Jess was vaguely aware of the other women watching in varying degrees of delight, fascinated astonishment, and attempted discretion. Those golden threads felt very eager now, reaching, wanting to wrap around her and Damien both together.
“Did Tante Colette show you the alien photo yet?” Layla asked gleefully, watching them.
Damien did not open his eyes. He barely moved his lips. “Layla. I warned you once about messing with me. Trust me, my grandfather taught me how to dispose of bodies.”
Layla laughed.
“The alien photo?” Jess asked.
“I might have a copy on my phone.” Allegra dug in her beach bag.
“Allegra.” Damien kept his eyes closed. “If you want to lose that phone, go ahead.”
Allegra hesitated and eyed him warily. Layla clearly wasn’t worried about being actually murdered, but no one seemed to doubt Damien capable of throwing a phone into the ocean. I’ll show you later, Allegra mouthed to Jess.
Damien turned his head, opened his eyes, and raised one eyebrow.
Allegra subsided, looking faintly chastened and entirely capable still of hauling out her phone the instant Damien’s back was turned. But not capable of doing it while he knew what she was doing.
All that gold in the air, those bright strands of interest and eagerness to accept, glinted closer and closer.
Jess lowered her lashes, peeking sideways at Damien, who had closed his eyes again. His lips were relaxed and peaceful, curving faintly upward as he lay in the sun.
I want to keep you. This man who had made her come alive everywhere, who had made her dream and wish and fight.
I want to reach for you. Stretch up my arms as high as I can to catch you. And if in the end she lost him—because nothing lasted, not flowers and definitely not people—she would at least have captured him in a bottle, to keep. Later, when she was lonely again, she could pull his bottle out and remember again how beautiful these days had been and know that she had given him her all. That she hadn’t just wished on a star. She’d climbed up into a tree with a giant mirror and tried to catch it.
“I want to try again,” she said. “With your fragrance.”
He smiled without opening his eyes and folded his arm across his chest to rest her hand against his heart. “Think you can figure me out?”
His heart beat under her fingertips, still fast from all the physical exercise. The sun kissed the drops of water curling across those ripped abs and caught in the dark hair on his chest. “No. I just think that I would really like trying.”
***
“You don’t have to do this today,” Damien murmured, slouching in that rickety chair in the old laboratory of the shop. The shadowy balm of the room stroked over skin that had felt too much sun and sea and wind that day. Generations of scent molecules seemed to dance like dust motes in the slanting light. “It’s Sunday.”
“I like doing it,” Jess said, and he kept his lashes lowered over his eyes as he studied her. She did like doing it, he realized. She bloomed in this space. Became herself. With his cousins and extended family, she had been quiet, not in rejection but just in care, as if she was watching a wild game for a while to figure out the rules before she tried to add herself to it. Not sure of her place or of how to find it. The complete opposite of Layla or Allegra, both of whom could make themselves comfortably at home in a barrel full of monkeys.
He bit back a grin. Or maybe a barrel full of big gorillas, beating their chests at each other. His family in a nutshell.
“What’s so funny?” Jess asked.
He shrugged, unable to answer, and just watched her. Yes, that reserve she had shown around his loud, large family was gone now. This was her space. She was at ease. In power. Sure of herself.
He never let anyone have power over him, not ever, and yet…he kind of wanted to unbutton his shirt all the way down and expose himself to even more of her power. You can do whatever you want to me. I think you’ve made my body utterly yours.
His breath moved through him deep and slow at the thought, and his eyes drifted closed.
Water ran, and the air shifted near him. A cool, damp cloth draped gently over his forehead and eyes.
Oh, hell, that felt so good. His breath caught at the force of it, and he pushed the cloth up enough to be able to see her. “I’m really fine,” he said. “My headaches have been greatly exaggerated.” And he never got them from sun and sea but from tension.
Also…shouldn’t he be taking care of her? Given her father’s long, slow passing, she must have spent much of the last few years taking care of someone else.
But she just smiled at him, a smile like a gentle, easy caress. “Of course they have,” she said, as if she liked taking care of him. And he couldn’t steel up the strength to resist it.
“Do you want some Vitamin E oil for your face, after all that sun and salt wind?” she asked, reaching for a jar.
Shades of his Tante Colette. Damien shook his head. His skin still felt fresh from his post-windsurfing shower, and he wanted to keep it that way. "I don’t want anything that makes me unpleasant to touch.”
She stilled. He kept his lashes down, his body easy. But through that veil, he saw her gaze trail the whole length of his slouched body before she pulled it away. She stared down at the bottle in her hand a moment, rubbing it once, twice, thrice.
Slow warmth moved through him, deep and strong. I’m right here. If you want to rub me.
“I’m glad they’re not just from tension,” she said suddenly.
He tried to keep his eyes half-closed as she set the bottle down and came up to him, but he couldn’t. He had to see her face. He forced himself to stay slouched and vulnerable while he looked up at her, instead of rising to immediately establish I am the biggest, most powerful person in this room. I control it. “What isn’t?”
“These.” Her fingers brushed as delicately as a butterfly’s wing beside one eye. “The little lines. They’re at least partly from squinting at the sun and salt.”
He gazed up at her, not sure what to say. Part of him wanted to ask, like some idiot vulnerable child, Do you mind them? Shit, it was hard not to stand up.
“I’m not sure about these.” She brushed the corners of his lips.
His heart beat too hard for such a small touch. Touch me some more.
And, Do you mind those?
“But I like it when you smile.” She pushed the corners of his lips gently up, and he couldn’t smile for the life of him. The touch, the gentleness, ran too powerfully through him.
She’s taking possession of me. She’s touching me like she has a right to.
He wanted to grab on to something, to hold on tight, and there wasn’t one damn thing strong enough in reach. The planks of a rickety folding chair. Her.
Was she strong enough now?
She was stronger than he’d understood, six months ago. Strong enough to be dealing with the long, inevitable death of the father she loved and still be starting a company, going to a party and trying to find love, reaching for stars. That took a deep-rooted core of power and dreaming and stubborn defiance, to keep wishing and working and trying, even in the darkest times.
Can I have that? That power, that dreaming, that wishing? Will you give it to me?
“I like it when you smile, too,” he said.
She did smile at that. This softened look of happiness.
He caught her hand and kissed it, holding her palm curved to his cheek so that his lips rested against her palm. She stood very still. And then her free hand lifted and petted gently through his hair.
I need this so much. So much he was afraid to tell her.
He loosed her hand and was unbearably frustrated when she moved back to the counter. Instead of, say, sinking down into his lap so that their combined weight broke that rickety chair.
He watched her under his lashes. The room felt as if it should be his. Everything about it—that weightless sense of ages, the sensuality, the elusive promise of all
those scents lurking in corners, the peace, and her moving around in it. “Have you figured out what you want to do with this place?”
She slanted him a glance. “I thought you were holding a court case over my head as to whether I had the right to do anything at all with it.”
Her ironic defense slashed through the moment. Did his sometimes do that to her? “If you decide to sell it, of course I would ask that you sell it to me,” he finally said evenly.
But it wouldn’t be the same, without her in it. He wouldn’t want to own it anymore. It would be just another thing he obtained on behalf of his family, while the hole in his middle grew bigger and bigger.
“I’m not selling it.” She gave him a stubborn, warning glance. “It’s mine.”
No irritation stirred in him at her claim. No desire to prove to her the contrary, that he could take whatever he set his mind to, that she had no right to anything belonging to the Rosiers. No, instead, this deep, deep sense of reassurance. It’s yours. And you’re mine.
He wanted that so bad.
“I can see you here,” he said instead. “Working here, in Grasse.” Right down the street from me. “Making this town your own.” My town.
“I want to make niche perfumes,” she said suddenly. Her voice sounded a little suffocated, inexplicably so, until it hit him—of course. Her father had made niche perfumes and earned an excellent reputation and not much financial success. She had made perfumes that sold but that no other top perfumer or critic respected, because they mocked everything the perfume industry was. And the last time she had tried to set up her own niche perfume company…he had taken it over. “And custom perfumes. Like I’m doing for you.”
Somehow that made his pulse quicken, that he might have helped her start over again. That he might be here at the birth of this brave and fascinating new life she could build for herself. “Opening a business in France is hell. You might want the help of a really good businessman.” He made his voice idle, almost indifferent. I don’t care if you don’t ask me for help. Yeah, right. “Someone with experience in the perfume industry.”
“I know a good businessman,” Jess said. “But the last time he got his hands on a dream business venture of mine, he ripped it away from me.”
Fuck.
“Plus, I’m not sure he likes me.”
His eyes opened wide at that. “Jasmin.” What the hell?
She peeked quickly at him through her lashes, and then busied herself with jars on the counter.
Was she teasing him? Or could she genuinely not tell? Pressure tightened at his temples, like the ice that came over him any time his family said some variation of We need someone inhuman for this. Damien, sounds like a good job for you.
Ridiculous, that ice of anger, given that he’d chosen his own career and forged his own reputation.
He breathed through it, long and steady, rubbing the pale streak of skin on his left wrist, focusing on the cool cloth on his forehead. Color mounted in her cheeks, and…right. Right.
That thing he’d had to learn—that her rejection of him hadn’t been all about him. She, herself, had been floundering, afraid to believe in anything in the cold light of day, overwhelmed by loss and grief, and could desperately have used his own strength. If he’d known. If he hadn’t pulled back into himself.
What a stupid, flimsy shield that cynical flippancy of hers had been, when he thought about it. A pathetic thing to have defeated someone as ruthless, as able to cut through any opposition, as he was.
And yet her doubt defeated him still.
Hard to convince someone not to doubt you, when your own faith had been shattered.
Except that…she kept putting it back together again. Piece by careful piece as if, no matter how many shards that beautiful initial hope had been shattered into, it was still worth saving. Since she had arrived in Grasse, she had fought with him but even that had been a fight for him. A way of communicating, of showing anger and letting him show his, until they got down to what had hurt and what mattered and worked it out. Unlike that time in New York, when she must have been at her very lowest point, now that she was stronger and less grief-stricken, she had never once truly turned him away. She had kept fighting with him the same way he had kept fighting with her—because it gave him an excuse to keep coming back for more.
“Jasmin.” He made his voice quiet, deep, something that could gently vibrate through the peace in that room without disturbing it. And when she met his eyes, he smiled at her. Just a little.
Like he’d done that first night he had met her, making himself someone she could believe in. Someone she could relax with, trust. No fighting necessary now. I’m here. You’re here. We were right about each other, that very first night.
She came toward him slowly, as if fascinated, a test strip in one hand. “I can’t get the heart notes in this thing right,” she said as she came to stand between his legs.
“No?” He smiled, as his heart lightened just at the thought that she was trying. He caught the hand that held the touche and pressed it against his chest, angling his head to sniff at the scent.
It was sweeter, this time. The steel and stone and time held something gentler at their heart. Vanilla? He wasn’t vanilla. But she was trying. He lifted her hand enough to kiss her knuckles.
She touched her free hand to his cheek. Funny how the barest graze of someone’s fingers could be so sweet. “Of course, my father says there’s no such thing,” she said softly. “Heart, and head, and base. That those ideas suggest a separate, linear structure, when all of them really blend together.”
What a…soothing idea. That the heart and the head and that deep, deep base could all blend smoothly together.
“Can I keep the trials?” he asked. “At least the ones you think are good enough for skin tests?” He’d line them up on his desk in his office just to know they were there. That she had tried and tried for him, reached for his heart over and over.
Her head tilted, her eyes pleased and searching. He wanted her to kiss him so bad. Wanted her to do it—to lean down, without his urging, and just brush her lips to his. It didn’t matter how light the brush. He would try not to grab her and be too greedy.
He tried to make his lips soft, inviting. Did he even know how to do that? Maybe, from her point of view, his lips still held that cool, hard, ruthless line, like they did in the photos of him that Rosier SA’s publicity department gave to the press.
“Do you want to try it?” He parted his collar, stroked the hollow of his own throat. “Here?” His fingertips were too damn callused from the rock climbing. His stroking didn’t have the texture he wanted at all. But a spritz of her scent would be almost close enough.
She hesitated and gave a funny little shrug. “I kind of do and yet…” Those dusk blue eyes met his, with all the promise of an early evening. “…I really like the way you smell without anything at all.” A faint hint of color on her cheeks, like the last light of sunset. “Just you.”
The power she had over him, that she could say something so simple and it could delight him so much. His hand curved over her butt, and he tried not to grip, tried not to pull her in close to him. You do it. You reach for me.
How long did he have to restrain himself, to get her to make the first move? Were his lips soft and inviting? No, they’d tightened in hunger again, and he bit on the inside of the lower one, trying to get them to relax.
Her thumb came and stroked beside the corner of his lips. “You have a triple A personality, don’t you?”
No, he didn’t, damn it. That sounded like a risk for heart disease or…migraines. Definitely a weakness. But he shook his head only a tiny, tiny bit, because if he shook it too hard it might knock her fingers away.
What was that look in her eyes? So wonderful and yet so baffling. Like tenderness, or protectiveness, just this great caress of a look that could not possibly be meant for him.
She bent her head and replaced the tug of her thumb with her own lips. A kiss.
She’d kissed him. All on her own, not him but her.
He drank in that kiss like a bee might drink in nectar if the crazy flower just turned upside down and started raining sweetness down on him instead of making him work for it. This glorious sense of starvation and generous fulfillment.
The cloth fell off his forehead to the floor. Her weight came more onto him, one of her hands dropping to his shoulder, the other curving around his head, the scent strip rubbing against his ear as she deepened the kiss. Yes. He spread his legs, urging her deeper between them. Get lost in me.
She rubbed her mouth away from his, nuzzling down toward the join of his shoulder, her fingers flexing into his hair as she took a deep breath, and then another. It drove him absolutely crazy when she did that, this woman who lived by her sense of smell luxuriating in his scent. His fingers flexed hard into her butt before he could stop them, and he pulled her in closer.
“I like trying to come up with fragrances for you,” she murmured into his ear. “I like the idea of you collecting samples of everything I try, as if they’re special to you. I like”—a little hesitation, and then, extra low, like a dirty secret—“I like marking you.”
His head flexed back, his body lifting toward the brush of that word marking. The chair creaked. He tightened his hold on her, so that if he went crashing down, at least he could bring her with him in a tangle of heat and thunder on the floor. Where had all her honesty and sincerity come from? This openness, as if she was deliberately lowering all weapons and shields, presenting herself without armor.
“If you ever wore someone else’s fragrance, I think it would drive me to a livid rage,” she said.
Would it? If he got more aroused, he would combust. Just explode and burn this centuries-old stone building down. He could not possibly sit still for this much longer.
“But,” she whispered, taking another deep breath of him, “I love the way you smell as just you.”
Oh, hell. He pulled her down onto him, finding her mouth again, his hands rubbing over her, too hard and too eager. The chair creaked again, and he lunged them to their feet before it could give under them.
A Wish Upon Jasmine Page 22
