Malorie’s teeth snapped together. “No one can tell the difference between the original formula and the profitable one, Tristan. No one.”
“I can.”
She waved her hands. “Well, no one that matters.”
Tristan glared at her, beyond outrage.
“You know what I mean!” She waved her hands more. “I can’t. Normal people can’t. No one who was going to buy it could! Merde, probably you couldn’t even tell yourself if it was a blind scent test.”
“Oh, trust me,” Tristan said grimly. “I could.”
She snorted. “Seriously, I should blindfold you and try it sometime.”
Tristan paused. An image rose up in his mind inexorably, and temper just kind of spread out in a lazier, hungrier heat through his body. His lips curled. “You thinking about bondage again, Malorie?”
A tide of red climbed up her cheeks and she made a sound between her teeth like a frustrated tiger. “Grrr, you are so annoying sometimes!”
She had no idea how much heat flamed inside him when he made her blush. Eager, wall-climbing heat, the kind that made him want to just do something. “I like the way you flip it,” he said agreeably. “Sometimes I get to tie you up and sometimes you get to tie me up. Although I’d prefer you drive me mad with something besides Fugace if you do it.”
“Oh, seriously, do not tempt me,” Malorie muttered, picking the bread knife up again.
He devoutly hoped she wasn’t imagining using that on him instead of what he wanted her to be imagining. He’d always had trouble getting Malorie to take the non-ice-water path in her fantasies. “So in this blindfolded image, do I have any clothes on, or am I completely vulnerable?”
The bread slice fell ragged and uneven to the cutting board.
Tristan allowed himself a slow, slow grin. “In mine you start with your clothes on,” he said helpfully. “I like to take my time.”
Malorie turned and glared at him.
It was so hard not to kiss Malorie sometimes it just about killed him. “What, weren’t you saving yourself for me?” he asked innocently.
Malorie set her knife down with a thump. “What am I doing here?”
“Slicing bread. But I think you forgot how to do it in America, so maybe I should take over.”
“Here,” Malorie hissed. “In your aunt’s house. That was a bastard trick to pull, Tristan.”
Had it been? He could be pretty damn bloody-minded about getting his way, as his grandfather had pointed out. “I thought it was best to get it over with. Then you wouldn’t worry about it anymore.”
Malorie stared at him. “And that wasn’t up to me to decide?”
Possibly. But then she might not have decided the thing he thought was best. People had a really bad habit of doing that.
Malorie’s record in that particular regard was abysmal.
“I should have been more subtle,” he admitted. “I didn’t expect you to start yanking on your wrist like that. I think you have trust issues.”
Malorie gaped at him. “You’re blaming me for not trusting you while you tricked me into doing something I didn’t want to do? And the only problem you see in the trick is that you weren’t more subtle about it?”
“You didn’t want to meet my aunt?” Tristan lifted his chin a little to convey that she had not only wounded him but was insulting his whole family. When you were wrong, always best to redirect.
“Merde, Tristan.” Abruptly Malorie bent over the cutting board and put her head in her hands. “My great-grandfather reported her best friend to the Gestapo. He got her killed.”
Élise Dubois, a schoolteacher with her own young son to protect, who had never wanted to have to be brave, but who had had a little Jewish girl hiding among the kids in her classroom and who hadn’t been able to let that little girl be taken. That had been how Élise started, working with his great aunt and his grandfather’s Resistance cell.
Tristan put his arm around Malorie and pulled her into his chest. Just concentrating on being her warmth. There was nothing else he could possibly do. “It’s in the past, Malorie,” he whispered finally. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
Malorie made a weary noise against his chest. “Everything’s so much easier in New York. You don’t have all this crap dragging you down like a ball and chain on your ankle.”
His arms tightened. Kind of the way his hand had tightened on her wrist when she tried to get away. “Those are roots, Malorie. Not a chain. They’re where you get your nutrients.”
“That’s easy for you to say! Your roots are beautiful!”
He dropped his hand to her wrist and pulled her after him to the door to his aunt’s house. He opened it and stood her on the steps in front of him, facing the great banister vine while he gripped her shoulders. “Look at it.”
She stood stiff under his hands.
“Look.” He gestured to the bottom of the stair. Where the vine grew out of a small space of earth in the cobblestoned street. He gestured to the top of the stair. Where, after being trained to climb under shadow, for the whole length of the stair street, trimmed back from every attempt to reach earlier for the sun, it had finally been allowed to strain upward again. And there, at the top of that thick vine that was as old as his aunt, a young growth had headed upward, and the fresh spring leaves of the grape vine were shifting gently in sunlight and breeze across a latticework of support.
Malorie still said nothing. But under his hands, her body shifted in a long, slow sigh.
“I like to climb,” he said. “So I’ve seen plenty of trees that started in a pocket of earth under a boulder, split that rock, and grew to be centuries old. I’ve seen trees that got crushed by another tree or split by lightning and still grew, in their new shape.”
“I’m not a tree,” she said. “I’m human. I have feet, to hike away.”
Tristan was silent for a moment. Then his hands caressed her shoulders. “You’re ruining my metaphor, Malorie,” he said gently.
And it was the gentleness that unstiffened her. That let that braced tension in her shoulders ease away. He savored it a moment, the loosened muscles under his hands, and then turned her back to him. “I didn’t bring you here to hurt you, Malorie.” Which she should damn well know, if she knew him at all. But Malorie’s distrust of his intentions didn’t really have anything to do with him, did it? It was about time he figured that out. “I just thought…it’s like a bandage, you know? Sometimes you just have to rip it off and let the wound get a little air.”
Malorie stood a step down from him, making her have to look much farther up than she usually did. Maybe that was why she looked so vulnerable and her eyes searched his as if she might actually be listening to him. She nodded slowly, still a little tired and sad.
He slid his hand down her arm to link his fingers snug and warm with hers and pull her back into the kitchen.
***
The lunch was…kind of nice, actually. Sitting in the walled garden, surrounded by the scents of herbs and the almond tree and stone and earth, reminded Malorie of her grandmother. Madame Delatour did keep testing her, but maybe because Malorie had been testing herself her whole life, she found she was almost pleased with the test. Finally, a chance to show I pass.
But after lunch, when Madame Delatour sent Tristan upstairs to change a lightbulb in a high ceiling, Malorie filled the sink with hot water and braced for whatever the grand old woman wanted to say to her in private.
“So what do you see in my nephew?” Madame Delatour asked, a little amused, stuffing mint into a tea pot.
So the old war hero was going to soften her up, chat about inconsequentials before she got to the real test. Fine. Malorie could deal with this. Although she’d almost find it safer to talk about Pierre Monsard.
“We’re not actually dating,” Malorie corrected. “We’re just”—what had Tristan called it?—“friends since school.”
“See too many of his flaws to take a chance on him, do you?”
“
What flaws?” Malorie said, confused.
Old dark eyes lifted from the teapot and held hers, Colette’s eyebrows lifting.
Seriously? Malorie had guessed Tristan’s great aunt and grandfather had impossible standards, but did Colette Delatour actually look at Tristan and see flaws? “He’s a sweet-tempered, disciplined, creative genius who loves his family so much he takes time for them every day. He’s athletic and funny and perceptive and the only grudge I’ve ever known him to hold is when someone ‘hurts’ one of his perfumes. What flaws?”
She tried not to openly glare at her elder, but she knew her gaze was far too challenging, maybe to the point of disrespect. It made her mad, the thought that anyone Tristan loved and looked up to could be so demanding that they thought he had flaws.
Colette Delatour turned away from her to pick up the kettle, and possibly there was a very faint curve around those old lips as she poured the boiling water over the mint. “Disciplined?” she asked after a moment.
Malorie controlled the need to roll her eyes like a teenager. “Just because he needs to move, you all act like that! To even get through perfume school, you have to memorize thousands of scents, and all their chemical formulae. He’s produced multiple top ten perfumes and he’s only twenty-nine. He’s disciplined as he—he—heck.”
She plunged her hands into the hot dishwater. It would normally be very offensive for her to try to wash the dishes in a near-stranger’s house, but Colette Delatour was ninety-seven and leaving them for her didn’t sit right. Besides, Malorie could claim America had worn off on her. Everybody knew Americans had no savoir-vivre.
“All those qualities, and I’m sure he would prefer you thought he was sexy,” Madame Delatour said mildly, setting the pot back on the burner and double-checking that she had turned that off.
“Oh, he’s far too sexy for his own good,” Malorie muttered to a dirty plate. Or at least for her own good.
There was the small sound of a shoe against wood in the doorway. She winced and glanced back.
Yes, sure enough. Tristan. Merde, how long had he been standing there?
He was staring at her, but when he saw she’d noticed, he came forward and pulled her hands out of the water. “I’ll do this. You can’t wash the dishes here.” And, sotto voce in English, “You’ll embarrass her.”
Colette Delatour didn’t look the least bit embarrassed to Malorie. If anything, she looked very faintly pleased with herself.
Well, at least Malorie had run out the clock and escaped whatever last test the merciless old hero had had planned for her. “I’ll go wash up,” she said, escaping to the bathroom.
***
Tristan watched Malorie go thoughtfully—always glad of a chance to watch that ass in motion in one of those skirts of hers—then glanced at his aunt with a raised eyebrow. “Merci, Tata.”
Tante Colette was smiling very faintly. “She’ll do.”
Yes, he had thought Tante Colette would like Malorie. The lunch had gone perfectly. Malorie had been respectful of his aunt’s age while still gathering her own pride around her like a shield, and Tante Colette had accepted that pride with considerable approval. He’d known something was up when he got sent upstairs for a lightbulb, but he’d figured by then that Malorie could handle it. Malorie had a wariness and vulnerability around warmth and praise from others that he was only just beginning to perceive, but when it came to fighting her corner, she could do just fine.
“What qualities?” he said.
His aunt raised her eyebrows at him. “Was she talking to you when she said it?”
He should have pressed a damn glass to the ceiling instead of actually changing that lightbulb. “Tata, have I ever mentioned you have a mean streak?”
Colette poured the tea into cups, the scent of mint surrounding him until he was wallowing in the comfort and challenge of home. “I believe that perfume recipe book was lost in the war, Tristan.”
“I wasn’t even talking about that this time!” he said, aggravated. Lost in the war, his ass. Although Tante Colette had honed her ability to lie calmly and convincingly in a time when not convincing would have meant torture and death for herself and others, so sometimes he had a doubt. He hoped she was just being mean, though, and making him wait for it until he’d—whatever the hell Raoul and Matt and Damien had done to deserve one of those precious heirlooms. “Come on, tell me what she said. I’ll wash the dishes.”
That faint smile. “You’ll wash the dishes anyway, Tristan.”
Well, yes. In fact, he was halfway done already, enjoying the way the lemon of the soap mixed with the mint of the tea. “Taking advantage of a man’s good nature,” he grumbled to a soup bowl, very audibly.
Tante Colette brought the tea cups to the kitchen table. “I guess if you want to know what qualities she thinks you have, you’ll have to get her to tell you herself.”
As if that was ever going to happen.
A flashing memory of Malorie’s incredulous face in the dimness of the Monsard store of treasures, that who the hell else would she want you to be?
“If you’ll take my advice, though, Tristan—”
“Always,” Tristan said promptly. Well, he at least thought about it most times. And usually learned to regret it when he didn’t take it.
“—you’ll tell her about those Monsard shares you bought from me.”
“Shh.” Tristan darted a glance toward the doorway. He wouldn’t put it past his aunt to—but no, Malorie wasn’t back yet. “Not yet.”
Tante Colette shook her head and took a sip of her mint tea. “Just don’t let her sell soaps to tourists in that place, whatever else you do. Or sell it to one of those giant New York fragrance houses looking to use Grasse to pretend it has a history.”
Tristan held up soapy hands. “Trust me, Tata, I am on it. Malorie may not know it yet, but that place is going to be beautiful again.”
Chapter 10
In the late afternoon, the great old doors of Monsard stood wide open, as did the windows, and dust particles stirred in the slanting sun across the courtyard. The boring old seventies-era display cases had been hauled out and pushed against a wall of the courtyard.
Malorie, her hands full of bank folders, strode forward and stopped dead. Shirtless, Tristan Rosier was on his knees in the main showroom, ripping up carpet.
Oh, wow. How the hell was she supposed to recover from that view?
Lean-hipped and strong-shouldered, his back had excellent definition from all that climbing and windsurfing and who knew what else he did—hauling things on the family farm, probably. The Rosiers sure were attached to their belief that they were peasants. Maybe back in the Revolution, they’d seen the value of keeping their feet firmly planted in the earth and their heads well away from a guillotine, and they’d been clinging to that strategy ever since.
Or maybe they just liked the land that much. Having their fingers in dirt or clinging to stone, their hands buried in roses and jasmine.
Her shoulders still felt so…eased, from that moment on the steps of his aunt’s home, when his tone had softened from insistent to gentle, accepting, and those long, strong fingers had stopped forcing her to look where he wanted and changed to a caress, letting her turn back around. She could have stepped right into him then and pressed her face against his chest, but of course she still knew the difference between fantasy and reality. But she’d faced his aunt far more easily after, her shoulder muscles warm all through lunch from that touch.
So maybe she had forgotten how to be properly braced against him, and that was why seeing him half-naked now zinged through to the end of every nerve she had.
His back muscles shifted as he sliced a roll of carpet and taped it closed, then tossed it sideways onto a pile of similar rolls. It was only April, but his back was already tanned from his insatiable need for outdoor living, and the glimpse of abs when he twisted for the throw made her mouth go dry.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, outraged
at herself. This was getting out of hand.
Tristan always had been someone who, given an inch, would take a mile. All with a bewitchingly charming grin just to make sure no one stopped him sooner.
He sat back on his heels, gloved hands resting on his jeans, a black lock flopping over his forehead, started to grin at her—and held up a hand, his face scrunching. Abruptly he twisted away and sneezed.
“À tes souhaits,” Malorie found herself saying automatically.
He sneezed again.
“À tes amours,” she said, a little more warily.
He peeked at her over his elbow and sneezed one more time, this one clearly forced.
She narrowed her eyes. “Qu’elles durent toujours. If you want your loves to last forever, which, with so many fish in the sea, you probably don’t.”
“It’s a good thing you told me about your father so I don’t have to take your cynicism personally anymore,” Tristan said cheerfully. “How was Hélène?”
“Suspiciously helpful.”
He nodded. “That CV of yours must have knocked her socks off. Who wouldn’t want to loan money to someone who could become head of accounting for Abbaye before she was twenty-nine?”
“She seemed particularly impressed with the fact that I could curb you.”
Tristan looked indignant. “You actually mention ruining Fugace on your CV?”
“I’m guessing you mentioned it to her. Would that have been in pillow talk or in a little call just after we had lunch?”
“If my past love life ever turns out to be your business, I’ll let you know, Malorie.”
Ouch.
He pulled off a glove and waggled his bare left hand. “If you like it, you gotta put a ring on it.”
She folded her arms and glared at him.
His gaze drifted down her body in a way that made her pencil skirt feel too short, all the way down to her ankles, then drifted back up. He gave a dreamy little sigh.
The problem with that dreamy sigh was the way it made her nipples ache. “Are you going to explain any time soon what you’re doing in my building ripping things up without my permission?”
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 11
