Crown of Bitter Orange

by Laura Florand

  She tucked her fingertips under the waistband, pulling on him.

  He stroked his thumb over her and very, very gently, very, very delicately, pulled a little, too.

  Oh, God.

  She bucked up to his hand. He soothed her, rubbing gently again, watching her face.

  She yanked at the button of his pants, fumbling, the stupid thing wouldn't fit through the buttonhole—

  He pressed his thumb more firmly down, in a little circular motion.

  She started to pant, her fingers slowing on his button, caressing it, caressing farther down, to his erection through his pants.

  He pressed into her hand. He was breathing very hard. But he kept his focus.

  Rubbing, rubbing, rubbing, watching her as if she was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen.

  God, Tristan knew how to live in the moment. Who knew how many women he'd seen orgasm? And yet he kept his entire focus on her, as if this moment was unique in all his life.

  It was unique in hers, too, but of course it would be. She'd never made love with Tristan before.

  Gorgeous, sexy, exasperating, overprivileged, beautiful-hearted Tristan Rosier.

  She managed to make his button obey her this time, slower with it, more determined. His breath grew rougher. His thumb a little more insistent.

  She pushed his pants down, scooped him free of his briefs.

  Tristan jerked so hard he might have been stabbed.

  So she soothed him. Soothed his cock. Shh, shh, shh, it's okay.

  He swore. Softly, eagerly, dirty, dirty words. Pressing into her hands. His thumb slid down the length of her, delving between her folds as he drew it back to press right where she wanted it.

  She pulled at him. Tristan, come on. I'm not doing this alone.

  No. At least she'd know for this one moment, that she'd had as much power over him as he'd had over her.

  Besides, it really was addictive, giving him pleasure.

  “Malorie. Damn it.” He scrabbled for his pants pocket, finding a packet.

  He opened the packet with one hand and his teeth, so that he could keep his other thumb on her. His hair had fallen over his forehead. As she ran her thumb up his length, he looked utterly wild. “Hold on, Malorie.” He grabbed both her hands and locked her wrists above her head.

  That left them both deprived. She bumped her pelvis up against him, rubbing herself against him to get that texture she was now missing, lifting her thighs to close around his hips.

  “Fuck.” Tristan rolled away from her for a second.

  She didn’t like the texture of the condom nearly as much as the silk-hard feel of him bare. But then, Tristan almost certainly didn’t like it as much either, and he wasn’t complaining. She closed her hand around him again, tracing her thumb over his base, that half-centimeter that was still bare. Tightening her hold.

  Tristan looped one hand under her and kissed her again, pulling her into him, deep, deep, as his fingers kept playing with her. She even liked, in a way, that his fingers were growing a little clumsy, that he was losing his rhythm as his focus pulled down and down into his own body.

  She sank her fingers into his butt and arched her pelvis up into his, pulling him inside her.

  Oh.

  Oh, wow. She arched into him as Tristan made a rough sound, and his hips thrust him deep, deep.

  Mmm.

  She found his fingers and brought them back to where she wanted them.

  He laughed a little, an incredulous, joyous sound, as his gaze drifted down her body. He braced his weight on one hand, arm hard against her side, and stroked her as he sank deep into her.

  Too much. Feelings grew bigger and bigger in her, pressing at her as if she was a balloon too full of helium, about to pop. And yet the pressure kept building, building, until she was frantic to release it, to burst so that she could come back down to earth…even in pieces.

  And then she did burst, her nails seizing his shoulders, her body jerking hard just as Tristan gave a rough sound and thrust hard into her. She threw her arm over her face. That was better. All in the dark. Now she couldn’t see him when they came. She could pretend he couldn’t see her.

  As she didn’t fall to earth like limp pieces of a balloon at all. As a stroking, coaxing hand eased her down as gently as if she was an orange blossom, drifting, floating, gently rocked by the breeze, to the ground in the night.

  She grabbed a fold of the cloth and pulled it over her face, not looking at Tristan. The man she had known all her life and never really known at all.

  He slid his face up just to the edge of the fold that protected her and kissed her temple. His hand rested on her belly, rubbing in a small, possessive motion. After a while, he moved away and then came back, laying his shirt over her upper body and then curving his to hers, pulling her back against him as he drew the scented cloth on which they lay up around them.

  Something tickled her shoulder.

  Tristan, twirling one white flower against it, idly, sometimes stroking it up and down her arm, his breath warming the top of her head. The flower traced over her knuckles, came back up her arm. Neither spoke. She was still being caressed by a flower when she fell fast asleep.

  Chapter 21

  The white flower snapped from the tree at the twist of her fingers and floated gently down to rest on Tristan’s body. Malorie smiled a little as she harvested, almost humming under her breath. The early light of a spring morning, the sun starting to warm away the chill of the night. The scents of orange blossom freshened again by the way the oils were starting to get absorbed by her arms and hands. The familiar, old gestures of harvesting with her grandmother and sisters, here in this place safe from all the world.

  And below her, one gorgeous specimen of manhood getting slowly covered in white flowers.

  Stay in the moment. There was really no more beautiful moment to be in.

  It wasn’t so bad, waking up to face the fact that she had finally slept with Tristan Rosier. Yes, she’d let the man who had everything have her body, too. But she’d also had his. If they were going to have to meet up in the streets for the rest of her life with a memory of this night in Tristan’s head, well…she’d also have the memory. And it was a pretty damn good one.

  It was when she saw him with other women that it was going to hurt.

  A vicious pang, just thinking about it.

  She hoped that the smell of orange blossom didn’t make her hurt like that, ever after. This was her safe space. What had she been thinking to let him in it?

  Stay in the moment.

  In this moment, if she could stay in it, the scent of orange blossom didn’t hurt yet. It carried with it more sensuality than she had ever experienced in her entire life. She’d woken a little bit ago to find Tristan still curled snug around her, heavily asleep but warming her against the spring night with his body, his shirt having slid mostly off her but the drop cloth still pulled around them, flowers caught in her hair. Even the aftermath of their love-making was incredibly sensual.

  A bud only partially open twisted in her fingers and fell onto Tristan’s forehead, a little harder without open petals to provide air resistance. He blinked awake sleepily, then stayed still, taking a moment to orient himself.

  A slow smile started to grow on his face. He pushed up onto one elbow, the blanket of white blossoms sliding over his body, a crown of flowers caught in his black hair, like some sybaritic god of spring. He looked down at the flowers sliding down his chest, bemused, then ran his hand over his stomach to come up with a handful of flowers that he let drift down again.

  He smiled up at her, two rungs up the ladder. “This is definitely better than ice water. But didn’t that guy in the stories have to marry Sleeping Beauty when he kept waking her up like that?”

  Her hand tightened around a branch as that one jabbed straight through her. No joke was taboo to him, was it? “I’m hardly Prince Charming, Tristan.”

  His smile faded. He sat all the way up and looked at
all the flowers piling in his lap, lifting another handful of them. “I’m charmed.”

  Could they not go in this direction? Pretend there was some happily ever after in here somewhere? “I thought I made your head blow off.”

  He shrugged. “I’m the youngest of five cousins. I’m used to people trying to drive me crazy as an expression of affection.”

  Her lips twitched. She was the youngest of three sisters. Their family might not have been as solid as Tristan’s, but, yes, she recognized the symptoms.

  Tristan lifted double handfuls and let the flowers slide off his hands again, clearly in love with the sensation.

  Her instinct for self-protection faded, and she reached out and snapped a flower free just over his head, watching it drift down as he turned his face up to it and let it kiss his lips. You’re so gorgeous. It’s really not fair.

  That generous, hungry sensuality of his, as if every sensation in life was one he wanted to savor. Yes, those good fairies had given him a lot of gifts. But Tristan had appreciated every one. He could have been truly spoiled. But he chose to see the world as one great present, and to appreciate every detail. And to try to offer it in turn to others.

  Tristan stretched out again, folding his hands behind his head. During the night, he had pulled his pants back on against the chill, but that ripped torso remained bare of anything but flowers. “Do you know I had my first sexual fantasy about you when I was fourteen years old?” he said meditatively. “And now, finally…” He twirled a flower in his fingers and smelled it, a little smile curving his lips.

  “All your dreams have come true,” she said ironically, back to self-protectiveness.

  “Hard to imagine a better dream than this,” Tristan said softly. He stroked his chest with a flower, absently. Then raised an eyebrow at her. “What about yours?”

  Malorie’s fingers stroked over a petal, as if she was trying to feel the same sensation he was giving himself as he brushed his chest. “Mine were more comfort fantasies,” she said, a little shy to talk about them. “Not so explicit.”

  He laughed. “Teenage boys and teenage girls are like two different species.”

  She found herself laughing back down at him.

  He reached a hand full of flowers up to her. “I can do comfort, too. Come here.”

  A vision of just sinking down with him again in broad daylight, cuddling up with him.

  It made her take a step higher up the ladder.

  Tristan watched her thoughtfully a moment. Then rolled to his feet in a flex of ab muscles that sent a wave of possessive heat through her—mine—and came to the ladder. Wrapping his hands around the rung to either side of her hips, he just leaned his head forward until it rested against her back.

  Malorie twisted around, and he let his face stay against her as she moved, until she was facing him, and his head rested against her belly. His eyes closed, and he nestled his head against the silk of her dress and let his weight sink against her.

  Malorie didn’t know what to make of it, the sweetness and warmth that ran up her middle from where his face rested and stole its way into her heart. It was so like all her fantasies of him when she was lonely or upset, except the reverse—he was the one seeking tactile comfort from her. She touched his hair, tentatively. Such silky, thick black hair. Her fingers sank into its waves, knocking a white flower loose from the careless crown of them still caught there.

  He ran his hands up her sides under her arms and lifted her off the ladder, lowering them both back down on the cloth. “You’re right,” he said, when he had her settled on his chest. “This is very nice.”

  His fingers ran through her hair, stroking it as if the sensation of every strand was fascinating to him. His heart thumped, steady and reliable, under her ear. His breaths eased slow and deep through his body, as if he was profoundly at peace. “Perfect,” he murmured, his tone oddly wondering, as if the man who had everything had never had anything as perfect as this.

  And it was perfect, that was the problem. Solid and warm and tender. So tempting she wanted to fall right into it, even though she knew that once she let go, she would fall forever. I’m in love with him. It wasn’t even a surprise to think it. More like an “about time you accepted that”. I think I’ve been in love with him a long time.

  It should have felt like falling.

  It didn’t.

  It felt like cuddling up against a strong, warm body that held her in perfect happiness.

  “It was you,” Tristan said suddenly.

  What?

  His fingers moved in her hair, the stem of a flower brushing the crown of her head. “Fugace. I’d been trying to capture you most of my damn life, and I finally did, I almost had you, it was almost perfect, I was that close, and I gave it to you, and you just pushed it away and broke it. Because you wanted to focus on your work. You always did that shit to me, Malorie. But I couldn’t believe you’d do it even with Fugace. It was beautiful.”

  Malorie’s fingers curled into the dark hair on Tristan’s chest. She stared at them, at that precarious grip on such a beautiful person, inside and out. Maybe she should have spent more time climbing, like Tristan did, to have a grip that could hang on to anything. “Me?”

  Fugace was her?

  “You had to recognize it, Malorie. The green and the shadow, the quiet and the toughness, the elusiveness, that fairy-tale courage of the youngest daughter who went off to seek her fortune and slipped through the prince’s hands.”

  She lifted her head to stare at him. That beautiful perfume? No. She had not seen herself in it. And it had never even occurred to her that Tristan Rosier, the industry’s most gorgeous and most popular scion, had made a perfume for her.

  Just as it had never occurred to her that he had a crush on her. Never occurred to her that when he came and talked to her at parties, or sat down on a bench too small for them both, he was doing anything but treating her with the same charming friendliness he treated everyone else.

  Maybe she didn’t only have trust issues. Maybe she had some freaking self-esteem issues. Which were probably textbook for a narcissist’s daughter, but damn it. She’d been positive she was too strong to fall into that trap.

  “Me?” she said again, her voice very small. Tristan Rosier had made a perfume for her?

  That shadowy, elusive promise of a perfume, like a whisper of white flowers on a spring night. Like a cool green swimming hole in the shadow of trees in a hot summer. With its core of courage.

  That perfume that all the critics had described as wistful. Full of longing.

  “Yes, you,” Tristan said, impatient and annoyed as only a wounded, unappreciated artiste could be.

  She’d thought that courage was Tristan’s courage, because he always took creative risks with his perfumes.

  That elusiveness was Tristan’s elusiveness. The quintessential fantasy of a man who could never come true in her real life.

  The way he’d described it had made her seem so…special. Heroic and poetic and romantic, all together.

  You didn’t realize? His voice had been so gentle. That anyone else saw that in you?

  She sat up and curled her arms around her knees, and so he sat up, too, wrapping his arm around her.

  Should I tell him? That she was in love with him, that she’d never climbed up this high before and she was afraid of the fall. The last man she’d believed in had enjoyed giving women brutal falls. And she knew that was a long time and a lot of therapy ago, but when things hurt you as a child, they hurt you forever. Those scars never went away.

  Tristan shifted and found his phone on the drop cloth, stretching his arm out in front of them to take a photo.

  In it, they looked like two wood gods that the Romans or their predecessors here might have come upon. Tristan’s fingers shifting in her hair had woven in a crown of flowers to match his own. White blossoms against their dark hair, golden skin, her green eyes and his brown, her pale silk dress crumpled and him shirtless. She’d smiled f
or the camera, but in her eyes or her posture there was a little wariness still, as if this wood goddess wasn’t sure what it might mean for her, to be caught. And in his, a profound and possessive contentment, as if everything was right with his world.

  I think he knows.

  Chapter 22

  Happiness opened for Malorie like a scent bottled and brought to maturation. Sprayed on a white strip, waved under her nose to test it out.

  She liked it. So now she had to try it on skin. See how it developed over hours, from that first quick, volatile top note to the longer notes that came out as her skin warmed. It changed her identity, this new perfume. Could it become her signature?

  Who was she?

  Because she had not made the scent. She wasn’t a perfumer. Tristan had made it, and her skin had married to it and made it glow.

  This happiness depended on someone else.

  A flash of a brown vial through the air, her hands just barely managing to clap together around it. Tristan had just climbed through her office window. He really did treat her like some people treated social media—popping over whenever he couldn’t focus anymore.

  She found she liked it. She was her own boss now, not a kid who had to please her teachers in school or her superiors at her new job, and her priorities were finally, finally aligning themselves with what, deep inside, she really wanted.

  Tristan swung his legs over the sill and came across to kiss her. “What do you think?” He nodded at the vial, his body relaxed, his tone casual, as if he couldn’t care less if she liked it or not.

  Yeah, right.

  She vaporized the trial on her elbow for lack of a test strip—if she was going to run a perfume company, she’d better fix that little lack in her office supplies—and brought her elbow to her nose.

  Mmm. Neroli, like the warm, rich shadow and amber tones of wealth and glamor. Risk and a hint of mischief, like a woman’s calves exposed under flirty flounces for the first time in two thousand years. Depth and curling grace, like history becoming new.