“It’s hard,” Tristan admitted. His lips turned down in what looked like genuine grief. “Every time I think about Fugace—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Malorie muttered.
He stiffened. “You know what your problem is? You have no heart. None!”
“Sure I do. And it’s bleeding for you right now.”
Tristan glared at her.
Guess I’ve still got it.
Tristan made a gesture with thumb and forefinger to evoke the sublime, a gesture so very French that it hit her middle. I’m home. “Fugace was beautiful. It could have changed the entire perfume industry. Changed the lives of people who wore it, changed the lives of people who met the people who wore it. And you sliced its heart out surgically and replaced it with a pig’s. To save money.”
She sighed very heavily.
He pulled back, offended.
She raised her eyebrows. “Moving forward, are you?”
“Well, I’m trying,” he said between his teeth. “If you would show one milligram of regret…”
“I have no heart,” she reminded him. “And I’m a sociopath. So I can’t.”
His lips pressed together as he eyed her. “And apparently you like to throw every irrational word a man ever says in the heat of passion back in his face the rest of his life.”
She shrugged. “If you don’t want to be reminded of irrational words, maybe you should stay rational.”
He gazed at her a frustrated moment, and then slowly that wickedness curled his lips and that dangerous gleam came back into his eyes. “But I don’t like to stay rational, Malorie. I love…the heat of passion.”
He shifted in closer to her with the last phrase.
Malorie held up a warning hand. “Don’t you start.”
The gleam grew brighter and wickeder. “Scared?”
Yes. She made a pffing sound of dismissal. “I can handle you with both hands tied behind my back.”
Tristan’s brown eyes trailed down over her body, and that honey glint in them just glowed like she was a fly and he was about to catch her. “Let’s try it,” he purred. “I’ll tie your hands, and then we’ll go from there.”
The thought of the reality of what she’d just said—of having her hands tied behind her back while Tristan moved up to her with that gleam in his eyes—stole all her breath. Dissolved cells. Woke heat in the worst possible places.
She wanted to do it, suddenly and so badly—tie her hands behind her, see what he did to her body—that not doing it hurt.
“Just think,” Tristan purred. “How many more irrational words you could get out of me, with your hands tied behind your back. Why, you might end up with things to throw in my face for the whole rest of our lives.”
And now she had a vision of Tristan losing coherence in his passion, hungry, muttering, stroking her harder and harder as he…
“Is this all just because you’re having trouble with one of your juices?” she said suspiciously. “Is that what’s going on? Because I really don’t appreciate being used as a distraction, Tristan.”
“Why? Your work is insanely boring. I’d think you’d be grateful.”
That kicked a laugh out of her. It should have insulted her, but thinking it—and saying it out loud—was so very Tristan.
Their eyes met on her laugh, his alive with his own willingness to share her laughter.
No wonder so many women wanted to wallow in Tristan as if he was their catnip. He just promised sexy happiness with every breath he took.
Every time he met her eyes while his own were laughing she wanted to kiss him.
“Maybe our mutual lives will be short,” Tristan suggested. “Maybe the sight of you in those pencil skirts nearly every day will make me explode and that will let you return to your boring accounts again.”
She looked down at her perfectly professional skirt. Sleek. Hem just slightly below the knee, where her legs looked good but she didn’t show too much of them for a business setting. She liked these skirts. They made her feel brisk, in control, perfectly attired, ready to take on the world. She slanted Tristan a wary glance.
He was looking at her legs.
She crossed her ankles uneasily.
A blissful smile relaxed his lips, and his eyes gleamed.
She stroked her hands down her skirt, as if that could somehow make it longer.
His smile grew.
“There is nothing wrong with my skirts!” she snapped.
“Merde, who said there was?” Tristan asked. “Tell me, and I’ll kill him.”
Maybe she should wear pants. Except that now it tickled at the backs of her knees, the thought of Tristan watching her legs. The thought of his head exploding for reasons other than her effect on his perfumes. Will you quit letting him get to you? You know he says this kind of thing to all women.
She’d dressed today to sound out bank officers on the kind of financing she could get if she did decide she wanted to get this place back up and running.
Which she wasn’t saying she did. Some days she didn’t know which felt lonelier—going back to her life in New York, where at least she had friends and good colleagues, or staying here and yet again forging a path on her own. Her lips twisted wryly. Once again, and this time in real life, Tristan was proving to be the bright spot in that loneliness, the energy and warmth. Don’t you dare rely on him for that. You know how that would play out.
“Hungry?” Tristan’s warm, low voice.
Damn, was it that obvious? She blinked him into focus.
He’d half-turned and was gazing at the courtyard fountain, hands in his pockets, posture über-casual. “It’s lunch time and, in a strange way, you’re new in town.” He held out a hand. “I thought you might rather put up with me than eat by yourself.”
A warmth infused her. It sounded much less lonely, to eat lunch with Tristan rather than by herself either at a restaurant terrace or in the courtyard below—pulling out the little yellow wooden table and chairs still tucked for that purpose in a storage closet near the main doors, just like every other shop on this street.
“But I smashed your life into pieces on the floor,” she said slowly. Why in the world would he try to make her life easier? Warmer?
“It’s part of my nefarious plan. If I make it easier for you to find your footing here, you’ll quit Abbaye and my perfumes for them will be safe.” He took her wrist and pulled. “Come on, Malorie. If worse comes to worst, you can always stab me with one of those ice stakes I’m pretty sure you carry around in your purse.”
Yeah, she wished. The whole damn point of never letting Tristan get too close to her was that she was pretty sure that once he got in close it would be too late.
Chapter 9
“I thought you meant lunch in Grasse,” Malorie said warily, one hand resting on the top of Tristan’s silver Audi while he held the door for her.
“My nefarious plans have layers. Kidnapping, extortion, and didn’t we say something about tying you up with your hands behind your back?”
Malorie gave him her most repressive look.
“Will you get in already?” Tristan put his hand on top of her head and pushed downward. “What do you think I’m going to do to you? Actually hold you for ransom?”
“Who’d pay it?” Malorie murmured, yielding. It was pretty hard to find a reason to refuse to get in a car with someone you’d known since childhood, when the only thing you had to fear from him was that he was so damn sexy you might throw yourself on him and then get really hurt.
She looked back up at Tristan, who stood frozen with one hand on the door, as if he’d just suffered a shock.
What? She smoothed her skirt uncertainly. No, her ass was still covered. Plus, it didn’t seem to be that kind of shock.
He slowly closed the door, his face oddly sober as he got behind the wheel. They were out of the underground parking garage before he spoke. “I’d pay it.”
“What?” Oh, the ransom. “Weren’t you the one doing the kidnapping?”
> His eyebrows knit as he took the road winding down out of the upper old town. “If you needed someone to pay a ransom for you—I’d pay it. You could call on me.”
For some reason that hit her right in the heart. You could call on me. Actually have someone to call on if she was in trouble. And not just any someone but someone who might be capable of rescuing her.
“Merde,” he muttered suddenly and slipped his hand off the gearshift to close it around hers.
Her eyes prickled. She turned her head to gaze out the window as they left buildings behind for hedge-hidden houses and then the maquis. She didn’t pull her hand free.
He gave it a little squeeze and had to release it to shift as the roads got steep and twisty. “So how is the decision going?”
Malorie hesitated, but networking was important anywhere and all the more so in Grasse, and no matter how hard it was to trust any aspect of her life to someone else, in her head at least she really did know that Tristan would never mean her harm. He might cause harm, but it wouldn’t be deliberate.
Of course, even her father’s harm to them hadn’t been deliberate, she thought darkly. It had just been a mismatch in desires. They’d wanted a father’s love, and he’d wanted…well, everybody else’s love. Their love, too, of course, but their love wasn’t nearly enough. Not worth the effort of keeping.
“Well, first I need to see if I even have financing options. And the banks will probably want written confirmation that I have my sisters’ proxy before I can go much farther with that.”
“What percentage of shares did you each end up with?”
“Twenty percent each. The rest were sold at different times.” And usually at rock bottom prices, such as when her grandmother was struggling so desperately back in the fifties, as an eighteen-year-old with a toddler, no husband, and an utterly disgraced father and family name. When the men buying had been either making pity purchases or lurking around like predator hyenas, hoping to end up with the whole business when the pack of them wore her grandmother down.
Yeah. For a whole layering of reasons, the women in Malorie’s family loathed letting men into positions of power over their lives. It never worked out well.
Tristan whistled softly between his teeth. “So no majority unless you can convince both of them to support you. Or find the rest of those shares.”
She sometimes forgot that Tristan had probably been sitting in boardrooms since he had received his first voting shares in Rosier SA, presumably around the same age as she’d been heading off with nothing more than the pack on her back to seek her fortune. He wasn’t “just” an artiste. He might have spent each meeting sketching like he used to do in school, for all she knew, but in some ways he might be more familiar with the way a company worked than she was.
Her next step, if she continued on her Paris-New York career path, was to aim for CFO of a company, but that was a jungle gym step she hadn’t managed to make just yet. Head of accounting for a major perfume house was already pretty damn good for a twenty-nine-year-old who had only ten years before hiked her way to Paris and started out as an au pair putting herself through school.
“I think they’ll support me initially,” Malorie said. “They’re pretty focused on their own careers and don’t really care, beyond worrying I’ve lost my mind to think about throwing away my own career and coming back here.”
Tristan’s eyebrows drew together again. As if he’d like to say a word or two to her sisters.
“But eventually they might need their share of their heritage, of course,” Malorie said. “And they might want it in liquid form.”
Tristan’s eyebrows knit more deeply. Disturbed, puzzled, close to uncomprehending. Maybe he had paid less attention in Rosier SA’s quarterly board meetings than she thought. “Even if it pulled the rug out from under your feet?”
“Well…they do deserve their share of their heritage, Tristan.”
“Not if it makes the whole family weaker.”
Malorie blinked. It fit with what she knew of Tristan and the Rosiers as soon as he said it, but until he said it, it hadn’t occurred to her how fundamentally different his attitude would be. A man was supposed to be strong enough, independent enough, capable enough that he enriched his family, not took from it.
She sighed a little. Sometimes it was so hard not to be jealous of the Rosier family it hurt.
“What banks are you seeing about financing?”
“This afternoon, I’m meeting with Banque Provençale and Banque Alpes-Maritime. But I haven’t made up my mind I want to quit my job at Abbaye, Tristan. I’m just looking at possibilities.”
He nodded, easing right up to the edge of the cliff they were on to let a car fit by in the other direction. “Who are you meeting with at Provençale? Sophie Girard?”
Of course he would know everyone in a position of power in Grasse. Especially the women. Malorie sighed. “Yes.”
“And who is it at Alpes-Maritime? Hélène?”
Malorie narrowed her eyes at him, wondering how pretty Sophie and Hélène were and what had happened to all the old white men who used to hold all the banking positions in Grasse. And every other position of power, pretty much. “Yes.”
Tristan nodded absently, a faint smile on his lips. Probably he had good memories of Sophie or Hélène or both. Malorie fought the urge to slouch in her seat and kick the floorboard. Then sat upright as they headed upward on another twisty road. “Sainte-Mère? You’re not thinking of your cousins’ place, are you?”
He was distant cousins with the Delange brothers, who had the Michelin three-star restaurant Aux Anges in Sainte-Mère. Well, “distant” in Rosier terms, which meant that they all stayed pretty close, even though they were only second or third cousins or something like that. She’d thought they were just going out for a casual lunch. If he went three star on her, she wasn’t sure what that meant or how to deal with it.
Tristan’s lips quirked as he adroitly navigated the car into the impossibly angled, tiny parking lot below the walls of Sainte-Mère. “Somewhere less formal.”
Well, thank God for that.
The medieval walls rose above them as they made the short, steep climb up to the great arch that cut through those walls. All the muscles in Malorie’s shoulders relaxed as they passed under the arch, a wash of peace as if she had come home. Sainte-Mère wasn’t her home town, and she hadn’t been back inside these particular medieval walls in years, but the stone, the age, a village steeped in time…those were her. For all her ability to succeed in Paris and New York, this land was her origin story.
Tristan turned them up a steep, shadowed stair-street that ran along the homes built into the medieval walls. An ancient vine so thick it took both her hands to encircle it ran up the other side of the stair-street like a banister. She stroked her hand over the stone and rested it on the vine, letting it slide under her palm as they climbed the stairs.
The whole place smelled of stone and shadow, and—
“Orange blossom,” Tristan murmured. “Even your hair smells of orange blossom. You haven’t been getting married this morning, have you?” He pulled a small leather journal out of his back pocket as he spoke, flipping it to a clean page and sketching.
In the old days, a bride would wear a crown of orange blossoms, and the flowers were still hugely popular for spring weddings. Innocently white, sensually sweet. To her, orange blossom was the scent of the safe space of her past, a shelter and peace and happiness in a world where she’d often felt wary. But to most people, orange blossom was the scent of happily ever after.
“No, I’m saving myself for you,” Malorie said solemnly. On Tristan’s page, an arch of stone was taking rough shape, plus a fall of dark hair from a person not fully drawn, an orange blossom in that hair.
Tristan cut her a dark glance that suggested the urge to strangle her just never really died.
And for some reason, Malorie felt a little flush try to run up her cheeks. She concentrated on the feel of the vine
under her hand to keep it at bay. Stop making stupid jokes about Tristan and happily ever after. You can’t pull them off.
“Well, I’d never expect you to be good with money,” she said cheerfully, forging ahead nevertheless. She had to prove she was just joking, after all. Tristan of all people should be able to handle this kind of conversation. He’d promised, hand over heart, to save himself for ninety-year-old grandmothers at least twice in her hearing.
And those old eyes had just sparkled.
Damn him for being such a sweetheart.
“Or capable of concentrating on the bottom line,” she added. “So there’s that.”
“I produce money very well,” Tristan said, a little coolly. Which was true, his perfumes often grossed hundreds of millions. He shoved the journal in his pocket and started back up the stairs. “But I do it best by thinking about that money as little as possible.”
Yeah, that seemed to be a common trait with artists. Thus the invention of gallery owners or agents or, in Tristan’s field, accountants and perfume company executives. “Good thing I was there to think about it for you with Fugace, then,” she couldn’t resist saying.
He stopped dead on the uneven stairs and pivoted. “Okay, you know what—” He glared at her. “I had already made Fugace’s production cost as low as it could be without detriment to the juice. That’s part of a perfumer’s job. Just because I don’t like to think about it in the brainstorming process doesn’t mean I’m oblivious. I’m a professional, Malorie.”
She’d been twenty-five, the accountant on his perfume but not yet head of accounting, recently arrived in Abbaye’s New York office, which had become the once Paris-based company’s real center of power in the past decade. She’d been determined to prove how good she was. Tristan had been twenty-five, a rising star perfumer, Fugace the biggest brief he had landed for Rosier SA yet.
“Me, too,” she said. “I’m a professional, too.”
And way, way too smart, after the havoc and insecurity her father had created in their lives, to let a man’s emotions override her own financial control.
Tristan sighed sharply and turned toward a door. He ignored its rose-shaped knocker and pushed it open. There was a restaurant here now? All the restaurants used to be up around the main places and surrounding streets.
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 9
