Crown of Bitter Orange

by Laura Florand

  Malorie’s whole body clenched and then released in one long wave of pleasure, her fingers kneading into his shoulders. “Jerk,” she managed.

  Tristan laughed and nipped her lip. His lips slid to her ear. “Pépé liked you,” he whispered. “I told you he would.”

  That made Malorie’s throat tighten. “He said I had my grandmother’s bones.”

  “He must have had a lot of respect for your grandmother, then.”

  Her throat ached more. Tristan just gave her things, so easily—these words that strengthened her, that made her feel as if she was someone good. Still on some level it scared her, because her father had done that, too—made a person feel wonderful about herself, all because of him, and then, once she lived for that admiration, used it against her as a weapon.

  But that’s not Tristan. That’s never been Tristan.

  “It’s too bad your grandfather never told her that,” Malorie said low. “Rosier respect could have made a big difference to her life.”

  “Your great-grandfather hurt him and Tante Colette pretty badly,” Tristan said gently. “And Pépé was only about ten years older than your grandmother. You have to remember that right after the war, he was barely out of his teens. He was a hero of the Resistance not because he always made the right decisions but because he made decisions at all. He acted. He tried.”

  Yeah. She didn’t want to blame Jean-Jacques Rosier or anyone else for all the old wounds in this country. Let’s let that blame go. Let’s bring out the good again, let its dust sparkle in the light, the old Art Nouveau gleam from before the war ever was.

  “Malorie.” Tristan loosed her clasped hair and twirled the almond twig that fell free between his fingers. “What is this place? There’s this hint of orange blossom coming over the walls, and…you know damn well if you don’t show me, I’m going to climb the walls on my own to see what’s inside.”

  She’d given him her grandmother’s address to pick her up, but she’d met him outside the gate then. He’d gazed at the walls a moment with his eyes narrowed, his head slightly tilted, but then he’d looked at her in her dress and seemed to forget pretty much everything else.

  “You wouldn’t call the police on me if I did, would you?” Tristan said.

  No. Which he knew damn well. Malorie rolled her eyes. “There you go again, getting away with murder just because people like you too much to punish you for it.”

  He smiled, running his thumb over her cheek to tug at her lips. “So you like me a little bit, Malorie?”

  “Well.” She managed a shrug. “We’ve been friends since grade school.”

  His smile split into something wider, rich and warm. “Or we’ve been something.” His thumb ran over her upper lip and then traced down, down her seatbelt, following its path over breast and hip, to release it.

  He kissed her once again, quickly, and got out of the car. She barely remembered to pull her act together enough to get out herself before he made it around to open her door for her. He still managed to be there in time to hold a hand out to her as she straightened from the low seat.

  “You know I can get out of a car by myself,” she told him. Even though that callused strength felt wonderful around her own strength.

  “I suspected,” Tristan said, amused. “But if you thought I was going to miss an opportunity to watch that skirt ride up your thighs while you got out of the seat, you don’t know me nearly as well as you think.”

  She had to laugh a little, shaking her head. And a little heat ran up her thighs and clenched between them. “Just so you know I can take care of myself. I hiked through the Alps on my own. I made my way to Paris from them on my own. I found a place to live, and went to school, and got a job, and made my way to New York…all on my own. I opened every single door I needed open…for myself.”

  I don’t need anyone. I do not depend on you.

  Tristan just looked at her for a long moment. His face had gone stern, such an unusual expression for him that it had a visceral impact. “Do you know I went by your house, a few days after the bac? And your mom said you were hiking with friends through the Alps. I stopped by a couple weeks later, but she said, ‘Oh, she’s still hiking.’ I thought you were with a group of friends still. Later it was, ‘Oh, she’s going to school in Paris now.’ I thought she and your older sisters had helped you get there, get set up, find a place to stay. I didn’t realize you’d done all that on your own until it was far too late to, to…make sure you were okay.”

  “Why did you stop by?” she said, confused.

  A very dangerous look. “Why the hell do you think, Malorie? I couldn’t see you in school anymore, so even though you never gave me the slightest sign of encouragement, I was going to go ahead and take the risk of asking you out. I kind of had…visions for that summer, actually.” His tone was dark, and he opened a hand as if letting something drop and then pushed that dropped thing away. “That was all a long time ago, and it’s gone now, but to be honest, if I’d known you were hiking and hitchhiking by yourself through France, I would probably have tried to find you. To make sure you were okay. So I could sleep at night.”

  “But your cousin could go off and join the Foreign Legion after his bac. And that was okay,” Malorie said dryly.

  Dark look. “No, it wasn’t okay, actually. But he was a ma—” Tristan broke off, too late. A man.

  “Sexist much, Tristan?” She pushed vines aside from the lock again and slid the key in.

  Tristan’s mouth set stubbornly. He said nothing.

  Let five men grow up together under Jean-Jacques Rosier’s tutelage and you could never cure them of their patriarchal worldview. Hell, the family still had an actual patriarch. Tristan could act as laid-back and amused about life as he liked, but his core showed, over and over.

  And she was not jealous at all of that solid male strength at the center of their family when her own family’s patriarch had crumbled in a storm like a rotten tree.

  She sighed and rested her head on the ivy covering the door into the orchard. And fantasized that he stroked his hand over her bent neck and sent shivers of reassurance and pleasure down her spine. Damn. Even imagining it sent shivers of pleasure down her spine.

  It was exceptionally dangerous to her emotional health and well-being to let him into her grandmother’s orchard.

  But he would love it so much. She could see his face now, as he walked through the orchard in the moonlight and all those scents rushed to kiss him.

  Like the eager women at every party he went to, she thought wryly.

  He put himself in danger, too, didn’t he? Every single time he made a perfume. All the life he could absorb distilled into a gift for everyone else. That they might honor, or that they might spit on.

  She sighed again, very softly, and turned her head, the ivy tickling her face. “Do you want to come in, Tristan?”

  His stubborn expression flickered. “Isn’t that what I just said?” He blinked at her, his eyes growing searching in the dimness, and then took a step toward her. “You mean—is that an invitation?”

  “I think I have something that will make you very happy,” she said quietly.

  Those supple black eyebrows of his drew together. He searched her face again, his expression incomprehensible. “Wow.” His voice was barely audible, but he looked kind of stunned. “And you’re only just now realizing that?”

  She didn’t understand what he meant, so she didn’t try. She opened the door. Tristan clicked his keys, and the car lights died.

  She let him in.

  Chapter 19

  The scent that had been teasing at Tristan, as elusive as Malorie, ever since he stepped out of the car, just rushed right at him and wrapped him in its silk. He took a step forward, surrounded by weddings and innocence and sensuality, dresses and flowers in a bride’s hair and sweet hope in her eyes, and promise. It fell on him, like a village dance in simpler times, petals tossing through the air.

  He breathed it in, blinking, focusing
on what was actually there.

  Trees whose white flowers tempted in the moonlight, against the dark gloss of their leaves.

  His heart stopped.

  His lungs expanded. He stretched out his arms as far as they could go, spreading his hands, as if the scent caressed the web between each finger. Tickled in under his fingernails. Stirred the follicles of hair all over his body. Reached everything about him.

  “You have a bitter orange orchard,” he breathed. “That’s where you picked up that scent.”

  He walked forward, reaching up to the first tree, his fingers trailing over bark and glossy leaves. He grabbed two branches and pulled himself up into them. Into that scent, into the moonlight.

  The orchard stretched around him, quiet night. Lights glittered in the distance, and a few bobbed gently on the sea, but here, this space of terraces was a refuge from that world.

  He cupped a blossom and buried his face in it, a scent swirling with textures—the silk of a bed, a woman’s skin, a hope of a future. The bark of the tree, the softness of the petals, the gloss of the leaves. Even the moonlight seemed to have a texture now, tingling over his skin.

  He was pulling in too much. He was growing giddy with it.

  He looked down for Malorie, like looking for an anchor.

  She stood with her hand resting on another tree, smiling just a little as she watched him. She blinked when he met her gaze and turned away immediately, walking a little way through the grove of trees, trailing the fingers of her free hand through the low-hanging leaves and flowers. Cloths had been stretched under the cleared trees, a scattering of flowers fallen on them. He wanted to help with the harvest. He found all harvests of flowers irresistible, but this one, in Malorie’s secret garden with the far view of the sea…it would be his idea of heaven.

  He picked a flower from his tree and dropped back down to her, very conscious, with all the sensations pouring in, of the sensations inside him—the athleticism of his own body, how lithe and strong and full of life it was. It was good to have his body. It was good to have his senses, gorging on the pleasures all around him. It was good to be alive.

  “Malorie.”

  White flowers against night-dark leaves formed her backdrop and, farther away, seen between the slope of trees, the sea.

  “This is wonderful. Thank you.” He stroked her dark hair back from her temple, just as he had in the car, and tucked the flower in her hair to replace the one she had given little Lexie and the almond blossoms that had long ago fallen free.

  Perfect.

  Well. One thing would make it more perfect. He bent and breathed in the scent of them together, the orange blossoms and her hair.

  Mmmm. Now that was perfect.

  “My grandmother willed it to the three of us,” she murmured and gave a little shiver of a grief too recent. “It was where we came after school. She would pick us up and…” Her voice fell away as she swallowed.

  He pulled her in against him, wrapping his arms around her. “I’m sorry, Malorie.” What else was there to say? He stroked her hair, in lieu of words.

  “You’ll make me cry, Tristan,” she said, very muffled.

  “You can if you want. I’ll just stay right here until you’ve done as much as you need, okay?”

  He didn’t know if that was the right thing to say, because all the tears in her just welled up out of her eyes that fast, and she pressed her face into his chest and started to shake with them.

  Her family was so damn…shattered. Everyone gone off to their end of the world, as if family had no holding power left for them anymore. Had she had no one to grieve with at the time? Or was this moment just one of those waves of grief that came back, like the wistfulness that still hit him sometimes for his own grandmother at the almond scent of Christmas? Like the way he sometimes still missed Lucien, when the wild herb scent of the hills hit him too hard, and cursed him for joining the Foreign Legion.

  “I loved it here,” she said. “With her somewhere around and me and my sisters playing in the orchard or coming inside to help slice up strawberries for our dessert or whatever she asked us to help with.”

  Of course. Who wouldn’t love it here? What a perfect secret place in the midst of the eager, glittery world that sloped to the coast.

  “And now there’s no one left.”

  Tristan had had nightmares about that, when his older cousins first ran off on him. He’d imagined all of them leaving what mattered most to him in the world—family—one by one, until out of all that beautiful, wild pack of joy they’d been as kids, he was the only one left. The shock of Lucien and Raoul’s departures had layered itself over his own complexes, as the youngest who had often had to fight not to be left behind by the older boys when they were little. But Matt and Damien, maybe partly in reaction to Raoul and Lucien’s departures, had held firm. And he had held firm. They were family. The country here was their country. J’y suis, j’y reste.

  I am here and here I’ll stay.

  Poor Malorie. He hugged her closer.

  “I think I broke us,” she whispered. “Angèle and Lise were still at university here. But when I started that hike…I just felt so clean, away from Grasse. I felt like I could be me. I didn’t have to be part of an old, decaying pattern. I could be something new and strong. But it was like I was the first hole in the dam or something. Then Angèle finished her degrees and left, and Lise finished hers and left. And Maman had only been holding on until we were grown—talk about someone who wanted to get away from everything Monsard meant and be her own person again. We all left. And then there was only my grandmother. Can you imagine how sad that must have been for her?”

  It made his chest tight to think about it, the small, quiet, and stubbornly proud old woman keeping her store, selling those soaps, while all her grandchildren left her. How many tourists who stopped him on the street to ask him to take pictures of them had he sent into that store, just so the old woman would have company?

  “She tried so hard to keep us together. Do you think it was easy for her, to hold her head up with her father’s shame on it and the way people must have treated her, after she got pregnant? But she did it. She stayed. She stuck with it. And all for what?”

  “For this, I think,” he said quietly, gesturing to the secret grove of orange blossom around them. “To give you this as children.”

  Because wasn’t that vital? The safe, magic spaces you had as a child, even if you grew up and left them behind. It must have been the only thing her grandmother knew to do—fight to preserve their heritage, no matter what. She wouldn’t have thought to cross seas and start over, the way Malorie and her sisters had.

  Malorie was silent for a moment. “Well, I want to give my children something,” she said fiercely into his chest. “I want to give my family something. I don’t want it to be only about me. I’ve done that too long already.”

  He tightened his arms around her, on a surge of emotion he didn’t know how to name. He just lov—admired her so much.

  She pressed her face into his chest, crying again.

  He ran his fingers through her hair, caught the orange blossom as he knocked it loose, restored it to its place, and just waited it out.

  ***

  Hot, strong, muscled chest.

  Cradled.

  Warm.

  You’re not a kitten, Malorie.

  But that was Tristan, rescuing her just the same.

  Grief twisted her like two hands on a wet rag, wringing all the water out of her, and then relaxed slowly, into that comfort he offered.

  If Tristan’s family was all patriarchal, her grandmother had been her family’s matriarch. Quieter, more subdued, more withdrawn from a world where the shame from her father had had such a direct and devastating impact on her own life possibilities, but there for them, just the same. Malorie had never even realized how much she took her grandmother for granted. And now the hole she had left could never be filled.

  Tristan’s hand on her back was str
ong and easy, rubbing through her hair. His scent was subtle, probably something he had designed himself. Warmth and wickedness and something indefinable, impossible to catch.

  Of course. That was Tristan all over. She was surprised he didn’t smell amused, too.

  The scent of orange blossom and night wrapped around both of them, a great, caressing promise. A cool, crisp spring midnight and a warm hold. Tristan’s heart beating under her hand.

  She hadn’t known that grief and consolation could be sensual, and as soon as she noticed that sensuality, it uncurled. Flourishing where grief had made room for other emotions. Her fingers kneaded once into his chest, to savor his heartbeat. His strength. His heat.

  That heartbeat picked up, just a little. A hint of heat came into his scent. His fingertips flexed into her back, adding a gentle new texture to his rubbing that rippled pleasure down her spine.

  Her breasts pressed against a hard chest. Her hips nestled against his. Their bodies fit together in all the right places. Even the sensitive, smooth skin of his throat was only a nuzzle away.

  He drew a quick breath, his fingers dropping to her lower back, kneading her closer, and she realized that she had nuzzled his throat, on the thought. He smelled so good. Now she wanted to lick him.

  She actually had to bite on the tip of her tongue as it started to sneak out.

  Tristan, damn it. Why do you have to be so damn enticing? It’s not fair.

  She was pretty sure he wasn’t even trying. Right at that moment, he was just focused on being a nice guy.

  She’d never been attracted to bad boys. Maybe because she’d known Tristan all her life. She’d always known, up close and personal, that the sexiest creature on Earth was a really good guy.

  An exasperating artiste, but a good person. It was just too bad for her that, belying a world-wide impression that women were idiots, every other female alive realized it, too.

  “Malorie.” His voice had deepened and roughened and held a hint of question. But no amusement whatsoever, for once.