“In the morning. At night, it’s easier to believe in dreams.”
He glanced at her once at that and then looked toward the horizon again, where the pink grew thinner and thinner. She remembered his multiple attempts to speak to her, after the takeover announcement, the way he withdrew, his expression closing, from her attempts at cool sophistication. She remembered her father dying, and her company lost, and her whole world coming all to pieces while she tried to play it cool because, of all the stupid things, she cared what he thought of her.
“It’s night.” His voice was as velveted as darkness.
“Almost.” Her own voice felt like velvet, too.
A feeling grew in her, as if she was standing in the wings, getting ready to shove herself naked out on stage.
It would be nice if he took her hand, to lead her out on it.
That night, he’d seduced her, no question about that. All the moves had been his.
But this time, he made no moves at all. He was seducing her effortlessly…just by being him.
She stared at her fingers, stretching them to see if they held any courage.
So much courage in the history of her family. And she was afraid to touch a man’s wrist?
Not a villain of a man. Not a superficial player. But a man who carried chests down from the attic for his old aunt and tried to catch the moon for his mother and who may not have understood how easily wounded she could be six months ago but who hadn’t meant her any harm at all.
She took a breath and touched that strong forearm. It tensed under her fingers.
She curved her hand around it and lifted his arm, bringing his wrist to her nose. It made her a little dizzy to take for herself that right to touch him.
Was that scent him? Had she gotten him this time? “What do you think?” she asked him.
An artist’s question, always vulnerable. Lesson after lesson in the perfume industry had taught her cynicism—not to put her heart into her work like her father. To approach it like a chemistry formula, plug these notes in for success. To keep her critical distance. But this afternoon, working on this scent…some of her heart had snuck into it.
It was the fault of that little shop. It was the fault of that lunch in a garden with a woman who had risked her heart and her life time and again. It was…his fault. His fault for yanking her into his arms when she was hurting.
Damien braced. Why would he brace? But then he brought his wrist to his face and breathed the scent.
The tension eased from the corners of his lips. His gaze swept over her once, searching. “It’s got…stone in it,” he said, low. “Stone and sun and time.”
So that had worked. She bent her head, smiling a little.
“Depth.”
She nodded.
He focused on the view again. No lines at the corners of his mouth. In profile, that mouth even looked…uncertain.
No. Hard, elegant, ruthless Damien Rosier? Uncertain?
“Do you like it?” she asked nervously. An artist’s most painful question.
“I might.”
Not exactly enthusiastic awe. But his caution touched her, somehow. It gave her the courage to lift her hand to finger his open collar. “May I?”
He turned to face her, leaning on one elbow on the parapet, the angle of his body bringing his throat more easily to her level. She stepped in close and nestled her face between the panels of his shirt to breathe deeply.
The sweet warmth of his body. A man should wear his fragrance wherever he wants to be kissed, one of her mentors had once said. She wanted to close her eyes and let her head sink forward, just stay there forever, breathing his scent. Except…
“It’s not right.”
“No?” his voice sounded husky.
“It’s still not you!” She drew back, frowning up at him. “Damn it.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I think I like it.”
No. If she’d gotten it right, he wouldn’t think he liked it. His whole body would vibrate like a chord struck just right when its scent was on his skin.
“Well, what do you know about it?” she said crushingly. “Are you a perfumer? No. It’s not right. There’s something missing.”
His lips curved in the most aggravating way. Like a moneyman indulging an artist. “I guess you’ll have to try again.”
She frowned at him. “Damn it. I was so positive.”
“I’m not sure I’m flattered, that you were convinced you knew me already.”
Ah. Touché. The idea caught her: that there might be more and more of him to get to know.
Oh. How…beautiful. Like this shimmering path twisting into the heart of dark, mysterious lands, luring her down it. She wanted to dance down it. She wanted to pick her way with cautious fascination. She wanted to clutch her dog Toto and watch out for witches.
And she wanted to be a little mysterious and fascinating to him.
“My father could take six months of trials on a perfume to get it right. There were some ideas he would play with for years before he did anything with them.” So many ideas left in his journals unfinished, when he died, so many small bottles of trials strewn across his desk. Once her career had been filled by the “Spoiled Brat” type of briefs, she’d grown more mechanical, getting the brief done and moving on to another. Once in a while, she’d try against all advice for another brief, something magical, but it got harder and harder to do every time the executives shook their heads and sent her back to the Spoiled Brat realm, giving the brief to someone whose name suited it more.
“Six months or years, hmm?” Damien smiled a little, with no suggestion at all that years was too much time to spend on his scent. He took her hand and brushed her fingers gently against the hollow of his throat. Frissons ran from her fingertips down her arm into her body, shivering everywhere.
“Why don’t you ever wear a tie?” she asked suddenly. Even in a tux at that party, no tie.
He shrugged, still playing her fingertips against that vulnerable point of his body. “They’re old-fashioned.”
Stroke and stroke of her fingers against himself. His skin was silk-smooth there, fine, over that strong curve of bone. His hand felt sure and warm around hers.
“They make me feel like I’m suffocating,” he added suddenly.
She stepped forward again, all at once, and kissed the hollow of his throat, there where he sought freedom from suffocation. She didn’t know what in the world came over her. Once there, she froze in embarrassment, and his arms came around her, one hand cupping her head.
The gentle rub of his hand against her hair, the shift of his chest in a quick breath. Such a strong, warm chest. It felt utterly delicious to be held against it.
She closed her eyes. “I wish…” A whisper that trailed off against his skin.
“What do you wish?” His voice, vibrating in his chest against her ear, rubbed her as gently as his hand on the back of her head.
But she couldn’t say it. She shook her head, losing her nerve.
He shifted her so that she leaned back against the parapet, his hands on either side of her. His eyes were dark and serious in the falling night. “I wonder if I get to make wishes.”
“What would you wish for?” she whispered.
He shook his head. Maybe he lost his nerve, too.
Her mouth felt too soft, too tender. Like it was begging for a kiss.
His gaze ran over her face and lingered on her lips.
“This,” he murmured. “I’d wish for this.”
But even as he bent his head, she couldn’t shake the sense that he was being chary with his own wishes, keeping them small. Asking for a drawing made with silver glitter instead of the actual moon.
His lips brushed her cheeks, the corners of her lips, his body rubbing subtly against hers. There and gone. His breath passed lightly over her lips as he shifted to her other cheek. A gentle, teasing test of skin to skin, lips brushing down to the corners of hers again.
She closed her eyes, lifti
ng towards him, bringing her fingers to his shoulders. Broad, strong shoulders. Fine, pressed cotton.
His lips, closing over hers. Firm and sure and sweet and hungry.
But not pushy. Not demanding. Not taking her over. Come. Come dream with me.
He’d kissed her like this that night on the terrace in New York, only a little more certain, a little more wondering, a little less in check.
I’m sorry. She went up onto tiptoe, into the kiss. I’m sorry I made you afraid to believe in this again.
Arousal pushed him past caution quickly, faster than it did for her. His hand firmed on her back, pressing her in harder, his kiss deepening, and the scent of stone and sun and time and steel and dappled shadow was lovely against his skin. She wanted to sink into it, sink into him.
Even if that scent wasn’t quite right.
He lifted his head, his breathing deep and fast. In the growing darkness, strings of lights shone in the plane trees that lined the esplanade. Café-goers sitting under those trees nudged each other and watched them, visibly, gleefully gossiping.
“Do you know a lot of people there?”
Damien didn’t even glance back over his shoulder. “Even if I don’t, they certainly know me.” He shifted his hand to her lower back and led them away, back into the windy streets. “Are you hungry?”
She’d been hungry the night she met him. Hungry for love, for hope, for happiness. He’d wrapped that hunger all up in sex and fulfilled it. And now…yes. She was hungry for more.
“This is a nice little restaurant,” Damien said.
Oh.
“Not as fancy as Gabe and Raphaël’s or Daniel’s, or that new place near here, Leroi’s, but if you don’t mind something simple…”
“Oh, please,” she said quickly. “Simple.”
That was what had been so perfect about that night, wasn’t it? How simple and true it had all seemed.
Damien had to greet several people as they moved through tables, their curious but friendly glances scoping her out as he politely introduced “Jasmin Bianchi, a perfumer”. They were seated on a terrace on a place where a fountain played and more lights sparkled in plane trees before she added, for something to say: “I don’t know who those people are, whose restaurants you mentioned. Gabe and…Daniel?”
“Gabriel and Raphaël Delange are my second cousins on the Delange side, and they have a three-star restaurant in Sainte-Mère, near Tante Colette. Daniel Laurier married my cousin Léa, and has his own three-star restaurant near here. Leroi’s just opened, to a lot of attention. His chef de cuisine isn’t that well-known yet, but Luc Leroi came down here from Paris, a very famous pastry chef.”
She shook her head ruefully. “Is there anyone in your family who isn’t an over-achiever?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Is there anyone in yours who isn’t?”
Fine, maybe she and her father could be called high achievers. Not over. Just pursuing their art with passion. There was nothing over about that.
“I’m the only person left in my family.” She forced down the lump in her throat.
“No, you’re not.”
She stared at him.
“You have a cousin, Layla, who has already won one Grammy but claims she’s just ‘average’. You have an adoptive great-grandmother who, with the help of your blood great-grandmother, saved thirty-six children during the Occupation. Their photos and stories hang in museums as heroes not only of France but of all humanity. And by adoption you have all of us. The Rosiers. The same cousins and ruthless elders I have.”
She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. The attempt made her nose and eyes sting. “I thought you didn’t consider Spoiled Brat an achievement.”
“If your anti-achievements stay at the number two and three spot in perfume sales for four years, it would be interesting to see what your achievements do,” Damien said dryly.
“Probably not as well. When you put your heart into things, they never sell as well.”
He shrugged. “I thought you were worth taking over a company so I could scoop you up as mine.”
The wording rippled through her. But she stiffened against it. “That didn’t work out for you so well, did it? I’m not that easily bought.”
His eyes narrowed. “Because you don’t like money.” He curled his lip over the word. “God forbid we care about a dirty word like that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with money.”
“Thank you.” That dark flash to his eyes in the night. “You relieve my mind.”
“I bet it’s distracting, though,” she said suddenly. “From what really matters.” A vision of those perfume launch parties—all those expensive dresses, expensive watches, hair, skin, shoes, cars, jewels. The infinite inflation of cost, as everyone tried to out-perform each other in success.
“And what really matters, Jess?”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. She looked around, at the tables full of people talking in low contentment, at the groups and couples that passed through the plaza, at a cat balanced on a balcony and a little girl coaxing it inside, at the strings of lights on great, old trees with peeling bark, at the Renaissance and medieval stone. At him, across from her, watching her as if he was going to think about every word she said. “This does.”
His mouth eased.
“Time. People. Doing what you love.” From a very little girl, she’d known a perfumer was what she wanted to be. But perfume had become such a flat, cynical act. Until she walked into that little shop. There, playing with concepts for perfumes for him and for her newly-discovered cousin Layla, she felt alive again. It was terrifying, actually. Like working on perfumes used to be, when she still tried to make them magical. Like trying to believe in something when you knew it could never come true. “What matters to you?”
“I don’t know,” he said, as if he really didn’t. And then, after a moment: “My family. Success. Strength. Here.” He gestured.
“Grasse?”
He nodded. “If we walk much in that direction, you’ll see the broken and boarded up windows, the men hanging out on doorsteps for lack of anything else to do. It’s a fight, to keep Grasse and the surrounding villages alive. Most of the flower production has gone out of this region, and that was what the economy depended on for centuries. We, Rosier SA, had to expand, become a global company with headquarters here, in order to be big enough to survive.”
“Good for you,” she said softly. Really good for him.
“My father and grandfather were the first ones to see we would have to change.”
“You’re the one who does it, though. Leads the battles, takes out the enemies, earns the scars.”
“Only one scar.” He touched his chin.
Every time Jess’s attention was drawn to that scar now, she wanted to press a kiss there for the little boy who had tried to capture the moon. Capture it for his mother, the woman who, at that point in his life, he must have loved most in the world.
“That’s what money does,” he said. “It keeps alive the places where people can take their time, do what they love.”
She reached out suddenly and touched the back of his hand. “Do you do what you love?”
He fell silent long enough that she thought he wasn’t going to answer. The waiter came and she withdrew her hand as they gave their orders, an interruption that could have let Damien change the subject. But when the waiter had gone, Damien turned his fork over, again and then again, running his finger down the back of it.
“Yes,” he said suddenly. “I do love it, actually. I love it every time I win. Every time I can say, I’ve made my family and my people—all the people who depend on us—safer and more powerful still.”
That made so much sense out of him. Not a shark, not an assassin. A warrior. A hero.
Exactly like generations of his family before him, adapting to the demands of the times, but always fighting for their family and their people, even if that definition of “his people” now included people all
over the globe. You wonder how much energy and time any one man can spare to saving the whole world, Tristan had said. And, Now you can see what your dream company can become when you have someone with real business acumen behind it.
“You wanted me to say something different, didn’t you?” Damien said. “That I hated it, that at heart I was really just a misunderstood artist trapped in a business suit.”
She shook her head. She was an artist. Business acumen like his was exotic, incomprehensible, and hot.
She’d just never truly believed someone as hot and capable as he was would find an artist-geek attractive himself.
But one thing gnawed at her. “Then why do you get migraines?”
He stared at her.
“If you love what you do…then why can’t you do it for more than a few hours without it splitting your head?”
His expression changed, several times—these flickers of half-processed and indecipherable emotions. He sat back. “I don’t know.”
“Did you get it checked out?”
“I don’t have a tumor or an aneurysm, if that’s what you mean,” he said dryly.
A fast punch of shock into her belly. “Thank God.”
He dipped his head a little. “Thank you.”
“Did you just thank me for being relieved you don’t have a brain tumor?” It reminded her of his reaction when she’d been surprised to realize he would have cared about her father’s death. “You don’t expect much from me, either, do you?”
His expression was so puzzled. Like the expression on his face when he’d learned that his mother had snuck into his room every night for weeks to make sure he was okay. As if he’d forgotten to expect care from anybody.
Kind of…kind of like her.
“Is your mom still alive?” she asked suddenly, and far too bluntly if his mother wasn’t.
He nodded.
So he didn’t expect care despite the fact that he was entirely surrounded by family members, including the mother who, that moon story suggested, loved her son very much.
“Do you still get along with her?”
“Of course,” he said, as if her question insulted his manners.
A Wish Upon Jasmine Page 14
