He started. “Maman?”
A woman in her fifties, trim and tanned, her sun lover’s skin older than her physique, smiled at Jess, lifted her eyebrows at her son, and then kissed Jess on each cheek, four times total. Gold bracelets chimed faintly on one wrist, and large, artsy red glass earrings caught the sun. Her short hair was dyed a stylish, gold-streaked brown.
“Véronique Rosier,” his mother told Jess. “You can call me Véro. I’m sure Damien was planning to introduce you to his mother first but got distracted.” A minatory sidelong glance at her son.
Damien let out the slow, restrained breath of a man dealing with far too many family members at once. Kind of the pained breath of a man who was…worried what the girl he was bringing home might think of his family?
“Maman,” he muttered, in the tone of someone who really wished he could discreetly kick his mother’s ankle under a table to make sure she behaved. “I didn’t see you were here.” And quite possibly might have turned that Aston Martin of his around and driven them the other way if he’d spotted her before he parked.
“So you’re the woman he tried to catch the moon for!” Jess realized all at once, delighted.
“Oh, please, don’t remind me,” Véro said, with a dramatic flinch.
Damien closed his eyes briefly, that tiny touch of color returning to his cheeks.
All Jess’s caution and reserve dissipated when he looked like that. It made her want to tickle his ribs. Tease him. Just relax with him and make him relax with her.
“I thought you and Papa were in Paris,” Damien said.
“Oh, I can’t run up to Paris every time your father has a business meeting.” Véro dismissed the idea with a perfectly manicured hand that had paint splotched across a knuckle. “I’d never get any of my own life lived. But we’ll have you both over to dinner as soon as he gets back, how about that?” She smiled at Jess.
Damien stared at his mother a second. “I—”
His mother kissed him firmly on his cheeks, four times, and then pinched one of them for good measure. “Next Saturday. I’ll make your favorite.”
Jess found his inability to handle his mother so adorable that it was all she could do not to kiss him. “That sounds wonderful,” she said firmly, before she realized that she’d essentially just assumed a place as Damien’s date before his family. A place he might have been trying to refuse her—that might have been the reason he found it so awkward to handle his mother’s assumptions.
She hesitated, uncertain all at once.
Damien slanted a thoughtful look down at her, but he didn’t say anything to argue.
Of course, he did have exquisite manners when he wasn’t angry. So what could he say, now that she’d accepted?
“I’ll have to check my calendar,” Damien said. “I may be out of town.”
Oh. That. That was what he could say.
All her pleasure deflated like a limp balloon.
“Then check it.” His mother reached into his pocket to pull out his phone.
“Maman.” He locked his hand over his pocket.
“Hey, if he’s busy, you should come hang out with us,” Tristan told Jess.
Damien pivoted like a knife striking.
“All of us,” Tristan told Damien guilelessly. “That concert Layla’s friend is doing, remember?”
Jess bit her lip on a surge of amusement. “Are you by any chance getting a migraine?” she murmured to Damien.
“Not quite yet,” Damien said, while Tristan’s mobile eyebrows shot to the top of his head, and Véro Rosier frowned in surprised concern at her son.
“You get migraines?” Tristan said to his cousin.
“I internalize the desire to give you a headache,” Damien retorted.
Tristan gazed at him a moment. “You know, that explains a lot about you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Damien muttered.
“So,” Tristan said cheerfully to Jess, “are you helping him relax?” A teasing lasciviousness in his eyes.
“I’m not sure he does that,” Jess said wryly, and Damien shot her a sudden sideways glance.
Images ran through her: Damien, his eyes closed on that uncomfortable chair in the little shop, the expression on his face as she had been preparing the fragrance strip. Damien, asleep on a big white bed, his lean, muscled body so lax it was almost innocent, as if all his muscles had lost their tension.
“Not even for you?” Tristan looked disappointed in her.
“Tristan,” Damien said between his teeth.
“Want me to sit on him?” Matt asked Damien in a growly voice.
Tristan sighed and shook his head. “Never,” he told Jess firmly, “be the youngest of five cousins. They gang up on me.”
“It’s the only way to beat him,” Matt growled. “He’s uncrushable.”
Tristan looked smug.
Which she supposed he could be, if all four of his older cousins had to gang up on him to beat him.
Where was the fifth cousin? “It looks kind of fun,” she said wistfully. “I mean, I know I’m not supposed to like you Rosiers, but…”
“Why are you not supposed to like us?” Tristan demanded, with the offense of someone who was liked by most of the world.
“Snobs,” Jess said. “Think you own the perfume industry. Shut everyone else out.”
Tristan looked indignant. “That’s what people say about us?”
“My father couldn’t even stay in Grasse. He had to go to New York to have any chance, and he always felt exiled.”
“Okay, your father must be twice my age,” Tristan protested. “I take issue with the claim that my cousins or I drove him out of Grasse. My uncles…I don’t know. It’s true about the old-boy network around here. But hell, Chris Bianchi is one of my role models. I love his work. It’s not commercial, but merde, it’s fascinating. If he wants to come work in our perfume division, it would be an honor to have him as a colleague.”
Damien made a little motion with the hand on the far side of Jess. Tristan’s gaze flickered to it, and his eyebrows flexed together as he gave Damien a quick, questioning look.
“I’m sure he would have been honored to know that,” Jess limited herself to saying, her throat tightening.
“Would have—” Tristan broke off. “Oh, hell. Is Chris Bianchi—”
“Six months ago,” Damien said, again with that motion of his hand, as if to push this conversation away.
“Fuck,” Tristan muttered, and looked to Jess, a quick, sincere sympathy in his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, ma pauvre petite.” Damien’s mother reached out to clasp both her hands.
“Thank you,” Jess said to both of them, her eyes stinging.
“I only met him a handful of times, but I admired your father a great deal,” Tristan said, all the laughter gone out of his face, replaced by regret.
Damien put his arm around Jess’s shoulders and pulled her in snug to his side.
Warmth and strength. Her throat tightened more, and she breathed carefully through it, focusing on the support, pushing past the urge to cry. “Thank you,” she said again.
Tristan and his other two male cousins all looked helplessly at Damien. Layla reached out and laid a hand on her arm.
Damien squeezed her shoulders. “Come here,” he said quietly. “Come pick jasmine.”
He led her down a row away from all the other pickers and away from his family to sit her on a little gardening bench with a basket. “Here.” The masculine gentleness both undid her and gave her strength at the same time. “When you get tired, let me know.”
It was the best thing she had ever done to process the grief for her father: pick fragile white flowers rich with the scent he had loved so much he had named her after it, this long, rhythmic meditation on life and ephemerality, with support nearby but not intrusive—just strong and warm and willing to be there. Her eyes prickled again, and the prickling gently subsided.
He’d lived a good life, her
father. He’d inspired a next generation. He’d inspired her.
She took a deep breath of the flower she had just picked. Some things, you captured as much of their essence as you could, to carry with you, but life wouldn’t let you keep forever the actual flower. She set the jasmine gently down to rest on top of the other fragile white blossoms in her basket.
A hand gave her shoulder a little squeeze. Damien, passing back by. Her head turned instinctively toward his hand, and his fingers smelled of jasmine, too. Such a strong masculine hand, and such a feminine smell. Just a kiss away.
She picked another jasmine flower and offered it to him in two fingers. His own peace offering from that morning.
And you never apologize to me at all.
Callused fingertips brushed hers as he took it. “I am sorry,” she said, looking up at him. “For what that’s worth.”
He twirled the single white blossom slowly in his fingers. His other hand squeezed her shoulder again. He nodded once, brushed the blossom across her cheek, and then walked on down the row, still carrying the flower.
Chapter 15
“This is part of your family history, too?” Jess asked wonderingly.
After lunch with his family, Raoul and Allegra had volunteered to take Tante Colette back to Sainte-Mère and Damien had driven Jess deeper into the valley, to where it narrowed toward the gorge through which the river entered the valley. He’d parked on a gravel shoulder, and they’d hiked down to the river. On the steep slopes, olives had once been planted, their silvery endurance still visible among the other trees and vines and vegetation that had grown up once that olive grove was abandoned, maybe centuries ago.
The slopes here must be kept verdant by the river and by what Damien described as a wet winter and spring, although now the dry air sipped the sweat straight off their skin as they walked, before a bead could form. The heat drew out scents of oak and herbs, and cicadas sifted their dry, timeless chorus through the air. Here and there, they had passed old walls that braced the terraces of the abandoned olives. Damien barely spoke during the walk, and this curious, prickly tension had grown in her as he followed her on the trail in silence.
But the pièce de résistance came when they reached the river. Chalk-filled from the hills, it flowed milky green under a small, stone bridge that looked… “Is it Roman?” Jess asked.
“Originally.” Damien’s face looked honed, brooding, as if he wasn’t thinking about what he said at all. “It was destroyed at some point during the fall of the empire. There’s mention in records of a Nicholas Rosier rebuilding it, but we’re not entirely sure if that was Niccolò Rosario himself or his son or grandson, since they were both named after the first Niccolò, and record-keepers often transformed Italian names to French here. That’s how Rosario became Rosier in the first place.”
“Incredible.” To have that much history, right there, as part of his blood, his heritage. How did his skin hold it all? Jess felt close to bursting just at being part of it secondhand.
Damien shrugged. “The valley goes to Matt.”
Jess cut him a quick glance. He said that as if it was a given of his life, but there was something about the line of his mouth that made it hit her: that so much of his history and heart was held in this valley, that he fought the capitalist fight to defend it, and that he was exiled from it. It made her want to go smack some people, and unfortunately she was pretty sure no amount of frustration would really allow her to smack a man who was ninety years old.
Damien’s head tilted, and he glanced back up the valley, obscured from view by the trees. “Unless he…” Damien broke off and shook his head once firmly, turning to swing over a great, fallen trunk and then down to the flat sandy bank of the narrow river. Jess followed him as he ducked under more low-hanging branches, laden with brown fruit, and found herself in a little private alcove formed by the wild fig tree arching over them and the sandy bank. The river ran just beyond the drape of the fig branch, a vivid milky green, and the bridge arched above it and them, some ten yards away.
“Beautiful,” she murmured. “I could sit here for hours.” Sheltered by the fig tree, nibbling on its fruit, watching the green flow of water under a Roman bridge. Oh, yes. With a book and maybe a comfortable pillow, she would stay here all day.
Except for the tension Damien brought into the space. Or maybe by himself, he would have brought no tension. Maybe it took both of them to create tension, inside this cocoon of peace.
She focused on the figs in front of her and the river beyond them, turning her back to Damien. The figs were irresistible. She plucked one and brought it to her mouth, but almost regretted it, too conscious of Damien watching.
“Figs are a sex symbol,” Damien said, as her lips closed around the round fruit.
Didn’t that figure. She closed her eyes, her tongue touching the roundness.
“Male,” Damien said, as her teeth sank into the sweet fruit, “and then you bite into it and it’s female.”
She drew the other half of the fruit away from her lips to look at it. The inside could, indeed, evoke the idea of the female sex. “That’s just nasty,” she muttered. “I never thought of figs that way at all.”
“No? Lots of other people have. From the Greeks at least. What an innocent mind you have, compared to the whole rest of history.”
He made that sound dirty, her innocent mind.
Or at least like something he could dirty up.
She took a deep breath, her body heating until she might soon split like that fig, and started to bring the other half to her mouth.
He caught her wrist. His eyes locked with hers. “Feed it to me.”
The hot, dry air whispered around her, and the cool stream taunted with its rushing song just behind her. In the peaceful shelter of the draping fig tree, nothing was at peace. And yet…it felt oddly safe. A safe space for testing their limits, for fighting something out.
“Feed it to me, Jess.” His eyes compelled her, tantalizing and promising.
Her hand trembled and brushed his face as she brought the fig to his lips. He took his time eating it, as if he was savoring the most luxurious of pleasures. She had to turn away, walking toward the edge of their little green cave, where fig branches draped between her and the river.
Silence. Peaceful and yet dangerous. The kind of protected space where anything could happen. And everything was so sensual. As if you could pick up time and caress it in your fingers. Sink your toes into it, curl them into its clinging grains. Take a bite of it, and it would burst sweet and lush on your tongue. Once upon that time, a young Roman soldier might have tempted his girl with a fig, as they curled up here, in peace and desire.
Even in the restful shade of the fig tree, it was still a hot afternoon. The water promised coolness, just a strip of clothes away.
Something about it reminded her of that beautiful moment of wishing above New York, but the arousal at the heart of it was bigger and dirtier, older than that newborn arousal that night six months ago. It had gotten scarred and grimy, lost its fresh baby face, but it was also a hell of a lot less fragile. Nobody needed to protect this arousal or nurture it. It could come right out and dominate its situation.
Movement behind her, large in that little cave of figs and green leaves and filtered light. Damien’s fingers brushed the top of her head.
“Wasp?” she said warily.
Without a word, he stretched his arm past her body to show her his hand. Some harmless-looking tiny black beetle crawled on his finger. He flicked his thumb, and it flew away.
Jess focused on a fig splitting with lushness, just in front of her.
Damien brought his hand back to her head and stroked it down over her hair. She took one long breath and didn’t want to release it, as if she could lose this moment if she didn’t hold on tight to every molecule of it she breathed in.
He closed his hand around her hair right near the roots and held it there, the back of his knuckles against the nape of her neck.
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She went still. The soft, reassuring sound of water filled their haven of figs.
He wound her hair around his wrist, pulling her back a step, himself forward, until his body was one long promise of heat just behind her. But it didn’t quite touch.
In the heat of the day, that promise of heat shouldn’t have tempted more than the cold water in front of her. And yet she wanted to step back far more than she wanted to step forward.
His head bent to just behind her ear, as he held her captive. “I’m still angry.” The dark words burred over her, something that came out of the night into this dappled daytime space.
“I said I was sor—”
His hand tightened on her hair, enough for a tiny sting. “I know what you said. I know how a nice person should feel now. I’m telling you how I really feel.”
Oh. His words moved through her in this rush of erotic promise, as if his honesty was as sensual as a slide of silk the length of her body. She tilted her head back into his hold, easing the sting. She couldn’t really see him—this barest glimpse from beneath his chin. But she didn’t try, her eyelids going heavy, too much sensation all around her for her to need vision.
“How do you feel, Jasmin?” A courteous question turned dangerous, a challenge threaded through with anger.
She closed her eyes completely and concentrated on feeling. She felt…she felt…like she wanted him to tighten his hold. Like she wanted him to do something with it. Like his hold on her hair was the grip that would finally haul her out of the quicksand she had been caught in, breaking her free once and for all. Her voice dropped lower than the sound of the river and the cicadas. “As if I could make a wish. And it would come true.”
“I’ve been a wish, thanks. This time I’d like to be something you actually believe in.” Fingers brushed just faintly over the nipple of one breast, through her shirt and bra. The touch teased all through her, this curling, hungry sensation that woke her body from head to toe. “Maybe I went about it the wrong way last time. Matching myself to what you wanted instead of matching myself to what you could actually believe was true.”
A Wish Upon Jasmine Page 17
