The key turned.
He slid his hand off the frame to push the door open for her, angling his body to give her clear passage in front of him. At least that one patriarchal bit of manners actually required him to step back and quit taking over.
Stepping into the great room was like an escape. Finally her body could stop shimmering. She focused on her surroundings, trying to forget that sensation of him curling her toes without even touching her.
The lights in the ceiling were dim and yellow, shining through dust. Tristan took a quick breath behind her.
A little surge of pride in her middle to show him this. Her heritage, her family’s old glory. And a sting of pain. Her last foray into the storage room had been with her sisters and her grandmother, a visit that now seemed like a wake, their last Christmas together. Maybe her grandmother had taken them down here that Christmas in one last bid to convince them their past was worth saving. That it wasn’t all shame and humiliation. That there was a future in who they were.
Malorie moved into the room. The Guimard chandelier hung from the ceiling, its flirtatious, Belle Époque gloriousness reigning dustily over shapes muffled in cloths like so many burial shrouds. Packed up in boxes. Put away on old cabinet shelves.
“Merde,” Tristan said reverently. “Look at that.” He was gazing at the chandelier, with its curtain of long slender crystal rods, the four green glass teardrops that concealed the light fixture itself. It was a gorgeous specimen of its era. Everything down here was.
No wonder gorgeous Tristan felt right at home, she thought a little wryly. For one second, it even seemed as if the two fit: the glories of her family’s pre-war past and Tristan’s easy, glorious present.
He could probably annex this place into his Rosier life and barely even notice it hadn’t been his to start with.
But still, she pulled a dust cover back, to show off an exquisite two-tiered table with graceful legs, its marquetry so delicately and beautifully done that the shadings of the wood formed a golden-brown layering of light—like the shadings of a sunset, perhaps—behind a tree trunk and leaves.
Dusty memories of coming down here as children, when they had no idea what a collaborator was and no one told them, when this was a treasure trove with a veil of sadness around it that they couldn’t understand. It was just something in the way their grandmother…didn’t speak, as the little girls hid under cloth draped tables or touched the perfume bottles in wonder. A knot grew in Malorie’s chest. I miss you, Mémère.
Tristan came to stand on the other side of the tall, slim table from her. “Wow, Malorie.” He traced one finger over the glossy surface as if he just had to touch. “This is incredible.”
Did he think so? Even with all his own glorious heritage to compare it to? The ache in her throat eased a little. She looked away from that one stroking finger of his that made her wish she was as silky-smooth as that wood.
“There used to be all kinds of perfume bottles, too. Rare Lalique bottles.” How she had loved those as a kid. “I remember one with a beautiful, opaque, amber-toned glass that cradled the form of two paired black hearts. With that trademark brushed, softened look of Lalique’s. And there were all these others—just beautiful.” She opened an old binder lying on top of a dust cover to show him the images of that inventory. The insurance records shouldn’t be in the same place as the things that could get burned or stolen; she’d have to move the binder.
Tristan came to stand at her shoulder to study the page. She touched a photo of a chatelaine perfume bottle that had belonged to her great-great-grandmother, from back in Monsard’s beautiful days. It had been a honeymoon present bought for her in Venice, the little blue bottle crowned with tiny orange blossoms.
“Did they get sold?” Tristan’s tone was as sympathetic as a squeeze of her shoulder.
“My father,” she said flatly. “He liked to charm, you know? And he had a real need to impress people with his ability to throw money around. Some of the bottles were worth tens of thousands of francs each, and they were the easiest to carry out without anyone noticing.”
A little silence. Then Tristan’s hand did close on her shoulder, a warm, strong weight. “I didn’t realize that about your father.”
Really? “Your parents and grandparents didn’t talk about it in front of you when we were kids?” She looked back at him.
His eyebrows were flexed, as if something had given him a great deal of food for thought. He shook his head slowly. “I’d picked up that they thought he was a jerk. I didn’t realize the details.”
Oh. Well, damn. She’d just admitted unnecessarily yet another layer of shameful behavior in her family past. Sometimes she wished to God she had been adopted.
She moved away from him, because it would have been far too tempting to lean back against him as if he could make everything all better, when she knew damn well that making things better was her job.
“You’re used to it, aren’t you?” She stopped under the chandelier and waved her hand. “A glorious heritage. The Rosiers have so much.”
“Not like this. We’ve never had our own perfume house. Nobody back before the wars was spending money on display this way, in my family. We’ve always been more of a peasant class.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Rosiers and their peasant family myth. They loved emphasizing their salt of the earth nature, but Malorie had had to study Grasse history, too. Glove-makers had been a central part of the Grasse economy back in Laurianne’s day—meaning Niccolò Rosario, the mercenary bastard of some Italian prince or whatever legend the Rosiers currently had going about him, had had his eye on the main prize and landed himself quite the wealthy widow. And he’d immediately gone into land with that wealth, obtaining the Rosier valley.
His descendants had built on that beginning. They hadn’t exactly been eating black bread and walking around in sabots back during the Revolution. They’d more likely been part of the annoyed, wealthy merchant class who wanted to limit aristocratic abuses in taxation and land confiscation, and who then found themselves scrambling to re-focus their marketing after the initial revolution got out of hand and their wealthiest clients had their heads cut off.
“We did have several very old heirlooms, from our ancestor Niccolò’s day, but they disappeared during the war,” Tristan said.
Oh, hell, she hoped her great-grandfather hadn’t stolen them.
“Or at least that’s one story,” Tristan said wryly. “My grandfather always said Tante Colette took them, and he does seem to have been right about that. She still claims she doesn’t have the one heirloom I really would love to see in person, but knowing Tante Colette she’s just being cagey. I haven’t proved myself worthy of it or something, and she’ll share it with me in her own good time. I hope.”
“What’s the one heirloom you would like to see so much?”
A reverence came into Tristan’s face, a kind of hushed longing. “Niccolò and Laurianne’s perfume recipe book. Written in their own hands. Can you imagine? Sometimes I have nightmares that it’s lying out in the rain, destroyed. That the Nazis took it and burned it or it’s in some Nazi descendant’s secret vault somewhere.” He took a breath. Gave that duck’s flick-shrug to his shoulders. His optimism came back. “But I bet Tante Colette is really just hiding it somewhere. Maybe she’ll surprise me with it as a wedding present or something.”
A little shock to Malorie’s stomach. “Are you thinking about getting married, Tristan?” How the hell had he managed to choose, from all his beautiful options?
Tristan laughed. But an odd, puzzled wistfulness slid across his face and knit his eyebrows. He shrugged and it disappeared. “I do want that old perfume book. But I should probably wait until I’ve found someone I want to spend the rest of my life with before I get married just in the hopes of it as a wedding present.”
Yeah. She just bet it was hard for someone with as many options as Tristan had to settle on only one for fifty years.
“Or find someone who wants
to spend the rest of her life with me,” Tristan said.
Malorie suppressed a snort. If he didn’t realize half the women he knew wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him, it was because he was deliberately refusing to admit it. Not ready to settle down.
“Really me,” Tristan said and slipped his hands in his pockets, so over-relaxed it was immediately obvious this subject mattered to him. “Not try to change me into someone else.”
Change him into someone else? “Who the hell else would she want you to be?” she asked incredulously. Sexy, sweet, gorgeous, athletic, creative, brilliant, funny, perceptive, capable of making a woman feel like a million bucks with a smile and a compliment…merde.
Tristan blinked at her, energy running through his body again. “She might want me to be good with money,” he said a little dryly. Something about his gaze on her was disconcertingly alert. Like he was trying to see right into the center of her brain to what was behind her words. “Capable of prioritizing it. Thinking about the bottom line.”
Malorie laughed affectionately. “You need to marry an accountant, Tristan,” she said, reaching up to set a perfume bottle back on its shelf. “Just focus on your art and let her take care of that stuff.”
For a moment there was absolute silence.
So silent that Malorie could hear the sound of her own heels on the floor as she lowered herself from stretching up to the shelf. She glanced back at him. His hands still in his pockets, he was gazing at her in the oddest wa—
All at once, the implication hit her. Heat raced up her cheeks. “I mean…obviously, I didn’t mean…” Oh, hell.
Tristan turned away, gazing at a cabinet shelf of 1920s perfume bottles, beautiful but less rare and therefore less valuable, so safe from her father. “You don’t think the accountant would drive me crazy?” he said idly after a moment. “Or me her?”
“Oh, definitely.” Malorie seized on that. “Definitely you would drive her crazy. I don’t know why I wished you on some poor, sane accountant.”
He slanted her a glance under his lashes, so discreet she wasn’t sure he wanted her to see it. It made her feel ridiculously vulnerable, as if he was trying to see through her clothes to her soul.
“Well, if you ever find an accountant who actually cares about my work and respects it, you let me know,” he said finally, the words a little crisp, and turned his back on her, going to stand in front of another cabinet and gaze at the perfume bottles.
Her gaze traced over his back. Tristan had such an easy way of carrying himself, and yet his shoulders were always straight, his head always up. Even in high school, his cousin Damien walked as if he was a knife and the world something he had to cut through. His cousin Matt had seemed to think the world was something he’d have to growl at and wrestle to the ground. But Tristan had always walked into the world as if it was the most beautiful thing ever and he wanted to experience every part of it.
He was an intensely physical being. It was one of the reasons school had been so hard on him. And that physicality showed from those broad shoulders down the definition of back muscles under his T-shirt, to the lean waist and that tight a—she cleared her throat.
“Maybe I should break into Tante Colette’s attic again in the middle of the night like we used to do as kids,” Tristan said. “Well, we tried to do once, and Lucien broke his arm.”
Oh, thank God, they were talking about that family treasure of his again. Thank you, Tristan, for not hanging me out to dry here.
Tristan grinned at her over his shoulder, as if the whole faux-pas about accountants had never happened. “Although given that we had the free run of the attic in daylight, I’m not sure what our logic was. Not that we ever found the heirlooms in daylight either. It’s amazing how easy it is to hide small treasures amid the masses of things attics accumulate when a family has lived in one place for hundreds of years.”
She looked around at all the objects crowded in this storage room. If there were any surprises from her family’s war history…she winced. They would probably be ones that layered her in shame.
“How is Lucien?”
Tristan said nothing at all for a moment, his face shadowed. And Tristan’s face was almost never shadowed.
“He’s been hurt?” Her voice dropped. He’d joined the Foreign Legion. What if he’d been killed? Her hand flexed and lifted toward Tristan’s arm, of its own volition.
“I don’t know.” Tristan was frowning at the floor. “We never hear from him.”
Her heart tightened again, and this time on Tristan’s behalf. Even on Lucien’s. He’d been five years older than she was, but insofar as she knew him, she, like most of the budding teenage girls, had thought quite well of him. Fit, fine, and, like all his cousins, a protector. No one messed with the girls, or with the smaller kids, when the Rosiers were around.
Her hand closed, tentatively, on Tristan’s forearm. A mistake. That touch felt both too dangerous and too inadequate. A need to do more pushed at her—a need to stroke or wrap her arm around his waist or…
But then, Tristan always had pulled all the emotions and energy in a room to him. Or was that just her emotions and energy he pulled?
Tristan’s gaze shifted from the floor to her hand. He gazed at it a long moment, his eyebrows faintly flexed, until she pulled back and hooked her thumb in her pocket to make her hand behave.
His gaze lifted to hers.
She turned away, touching a dust cover. “You don’t know how to contact him?” she said huskily.
“We don’t even know his name in the Legion.”
Yeah. That was what the Legion was famous for. Letting men disappear and become someone else entirely.
Malorie grimaced. For a family as tight as the Rosiers, the wound must never close. And Tristan, for all his ability to absorb all attention, returned that attention in spades. He had such a generous damn heart.
She didn’t know what to say. She wanted to reach out and squeeze his arm again, and obviously she couldn’t allow herself to do that.
“I’m sorry,” she said low. Even the Rosier family had its problems, didn’t it?
At least the Rosiers had each other to fall back on, in times of hurt. She and her sisters had helped each other at her grandmother’s funeral, of course they had. But most of the time, she just had herself.
A hand ghosted over her hair and lightly touched her shoulder. “Thank you, Malorie,” Tristan said quietly.
For some reason her throat clogged. As if somewhere in that grazing touch, there was some hint that someone had thought of her. How bittersweet it must be for her to be down here, how lonely and lost she must feel.
“How are your sisters?” Tristan asked.
Her throat hurt worse. “Oh, fine. Angèle’s in Tierra del Fuego having the time of her life researching penguins.” She laughed a little and rolled her eyes, inviting him to share her ruefulness over such an obsession. “And Lise is with SOS Médecins right now in the Central African Republic.”
She hoped Lise was fine. Penguins didn’t seem inherently dangerous, but Lise’s job exposed her to far more trauma than Malorie would ever be able to handle.
It would be nice, the thought whispered through her, for Lise to be able to come home to that garden of bitter orange trees if she ever needed it. Just like we could when Mémère was alive.
She was the only one in her family since her grandmother with a practical bone in her body. Maybe that practicality could be on behalf of more people than just herself.
“And how’s your mother?”
“In French Polynesia.” Malorie smiled. “She certainly set out to have a second life once we left home. She runs a little resort on Ruahine, paints, and has a boyfriend ten years younger than she is.” The boyfriend reminded Malorie a little of her father, in fact—charming and quick to use that charm to get what he wanted out of people, such as her mother’s financial support. But overall they seemed happy. Her mother had well and thoroughly washed her hands of her time
hooked into the Monsard family and was not looking back. Even her daughters had to go see her rather than the other way around. But then who could complain about an excuse to vacation on a Polynesian island?
“How are you?” Tristan said suddenly.
Malorie met his gaze. For a moment neither said anything at all, his eyes brown and steady, until a weird heat started to gather in her chest.. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Fine. Obviously.”
“Well, it is obvious,” Tristan said slowly, watching her. “But it’s obvious a duck is calmly floating on the water without the slightest effort, too. And underneath it’s really paddling like mad.”
Her breath felt tight. Threatened. Hopeful. As if something was about to break free and it might be dangerous. Or an utter relief.
Tristan lifted a hand until callused fingertips just grazed her cheekbone. “Malorie—”
She twisted away and sneezed. Once, twice. “Sorry.” She held up a hand, warding him away. “It must be the dust.”
Tristan’s hand dropped. He slipped both his hands into his pockets and took a step back, just watching her. “À tes souhaits,” he said, after too long a delay. To her wishes, may they come true. It had been a long time since she had heard that phrase, instead of the American bless you. And for two sneezes, he was supposed to say— “À tes amours.”
To her loves. Yes. In that warm, rich voice that grazed over a woman’s skin. She sneezed a third time.
“Qu’elles durent toujours,” he added. May they last forever.
Their eyes met, just for a moment, and then she turned away, rubbing her arms, trying to capture that sense of warmth grazing over her skin that Tristan’s voice always brought.
Tristan thrust a hand through his hair, a gesture that always made her palm prickle with the desire to know what his hair felt like, and looked around him as if searching for help. “Would you be willing to show me more?” He gestured to the covered furniture. “I love this kind of thing.”
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 5
