“‘My building.’ Nice ring to that, isn’t it?” Tristan said. “You like saying it?”
Yes. She gave him her most repressive look.
“What, you’re trying to pretend you wanted this carpet to stay?”
“I know you Rosiers think everything in Grasse belongs to you, but where do you get off waltzing in here and doing whatever you choose to my family property?”
“Well, it provokes you. That’s always fun.”
She fisted her hands in the crooks of her elbows.
“Allez, Malorie. I’m helping you. You know you want to see that floor again.”
Malorie flung out her arms. “Why are you helping me?”
“I want to make sure you do things right. I’ve got a vision for this place.”
She stared at him. “Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “It’s restored to glory. All those Gallé display tables below are back up here and on them are the most beautiful perfumes. There’s only one flaw in the vision, actually—you.”
That would hurt more if it wasn’t perfectly obvious that Tristan was just trying to get a rise out of her. Odd thought—did he get as much of a zing out of provoking her as she did out of provoking him? “Do I spoil your perfect little world, Tristan?”
He wrinkled his nose. “You’d want to focus on the bottom line. When this place could be a show house. Everything that’s best about perfumery. Can you imagine? A company where the perfume took priority. Where it was about making the best, not making the most money.”
“Okay. I imagined it. It already failed spectacularly in my vision, and it only took six months.”
He cast her a dark glance. There she went, shattering his illusions again. Waking him out of his blissful, sun-kissed dreams to make sure he didn’t get skin cancer. Talk about a lousy role in his life.
On the other hand, it would be perfectly crappy to get skin cancer, wouldn’t it?
“What happens in your dream world?” she said. “You buy up Monsard and run it like a tax write-off?”
“Maybe you’re underestimating the public and the power of a great perfume,” Tristan said haughtily.
Right. Malorie pinched the bridge of her nose. “You do remember this is the same public that has kept Spoiled Brat in the top ten for the past four years?”
“Niche perfumes,” Tristan said. “To people with taste.”
A glimpse of that passionate artist heart of his showed through his eyes. It was always hard to say no to Tristan when that happened. Well, it was always hard to say no to Tristan period, but that was the worst—when she knew it truly mattered to him.
“I really don’t think it’s smart to limit your market to such a tiny group.”
He shook his head. “It’s the perfect place to make it work, Malorie. Here, maybe eventually another shop in some expensive part of Paris. It’s what Monsard was so good at it in the old days, before the war, right? Appealing to the clientele who wanted something unique to them, something with taste.”
The old glory days. Of glamor and happiness and hope.
Could this place nourish hope? This place that was all past, so much failure. Was it roots or a ball and chain?
“Is that why you’re helping?” Malorie tried to keep her tone cynical. Tough. Not about to be taken in. Not even by Tristan. “Softening me up so you can take it over?”
Tristan looked puzzled. “Malorie. We’ve known each other most of our lives. We’ve been friends at the very least since high school.”
“You never even spoke to me in high school,” Malorie said, confused.
Tristan looked as if she’d slapped him. “You don’t even remember, do you.” His voice had flattened. It wasn’t a question.
“I mean, just the kind of automatic exchanges when we crossed paths. ‘Pardon’, when you brushed too close to me in the hall. ‘Excuse me, do you mind if I reach past you to get that book?’”
Tristan closed his utility knife and rested it on his knee. “And how often did that happen, Malorie?”
She stared at him. He held her eyes, his gaze straight and a little stern, reminding her oddly of his great aunt’s gaze. That gaze that wasn’t going to let someone wiggle away from the truth.
“You were always friendly to everybody,” she said, slowly. “That was just the way you were. Even to me.”
“‘Even’?” Tristan said blankly.
She made a little wave of her hand. “You know, the…nerdy girl. With the cheap clothes. A Monsard.”
Oh, here we go again, Tristan thought. “You know I never even thought about what your last name was? Not ever.”
Or maybe, well…once in a while had he thought about it, on those museum field trips, when he’d noticed the blankness of her expression and the way she stood far to the back and so he’d gone to stand a little too close to her, so that she’d have a shoulder pressing against hers. If he’d had the right, he would have put his arm around her, but he didn’t, so…he’d done what he could.
He tried to wrap his mind around it, but he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to grow up as the great-granddaughter of a collaborator. His entire existence had been dominated by the pride and glory of his grandparents and great aunt, Resistance heroes. He had always had a lot to live up to. He couldn’t imagine what it was like to have a lot to rise above.
One corner of Malorie’s lips twisted so wryly he felt vaguely as if he’d been guilty of white male privilege or something. Privileged oblivion to someone else’s point of view.
“You wore cheap clothes?” he said blankly. Hadn’t they all just worn jeans and T-shirts?
“Compared to most of the girls who hung around you, yes,” she said, back to that dryness of hers.
He frowned a little. He had no idea what the clothes cost, but yeah, now that she mentioned it, he did remember short skirts and nice quality boots and some absolutely vile perfumes in the circle of girls around him. Some people thought every woman should have a signature scent, but like many aspects of adolescence, the search for that identity had sometimes manifested itself in glaringly over-sexualized, awkward ways.
Malorie had left no sillage behind her at all, in the high school halls. Or rather her sillage had been a space, a wake of quiet where a man could take a deep breath and almost hope to clear his head. But usually she was gone far too fast for him to reach that hope.
“Did I ever do anything that suggested I gave a crap about any of those things?” Tristan said, profoundly irritated. He’d spent all those years in high school unable to touch Malorie not because she was busy dismissing him as an immature trouble-maker but because she was too proud to risk him looking down at her?
Didn’t that just figure, about Malorie.
“You know, you are very annoying,” he said.
Her lips quirked in that dry way that made him want to just kiss the hell out of her. “You’ve mentioned.”
“One of these days you’re going to quit screwing my life up for ridiculous reasons.” Tristan attacked the carpet with a vengeance. “‘Oh, this ingredient costs too much.’ ‘Oh, my clothes don’t cost enough.’ Whatever, Malorie.”
“You do a terrible falsetto.”
“Thank you. That’s the first nice thing you’ve said about me in our whole freaking lives.”
Chapter 11
He’d managed to get another swathe of carpet sliced, rolled, taped and tossed over with the others, just getting back into the rhythm, when Malorie’s shoes appeared to his left, on still untouched threadbare carpet.
It had been a long time since he’d knelt at Malorie’s feet, and a wave of erotic nostalgia washed through him. Hell, too bad he didn’t have a pencil or a textbook to drop at them.
Malorie must mean to help him, because she slipped out of her elegant heels, standing on the carpet in bare feet. Her toes flexed into their freedom, and hot blood pounded in his head, taking him right back to when he was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
Only he knew
a lot more about women now. He knew those heels made her feet sore. So if a man caught her foot in one strong grip right now and squeezed, how long would it take him to have her moaning and twisting in that pencil skirt and begging him to push it higher up her thighs?
In fact, if he rolled her back on the rest of this dusty carpet and took one of her feet in his hand and—
Heat flushed up under his skin. Damn Malorie got to him.
“That’s not true,” Malorie said, and the sexual fantasy was so vivid in his head that he almost argued with her about it. Oh, yes, you do get to me, Malorie. Just because I never get to you doesn’t mean we’re all as immune to maddening sexual desire.
“That it’s the first nice thing. On that report on our group that our teacher made each of us do on our Occupation project, I said you were an excellent partner, easy to work with, contributing lots of ideas, doing your part.”
It was ridiculous how much that warmed his insides. “Really?” He felt all fuzzy with pleasure. Get a grip, Tristan.
But he’d liked working on the group project. It had been the kind of academic work he could actually do well—not pinned to a desk, able to sprawl out in an empty classroom after school, move, minimize distractions, work on a subject that interested him. Watch the way Malorie’s neck curved over their poster as she was carefully etching letters. Plus, he’d been dying to prove to the smart girl in school that he was smart, too, even if he couldn’t fit his brains the right way into the school box. So he’d really put his all into the project.
Malorie shrugged.
Hey. Was Malorie blushing a little?
Now that was interesting.
“What did you say about me?” she challenged.
He’d actually had to rewrite the whole group evaluation several times, because every time he got to the part where he had to reflect on his partner’s work, he blinked after a while to find he’d sketched Malorie’s face and beside it notes for how to capture her in a scent. How to grasp that sense of space in her sillage, of cleanness and refuge.
He still hadn’t quite figured out how to do that with a scent. A perfume seemed inherently that space’s antithesis.
He’d come the closest with Fugace, but…well, anyway.
“Pretty much the same,” he said. Merde but her legs went up forever. And his mouth went dry and his brain short-circuited just like it had every single damn time he’d dropped his pencil at her feet in high school. “That was before you went into financial management so it was still true.”
Just crouching to tape the next carpet roll for him, she stiffened upright. “Tristan. You know, sometimes it is very hard to not just”—her hands flexed in the air in a frustrated motion—“do something to you.”
“Yeah.” He retracted the blade of the utility knife. “Tell me about it.” He took his time pulling off his work gloves, savoring the anticipation. “Although it’s hardly my fault you sold your soul to the devil.”
If she was one of his cousins, he’d make some joke about “it must run in the family”—just put his finger right on that old wound and make it into something they could laugh about. But she’d probably take him seriously and shut down like a light. Worse, she’d probably be hurt. So he sat on that bit of humor.
“You know, one of these days I may strangle you,” Malorie said.
He shrugged. “My neck’s right here.” Bring it, baby. Tristan had been picking up girls since he was five years old, when three or four of them at once, none of them Malorie, had insisted he “marry them” on the playground in a mass ceremony that had involved some kind of dancing and them chasing him and throwing flowering weeds at him. A lifetime of experience had taught him one thing for certain: if annoyance got her to grab him and break that physical barrier, then he had won half the battle.
Her eyes flickered over the hollow of his throat, over his shoulders, down his chest. She turned her head away and focused intensely on the carpet.
Yes.
“Look,” he said. “I’ll even help.” He took her free hand, a jolt of intimacy right up his arm, and curved her fingers around his throat. “Go ahead.” He lifted his chin bravely. “I’m ready to die.”
Malorie laughed involuntarily at that, but her laugh broke on an indrawn breath. Her eyes flickered to her hand on his throat. .
She jerked her hand away and looked back at the carpet. But not before he had seen her dilated pupils.
Yes.
“Your legs kill me,” he said. “Remember back in high school when I was always bumping into you in the hall so I could pick up your textbooks?”
“What?” She looked so blankly astonished that it set his teeth on edge. Maybe if he bit her thigh that would get through to her.
“You don’t remember.” Had he penetrated her sexual consciousness at all back then? “You know, it’s a good thing there were other girls back in high school, Malorie, or your brush offs would have given me a complex.”
She gave a faint snort. “Yeah, I noticed you and the other girls.”
Well, good. He hoped she’d wanted to scratch his eyes out over them. That would have been an emotion. “You had the first option.” He dropped his gloves on the exposed plywood. “You just turned it down.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Why do you keep harping on about high school? We happened to sit next to each other in a few classes, but come on, Tristan. We didn’t hang out or anything.”
This still had the power to annoy him so damn much. “We did not just happen to sit next to each other, Malorie. It took some strategizing on my part.” Usually he’d aimed for the desk behind her. It probably sounded creepy now, but it was about the only way he had gotten through high school. Watching girls, and most particularly her. He’d branched out more than a little when it became obvious that his crush on her was a lost cause and that plenty of other girls were more than happy to give him all those sensual experiences he craved. But somehow or other, even when he was surrounded by pretty girls, she’d always pull him back to her.
She stared at him as if he’d just turned her whole world upside down.
“You don’t remember all the times my pencil rolled under your desk?”
“Not really.” She was watching him as if he was transforming into a werewolf right before her eyes. “I mean, people were always dropping things.”
They were, because it gave them an excuse to shift in their seats. Tristan wasn’t the only restless captive.
But still—pretty nearly the only thing he’d retained to this day from high school math class were those little zinging memories of stretching a hand past Malorie’s legs for his pencil, and she didn’t even remember at all? “What the hell were you focused on, the Pythagorean theorem?”
“Well…probably whatever the subject was.”
Bon sang.
That was probably why she could go into financial management and accounting. She had the ability to stay focused on maddeningly boring things as if they mattered.
More than him brushing her legs?
Damn.
“It would roll right here. If I aimed it right.” He stretched his hand forward until his thumb and then his forearm brushed her ankle, pretending to pick up a pencil. Malorie went very still. Not shifting away from that brush of his hand. “I guess I was harassing you, but I was a stupid teenager and didn’t realize.”
Malorie stared at him. “I thought you were just being you. When we were four, you used to spill crayons all over the place on purpose just so you could get up and pick them up.”
“And you’d always have to help me,” he remembered. His hand curved around her calf. Not tentative. He made it warm and sure, as if it had the right to be there. As if it had always had the right to be there. “And even though you should have appreciated the opportunity I made for you to get out of those little desks and crawl around on the floor chasing colorful things, you still considered it highly unfair. I don’t know why. You didn’t even have to get in trouble for it—I
was the one who shouldered all the blame.”
Her lips twitched a little. That warmth came into her eyes, the warmth that always got to him, as if fundamentally, deep down under her need to protect herself, Malorie really liked him. “I should have known that was your perspective.”
His thumb ran down over the front of her ankle, tracing that tendon, his fingers massaging subtly into her lower calf. Her calves had been pale in New York, but here they had already flushed warm gold again from her hike through the hills. “I should have known it wasn’t yours.”
Her head was bent so she could watch his hand on her calf, dark climber gold against spring hiking gold, both of them with sun-loving Mediterranean skin. She gave a little shrug of one shoulder. “Charming guys are always getting away with murder while the women have to do all the work.”
Ouch. “That’s not who I am, Malorie.” His palm rubbed, slow and firm, up her calf. He looked up at her parted lips, at that confused, hungry expression she was trying to control. She still hadn’t pulled her leg away. “You know that now, don’t you? That I like to work. And I don’t like, ever, to let people down.”
A sudden rush of emotion trembled across her face, almost like the brink of tears. “You’re such a nice guy, Tristan,” she said, muffled, her hand covering her face. “Do you have a mean bone in your body?”
Merde, if he ended up in the friend zone after all this, he was going to lose his mind. Malorie right down the street from him treating him like a sexless friend might actually be a more misery-inducing prospect than Malorie in New York, dating other men as if both she and her dates were cool, independent skyscrapers.
He scraped his calluses very gently behind her knee, and she shivered from her toes to her head. “Some of my sexual fantasies about you are kind of mean. You beg in them for a long time.”
Malorie lowered her hand enough to cover her mouth and stare at him, green eyes a little dazed, as if those dilated pupils of hers were letting in too much light.
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 12
