He pulled her inside after him, and a chill ran right up her spine as she saw photos on the walls, a hall, a homey kitchen with orange-red pots hanging on the walls. “Tristan!” she hissed. She yanked on her wrist.
That climber’s hand tightened into an unbreakable grip without the slightest effort at all. “Tata?” he called. He poked his head in the empty kitchen, then pulled Malorie along behind him down the hall, checking a laundry room next.
“What are you doing?” Malorie said. “Tristan, please tell me this isn’t your—”
“Tante Colette?” Tristan pushed through another door and into a great walled garden.
Malorie felt as if she’d been expecting a friendly dip in a warm pool and he’d plunged her into ice water. Colette? Colette Delatour? His Resistance hero great aunt who was one of the people who had born witness against Malorie’s own great-grandfather in his trial for collaboration? Colette Delatour, whose closest friend, Élise Dubois, had been betrayed to her death by Pierre Monsard to advance Maison de Monsard power.
Oh, God.
“Tristan, please—” Malorie dug at his hand with her nails, trying to pry it off her wrist. Before she could switch to open violence like punching him in the kidneys, they were in the garden.
An old, old woman sat in a rocking chair in the sun, her eyes closed, not moving.
Tristan stilled. His grip on her wrist finally relaxed, but his hand slid down and closed around hers, his fingers linking and clinging for a moment, in a weird shift, as if he was clinging to her for safety.
A little shock of fear. Surely Madame Delatour was just sleeping? Although…she was old. She’d been an adult during the war. Malorie’s own grandmother had only been a child then, and she’d already succumbed to her own old age.
Tristan loosed her hand and strode forward, kneeling by his great aunt’s chair, his hand closing around her wrist. His face relaxed as soon as he touched her. “Tata?” He gave her hand a little shake.
The old woman’s eyes opened and Malorie went still as a mouse hoping not to be noticed by an owl. But Tristan broke into a smile, and watching him, she thought: He is so freaking adorable. God, how can anyone that sexy and arrogant and irrationally artistic have that much generous love in him to give to his people?
It made her so damn jealous of his people.
Colette Delatour frowned down at him. “Sneaking up on me?”
A little brown and white floppy-eared dog that looked as if it might be a cross between a Jack Russell and a King Charles trotted out from somewhere to lick Tristan’s hand. Tristan scratched its ears. “I’m going to buy you a mastiff. Patapouf here has lost his ferocious guard dog edge.”
From the way Colette Delatour’s time-worn face relaxed in amusement, it was possible the little dog had never had a ferocious edge. She let her hand rest on Tristan’s head and gently ruffled his hair. Another thing that made Malorie jealous. She’d spent most of her teenage and adult life wanting to ruffle Tristan’s hair. Or yank it out.
And she’d still never touched it once.
Colette stood, in that careful way that meant her knees hurt, which Malorie recognized from her own grandmother. Colette Delatour must be, what, sixteen or seventeen years older than Chloé Monsard? But she didn’t look older. Meaning either that at a certain point age just stopped showing in the same way or that Colette Delatour had really good genes.
Which would just figure for a Rosie—oh, right. Colette Delatour wasn’t genetically a Rosier, was she? Her mother had married Jean-Jacques Rosier’s father, right?
Maybe that valley of roses just had particularly good air.
Or maybe having all her grandnephews around, instead of being left all alone, gave her something to live for. Malorie bent her head, on a wave of grief and guilt again.
“I brought a friend for lunch, Tata.” Tristan sprang up with the ease of an intensely physical man nearly seventy years Madame Delatour’s junior, kissed her cheeks, and offered his arm.
His aunt patted it but didn’t take it, standing straight and tall and on her own steam.
As usual when Malorie saw her, she was so impressed that she desperately wished she could hide behind that old garden shed over there and be overlooked. And, as usual, she had too much pride to actually do it. She took a deep breath, standing straight and tall herself.
“How nice,” Colette Delatour said, studying Malorie across the garden. Then those old, dark eyes slanted Tristan a very thoughtful look, a faint curve to her lips. “I’m trying to think when you’ve ever introduced me to a friend.”
“And let you scare them off?” Tristan retorted.
“So what does this mean? That you don’t care if she gets scared, or that you’re finally dating someone with guts?”
Tristan gave his aunt a profoundly disgruntled look. One of those will you shut up already? looks common to close families that liked to embarrass each other. Malorie wondered how to correct the impression they were dating without having to draw more attention to herself and thus brave the old woman’s judgement of her. Tristan might not mind the word dating, but she’d like to set herself apart from the thousands of other women he’d taken to lunch, dinner, or bed.
“Malorie.” Tristan beckoned. Malorie braced herself and kept her chin steady, not low but not defiantly high either, as she crossed the garden. “Tata, may I introduce Malorie Monsard?”
A subtle shock around the old woman’s eyes at the name. Malorie tightened all her muscles.
“She and I went to school together,” Tristan said blithely. “Malorie, this is my aunt, Colette Delatour.”
“It’s an honor,” Malorie said very low. She was afraid to hold out her hand and have it rejected, and it would be far too much presumption for someone her age to kiss such a venerable old lady’s cheeks on first introduction. So her hand flexed uneasily at her side, and she kept straight and still.
Colette Delatour gave her a steady, searching look from head to toe. Her expression was thoughtful and, now that she had schooled away that first flicker at Malorie’s last name, unreadable. “I knew your great-grandparents,” she finally said neutrally.
Malorie flushed in a painful, inexorable wave of shame and shot Tristan a look she wished could stab him. Oblivious, secure bastard.
“And your grandmother,” the old woman said, and Malorie folded her arms over her middle. Someone of Colette Delatour’s age had probably severely judged a sixteen-year-old who had found herself pregnant back in the fifties.
“And your father,” Colette Delatour said.
Malorie’s jaw tightened. Tristan’s eyes narrowed on his aunt, his face gone grave and his lips parting as if he was about to speak.
“Your grandmother was a strong woman,” Colette Delatour said. Simply and flatly, as if no one could ask for a better compliment so there was no sense putting flowers around it.
“I know.” Malorie held the old hero’s eyes with a sudden flash of anger. How dare you test me? I test myself.
Her whole life, she’d been testing herself. Trying to make sure that on the exam of life, her own results were different.
“What about you?” Colette said.
Malorie said nothing, her arms folded, her eyes holding the older woman’s stubbornly.
“When she was nineteen, she hiked all the way from here nearly to Paris, and made friends with a family on the trail, and worked as their au pair so she could have a place to stay in Paris, and put herself through school there, and now she’s head of accounting at Abbaye,” Tristan said suddenly.
Malorie took a little breath. He’d just defended her. No one did that. It felt so good to have someone fighting at her side it hurt.
Colette’s gray-white eyebrows went up a little. “Is that so?”
Malorie gave a jerky shrug of one shoulder, not unfolding her arms.
“I always wondered if I should have had more adventures,” said the woman who had faced down Gestapo, been a central point of a spy network of perfumers throughout Fran
ce, and helped thirty-six children escape through the Alps. Her tone was a little wistful.
Malorie felt her arms relaxing on the urge to give an incredulous laugh. She didn’t dare go that far, but still.
“Oh, because you haven’t traveled enough, Tata.” Tristan rolled his eyes, clearly opting to pursue a possible lightening of this moment. He looked at Malorie. “Do you know she went to Nepal, Kenya, and New Zealand before she was fifty? This was traveling back in the fifties and sixties, you understand. She’s been more places than I have!”
Colette relaxed her gaze on Malorie and raised her eyebrows at Tristan. “I’ve had close to seventy more years of opportunities, last I checked.”
“There you go, rubbing your age in to one-up the rest of us again.” Tristan shook his head.
Colette laughed. Laughed. For his next feat, Tristan was probably going to get a stone statue to unbend and become human.
Tristan leaned forward and kissed his aunt’s cheek again, spontaneously. “Shall I go make lunch, Tata?”
“I’ve got a soup on already. You could cut some herbs and greens for a salad and slice the bread and bring everything out. If your friend has the courage to stick around.”
***
Tristan had always found happiness easy. Unhappiness was hard and painful, and he avoided it if he could. But happiness was everywhere.
In the slide of his fingers over stone. In the scent of mint released as he clipped the greens for the salad. In the scent of the almond tree, its blooms pale and their fragrance irresistible, filling the garden with a gentle sweetness. In the walls rising around him, this safe, quiet, sheltered space where he had hunted treasure as a child with his cousins, sat and talked to his aunt as a teenager and adult.
He worried about Malorie, who didn’t seem to have access to as much happiness and who never seemed to trust it when it was offered. Who’d cut his heart down to the size of a business deal, when he’d held it out to her in Fugace. Who’d kept her quiet concentration when they’d worked together on that Occupation project in high school, as if the Occupation was more important than the present was. Or just safer.
His aunt had challenged her courage, but Malorie was always going to win that challenge. It wasn’t her courage at question, quite the reverse. It was how she never let her guard down at all. She was worse than Damien, and almost as bad as Tante Colette and his grandfather.
He offered her a sprig of mint, one of the most compact sources of happiness he could lay his hands on, its crisp, vivid fragrance like a miracle. He knew it wasn’t in fashion to really believe in miracles and go to church and all that, not beyond weddings and baptisms, not since his grandmother had died. But it was hard for a perfumer to harden his heart to all possibility. All the scents in the world that were all around him, that anyone could have, always seemed to be a way that someone had said, Here. My gift. Be happy.
So he just tried to pass it on.
Malorie was clipping the butter lettuce, but she crushed a couple of the mint leaves between her fingers and brought the sprig to her face, breathing slowly, her eyes closing. Her face grew wistful and a little sad. Ah. Scents could do that, too—remind someone of something lost. Her grandmother?
He crushed some thyme and brought it close to her nose while her eyes were closed, to see if she caught the change of scent. Her nose crinkled, and her eyes opened, meeting his with a little leap of warmth in them. “A garden is your idea of heaven, isn’t it?”
Heaven was a concept he’d never attached to. It seemed so pale and bland. No one ever talked about the scents in heaven, or the dirt, or the little earthworm curling back into the soil there. There didn’t seem to be any granite cliffs to offer a man a challenge, or harvests to bring in with his cousins, or roofs to repair for his aunt on a Saturday morning. No sweat and work and he was pretty sure that meant no laughter, because where did the bonding come from if it wasn’t through the efforts you made together? He bet no kid ever broke his arm sneaking over his aunt’s wall in the night, in heaven, or burnt the sole off his shoe leaping over a bonfire when his parents thought he was in bed, or jumped off a twenty-seven-meter cliff that could have killed him.
“I like life right here,” he said. He didn’t know what he’d do when everyone he loved started leaving him by dying, and then he’d have to choose between the world he loved and following after them. As the youngest, there was a real possibility that one day he’d be the last one of his cousins here.
His heart twisted hard. He slid away from the thought, back into happiness, taking the basket they’d filled and heading into the house. Malorie followed while Tata smoothed a tablecloth over the teak table outside.
“Do you worry about her?” Malorie asked quietly behind him.
He set the basket by the sink and looked around.
“Earlier, when you first saw her,” she said, a little awkwardly, “I thought you acted a little…scared, just for a second.”
“She’s ninety-seven,” Tristan said, and his throat tightened suddenly, and his eyes stung. He turned on the water, angling his shoulder so she couldn’t see his face. He hated having so much emotion sometimes. It had been the bane of his existence when he was a child, before he’d learned to hide it from his older cousins. “So sometimes I…I mean sometimes…” He saw Tante Colette sleeping in the sunlight, and fear jolted through him that this time she wasn’t sleeping. He washed herbs in this kitchen and imagined that moment when all the life in it would die, and the kitchen and the garden would become new holes in his life, like the hole Lucien had left. Like the hole Raoul had left for so long. Like the hole Malorie had left, damn her for being so oblivious to it.
And some day his grandfather wouldn’t be there to walk the hills with him, and some day…
Malorie’s hand touched his back lightly. As if he might be contagious. “I wish you weren’t such a nice guy,” she said softly.
His nose crinkled, because it was still stinging, and he had to get that down before he turned. “Why the hell would you wish that?”
“Oh, you’d never understand.” A thread of darkness in her tone. She turned to pull the big country loaf out of its linen bag and set it on the heavy wood cutting board.
“I might be smarter than I look,” Tristan said dryly. At least she’d helped that stinging go away. “Why don’t you give explaining it to me a try?”
Malorie just angled him an ironic look and took the bread knife to the big country loaf. The scent of fresh bread released into the kitchen, along with the mint and thyme and freshness of the salad and the cozy comfort of a soup full of roots—potatoes, carrots, parsnips, puréed together and simmering to wait for them. A spring meal—the rests of the winter and the promise of the summer. Anything could grow in the spring. Even things that had been frozen by winter again and again and again.
“It makes it hard to resist you,” Malorie said suddenly.
A jolt ran through Tristan’s body. Malorie had never, in their entire lives, given any sign that she found him hard to resist. She had always kept herself like a secret garden, behind the only damn wall in the world that he couldn’t manage to climb. “That must be what I don’t quite get, Malorie.” He cut off the faucet and turned to face her. “Why would you want to do that?”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you, Tristan.”
She might as well have hauled off and punched him. “Why not?”
He’d trust anyone in his family. They’d been, for generations now, the absolute bedrock of this region. It was his own generation’s most fundamental responsibility, never to fail in that trust. To be honest and honorable and strong and ready to fight for what was right. He couldn’t imagine failing in that duty; who would he be if he wasn’t those things?
And beyond that, he was the emotional bedrock of his family. Even his grandfather realized it. Merde, when his grandfather and great aunt died, he might be the only one left to keep his family sane. To keep them together. He was the
youngest, and yet all that responsibility to be wise, to give the right advice, to redirect someone with a wry word down the right path, would fall on him. What the hell had he ever done to anyone that was untrustworthy?
“You could have any woman you wanted, Tristan,” Malorie said dryly. “And you do.”
He pressed mint-scented thumb and forefinger to the crease between his brows. “No, I obviously don’t, Malorie. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
She gazed at him blankly.
Seriously?
“Really want,” Malorie said. “Not like some game. Although that might be the problem. It’s all just a big fun game to you. And for most of us, it’s a little more serious.”
What was wrong with games? What was wooing a woman supposed to be, a war exercise?
“I know you’re more serious, Malorie,” Tristan said between his teeth. “Trust me, that has been repeated to me, ad nauseum, since we were four years old.”
“I didn’t mean like our teachers would say in school,” Malorie said uneasily. Sérieux. Willing to focus, hard-working. Or in Tristan’s case, pas sérieux. Not willing, not a good student, not disciplined. “I know you work hard.”
His jaw had set harder than he wanted it to. He searched her eyes. “Do you?”
“Of course I know that!” Malorie said, exasperated. “Tristan, come on. You’re one of the top perfumers in the world, and you’re only twenty-nine. You just can’t focus well when you’re sitting still. Any idiot can see that.”
“Yeah, but you’re not an idiot,” Tristan said dryly. Which he’d been called, by teachers. Arrête de faire ton imbécile, Tristan. Stop acting like an idiot. “So maybe you can’t.”
“What are you trying to say, that I’ve got my head up my ass?” Malorie folded her arms. “Of course I can see that. Hell, the perfumes you’ve made. I mean Fugace was beauti—” She broke off, wincing.
He felt as if he’d taken a blow to his middle. It stopped all breath and it hurt and he couldn’t figure out what to make of it. “You realized Fugace was beautiful? And you still ruined it?”
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 10
