Tristan stared at his grandfather, a slow wave of heat climbing up his cheeks. He felt as if he was ten years old again. Awkwardly thrilled to have someone understand him. To have impressed his grandfather.
Without jumping off a cliff. Without shooting something. Without working tirelessly in the fields, no complaining. Without even realizing he was doing it.
“We had a guy like that, back in our cell.”
Tristan perked his ears. It was rare that his grandfather referenced his Resistance days, but all the cousins had always scrambled for any knowledge of it they could get.
“When it was raining on us and cold and we’d screwed up an attack and everyone in the group was ready to go home, give up, or possibly kill each other…he’d make us all laugh instead. He was the guy who’d sit down beside you on a rock while you were brooding, tangled up, and say that wry thing that made you take yourself a little less seriously—and know you were accepted even if you were screwed up. He’d ease the tempers and the trouble so that people could put forward the best of themselves. Be the best of themselves.”
Tristan was silent for a moment, trying to digest this. He’d never even thought about himself this way before. It felt too rich and buttery golden to digest.
“What happened to him?” His grandfather had that expression on his face—the one that meant memories were both good and sad. At ninety-one, he’d outlived most of his peers.
“He was deported three months before the Americans pushed up from Italy,” his grandfather said, crisply, that way he always had to talk about the worst things, if he talked about them at all. “When Monsard sold us out. We never saw him again. I used to wonder how long he kept people’s spirits up on the train and in the camp.” That sheen moved across his grandfather’s eyes, that shadow of a grief that could never really heal. “Used to imagine him keeping them up until the bitter end.”
The hair on the back of Tristan’s neck lifted. He bent his head. Memories of a war that had ended decades before his own birth had formed the bedrock of his existence. They had filled history books in schools. They were the subject of multiple museums around here. But hearing that oral memory, from his grandfather who had lived it, always made it hit…well, home.
“Pierre Monsard?” As if there was any other Monsard family around here. “Your friend was one of the three he betrayed?”
His grandfather nodded once and looked away.
Tristan gazed out over the valley that his family had held for centuries. And saw Malorie’s green eyes against the evening pines.
There’s a risk to me failing, too. It’s the risk that’s all we’ll ever be.
“It’s funny how his descendants have turned out so different from him,” he said casually, studying the land.
“They didn’t defend their land, did they? All three of those girls left.”
“Maybe they went off on a quest,” Tristan said. “To grow strong enough to defend it.”
“What is this, a fairy tale?” his grandfather said with that faint note of irony he used sometimes when he just wanted to confuse the hell out of everyone. For example, was he being sardonic about anyone believing life was a fairy tale? Or was the irony self-directed, considering they were standing on the edge of a valley of roses and he himself had saved children by hiding them in a wagon of roses?
“If it is, the youngest should have an edge,” Tristan teased. His grandfather had also been the youngest, once his father had remarried and given him Colette as a stepsister. Tristan was both an only child and the youngest of the five cousins, so who knew how that worked out.
His grandfather just gave him that look, the one with an extra crumple around the edges of his lips, a compressed smile.
Yes, Pépé loved him.
“Do you blame everyone who leaves?” he asked cautiously. “Who doesn’t stay and fight for the land?”
Did Pépé still love Lucien? He never talked about him at all, except that when he mentioned the number of grandsons he had, it was still always five. Tristan thought the fear of not being loved by his grandfather and the stupid-assed fear of not having a place among his cousins anymore was what had driven Lucien away. So if he ever, ever managed to see Lucien again, he wanted to be able to tell him: You’re an idiot. Pépé misses you. Come home.
Pépé was silent for a moment. “Some people have a reason,” he said finally, not looking at him.
But he could be thinking about two of his own sons, Lucien’s father and Raoul’s father, who kept only the most minimal contact anymore with the family. Raoul’s father reacting to his wife’s death and Lucien’s father, well…
“What about Lucien?” Tristan probed cautiously. No one talked to his grandfather about this. Maybe everyone was afraid of what he would say.
Pépé shot him a sharp blue glance. “Since when is fighting for your country not fighting for this land?” Ton pays, ce pays. They were the same word, in French.
All the tension in Tristan’s face muscles relaxed, only then making him realize it had accumulated. He smiled at his grandfather in relief and approval.
Pépé said nothing for another moment. “He has leaves, though,” he added crisply, as if that was his final word on the subject.
Yes, Lucien did. Leaves he never used to come see them. And there were other ways to serve your country than joining the Foreign Legion and abandoning your entire identity, too. Damn it, Lucien.
A sigh slipped out of him. “I didn’t straighten Raoul and Lucien out. Didn’t hold them together.”
Tristan had still been to all intents and purposes a kid when Lucien’s mother tossed the hand grenade of Lucien’s true paternity straight into the heart of their family. He’d been old enough to pretend he understood what everyone was talking about and young enough that he couldn’t quite figure out how Lucien could not be his father’s son. If Lucien’s mom was married to Lucien’s dad, how could anyone else have fathered him?
But while he might not have understood why it mattered so much, whether Lucien’s father had contributed his sperm to the relationship or not—if he’d been his father for all his life, it seemed as if something so tiny you couldn’t even see it without a microscope shouldn’t matter—he remembered the way Lucien had changed. He remembered that his older cousin had never wanted to see their grandfather anymore and had grown strange and distant with all of them. And he remembered still the brutal shock a year later of learning Lucien was gone.
Just…gone. He’d chosen to just wipe his name out of existence, to walk out and leave them all as if Lucien Rosier and all that wonderful, glorious happiness that had been Tristan’s vision of their childhood together had never been.
“Lucien and Raoul are when you learned the risks of not being the glue that holds your family together,” his grandfather said. Everything about his wrinkled face compressed, his grandfather’s hard control of his own emotions etched by time until it had grown visible, like stone under eroded land. “Learned what you could lose if you didn’t get it right.”
Maybe. Tristan remembered how anxious he’d gotten about Matt and Damien after Raoul and Lucien left. How alert he’d been to any chance that they, too, were going to break down and disappear on him. Maybe that was when he’d started applying those youngest-cousin emotional manipulation skills to something other than just getting his own way.
Hell, maybe that was even part of the reason he liked to capture emotions in bottles so much. So he could bring them out and relive them again, so they couldn’t escape him.
“I don’t think I’m nearly as selfless as you make me sound,” Tristan said.
His grandfather snorted. “Who said it was selfless? You’re the most bloody-minded of the lot. Never seen a kid so determined to get his own way. Not since me.”
Okay, now Tristan recognized himself. It was really much better for himself and everyone he knew if he got his way. Nobody else in his family even properly understood what they wanted, most of the time.
Pépé’s lips
got a little bit more crumpled, from the suppression of his smile. Affection filled his blue eyes and made Tristan feel like a puppy, delighted to have pleased his grandfather. Damn it. He was twenty-nine years old. You’d think he could grow out of that.
“It’s just that what you want is to have your people all around you, happy,” his grandfather said. His smile softened, a rare sight. He gripped Tristan’s shoulder. “I told you that you were a lot like me.”
Chapter 7
Brown eyes. Black hair. Callused fingers, on her inner wrist, warm and gentle and sure.
Malorie tossed and turned, caught between a tough decision and the figment of her imagination who was always so good at reassuring her when things were tough.
She needed to be careful of Grasse. Tristan’s proximity might make her imagination of him start to seem all too real. Possible. It might have calluses that grazed against her skin, long black lashes that lifted when his eyes suddenly met hers, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes of a young man who spent a lot of time in the sun or on the water and the way they tightened just for her.
It was still dark out when she woke in the twin bed she used to use when she spent the night at her grandmother’s house as a child. The scents of orange blossom carried through the open window, with the chill of the spring night. She rose. In New York, she would have been stuck inside four walls with her worry, at this hour before dawn. But here, she could go out among the orange trees, in that hush of scent and darkness, the orchard a patch of shadow amid the lights of the developed coast that sparkled down the slopes to the sea.
She got her grandmother’s scythe and went to work, clearing back the growth around the first half dozen trees, then stretched out the old ground cloths and pulled out one of the several ladders. White flowers fell softly from her fingers in the pre-dawn light, pattering against the cloths below.
The gloss of leaves against her skin, the silk of petals in her fingers, the sting of scratches she accumulated on her forearms from the overgrown brush as she worked. The scent everywhere, until she could no longer even really smell it. It became part of her again, like it once had been. Until the rhythm sank back into her fingers, the sun rising, the birds waking.
Tristan would love it here. The thought ghosted across her mind. If you ever let him in.
The sun rose gently, flushing the sky above the sea. The flowers twisted and fell, silk between her fingers. The scent of orange blossom surrounded her, rich and sweet.
She hadn’t realized that it had been a very, very long time since she had felt at peace.
***
Depth and dust and secret. A treasure gleaming in the dark. Long, gorgeous legs in a crisp pencil skirt striding toward it. It was a scent, that treasure. It was a perfume bottle, almost lost to time and war. It was a story that could still come true.
To an outside observer, Tristan stood perfectly still in the middle of his office, but in his head, everything was happening. Scents came together, multiplied, spun off, a kaleidoscope of possibilities all started from one idea. Many of them he could smell just standing there with his eyes closed. Some he wanted to have the lab blend to see if the components bonded the way he thought they would.
To see if he could capture that glimpse of a past and future story.
It needed a flower. He needed to figure out what was in that perfume bottle at the depths and let its secret scent rise out of the dark and mysterious base.
Flower.
A flower.
Floral.
Floral. Floral. Why did that make him—
Oh, fuck.
That damn beach floral he was doing for LBRH. He still hadn’t figured that thing out.
He broke his stillness and went to his desk to write down all his initial ideas for a dust and secret scent before he lost them. He sent two to the lab to mix for him.
Then he gave all his beach floral vials and notes a disgruntled look.
Merde, this stupid beach floral. Who the hell wanted to make another beach floral? And not, of course, one where you could do something creative and difficult that people would talk about and think about. No, it was basically just supposed to be mangoes and coconut and sand and sea.
He banged his head down on the sketches he had spread out all over his desk and growled at them.
Then he turned his head enough to unsquoosh his nose and took a deep breath of the paper, the graphite from his drawing pencils. His fingers stroked over the old wood of the desk. Paper and thought and time, all the time up here under the roof of Rosier SA, all the people who had filled this building and thought and worked and created, and the way the noises from the pedestrian street would have reached them, century after century, and the way even the scents that wafted in from the window would have been so much the same—some restaurant had put beef on its grill with tomatoes and thyme, and the wind stirred with a far hint of the sea.
Or paper and time like his grandfather’s face, like that impression of a map crumpled up by use but you could still pull it out of your pocket in every emergency. That. How did you catch that?
He flipped the nearest sheet of paper over and started to sketch a few formula ideas on—oops. That was the nearly naked bikini butt he had sketched earlier, a curvy woman stretched out on a towel with flowers in her hair, as he tried to give himself inspiration.
Yeah.
He shoved the paper-and-time formula away. You couldn’t make money for a major fragrance house or land briefs from the top designer houses with a fragrance that was paper and time.
The pressure of that dream of his again. The one where he wasn’t a commercial perfumer, he had his own niche house where he made whimsical perfumes, ones that smelled like dust and treasure for those who thought life held the promise of so many secret treasures, or ones that smelled like paper and time for people who loved to smell like paper and time. A book lover’s scent. A philosopher’s scent.
An alchemist’s scent…
Focus on your beach floral.
But the scents were spinning off in his brain already, a whole series, the variations he would make in the base of paper and time so that one scent would be Libraire or Bibliophile or Lecteur. One would be Philosophe. One would be Alchimiste. Probably he should let the marketing team come up with the names.
Except he couldn’t do this dream. His perfumes made too much for Rosier SA. If he landed the brief for a commercially successful perfume—a beach floral, for example—then the perfume house it was for would use Rosier SA to produce it. That was the way the perfume industry worked. Meaning that each successful perfume he landed paid for more Rosier SA salaries than he could count—he let Damien do that kind of calculation—and spread out throughout all their suppliers around the world, to small producers in Indonesia or the Congo or right here around Grasse who depended on Rosier SA’s annual purchases to survive.
He couldn’t abandon commercial success to do niche perfumes instead.
Although what would be lovely would be to do both. To land commercial briefs and to, maybe, right down the street, have his own niche house where he created all the whimsies a man enthralled by the world could ever want.
A little whiff of fancy, like a hint of scent. Malorie’s Maison de Monsard restored to all that Art Nouveau glory, there at the most perfect corner of Grasse, filled with scents that were magical, that caught at all the history and grandeur and centuries of effort around here. And on one of those beautiful display tables, a fragrance that was paper and time. With a bottle made by the local twins, Manon and Nathan Viale, and…
Focus. Always a challenge for him if he wasn’t sensually, physically fascinated by what he was doing. This perfume house wanted a beach floral. And since it was likely to be the bestseller of the next summer season, it was up to him to get it right so that Rosier SA could get all the profits from it.
He got up and went to his balcony, gazing down the street. He couldn’t quite make out La Maison de Monsard from there, and abruptly he caught the edge
of the roof and hauled himself up onto it.
There.
Now he could see Monsard’s zinc, a contrast with all the red tiles.
Not that Malorie Monsard was why he couldn’t focus. Not anymore, damn it. He wasn’t in high school.
It was that stupid beach floral.
He sniffed his elbow. Yeah, no. That latest trial was not going to work on skin. He smelled like somebody had laced sunscreen with mango. He checked his other arm. Non, rolling that sunscreened body in sand did not make this scent any more original.
Well, just fuck then. He hated beach florals.
He stretched his fingers and stared at them.
Malorie probably hated them, too. He could not even conceive of her wearing a beach floral. It would be something secret, elusive, not there. What he had tried to do with Fugace. An absence of scent almost, luring you closer and closer until you were in this cool green shaded place where you could just feel…safe…from all the barrage of sensations around you and then…
She lifted one booted foot, planted it in the center of your chest, and just kicked you back out of her safe space.
Challenged your freaking production costs.
He flipped his hands over, staring at the calluses. Rock climbing, windsurfing. Movement.
Maybe that was why Malorie had never responded to him. She remembered him from grade school. Restless, wild, distracting everyone, driving the teacher crazy, learning to charm his way out of the constant trouble he was in.
In several classes, one teacher attempt to get him to behave was to put him next to Malorie so she could be the good example and because she was the only one in class the teacher was sure would resist his efforts to rope her into something more active and interesting than math or penmanship.
He’d tried, of course. Rough in his grabs for attention at first, because, since he spent his childhood tumbling and wrestling his way across the hills with his older, all male cousins, he just thought that was the way people who liked each other interacted. He’d teased her and grabbed papers from her and drawn things for her across them. He’d stolen food from her plate at lunch whenever they ate in the cantine instead of going home for lunch, and he’d kicked his soccer ball into her games with her friends at recess and made them chase him away.
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 7
