He seemed to gather his charm and then send it her way in a glance, breaking through the seriousness with it. Inviting, warm, how can you possibly resist me?
She sighed. But it had always secretly made her so happy to make Tristan happy. She’d had to read Gloria Steinem every night to keep from ruining her career for him for Fugace. He’d been so passionate and so upset and so, so sure that if he asked the right way, any woman in the world would give him what he wanted. She honestly thought she might be the first woman to tell Tristan no in his entire life. He sure used to wrap their teachers around his finger, all while getting away with the most outrageous behavior.
It was probably just as well she’d known him all her life and knew better than to fall for his bullshit.
At least the thing he wanted this time didn’t hurt her. So she showed him all the pieces that had once made a glorious showroom upstairs. Lamps and tables and cases and perfume bottles.
“I never even knew Monsard had all this,” Tristan said. “The showroom upstairs could be amazing.”
The hunger in his tone sounded disconcertingly possessive. If she wanted to sell this place to him, she could move in and close the deal right now, couldn’t she?
Parfums Rosier it could say over the door. Not MONSARD.
“It needs a lot of work,” she said.
“I told you I don’t mind work,” he said. And then suddenly, decisively, “I’ll take it.”
The jolt ran all the way through her. He’d take it? Just like that? All that was left of her family, his for the snap of his fingers?
“What do you mean, you’ll take it?” she heard herself ask between her teeth.
He looked confused by her tone. “If you want to sell it.” He made a big gesture with his hands, as if to indicate all the wonders of the world, right here within his reach. “Promise me you’ll see me first. I’ll take good care of it for you, Malorie. Don’t sell it to someone like LBRH.”
LBRH was one of the huge international fragrance companies that had reached out to Malorie’s grandmother about buying it so as to have a presence in Grasse, just for the marketing romance of being able to say they were part of the historic perfume capital of the world.
She folded her arms. “Maybe I don’t want to sell it.” Her voice sounded hard even to her. That moment of intimacy and understanding retreated. Maybe it had only ever been a trick to soften her up. Her father used to do that kind of thing.
Tristan’s shoulders slumped a little. “You’re just going to shut it up again and let it go to waste?”
Her arms tightened. She wanted to strike out at him, as if he was hurting her, and yet he’d said nothing that should be painful.
Tristan pinched the bridge of his nose. “I suppose in your mind that’s the rational thing to do.” His tone turned rational into a dirty word.
No. Selling it was the rational thing to do. Take the money, manage it wisely, retire at fifty. Or do whatever the hell else she wanted to do with her life.
Shutting it up again was the can’t-face-a-tough-choice thing to do.
“I think I will restore it,” she heard herself say, her voice harsh.
Tristan stilled. Really still, like that stupid moment when she’d said he should marry an accountant. Under the hand that still pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes locked with hers.
“Why not?” she said fiercely. “It’s my family heritage.”
Tristan’s hand slowly lowered, but his eyes never left hers. “I never said it wasn’t.”
“I can keep it if I want to,” she said. “It’s mine.”
He said nothing. Just watched her, those supple eyebrows of his ever so slightly drawn together.
She gave him a cool look. “You don’t think I can make anything of it?”
Here. In Grasse. Where the world belonged to the Rosiers and her very name was against her.
Tristan’s eyebrows went up just a little. “I think you can do whatever you set your mind to, Malorie.” He sounded surprised this was even a question.
She blinked, caught off guard. She could do whatever she set her mind to, yes, she absolutely could, but…how did Tristan know that?
“You set off on a hike with friends one day to celebrate your bac. And when you decided that you liked it better away from here, you just kept going and never came back.”
Again that faint thread of darkness in his voice, but mostly it was full of a genuine admiration that felt like having two strong hands curve around her shoulders and grip them in approval. And no one had gripped her shoulders in approval. Not…well, ever. She’d tried some relationships in Paris and New York, but…There’d never been a man in her life to be proud of her.
“How did you do it, Malorie?” Tristan said wonderingly. “Go from a girl just out of high school hiking into the Alps with nothing but a backpack to the head of accounting at a major perfume house in New York?”
Her lips were starting to relax into far too vulnerable a smile. Like she needed his admiration. Craved it.
Another thing her father had been good at. Giving just enough admiration to get the women around him to depend on it and let him get away with murder so he wouldn’t withdraw it.
But Tristan is nothing like your father. You should know that. She did know it. But sometimes it was hard to trust it.
Tristan shook his head. “Up to the point when you started destroying my perfumes to advance your career, I don’t even know.”
Oh, thank God. Something she could get exasperated about. Saved by the Tristan-the-artist bell. “I destroyed your—first of all, I did not destroy them. I insisted on less expensive formulas to do my job correctly, which, yes, when you do a good job that does tend to advance your career. As I believe you may have noticed yourself, in your own career.”
He folded his arms. “Fugace was special.”
She sighed. “I take that back about you marrying an accountant. You’d drive her to an early grave.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Well, you would.”
“Maybe she’d drive me to an early grave by insisting on destroying my perfumes all the time.”
She gripped her hair. “Excuse me for not jettisoning my own career to advance yours.”
He scowled.
She scowled back.
They eyed each other a moment, and then humor glinted in his eyes, and his lips quirked, inviting her to share it.
She sighed at the laugh that ran through her in response. She’d spent her whole life seeing Tristan charm every teacher or any other woman who ever got annoyed with him into laughter instead, and yet the trick still always worked on her. “I never had a powerful family to fall back on if I messed up my career, Tristan,” she managed to say coolly.
She’d had, in New York, absolutely nobody. In that whole huge city, the only person she’d had was her.
“I’ve never fallen back on my family,” Tristan said, clipped.
Was he kidding her? When he said I’ll take it about her entire heritage like that, who did he think was giving him that power? He meant Rosier SA was going to buy it, on his behalf, or he meant that he’d get a loan with a single phone call because no bank around here would ever refuse to loan a Rosier scion money. Or even if he meant he’d use his own money, what did he think had given him the entrée into the perfume industry so that he could become the star perfumer that he was?
She gritted her teeth. “You’ve always had so much power and strength around you that you don’t even know what it’s like to start falling. It wouldn’t be possible. None of you would let the other fall.”
He started to speak, clearly angry, but as he opened his mouth, he took a long breath in and let it slowly out. Thinking. Which was another Tristan trait. He had a really fast, bright brain, and he assessed what other people said and did constantly. It was one of the things that probably made him so good at landing so many hot women. He paid attention to their words and actions. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was seven years old
and the first to dive off the cliffs at Bonifacio?”
Twenty-seven meters above the sea. Merde. He’d done that at seven? Of course he had. That was Tristan all over.
“I can’t even remember whose idea it was. None of us were supposed to be out there at all, but we were always getting in trouble. Because we were always daring each other, egging each other on. And I was the youngest, and I wanted like anything to lead. To win. This impossible thing, right? For a seven-year-old boy to win against a twelve-year-old boy. So I ran ahead of Raoul while he was yelling after me to try to catch me, and I just went straight over without even stopping.”
“Merde, Tristan. Your parents must have died. Did they kill you?”
Tristan gave her a sweet smile. “Conversely, I very rarely got in much trouble for any of the things we got up to. After all, I was only little. The older boys were supposed to keep an eye on me.”
Malorie had to laugh a little. Yeah, Tristan probably played his mom like a violin.
“So I understand your point,” Tristan said, “about always having support. They probably wouldn’t let me fall, if there was a way they could help. But (a) I don’t think you have any idea how strongly my grandfather values independence and self-reliance and how much we all wanted to live up to him, and (b) I don’t think you have any idea how much we challenged each other. We might not want to let each other fall but we sure as hell come up with ideas like ‘let’s jump off a twenty-seven-meter cliff face’, and then race each other to see who gets there first.”
Yeah, she could totally see that, in the way the Rosier cousins related. “But you’re missing my point. Which is that you can take all the risks you want, because you might kill yourself, but you’ll never find yourself out on the street.”
“Neither will you, Malorie. Unless you switched nationalities while you were in New York. You’d have government aid.”
“Because you think I want to live off handouts from the government?”
“Because you think I want to live off handouts from my cousins?” Tristan held her eyes. “I’m pretty sure there’s a greater risk to my pride and self-worth to me failing than you can quite wrap your mind around.”
Malorie frowned. A vision of his grandfather rose in her mind. That tough, tough old man with his blue eyes that looked at you as if he could see the swastika printed on your soul from a thousand meters—and hit it at that distance, too, ridding the world of one more element of evil. When he came for talks in school, she sank down as low as possible in her desk and hoped to God he didn’t spot any resemblance to her great-grandfather that would make him realize who she was.
Yeah, she wouldn’t want to fail in his eyes. She, personally, often didn’t even want to exist in his eyes. (Which would be a shame, she reminded herself fiercely. You’re a strong person. You’re living a full life. Don’t let that gaze make you quail.)
She thought of Tristan’s grandmother and his aunt, Colette Delatour. Women who had looked Gestapo in the eye and smiled as if no children at all hid only a few feet away.
Of his cousins, who back in high school already walked as if the world was theirs for the making.
“There’s a risk to me failing, too,” she said. “It’s the risk that a failure is all we’ll ever be.”
And she ran back up the stairs, moving quickly to get out into the light of day.
Chapter 6
Dark hair. Green eyes. Cool quiet. Focus.
Sometimes it seemed as if all his life Tristan had been just outside the edges of Malorie’s secret, shadowed pool, trying to escape the noise around him and slip up to her, to have the right to just dip his fingers in the cool water of her. As if she was a shelter he was never allowed to rest in.
Discipline and ambition, determination and courage.
All his life, he had been pushing himself at Malorie, from stealing her pencils to trying to force her to respect his perfumes, always, always, always trying to tell her, Look at me.
Play with me, talk to me, notice me, admire me. I admire you.
What the hell was wrong with him? It wasn’t as if there weren’t other women out there. He loved women and it had been with considerable delight and relief in high school—especially after his crash and burn with Malorie—that he had discovered a lot of them loved him, too. It wasn’t as if he’d spent the past fifteen years mooning over her, damn it.
But…
He gazed out over the valley and consciously kept himself from folding his arms, tightening his jaw.
“Do you think I’m only who I am because of my family?” he asked his grandfather.
They stood on the slope of the valley, looking across the fields of roses that were leafing out. He and his grandfather used to hike all through these mountains, Tristan as a boy running and shouting and playing with his cousins around him, or hunting, going careful and quiet, or just one on one, especially as Tristan grew into a teenager and more and more needed to walk with his grandfather, a man with standards like a great, majestic cliff to climb. He’d loved that—the challenge his grandfather offered him, to be the best man he could be.
Pépé gave him an incredulous look from faded blue eyes that still seemed capable of spotting a German soldier slipping through pines all the way on the other side of the valley. Those old hands might still be steady enough to pick him off at this distance, too.
“Yes,” Pépé said dryly, in that was your cradle rocked too close to the wall? tone. “If you need any other obvious information today, I also think the sky is blue.”
Tristan sighed.
Pépé’s face was as wrinkled and weather-stained as a map that had been crumpled up and carried in the pocket of Time for a century, pulled out and consulted in all conditions, at every emergency. “Of course, I also think your family is only what it is because of you.”
Really? That felt oddly…true. Powerful. Tristan found himself taking a deep breath, the rich subtle scents of home filling him. Pine. Earth. That fresh greenness of the land unfurling.
“You think I change my family?” he asked, awkward unexpectedly and almost shy. Not emotions he felt ever. But…he was the youngest. In a family that had a history that lost itself back in the Middle Ages. Had he actually made a mark?
He’d fought like hell to become one of the top perfumers in the world, but even that…there had been plenty of perfumers in his family’s past. Merde, Niccolò and Laurianne were supposed to have single-handedly introduced new perfume techniques that changed Grasse from a city of glove-makers to the center of perfume for centuries. How did you make your mark in a family where multiple members of it had changed the entire course of history?
That old blue glance clearly questioned Tristan’s sense. Such a familiar look that Tristan’s lips relaxed into affectionate amusement. Damn, he loved his grandfather.
“I think you hold it together,” Pépé said, so astonishingly that Tristan actually moved his feet to catch his balance, as if the ground was shifting under him when in fact it was holding just as rock steady as ground around Pépé was supposed to do.
Blue eyes pinned him. “You didn’t realize?” From Pépé’s expression, this was a failure in self-assessment on Tristan’s part.
“No,” Tristan said honestly. For one thing, it wasn’t together. Lucien and Raoul had both run off and left him. So had Malorie, for that matter, although at least he’d always known his crush on her was one-sided. Unlike what he had thought about his absolute love for his older cousins, which, as a child, he’d just assumed was returned. Until they walked away from him without ever even glancing back.
If he was the one who held things together, he’d done a shit hell job of it when he was a teenager.
“Mmm,” Pépé said.
Tristan watched him expectantly.
Pépé studied the land before them.
“Pépé,” Tristan said between his teeth.
“I don’t want to make you start overthinking it,” Pépé said. “Getting self-conscious.”
&
nbsp; “Self-conscious? Have you even met me?”
“Yes,” Pépé said calmly, as if he knew far more about Tristan than Tristan did.
Tristan narrowed his eyes at him. He did, of course, want to prove to his grandfather that if there was one subject in the world on which Tristan was more expert than Pépé was, it was himself. But he also desperately wanted to know what his grandfather was thinking.
Maybe Tristan really was spoiled in some way as the youngest. Some of his older cousins had had their doubts they could ever please Pépé. They’d done crazy things to try to live up to him.
Lucien had joined the Foreign Legion to impress him, Raoul had run off to Africa and gotten shot by a rebel warlord while defending Rosier SA suppliers, Matt devoted his whole being to becoming the patriarch Pépé wanted him to be, Damien drove himself so hard as the ruthless businessman that it was a good thing Jess was saving him from an early grave.
But Tristan, somehow, had always been absolutely sure that Pépé loved him.
It seemed so obvious to him. In the demands Pépé made of them, in the time he spent with them, in the way he had taught them these hills and fed them their first taste of truffle, in the way he never, ever faltered in his expectation—his conviction—that they would be good men.
To Tristan, all his cousins’ doubts that they could be good enough for Pépé had come from inside them. From how much they hero-worshipped the old man. The grandchildren of a superhero who worried that they only had ordinary mortal powers. Pépé had clearly never doubted their worth at all. He’d invested in it and believed in it with every stride he’d taken across these lands, with them scampering, or running, or eventually also striding strongly alongside him.
But how did you ever live up to a man like that? A man who was not only great but good? How did you stand as tall, cast a shadow that was as long?
“You siphon them off,” Pépé said absently. He was watching a pair of vultures spin over the cliffs at the head of the valley.
What?
“When they’re getting twisted up in their own emotions, you make them laugh. You straighten them out. So they can fit together. You love them for who they are. So that they can be happy in who they are.”
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 6
