Well, that explained the number of people in the streets late the night before. She’d lost track, with the travel. “Thanks for the update. Now go find some other woman you think you can get to beg.”
Her own words jerked through her, the thought of some other woman—a beautiful model, of course—begging him for every fuck he wanted to give. The image wrenched her stomach to nausea.
Damien shoved a hand through his wet hair, his lips tightening. “I’m sorry about that.”
He should be, of course. No man she knew had ever said fuck like that to her. Like a verb, with her its object. The men she attracted were sweet, quiet. She’d never known a word could heat her entire body like this, for hours and hours, make it heat again the instant she saw him.
“You apologize to me a lot.” And there was something to be said for a man who had the grace to apologize.
“And you never apologize to me at all,” he said rather grimly.
Oh. She folded her arms over her chest. Under the hoodie she’d pulled on when his knocking woke her, she wore only a cami and yoga pants and no bra. It was a very disconcerting state of attire, for facing off with Damien Rosier. Even, or maybe especially, when he was in a T-shirt. “I didn’t say I wanted to fuck you,” she said angrily, before she thought.
One corner of his lips twisted up. “If you had, trust me, I wouldn’t be asking for an apology.”
It clenched in her stomach, rubbed over her nipples as if the words were his two thumbs taking control. She tightened her arms, desperate to get a bra on as some token armor. “Just spit it out. Why did you drag me out of bed at this hour?”
His gaze swept over her hoodie and messy hair, until all she could think about was a bed. Her body being dragged across one by strong masculine hands taking her over…
“Funny,” Damien said dryly. “I thought you were an early riser.”
Why in the world would he think tha—a memory of sneaking out of his bed at dawn while he was fast asleep, his arm still stretched over the part of the mattress where she had been. The sight of his full name on an envelope on top of a stack of mail by the door, as she let herself out, and the shock of the realization. Oh, good God, he’s that Damien. The whole walk of shame home in her heels and silly flowing evening dress, in New York at six in the morning. The calls and knowing commentary from men, until she found a taxi. Taking a shower, when every inch of her body felt sensitive, and getting dressed in jeans, and hurrying to her father’s apartment so she would get there in time to talk to the hospice care nurse.
“It’s six hours earlier, in the time zone I was in until six days ago,” she said, to avoid all that.
“So you must have had a hard time falling asleep,” Damien purred. “Tossed and turned until all hours of the morning.”
Well…not exactly. But only because she’d cracked under the torment of the images and dragged her own hand down her body and…She glared at him. “Don’t make me bring out my Mace.”
Dark, dangerous humor. “Don’t make me rub you three times to see if I can get my wishes to come true.”
Oh. She took a step back, on the impact of it. Damn it, her body was already frantic for him. And it had taken him less than a minute. “Go to hell,” she said, which was a total lie. That wasn’t what she wanted to have happen at all. Fuck, those chiseled lips said in her head. I want to spread your legs and do whatever I want to you.
“I’ve got flowers,” he said.
What?
“That’s what a man offers, right, when he needs to apologize?” Something still faintly sullen around the press of his lips, as if that need to apologize went against the grain.
“You think flowers can do it?” she said scathingly. But she scanned for his flowers nevertheless, with a little kick of hope in her heart. She didn’t see any sign of anything but hot male in a T-shirt, empty-handed. “Go to hell.”
“You haven’t seen the flowers yet.”
She drew her eyebrows together suspiciously.
“Your namesake.” He reached out to pick a small white flower from the thick mass of them growing near the door and held it to her in two fingers. “Jasmine.”
Okay, that was kind of lame, as an offering of flowers went. He could have at least brought a proper bouquet. She did love jasmine, though. Her scent. But if he tucked that flower behind her ear, she was going to bite his fingers. Hard. “Thanks,” she said very dryly, not taking the flower.
“A whole field of jasmine, in fact,” he said. “The biggest field in France.”
She blinked at him a second. And then an inkling of what he might be talking about started to work through her, and her eyes widened.
“It’s the harvest. And we are its biggest harvesters. Come see. Better yet”—he brought the little flower to just below her nose, caressing her with its rich, sweet, moonlit scent—“come smell.”
Oh. She stared at him with her lips parted. Oh, that was just…impossible.
Utterly impossible to refuse this, no matter how much she should throw his flowers back in his face.
“The jasmine harvest,” she whispered.
The corners of his lips eased upward. He nodded once.
“The actual jasmine harvest.” Flowers stretching everywhere, full of their rich, whole scent, before the distillation process changed it. If she had been a visual artist, this would have been like giving her a glimpse of the actual sun instead of just paintings of it. As she was a perfumer, there was literally no greater or more sensual a gift he could have offered her. “Can I touch the flowers?”
He slipped his hands in his jeans pockets, the waist tugging down against his hips, drawing her eye to flat abs and—she yanked her gaze back up to his face. That subtle, dangerous smile. “Jess, chérie. If you’ve got the guts to reach for it, you can touch anything you want.”
Chapter 14
“Are you going soft on me like your cousins?” Pépé demanded, locking faded blue eyes on Damien as if he was looking at him through the scope on a rifle. A talent Pépé had not lost, in seventy years of not holing up in the hills with a rifle.
“Me? Soft?” Damien barely bothered to raise his eyebrows. When family didn’t believe it was possible for him to have emotions, it took astonishingly little to dissuade them of any doubts.
Pépé narrowed his eyes. Smooth away the wrinkles, change the white hair to black, and those blue eyes could have belonged to the head of a Resistance cell realizing one of his operatives had been subverted. Actually, hell, if his country got occupied again, Pépé would be right back at the head of a Resistance cell today, white hair and wrinkles and all. He’d kick some serious ass. “You brought your aunt here.”
It had been an easy matter to stop and pick up Tante Colette, giving pleasure to both her and Jess. Jess’s aloneness scared the hell out of him. As if she was just floating in this dark void, with no human connection to keep her from being lost in it.
His family might drive him crazy, but without them, he would be completely adrift, no meaning to his life at all.
“I knew how much you missed your sister,” Damien said dryly.
Pépé gave him one of the looks he used to sit on his upstart grandsons. “And you brought that girl she’s using to get to you.”
“Admit it, Pépé. Secretly you and Tante Colette exchange texts in plots to get us all matched up. We all know what’s really going on here.”
Pépé…wait. Did Pépé blink? Hell. Seriously? Damien typically overestimated his opponents’ ability to strategize—it was one of his greatest weaknesses, in fact, his tendency to assume his opponents actually had a chess-master level of strategy behind their actions—but in his grandfather’s and great-aunt’s cases, overestimation might not be possible.
“You can’t bluff me, kid,” Pépé said grimly.
Yeah, and Damien also probably couldn’t outsmart two people who had saved thirty-six kids and fought the German occupiers all while pretending to the world that they couldn’t stand each other and that Tante Colette wasn�
�t even considered part of the family.
Hmm.
Damien narrowed his own eyes at his grandfather. The crossing of steel blades.
A very faint smile touched Pépé’s mouth. He pressed it out immediately. “So. You’re going to just let this girl steal Laurianne’s shop from our family? The shop where we all started? That’s been in our family since the Renaissance?”
“I’m working on it.” Humor flickered. “Of course, Jess would say that we’ve had it much longer than our fair share.”
Pépé transferred that narrowed gaze to Jess. Her head was buried in a jasmine bush, her hair, still damp from her shower, spilling against the green leaves. Her sensual happiness charged through Damien erotically. He’d given this pleasure to her. He’d thrilled all her senses.
A faint smile curved his mouth. Knowing perfumers, she might even prefer it to an orgasm.
But just in case, he’d liked to give her a few orgasms, too. Press her back up against an oak tree in the maquis and make her come surrounded by scents of sun and time and shade and pine and herbs. Pull her down on top of him between these rows of jasmine tonight, while the moon gilded over their white petals, and make her come surrounded by the rich, sweet scent of her namesake flower and the scent of her own sex. Take her up those stairs above the perfume shop and crowd her backward onto that bed and make her come amid lavender-scented sheets that had been embroidered a hundred years ago…
He dragged his focus back to his grandfather. The last thing a man needed to do when dealing with Pépé was get distracted.
“And I hate to point this out, Pépé, but I believe the shop was passed to Tante Colette before my parents were even born. Now whose watch would that have been on?”
Pépé gave him one of those sharp glances that said, Oh, are you doing battle with me? Good. “You boys have no respect.”
Damien smiled. “And here I thought that lying to you and acting as if you couldn’t fight your own battles anymore would be a lack of respect. Getting old?”
That curl to Pépé’s lips. Damien’s mother said he smiled just like his grandfather. A statement that was always accompanied by a resigned shake of her head. “I can still take you, kid.”
Damien glanced from his grandfather to his great-aunt, at some distance from them and busy ignoring Pépé completely. Tristan had just tucked a jasmine flower into Tante Colette’s hair.
Again, a little caution ran through him. Sometimes, he couldn’t shake the feeling that out-plotting their descendants while pretending not to even speak to each other would be child’s play for two Resistance veterans.
“Pépé.” He opened his hand in the nearest thing a man of his generation could come to a bow. “Losing to you would be an honor.”
***
Jess had died and gone to heaven. No wonder her father had always lived New York like exile. No wonder some part of him had always missed his homeland so badly. The scents. They had texture, they had feeling, they had life.
The silk of the petals and gloss of leaves brushed her face, and the oils, when she carefully picked a flower and placed it in the basket Damien had given her, caressed scent onto her skin. Dirt under her feet released its own scents, and she wanted to take off her shoes and sink her toes into it.
Shaky and vulnerable with sensuality and pleasure—as if she’d just been experiencing multiple orgasms—she looked up to find Damien and a tall, old man approaching her and tried to pull herself together. She had changed into a sleeveless top and capri pants for this excursion, but now she wished for her hoodie again—just to be able to pull it over herself and not show how naked she felt.
“Jess. May I present my grandfather to you? Jean-Jacques Rosier.” A small smile curved Damien’s lips. “Your great-uncle.”
Jean-Jacques Rosier shot him a sharp look. “By adoption,” he said firmly.
“So you still have your limited view of family, Jacky?” a cool, rusty voice said, and Jess looked around to discover Colette Delatour coming up on them.
Jean-Jacques Rosier glared at his stepsister. “Laurianne’s shop is all the proof I need of the danger of not keeping what’s of value to us in the hands of the real—the blood family.”
Damien’s hand curved under Jess’s elbow. “You know how in films someone pulls the pin on a grenade and everyone dives for cover? This would be a similar cue.”
Those old sniper blue eyes snapped back to Jess before she could go a step. A man whose experience of live grenades probably wasn’t confined to films. “Running?”
Her backbone turned to adamantine just at the glance. She lifted her chin. “No. I think you Rosiers have shut out enough people who didn’t fit your ideas of family.”
Colette smiled faintly.
“You think you deserve a shop that has been in our family for centuries?”
Jess locked eyes with Jean-Jacques Rosier. “Just call me Robespierre.”
Damien made a little choked sound, his hand flexing on her elbow. “Told you,” he said to his grandfather.
“Besides,” Jess added, “if I’d risked my life day after day for five years in that shop making perfumes to send messages across Europe in a fight to save my world, I guess I’d think I had the right to do exactly what I wanted with it, when I was done.” She turned and inclined her head to Colette. “I’m honored.” And, as she thought about it more and it really hit her, this choked feeling grew inside: “Deeply.”
Both sets of white eyebrows went up a little, not quite in surprise or doubt, but in some kind of thoughtfulness. Colette and Jean-Jacques glanced at each other and back at her and Damien.
Damien’s hand was warm under her elbow. “On that note,” he murmured, and led her down the row of jasmine, “would you like to meet any more of my family? I promise that they’re exactly as difficult as our elders might lead you to expect.”
Jess tilted her head back, still adjusting from the impact of the previous meeting. “That’s amazing. You look exactly like him.”
“White-haired, blue-eyed, and wrinkled like a note from the past?”
“It’s in the bones. The mouth.” The lean hardness. And most notably in that ruthless, do-whatever-it-takes look in the eyes.
“In my defense, then, can I mention that he also helped get thirty-six children over the Alps, and that he met our grandmother while doing it—she took them on into Switzerland. He was faithful to her until the day she died, and still is.”
“You’d do that,” she said definitely.
Damien actually tripped. Just this barest stumble on a clump of dirt, quickly smoothed out. “Be faithful?” he asked oddly.
“If your country was occupied by a deadly enemy, you’d organize a cell to fight them off and save everyone you could. And you’d do it well. You’d outsmart them over and over. I can see you doing it.”
He stared down at her a moment. He looked utterly confounded—embarrassed and honored and completely confused. Finally he rubbed his hand through his hair. “What about the part about falling in love and loving that one woman for the rest of my life?”
Heat flushed up her cheeks. She felt vulnerable and full of wishing. “I’m sure your grandmother deserved it.”
“Very much so, yes.”
She loved how much he loved his family. It made her intensely hungry. “Have you ever been in love?” she asked wistfully.
His expression grew distant. “I fell in love once.”
A little pang in her heart. She shouldn’t have asked.
He looked away from her to hold out his hand to a big man who needed to shave before he turned into a bear. “Jess, my cousin, Matthieu Rosier. Your cousin Layla’s fiancé.”
The bear bent and kissed her cheeks, brown eyes assessing, and then Layla appeared, slipping under his arm. Layla hesitated over her greeting, but then went with the French cheek-kissing thing.
A happy scent, Jess thought as Layla’s exuberant curls brushed her nose. For her cousin, she definitely needed to make it a happy scent. Full
of life and joy.
My cousin. She tested the phrase again. My cousin Layla.
“My cousin Tristan.” Tristan’s brown eyes leapt with laughter as he leaned down.
Jess, who had started to reach for his hand, which was how she usually greeted professional colleagues, adjusted wryly to kisses. Tristan straightened, winking at her. Any woman who dated this guy had to have more hormones than sense. He was obviously trouble.
“You know,” Tristan said, with that gleam of laughter in his brown eyes, “I am very intrigued to meet you.” He glanced at Damien.
Damien gave him a blunt back off look.
“Make that fascinated. Riveted. Compelled.”
“Tristan,” Damien said between his teeth.
“Words fail me,” Tristan said, holding his cousin’s eyes.
“They will, in a second,” Damien retorted. “Or at least the ability to speak will fail you.”
Tristan grinned. “You know, I wouldn’t have matched you with Spoiled Brat in a thousand years,” he told Jess, as if they were meeting for the first time. “There’s something about an unexpected streak of cynicism behind a sweet face, isn’t there? That perfume was brilliant. The most brilliant send-up of modern society in our generation. And you were only twenty-four.”
Damien stared at Tristan as if he had dropped off the moon. And Damien was about to punch him right back to it.
“Enchanté. Tout à fait enchanté.” Tristan bent over the hand she had offered for a shake, as if to kiss it.
Damien grabbed his cousin by the shoulder and shoved him back two steps. Tristan laughed out loud.
“Excuse him.” Another big man stepped in front of Tristan. “It always did take all four of us to sit on him. And even then he usually wiggled free.”
“Raoul,” Damien said to her.
Amber eyes and slate-streaked russet hair and an edge to this big man like a feral wolf. The man who had helped Damien carry the mattress in. He bent his head and kissed her cheeks.
“His fiancée, Allegra.” A small woman with glossy dark hair and bright brown eyes.
“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” a voice asked behind Damien.
A Wish Upon Jasmine Page 16
