Anything rather than sit still and focus on things that had no sensation. Even as a little kid, he’d known that she had more sensation than everything else teachers wanted him to do.
He’d been surprised to learn as an adult, from his friends in New York, that in some countries they medicated kids like him. He’d found it troubling—his personality was so bad that some societies would intervene to change it to make him fit, rather than make room for him? In France, no one had thought of medication, but they’d most certainly thought he should conform—all on his own, with nothing but his own will and discipline.
He tried. Merde but he’d tried, early on. Failing over and over and over, and when he was very little, only four or five, breaking down in tears over it day after day, in the secret of his home, where only his mother knew. And kept going back, day after day because he had no choice, and trying again. For years and years his will and discipline were never enough. He’d felt like he was failing everybody.
So he’d stayed in trouble on a daily basis, and charmed his way out of it as often as he could to save his parents more phone calls. It wasn’t mean trouble, he just couldn’t sit still, and it was best if he could get his teachers to treat that with affectionate exasperation rather than anger.
And then he still remembered coming into class the very last second the first day of school back from summer when he was fourteen. And sliding into the empty seat behind Malorie. And her standing back up a moment to bend over and catch a pen that she’d dropped under a neighboring desk.
The curve of her butt.
The length of her legs.
The fall of her black hair.
And all that greedy, confusing, embarrassing sexual desire that had been building in him over the summer just woke up with a zing and focused.
It was the same year Raoul and Lucien left, shattering his whole happy vision of a world in which five cousins played and worked together all their lives. So maybe there were more factors besides his own puberty and falling for a girl that got him to start growing up that year.
He never did learn to do more than survive the torture of school as best he could, but he did get better at it that year. Learned techniques to handle himself. He’d sit there, focusing on Malorie, sketching—her, a cliff face, a green river, shadows, things that had sensations in them—and he didn’t exactly become a star student, but he started learning control, to be less disruptive. To channel himself as best he could.
He never could get Malorie to reciprocate the interest, though. He’d tried that charm he’d learned as a restless child on plenty of other girls in school, and it turned out nearly all of them responded to it when it was combined with his teenage physical form. The discovery of girls—who were pretty much packed with sensation a restless, hungry young man could focus on—had transformed his whole experience of school.
But Malorie stayed unreachable. She’d be polite, but she kept a reserve with him that he’d never managed to penetrate. Maybe he was permanently branded in her brain as the annoying brat from grade school.
In fact, it wasn’t until he started working in perfumes, when everything he had to memorize had a sensation to it, a meaning, that he’d flourished. Scents could hold his brain together. If he could sink into them in his head, those scents carried all the activity and richness of life. Playing with them in his head felt like exploring the world, amassing sensations. He could focus on them.
He loved the world around him. He loved its people and its scents and its textures and the way his own body felt, when he was giving it a challenge.
It’s just that what you want is to have your people all around you, happy.
Happiness. Your people happy all around you.
That was what a beach memory was about, right? Having one’s people happy all around. Not the sunscreen or the sand or the coconut oil—those were just triggers. His job was to catch the happiness and bottle it up, so anyone who opened that bottle could live that happiness again in a breath.
Pretty women in bikinis. Toddlers clinging to their parents’ hands as they jumped wavelets. Dogs bounding into the water. A giant sandcastle, from a whole family’s hours of sandy ambition. The love-battle with the wind, out on a windsurfing board, all exhilaration and laughing challenges and insults with his cousins.
Wistfulness. Wanting to capture that time again.
That was what a beach floral should do.
Not too brash, not a slap of coconut. His beach floral wouldn’t be a perfume people wore in the summer so much as the winter, when the skies were too gray. Condensed happiness and longing for the sun to come again.
He went back to his desk to sketch out ideas, sometimes in drawing form because he couldn’t think how to capture the image with a scent yet, sometimes with formula components. He pulled out vials, including new molecules labs kept sending him. Sniffed them and tapped his fingers and paced and climbed the walls—literally, gripping door frames and curling himself up until he could touch his feet to the beams in the ceiling, like a monkey.
Finally he sent a half dozen formulae down to the lab to blend for him and went back to the balcony. And looked toward the zinc roof of La Maison de Monsard again.
You’re the most bloody-minded of the lot. Never seen a kid so determined to get his own way.
Well, he knew what he wanted.
So why didn’t he go get it?
Chapter 8
“Why do you smell of orange blossom?” a gorgeous, rich-timbred voice asked.
Malorie was pacing the corner office above the courtyard, what had once been her grandmother and her great-grandfather’s command center for La Maison de Monsard, phone against her ear. She gave up on the hold and hung up, turning.
Tristan, of course. Leaning in her doorway, all that lean form packed with energy, hot and sweet and full of life. Tall, lean, strong, beautiful cheekbones, supple, precise, amused mouth, kissable as hell. That man was walking sex. It was no wonder women threw themselves at him wherever he went.
From the corner office, she’d actually been able to witness that while she waited on hold. Tristan bending to pet a curly-haired dog, while its blond owner talked to him and ended up with her hand on his arm when he straightened, leaning into him. Tristan talking to the owner of the women’s clothing shop, come out from her work on her display window to catch him and kiss his cheeks. Tristan giving an appreciative smile to a pack of pretty tourists who looked a sexy twenty or so, the young women walking on just a little way, whispering to each other and glancing back, and then suddenly turning back to him to ask him to take photos of them. He’d clearly enjoyed every minute of it, but Malorie had gotten so annoyed she’d turned and paced away from the window and hadn’t seen if any exchange of numbers resulted.
The annoyance crisped her tone when she spoke. “Can I help you?”
“Who knows, Malorie? You’ve never tried to be helpful.”
She sighed and gazed at the ceiling. That was Tristan for you. If a woman wasn’t tripping over herself to be the first to sit in his lap, he took it as a personal insult. It wasn’t even his fault. He thought eager, flirting willingness was how women normally acted.
“Is that…no, that’s not Molini’s Neroli,” Tristan said. “Who made it?”
He straightened and strolled forward, as unhurried as if she was a pretty girl he was about to flirt with. For someone who almost always seemed so laid-back, it was amazing the intensity he brought to a room. Everything else faded to background around him.
“And you have scratches on your arms.” He took her wrist as calmly as if it belonged to him and lifted her arm to study the scratches. “A little early in the year to be tangling with rose bushes, isn’t it?”
She tugged at her wrist.
He brought her arm all the way to his face and took a long, deep breath of the back of her wrist before he let it go. “Hmm.”
Little shivers ran through her. She quelled them with a firm smoothing of her skirt. “Do you mind, Tristan?”
“Hmm?” he said absently, his mind clearly focused on scent and nothing else.
“Can you even imagine if I grabbed your arm and started sniffing you as if you were my personal scent strip?”
Brown eyes rested vaguely on her a moment. And then slowly focused. His eyes honed in on her and darkened. His lips parted and—he blinked and gave his head a shake. A wry, devastating smile curled his lips. “As a matter of fact, I can, Malorie chérie. Are you glad you asked?”
Her head bending over his naked, ripped torso as she gently, deeply…breathed him in. “It was a rhetorical question.”
He held out his upturned wrist. “Want to?”
Her toes curled slowly inside her pumps. “Are you just bored, Tristan?”
“Well, I’m not now.” His eyes gleamed. Her middle heated, the gleam glowing there like honey in the sun.
“You know, most people turn to social media when they can’t concentrate.”
“Yeah, I never got that,” Tristan said absently. “There aren’t any sensations. Seriously, what do you think? I’ve been skin testing some ideas for this damn beach floral I’m working on.” He stretched out his arm more fully and pointed to his elbow. “This is my favorite but it’s still not right.”
Malorie hesitated but curiosity got the better of her. “What’s its production cost?” she murmured, just to be on the safe side, as she bent her nose to his elbow.
Tristan didn’t make an annoyed noise, though, as he should have at that question. His arm bent as she leaned in, so that his biceps hardened into a strong curve just as her lips got close to them. Heat rushed through her and brought a tingling ache to her lips and hands and even her teeth—all the parts of her that weren’t just sinking into enjoyment of those biceps right now. His skin had warmed the scent he had tested, a promise of sand and sun and happiness, full of energy and joie de vivre. Once you knew perfumes, you could always pick Tristan’s scents out. They always had that base note of happiness. Sensual, playful, intense, wistful, but there, at the base, every time.
“Where’s the floral?” she said.
Tristan sighed. “Et voilà. Every time I up the floral, it turns into a clichéd mess. I don’t know why I ever had to land this brief.”
Because a successful beach floral would make millions for Rosier SA, that was why. A responsibility that Tristan, for all his artistic complaining about the role of money in his work, assumed like the pillar of his family that he was.
Must be nice to have a family with so many strong pillars.
“It’s fun,” she said, a little wistfully. It smelled like their Sunday afternoons at the beach when she was a kid, before things went more and more to pieces or at least, as a kid, before she’d perceived the pieces they were already in. It smelled like that, only a little more secure, like a Mediterranean beach, not like those wide open American beaches where the sand was constantly washing away under your feet. “Sweet and…solid, somehow.” Like his family afternoons at the beach must have been, compared to hers. “I like it without the floral.”
“Yeah?” Tristan contorted his arm to smell his own elbow. “It might have some possibilities as a masculine. Unfortunately, what I’m supposed to be producing is most definitely a floral. The brief was clear on that. A big floral.”
Malorie grimaced sympathetically. It was the unfortunate nature of a perfumer’s work that his art was supposed to be commercial. It didn’t bother her—she liked for things to make enough money you could depend on them—but she could understand how frustrating it was for Tristan to contort himself for marketing departments. Mostly she could understand because he’d been very very clear about it when arguing with her over Fugace.
“Why are you doing it, if you hate the idea?”
Tristan raised a supple black eyebrow at her, as if she of all people should know. “It could make millions for us.”
Yes. As artistic as Tristan was, he took his responsibility to earn money for his family and, importantly, for every single person whose livelihood depended on Rosier SA’s success, as a matter of course.
And he’d probably say something deeply sardonic about accountants if he knew she found that trait so attractive it made a prickle of arousal run through her just thinking about it. Her father had not considered it his responsibility to earn money for his family. He’d milked Monsard’s failing resources until they were dry, to feed his own sense of self-worth. So she knew better than to take such an important character trait for granted.
“What about this one?” Tristan held out his other elbow.
Ah, interesting. Darkness and time and somewhere a treasure. It made her want to bite the swell of his biceps to see what that scent tasted like on his skin. “This is a beach floral? What is it, a pirate cove? It makes you smell like Indiana Jones.”
“Hmm.” Tristan sounded dissatisfied. “Maybe a little less dusty, then, and a little more…something. I’m not sure I meant it to be a masculine.”
Malorie shrugged. “You know what I think about masculine and feminine perfumes.” She thought that women needed to be able to dream of cracking a whip at their problems and swinging through the air after lost treasure and dealing with everything, even with snakes, just as much as men did. And very few “feminine” perfumes allowed women any kind of adventure other than sexual ones.
“Yeah. I like your thoughts about masculine and feminine perfumes. We should talk more about them, some place less noisy than a perfume launch party.”
They’d started to discuss it once on a quiet terrace at a perfume launch party. For a few minutes. Soon after Tristan wandered out and joined her there multiple other people—most of them about ten times as beautiful and a hundred times as rich and famous as Malorie—had followed after him. Tristan, the human magnet.
“Is it just orange blossom water?” Tristan said, back on her scent. “Is that what you use? I’d like to know who makes it, because it’s remarkably full. Almost fresh off the flower, with this hint of human honey in it.”
“Hint of human honey” might not make sense to anyone outside the perfume industry, but Malorie had spent her entire life surrounded by people who talked like that.
It was just…strange, in a way that tickled in inappropriate places in her body, to know that she herself was the hint of human honey.
“Farelli made me a one-off scent,” Malorie murmured, naming one of Tristan’s rivals just to see what happened.
Tristan laughed. “Good one. He never made something that full of light in his life. But I could”—he grabbed her wrist and sniffed it again, this time the inside of it, completely forgetting the line she had just drawn in the sand about not doing that—“well, maybe…hmm.”
“Tristan.” She pulled her wrist back, and the calluses on the tips of his fingers grazed over her skin. “I am not a perfume touche.”
“No, of course not,” he said absently. “You’re much more interesting. Paper is always such a sad substitute for human skin.” He reached for her wrist again and frowned at her when she shifted it away. “Would you let me concentrate for two seconds?”
Just because he offered up his bare arm to her didn’t mean she had to return the favor. She folded her arms, tucking her hands securely into her elbows. “No. I prefer to remain enigmatic.”
Tristan narrowed brown eyes at her.
She gave him a cool, aloof look back.
He looked just a tiny bit pissed off.
She fought to keep her lips from curving in self-congratulations again. To the best of her knowledge, she was the only person alive who could get ever-amused, ever-unruffled Tristan to look pissed off. And she did it just by being herself—sticking to her guns.
Apparently women didn’t do that too often around him.
“I’ll buy you chocolates,” Tristan said.
“What?”
“If you’ll let me sniff your skin,” he said in a what-else-could-we-be-talking-about tone.
She pressed her hands into her elbows, in inst
inctive self-protection against the stirring in her middle at this negotiation. “Tristan—”
“I have to be up in Paris in a couple of weeks. I’ll bring back whoever you want. Who’s your favorite? Richard? Marquis? Would you rather have macarons?”
“Tristan! You cannot trade chocolates for the right to—to—” She tightened her arms. She didn’t know what was going on here, but one thing was for sure—he was a lot easier to handle when his head was exploding on her ceiling. Quick. Think of a cheap perfume component you can substitute for an outrageously expensive one.
“Well, what can I trade?” He eyed the spot where her wrists tucked tight against her arms and flexed his fingers a little, as if it was all he could do to not start prying them free. “What would you like?”
“You can’t trade anything for the right to touch me, Tristan! That’s not for sale.”
His eyebrows crinkled. “It’s just for research purposes! It wasn’t like I was trying to bribe you for sexual favo…” His voice trailed off, like a robot that had run out of battery. He closed his eyes a moment and curled his fingers into his palms.
“Oh, go away,” Malorie said, disgusted. With herself. He was making her insides get all frantic and, and…curly.
He gave her a reproving look. “You know, you’re not very friendly.”
“I smashed your life. Into pieces! On the floor!” She made exaggerated stabbing motions with her hands, mimicking him when they met on the trail.
“But now we’re neighbors,” he said. “So I’m trying to forgive you and move forward.”
She stared at him with her mouth open. He was trying to forgive her? For what, how badly he behaved when he didn’t get his way?
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 8
