He stood there a long moment, and then made his way through the old twisty streets to his own apartment and climbed his narrow, winding stair.
She hadn’t offered to come check under his bed for monsters either, he noticed. Because that would be ridiculous, of course. No monsters would dare mess with him. He’d slice them up and hang their body parts on the wall as a warning to others.
But he felt a little anxious to be lying in his bed by himself, just the same.
***
Jess undressed quickly. She’d learned to do that, these past two and a half years, to keep it brisk, to dive under the comforter, because sometimes grief lurked under the bed, ready to come out and grab at any toe it found peeking out from under the covers, then climb up it and settle in her heart.
She thought she was taming it, though, that monster grief. These days it was so much softer than it had been in its first wild rages. Cuddly, almost. If it climbed onto her pillow, she could tuck it into her chest and pet it, wistful but not weeping. Sometimes even smiling, as she stroked those memories, as if grief had become a tactile pleasure, or a loved one’s perfume, that she kept on a shelf to open for a whiff from time to time. A way to think about and remember someone lost, to value that someone.
But tonight either that monster under her bed had gone on vacation or she had, abandoning the home where grief lurked for other climes, leaving no forwarding address.
So much life had filled up her day. Her week. Sun and stone and flowers, scent and sex. She wanted to think about Damien. The thought of him moved in the darkness. He had a little smile on his face. He was unbuttoning his shirt, taking off his watch and cufflinks. She closed her hand over the real watch on the old, scarred nightstand. It was cool and hard in the night, but he wasn’t.
He smiled at her. Moonlight softened the idea of him, and shadow brought out his darkness.
She liked it. She snuggled in the sheets and closed her eyes to pretend he was really there. The sheets smelled of lavender, and the room smelled of time. Old time. Time that had been piling up there for a while, waiting for someone to come in and shake it awake, dust it off.
She breathed it in, focusing on a smile in shadow and moonlight. Dark hair blurring into darkness. Warmth. Warmth that would fill the whole bed, if he was there.
He was a really nice dream.
Cuddly, even. She touched his watch on her nightstand, that impervious, elegant titanium, and imagined his eyebrow shooting up at the suggestion he could be cuddly. A little curl of laughter teased through her as she fell asleep.
Chapter 20
“I think it’s cute,” Allegra said, hugging her knees and grinning.
“Allegra, you think everything is cute!” Layla retorted. “Which, granted, might have been justified in Matt’s case. He’s a teddy bear—don’t tell him I said that. But Damien is most definitely not. That’s like calling a black panther cute.”
“Or James Bond,” Jolie agreed. Layla gave her a delighted high five.
The women, wet from their own windsurfing, sat now on the beach, watching the men out on the waves. Léa was the only one of the women who had grown up by the sea and could have windsurfed just as long as the male cousins, but she had joined the other women when they retired exhausted to the beach, as if she enjoyed hanging out with them. Léa, with her straw blond ponytail, was a second cousin to Damien and the other Rosiers out there. Jolie, who had hair the color of something fresh baked out of the oven, had just married Gabriel Delange, whom Damien had also introduced as some kind of cousin. The restaurant owner, right. Jess was losing track of who was related how, getting tangled in this massive web of family.
“He’s supposed to be getting that shop back from Jess.” Allegra nodded at Jess, who sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching this happy group of females with some fascination. Gold strands of warmth and affection seemed to glimmer in the air around them, stretching between them in an unfamiliar web of family and support. She’d had friends, of course, but never those television-storybook friends to whom she could turn for anything and everything. And in terms of family, she had had the one thick golden cord with her father, and that was it.
The friendliness here was particularly crazy because as far as she could tell, these women barely knew each other. The heart of that network of gold threads was out on the waves. Except for Léa, all of these women had joined the family recently, by virtue of being in a relationship with one of the men currently windsurfing.
Wow.
Jealousy curled her toes into the sand. That easy, generous creation of friendship, that endless reach of family, family everywhere. It made her feel on the outside looking in and lonely.
Layla grinned at Jess. “So Damien brought you out here to drown you, is that it?”
Damien had stood waist-deep in waves, bare-chested and wet, his hot, slick physicality grappling with hers, over and over, as he righted her patiently, fall after fall. Which was why Jess didn’t want to be hanging out with the other women on the sand. Not this morning. She wanted to drag Damien’s hot wet body back to that little room over the shop and do something with it. Hell, maybe she could push him back on a counter or a bed and take charge. It would be fun to wrestle with him for control, that was for sure. Especially if his face lit with that sudden, flashing laughter as they struggled.
“His reputation for meanness is greatly exaggerated,” Jess said.
All the women burst out laughing. “Don’t go destroying it,” Léa said. “He put a lot of work into building that reputation.”
Layla shook her head. “I still remember him telling me he was the mean one. Which he claimed, of course, while he was trying to save Matt’s valley for him. Mean right to the core.” She rolled her eyes. “They’ve got some kind of complex, these guys. I think it comes from growing up in such intensely competitive circumstances, always trying to be the biggest and the baddest and convinced that their value only comes from how tough they are. Nobody cares about anything else at all. You want to bop them over the head.” She made a head-bopping gesture. “Or possibly their grandfather? But that’s the way they are.”
“Not Tristan,” Léa said. “To be fair. He couldn’t care less whether people think he’s tough or not.”
Out on the waves, Tristan did the most impossible flipping thing of any of them, landing with a jolt and then a smooth sail on.
“Hmm,” Jess said. She had a little bit of her own experience with pretending she didn’t care as a form of self-protection.
“Damien is supposed to be getting that shop back, and instead he took Jess windsurfing,” Allegra said. “And none of you think that’s cute?”
“Damien just isn’t cute, Allegra,” Léa said, amused. “That’s like calling a sword cute. It’s not going to work.”
A sword, a panther, James Bond. Jess eyed Damien. As she watched, he hit a wave badly as he came off a flip and was knocked free of his board and a good ten feet through the air before he hit the water. He came up in a surge through the chop, shaking that black head, and grinned at something one of his cousins must have yelled to him. Damien laughed as he gave his cousin the finger and then cut strongly through the waves to recover his board.
The men were having the time of their lives. It was kind of beautiful to see, actually. As if tension and rivalry found a healthy outlet and they could just play. Challenge and compete in a way that vented an insane amount of physical energy and do it all laughing.
“You don’t think Damien is cute, Jess?” Allegra challenged. The woman was like a dog with a bone with that cute thing, wasn’t she?
“I’m not sure cute is quite the word I would use,” Jess said cautiously. Hot. Dangerous. Controlled. Sexy.
With this pure core of…honor.
Care.
Hunger.
Allegra looked disappointed in her. “How many other women has he brought windsurfing with his family?” she challenged.
Jolie and Layla, recent additions to the family, gl
anced at Léa. Léa raised her eyebrows and then slanted a thoughtful glance at Jess. Then she smiled a slow smile. “None at all,” she said.
Jess blushed to the roots of her hair. Really? Really?
Wow. Her arms tightened around her knees until she nearly toppled over from the squeeze. What did that mean?
“Of course, nobody brought girlfriends, until Gabe insisted on bringing you.” Léa nodded to Jolie. “It was mostly our cousin time. Meaning guy time, plus me, because I could keep up.”
Oh. So maybe Jess was just the first person Damien had dated—were they dating?—since the shift in the cousins’ windsurfing tradition to accommodate dates?
Allegra decided to play her own devil's advocate. “It’s probably all some part of a nefarious plan. Knowing Damien.”
Jess flexed her toes in the sand. “No. It isn’t.”
All the women looked at her, definitely interested.
“Anyway, even if it was part of a plan, it wouldn’t be nefarious, would it? He’d be doing it for all of you.”
Layla blinked. And smiled at her. A relieved smile that said, I think I might end up liking you.
“But,” Jess said slowly, “I don’t think he’d sacrifice me for all of you.” She thought about it a moment more. No. “He wouldn’t.”
Now all the women were smiling a little, settling back into the sand. Jess didn’t know why, but she had the impression she’d just succeeded at some kind of initiation ceremony.
“He’d sacrifice himself, of course,” she said suddenly. “I think he does that all the time. But…now he can’t, because he’d have to sacrifice me, too. It’s probably confusing for him.”
“That’s beautiful,” Layla said suddenly, gazing out over the waves. “That for once Damien might have to do the right thing by himself because it’s the only way to do the right thing by you, too. It’s not cute, Allegra. It’s beautiful.”
“You saw that, did you?” Léa asked softly. “The sacrifice?”
“You saw it?” Jess asked accusingly. And Léa, his cousin, hadn’t tried to change that pattern?
“That’s why we have a saying, in the family: Be careful what you wish for. Damien will get it for you.” Léa blotted a drop of seawater before it ran off her hair into her eyes. “So that we remember, you know—not to take too much advantage of that.”
Oh. Oh. That was why Colette Delatour had told her the story? Because his family did see and wanted to make sure she saw, too?
“But then why—” She broke off. If his family understood him and cared for him properly, why did he have little lines at the corners of his eyes and lips when he was only thirty?
“The guys are…rougher,” Léa said. “You can’t underestimate the effect of having grown up with a Resistance hero for a patriarch and another for their honorary fairy godmother. Or guardian witch. And of growing up with four similarly-driven cousins for competition. They don’t know how to be less than ruthlessly demanding of themselves and of each other. It’s what they’ve always known. You either handle the family challenge or you leave and put yourself in some other insanely challenging situation instead, like Raoul and Lucien did, or like Raoul’s father and Lucien’s…not-father before them. Or there’s Damien’s own father for a role model—so focused on fulfilling everything he thinks everyone else needs him to be that he can hardly remember how to live otherwise.” Léa was silent for a moment. And then, “Daniel’s like that,” she said low. “It took me a long time to understand how much. That’s how I know.”
“Who’s Lucien?” Jess asked.
“Another cousin,” Léa said. A flicker in her eyes, as if something about Lucien was painful. “Second to the oldest.”
“And Daniel’s your husband, right?” The husband Léa had had since she was eighteen years old? Was she keeping all these family details straight?
Léa nodded and looked out at the waves. A little smile relaxed her mouth. “He’s trying to learn how to play.”
“You should go play with him.” Jess would be out there with Damien still, if her arms hadn’t given out on her about the same time she had realized that taking care of her beginner self was preventing him from just letting himself go and glorying in the waves and the wind. That he was sacrificing his own needs to take care of hers, in other words.
That seemed to be kind of a thing with him.
“I will.” Léa had such a tender smile as she watched her Daniel out there on the waves. “But this is good for him, too. Not to think about me or anything really, just to be. Just the pure fun.”
“Isn’t it good for you, too?”
Léa nodded, her eyes warming in a way that made Jess feel…almost as if there were very fine, nearly invisible golden strands stretching hesitantly through the air toward her from the other woman, a little curious, a little tentative, wondering if she would be a good person to attach to.
They reached through the air from all the women like very faint trails of scent.
“Has anyone ever made you your own perfume?” she asked them. “Customized, I mean? Unique to you?”
Various expressions of confusion at this non sequitur, except from Layla, who smiled.
“Tristan used to when we were kids,” Léa said. “But not since he finished his training and grew in such demand. Now all his perfumes are big perfumes. For major houses.”
“I’m so sick of big perfumes,” Jess said. “Always having to think about marketing and consumer trends and what the company can sell instead of what is actually good.” She closed her eyes a moment. Visions danced in the sunlight against them, a thousand ways to succeed twirling gaily with a thousand ways to fail. Just like every perfume she had ever made, in those moments when she held it in her head before she started trying to put a formula on paper. “I think I want to go little. In that shop. Make custom perfumes.”
There. She’d said it. The swoop in her stomach felt as if a roller coaster had just started its dive. She was really going to take over the shop of a woman who had once literally saved lives and fought a war with her perfumes? She was?
She’d failed at her last attempt to escape big business and go out on her own. Big business, in the guise of Damien, had just reached out and caught her back, idly, without even any effort.
But the vision grew more golden in her, the sun shining bright against her eyelids. That perfume shop spoke to everything she wanted to be.
She stretched out her arms to feel the hot sand under her fingers and looked at all those potential some-kind-of-cousins.
Layla grinned at her. “I like your confidence that Damien isn’t going to manage to get that shop back from you.”
“My great-grandmother gave it to me,” Jess said adamantly. “He doesn’t have anything to say about it.” She wondered if her blood great-grandmother, Élise Dubois, had frequented that shop, too. Pretended to sample different scents like an innocent shopper, bought a perfume as a gift, packaged it up, and mailed it to Paris or Berlin.
Layla gave her a tip of her sunhat.
“You go.” Allegra grinned.
Léa raised an eyebrow that suddenly, vividly, showed her relationship to Damien. Who had brought his board in and was now coming up the beach.
“I could make you each one, if you like.” Jess said. “To warm up. Get started.”
All the women broke out into smiles. Those gold strands reaching for her grew stronger, a little more confident of their welcome.
“Be careful. She’s expensive,” Damien said, and she looked up at him. For a moment his body blocked the sun, making him all shadow against brightness. He dropped to a knee on the giant towel he had brought for them and reached for a smaller one to dry his dripping body. It brought his face into view, the wicked and relaxed smile on it, no tension in him anywhere. She wanted to rub his temples to savor how completely absent that migraine tension was. “She’ll take you for everything you have. If you leave her shop stripped down to bare skin, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Laught
er lurked in his eyes as he stretched out on the towel beside her, resting on his elbows. God, he had a good body—a long, lean, ripped torso, broad, muscled shoulders narrowing down to washboard abs and a flat stomach. Paler on the abs and chest than his arms, this gradation up from the bronze at his wrists to the warm gold of his arms and the pale gold of his shoulders and chest, drops of water clinging to the dark chest hair. He hid a hell of a lot under that suit, didn’t he?
“It’s for free,” Jess said firmly. “I don’t charge…” She hesitated over a hugely presumptuous word.
“Family?” Damien said. “Merde, don’t start that. There are hundreds of them running around. Make them pay through the nose. It’s the only way to keep them from eating you alive.”
His voice was teasing. He was still smiling, still relaxed, as he leaned back and closed his eyes against the sun. But Jess studied him sideways a moment, the sunlight fragmenting against her lowered lashes.
I think I will not eat you alive, she thought. I will try not to. I’d rather you felt…whole. Not beset by ravening teeth. She touched a hand to that strong bare wrist where his watch had left a swathe of paler skin. “You can have it back,” she said softly. “Your watch. If you need it.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her. The sun must have shone in his eyes, because he rolled onto one elbow to turn his back to it, gazing at her. Just this eased curve to those lips that were usually so firm. He looked down at her hand on his wrist. Then he turned his hand over and took hers. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
She smiled a little, too, relaxing into the sense of him.
He played with her fingers. “Where do you keep it?”
I tried cynicism and self-protection. I want to try being honest with you now. Even if it takes more courage. “On the nightstand by my bed.”
His fingers tightened gently around hers. He lifted her hand and kissed it. “Then keep it,” he said, and lay back down to close his eyes again, keeping hold of her hand.
A Wish Upon Jasmine Page 21
