Sometimes, he thought that he’d had an emptiness the size of a valley inside him all his life. But he knew exactly when that emptiness had condensed in him in that cold, icy way so that he couldn’t ignore it anymore.
Monday morning. All weekend, an anxious, temper-edged emptiness had been growing in him. What had happened to her? Why had she left like that, before he even woke up? Was she cheating on someone with him or something? The perfume industry was a small world, but he hadn’t seen her in it before. Would he be able to find her again? Would she want to be found, or the next time he saw her, would she be on her husband’s arm and desperately beseeching him with her eyes not to say anything?
Had it not…had it not seemed special to her? Was it just some kind of dream? Those dreams like other people had, that got away from them in the morning because they were so careless and impractical with them, dreams that no one ever gave substance to.
But that didn’t make sense, because…he gave substance to dreams. That was what he was in life, the person who put something solid into the crazy dreams and made them come true. While everyone else floundered when their wishes were exposed to reality, unable to protect them in the harsh light of day, he toughed it up and did whatever the hell was necessary to make the wish come true.
Which would make it the ultimate irony if the most beautiful dream he had ever had escaped him. Left him empty.
But he’d had to put the emptiness aside, of course, to stride into that meeting room. All the founding team of that business gathered, and Tara Lee smiling at them and acting charming, which was when he learned that she hadn’t even discussed the sale with the rest of them before she did it. She had the majority shares, and she’d sold them all to him and with it left the others who had built the dream with her high and dry.
And there she was. Jess. Sitting there staring at him. His Jess, only today she was in jeans and a pretty shirt, and her face had this stunned blankness on it. When he tried to meet her eyes, she looked down at the table in front of her. For a second, he was so sure she was about to cry that his instincts tried to shred through all his self-control and make him commit one of the worst faux pas a man could make when he took over a company—go up to a female employee and pull her into his arms so that everyone could see they had a past.
He’d managed not to do that. Long enough for the introductions, when he’d found out that she wasn’t just Jess but Jasmin Bianchi, the reason he had been excited about this company in the first place. That had been a shock. She’d made Spoiled Brat? Hell, that was an unexpected facet to her character.
And he wanted to go discover all those other facets right then. He’d kept the meeting upbeat, brisk, telling them about his ideas for how to make the company viable, that he was there to help them flourish not uproot them, that Rosier SA was interested in seeing this venture come to full flower. The type of people who could found an artisan perfume company without a lick of business sense ate that kind of flower language up.
Afterward, he almost hadn’t managed to catch her. She was leaving quickly, her face this blank thing that hurt him, as if she had been drugged and was being dragged off to something terrible.
“Jess.” He managed to catch her in the lobby downstairs, just shy of the door.
She braced before she turned. Then she looked at her phone and texted something, as if she barely had her mind on him, glancing at him up and down with this amusement that just grated. “You again?” she said, like a jaded socialite having to deal with the unwanted consequences of a one-night stand. Her eyes were odd, though. Her eyes seemed glassy. Maybe she was drugged.
Fuck, could she have been on drugs that night? Did that explain that misty magic feel to her?
“Jess.” He could feel his eyebrows draw together, that wide-open feeling she produced in him drawing in, trying to fold back up tight. “Jasmin.”
A bored lift of her eyebrows. She looked like a thirteen-year-old trying to produce ennui. It was ridiculous. It was as annoying as it was from a thirteen-year-old, in fact. Worse.
“Jess. Let me—can I take you for coffee? Lunch?”
She gave him an ironic smile and shook her head. “I’m busy, I’m afraid.”
And that was a slap in the face. Too busy to have coffee? When he’d—when they’d—he took a breath. “Dinner?”
“I’ve really got to go,” she said, looking at her phone. She texted something, and he suppressed the urge to wrench the phone out of her hand and throw it across the lobby.
“But Jess—”
Her eyebrows stopped him. She made him feel as if he was some teenage nerd trying to declare his undying love for the most popular girl in school. Made him feel that in more ways than one—like he really wanted to do that—grab her, tell her she must not understand, he lov—
“What was it, droit de seigneur?” she said. “Is that how you always seal the deal? I got to be your little bottle of champagne to toast yourself in your victory? Did you sleep with Tara, too?”
He stopped stock still staring at her. This sick, great hollowness opened, and he felt like he was falling into it. That whole night of tenderness and wonder, and…that was what she thought of him? “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that. Jess, the company doesn’t matter—”
Her eyes lifted from her phone and locked with his. “It does to me.”
“I’ll buy you a new one,” he said roughly, impatiently. “It’s just a company, Jess, merde. I—”
“I’ve got to go.” She pocketed her phone.
“I didn’t know you were Jasmin Bianchi, Jess,” he said quickly, struggling not to just grab her and hold her in place. “Not that who you are matters, none of this matters, Jess, but—”
“Ciao,” she said, and walked out.
And this great hollow emptiness had expanded inside him, icing him everywhere, this loss, this incredulous wait, what? What? How could this have just happened? Either it was just a hook-up or it was life-changingly special, but it can’t—surely it can’t have been both?
And yet it had been both. One thing to her and one thing to him. He’d tried several times—tried to initiate a conversation the next day as she packed up her supplies and walked out, tried to call her two weeks later after she might have had time to think—but he’d never gotten through to her at all. She’d been crystal clear on it: You’re just not that important.
Everything that he had thought so special—not worth her time. Because she thought he was just a bastard with money, a taker, a user.
Sitting on the limestone now, with his cousins, he rubbed his bare left wrist. When he slid behind the wheel of his car dressed for business, just the assets within that space—the Aston Martin, the watch, the suit, the cufflinks, the damn platinum pens people gave him—were worth half a million dollars.
So it was stupid to feel so empty. As if he had nothing that was actually his.
Chapter 10
Shit. Jess clenched her fist on the counter the next morning, restless with a rage that had kept her tossing on that new mattress half the night.
He’d called this scent shit? When she’d captured so perfectly that steel quality to him that he liked to show the world. It should be exactly the kind of scent he would want to wear as he strode into a meeting to let those present know that he’d bought up all their dreams and ambitions because they’d made such easy, stupid targets out of themselves.
Not that anyone in a boardroom should be able to smell his scent, of course. It wasn’t the Renaissance. A man these days must wear fragrance with restraint. A touch of it at the base of his throat or the nape of his neck, a spritz perhaps in the lining of his jacket, so that when he took it off, you got just an elusive waft of the man he wanted you to know.
A vision of Damien Rosier, removing his suit coat in a boardroom as he moved in for the kill.
A vision of Damien removing his coat in a restaurant and turning to offer his arm to Nathalie Leclair.
A vision of Damien removing his coat in his
bedroom, his eyes on her…
No steel in that moment, or at least none that he’d wanted to telegraph.
Seduction then. Was that what a fragrance for him needed? Did he prefer to soften what he was with his scent rather than advertise it?
Her fingers sank into the folds of his coat, and she lifted it to breathe inside the lining, around the collar. Her whole body clenched as everything came back to her—the way his body had felt, braced over hers in his bed, the hunger in his eyes, the care of her, that This is our first time and I don’t want to scare you away care, how much he held himself in check, and how that restraint honed his cheekbones and made his mouth severe and passionate, his eyes glittering with so much intensity. The way his lips had felt, as he buried his face in her throat and kissed her all…down…her…
“Excuse me,” said a voice from the door to the old-fashioned laboratory, and she jerked out of the memory, dropping the coat.
The woman who stood there had bronze-tipped hair so curly that it was the first thing Jess saw. The second was the raised eyebrow and the curious way the woman’s green eyes rested on the coat. With intrigued recognition.
Jess just managed not to shove the coat guiltily behind her back. “May I help you?”
“I’m Layla Dubois,” the other woman said, and Jess thought: I know that face. She’d seen it just last night, while researching the Rosiers online to give herself greater knowledge of her possible enemies here. That’s Belle Woods. Yet another of the glamorous, famous women the Rosiers date.
Before Damien’s cousin Matthieu Rosier had started appearing on celebrity sites with Belle Woods, he’d been on them a lot with model Nathalie Leclair, which was…nauseating, if both cousins had hooked up with the same model. But confusing, too—like…what was Damien’s relationship with Nathalie? Had he possibly not been hitting on the model that evening Jess had seen them?
If so…if so…she couldn’t think about it. It hurt her stomach too much to think that she might have actually had a chance at something beautiful and destroyed it because she was too afraid to believe.
“I like your music,” Jess said to Belle Woods, instead of any of this, with more dryness than that music deserved. “Wish for Me”, which hadn’t even been released yet but which had gone viral on YouTube from a recording made at a festival, was the kind of song that made an already lonely woman just want to hang her head and cry.
The irony of a musician who’d had all her wishes in life come true having the musical ability to twist lonely hearts like that. She’d probably win another Grammy for the damn thing. And God, did anyone in this family ever date someone ordinary?
The rock star smiled wryly at having her incognito immediately blown. “You’re Jasmin Bianchi, right?”
“Most people call me Jess.”
“My family call me Layla,” the other woman said. Her head tilted. She kept studying Jess in a way that made Jess want to check a mirror to fix her hair and make sure she could support such a searching gaze. Layla took a deep breath. “Which, um, I think we might be. That is…I think we might be related.”
What?
Jess stared at her.
“Have you talked to Tante Colette yet?” Layla asked.
Colette Delatour? The woman who had given this to her? The ninety-six-year-old woman Damien didn’t want to accuse of dementia in a court of law? “I should,” she said uneasily.
She should have done it already, before she got caught up in this shop and a battle with Damien. She just wasn’t used to having…well, relatives. Generations. Someone behind her to whom she could and should turn and talk.
“Do you want me to take you to see her?” Layla asked.
Jess hesitated. That felt so…supported. To have someone there for her, when she faced an unsettling time. She tested the idea, but it felt like pressing her feet into sand while standing in the waves. “There’s no need,” she said quickly. “I can go on my own.”
“Oh.” Layla’s expression flickered. “You, ah…you don’t get lost around here? I always used to,” she said ruefully. “In fact, I still do, half the time.”
“No, I’m fine on my own,” Jess said.
Again Layla’s expression flickered. “Oh. Okay.” She hesitated, visibly uncomfortable, and then shifted to look at the shelves. “What an amazing place. I didn’t know the family had this. Tante Colette never showed it to me.”
“You thought it should come to you, too?” Jess asked warily.
“What?” Layla gave her a confused look. As if Jess didn’t quite make the sense Layla had expected her to make. “No, not at all. I’m still trying to adjust to the inheritance she gave me. I just didn’t know Tante Colette had more of these shocks for the family up her sleeve. Her idea of a magic wand is more along the lines of a cattle prod.”
Jess waited, trying to figure out what in the world Layla meant.
“Fairy godmother hardened Resistance war hero style,” Layla said, waving her hands. “You know?”
Jess looked at her blankly. Maybe Layla would start making sense if she kept talking long enough.
“I also didn’t know I had a, you know, a…cousin.” Layla peeked at her, keeping her body facing the shelves of bottles but her glance lingering, studying Jess again.
“A…” Jess stared at her.
“I’m pretty sure,” Layla said. “That is—I mean…well, we should ask Tante Colette. If you’re descended from Léonard Dubois, too. If that’s why she gave you this place.”
Jess’s eyebrows crinkled together. “My father was illegitimate. I think it was part of what drove him to the U.S. That sense that he could never find his place here where…the big perfume families hold sway.” Notably, the Rosiers.
“Monsieur Rosier says Léo was a very wild teenager, running around a lot before he ran away.”
“Monsieur...? Louis Rosier?” Damien’s father, the formal head of Rosier SA, who got his son to do all the dirty work?
“Jean-Jacques Rosier. Matt’s grandfather. And Damien’s,” Layla added, with a little gleam in her eye as she glanced at the coat Jess still held.
Jess shoved that coat farther down the counter. “There are a lot of Rosiers around here,” she said dryly. All that mass of family and power against…just her. All by herself. Her father had made his way in life alone, too, and she’d been luckier than he had. Until six months ago, she had at least had him.
She couldn’t even imagine what it must be like for Damien to have a support system reaching out infinitely, through centuries of networking and extended family, so that on that damn phone of his he probably had five hundred people he could call for help removing any given problem.
A problem like her, for example.
“Yes,” Layla said happily, hugging herself and then spreading her arms. “So much family.”
Well, somebody certainly felt welcomed into that family, didn’t she? Jess rubbed a cufflink between her fingers, feeling exposed and alone.
She glanced up to find Layla eyeing her wistfully again, sidelong. Layla looked quickly away.
“Thanks for coming to meet me,” Jess said awkwardly. She could feel it, that effort on Layla’s part to reach out to her. And yet trying to reach back across the gap between them with her own hand extended felt so risky. Like…to not be exposed and alone, to create a new family, she would have to try to believe in the scariest and most impossible things.
Expose herself to infinitely greater possibilities of hurt than the one of being lonely.
“Of course,” Layla said, confused and uneasy. “I mean, I…I’ve never had a cousin.”
Oh. Jess stared at the other woman a moment. Layla knew what it was like to be alone, too?
Jess hesitated, rubbing her hand over the counter. Memory stirred, all the times her father had made her perfumes that smelled like dragon’s wings or fairy dust, all the ways he had reached from his world into hers as a little girl, to hold them close.
There was something Jess could do. Something that c
ould reach out to this alien cousin. It was its own kind of risk, but it was a risk she knew how to take. “Would you like me to make you a perfume?”
***
A great, bare vine climbed up the street of stairs like a banister, or like massive roots leaving a path for humans to follow as they reached for the sun. In the hush of thick medieval walls, the stairs lay in shadow. Jess’s stomach hurt as she stopped in front of an ancient oak door with a rose-shaped brass knocker.
You’re just hungry, she told her stomach sternly. She hadn’t yet had lunch.
She took a deep breath and grasped it, knocking with the flower on that ancient door to let her in.
Yeah, and that didn’t feel like wishing on a star at all.
There was no answer. Of course not.
She swallowed finally and turned away, the hurt in her stomach relaxing into something more empty.
The door opened. “Yes?”
She turned around so fast she tripped on the stairs and had to grab the old vine for balance. An old, old woman stood in the door. Straight and tall, with white hair and a face as wrinkled as paper that had been crumpled in a fist time after time and then spread out. She wore a thick rust-colored tunic over dirt-stained black yoga pants and held gardening gloves in one hand.
Jess’s heart started to beat too fast, and she gripped the vine more tightly. Thick as a man’s wrist and more reliable, that vine. “I’m…I’m Jess Bianchi. Jasmin Bianchi.”
Light flared in the old woman’s dark eyes. “Jasmin.” She held out her hand.
Jess clasped it carefully, afraid of delicate bones, but the old woman’s grip was strong. She smelled of lavender and lemon, a hint of dirt and a little bit of onion, as if she’d been pulling onion grass in the garden or cooking in the kitchen.
A Wish Upon Jasmine Page 10
