sports together—rock climbing, windsurfing, dirt biking. Strangers assumed they
were brothers, not just cousins. But Tristan played through life, and it showed in all the relaxed lines of his body. Whereas Damien…Damien suddenly wanted to grab that cone from Tristan and walk off to eat it himself, in private, sucking cool sweetness down his throat until he could calm down.
“Okay, now I really want to get a look at her,” Tristan said. “What is she, gorgeous?”
No. She was pretty. Like a child’s bouquet of handpicked wildflowers in the middle of a host of hothouse roses. Funny. Most of the famous actresses he knew could look past all the bouquets sent them on opening night and clutch to them their own child’s handpicked, wistful bouquet as the truest, most beautiful thing there. But nobody thought he could.
Like…what the actual fuck? Who on this whole planet was so jaded and indulged as to actually prefer two dozen roses to a fistful of wild flowers picked with great hope just for you?
Yet people thought he wouldn’t know the difference. He’d crush the wildflowers in his fist. His own family fucking thought that.
Yet she…hadn’t. Leaning on that terrace beside her over New York that cold February night, the fragile cocoon of warmth from the patio heaters battling the chilly air, he’d felt almost as if they were holding a single daisy between them, taking turns plucking off petals to see what dream they could find. She likes me a little…I like her a lot.
She had a sweetheart face, and a pensive mouth, and soft, long light brown waves and curls that looked as if she just caught them in a knot at her nape when she stepped out of the shower and called it a good hair day. When she dressed up, she liked flowing, romantic dresses, as if the little girl in her had never quite gotten over playing at princess.
And ever since they’d slept together, she looked at him with a cynical curve to her lips, an ironic eyebrow, and a flippant briskness that didn’t suit her at all.
It made him want to do…well, pretty much everything he’d just been so insane as to tell her. Even the part where he walked out in a fucking temper because that flippant, cynical barrier she’d put up made him want to rend things.
Himself, maybe.
A Wish Upon Jasmine Page 6
