Crown of Bitter Orange

by Laura Florand

  There was an unleashed tenderness now in the way Tristan touched her face or stroked back her hair or played with her hand that was overwhelming her. She’d never experienced anything like it, and when their eyes met, she thought, I don’t think he’s ever felt anything like it either.

  And she’d always thought Tristan had felt everything there was to feel.

  “What’s in it?” she managed huskily.

  “Something that needs to mature still, I think,” he said, watching her.

  She opened the bottle and dabbed the stopper against her wrist. Tenderness, here again. A delicate, hopeful, starlit scent, orange blossom like a thread of a path you could follow through the night. Or like two people sitting in the early dawn together, sensual and vulnerable and with flowers in their hair.

  She reached out and linked her fingers with his. He tightened his grip and pulled her in snug against his hard body. Her head against his shoulder, she closed her eyes. Taking slow breaths, letting herself just sink into the sensuality of being with Tristan. What did he smell like today? A little bit of this tender scent. He’d tested it on his own skin first, sometime earlier, hadn’t he?

  “I have something I wanted to ask you about.” She showed him the envelope. “Do you recognize this key?”

  His eyes lit with interest, but he shook his head. “It looks old. Do you want me to ask my aunt and my grandfather?”

  Malorie winced. She’d kind of wanted to absorb whatever this key revealed before she had to tell his aunt or grandfather about it. You never knew, in her family.

  Tristan turned the key in his hands. “Maybe it’s to one of those cabinets downstairs. Or to some little box in one. I don’t know what it might have to do with the Rosiers. Can we go on a treasure hunt?”

  Malorie had faced the envelope and key with dread, but Tristan looked like a kid who’d just been handed a real pirate’s map. Her own wariness softened. Tristan made everything seem as if it would be all right.

  Mostly, she realized, because from his perspective it would be. Whatever the key revealed, he wouldn’t think less of her.

  “I always loved treasure hunting,” he confessed, doing that thing that just aroused the hell out of her, that combination of sexy, hard-bodied man and boyish enthusiasm. “Did I ever tell you about the time we climbed over Tata Colette’s wall in the middle of the night and Lucien broke his arm?”

  “You mentioned it, yes,” Malorie said, amused. She had a flashing vision of Tristan, old and white-haired, repeating the same story yet again to tolerant great-grandchildren. It was an oddly enticing little glimpse into a possible future—he was still full of life and enthusiasm, even wrinkled with age. His grandchildren, she was pretty sure, adored him.

  “Oh,” Tristan said. And then, unabashed, “Well, it’s a great story.” He grinned at her.

  “So you want to go on a treasure hunt through my family’s treasures?” Malorie took the key from his palm and held it up.

  “Hell, yes.” He grabbed it from her. “Let’s go. Anything in here it might fit, do you think?”

  ***

  Tristan was still going strong, but Malorie was getting rather sick of trying keyholes in the storage room an hour later and was delighted to have a FaceTime ping from Angèle to give her an excuse to take a break. Plus, she’d been trying to get in touch with Angèle ever since she got back to Grasse.

  “I’ll be back,” she told Tristan as she put her phone away and went up to take it on her laptop in the office.

  Pixelated face, a warm jacket with the hood pulled over her head, Angèle’s brown hair escaping in wisps in the wind. Behind her a beautiful old building in warm golden tones. The building blurred in the background as Angèle shifted to, presumably, a less out-in-the-open place to talk.

  “Well, look at that,” Malorie said. “You’re finally speaking to me.”

  “Really poor reception at the penguin colonies, Malorie.”

  “How are they doing? The penguins?” She’d been down there a couple of years ago. Angèle did retreat to Rio Grande from time to time, where she must be now, but as for the colonies themselves…talk about remote.

  Angèle’s face relaxed. “Pretty well. Although if people would let the King Penguins get established before they showed up en masse to take pictures, it probably wouldn’t hurt.” She rolled her eyes.

  “By en masse, you mean ten to twenty people a day? Who sit respectfully at a distance with cameras, crossing their fingers that a penguin will wander up closer out of curiosity?”

  Angèle gave her a disgruntled look. “That’s how it starts.”

  Malorie grinned. Angèle had come to visit her in New York a few times, too—mostly because so many major conferences in wildlife biology were in North America. She always loved the restaurants, but she always asked Malorie how she stood the noise for more than a few days at a time.

  “So what the hell are you doing?” Angèle asked. “Have you lost your mind?”

  Malorie lifted her eyes to heaven a moment, hoping the pixelated connection showed the gesture properly. You could put Angèle all the way down in Tierra del Fuego, but you could never take that older sister I-know-better-than-you-do tone out of her. She probably bossed every single other biologist out there. “I’m trying to restore La Maison de Monsard,” she said. “Somebody has to do it.”

  “Why? Let the thing die.”

  Malorie tensed. All the hairs on her arms lifted when Angèle said that. As if she’d been cut loose from the world, to float without roots for eternity. “It’s our heritage, Angèle.”

  Angèle either just looked at her for a moment or the connection was freezing up.

  Malorie made a gesture. “It doesn’t have to matter to you, too.” It didn’t. Even if it hurt. “I just need your shares. Or your proxy for them, if you want to keep official ownership of them.”

  “I think you’re crazy,” Angèle said. “Why don’t you just sell your shares to the Rosiers? Tristan’s begging for them.”

  Malorie blinked. “…Tristan?” Wait, what?

  “Surely he’s asked you for yours, too.”

  “I—no. He hasn’t done that.” Her thoughts were starting to slow, as if they were stuck in honey.

  “Really?” Angèle sounded surprised. “That’s weird. He even told me he’d create a grant for young women from Grasse who wanted to study biology if I signed them over to him.”

  Oh, smart. Tristan was always so smart about people. He knew that would tempt Angèle far more than money.

  While Malorie always thought of practical things—money—Tristan always knew that there were far more buttons to push on people to get what you wanted.

  He knew about honey.

  It smelled so sweet, it tasted so good…and it trapped way more flies than vinegar.

  Those poor, stupid flies probably even thought it was a good way to go.

  “Lise, too?” she said slowly. “Has he asked her about them, too?”

  Angèle’s eyebrows drew together in a little frown. “Maybe. It’s really hard to get in touch with Lise anymore.” Said the person who spent half her time observing isolated penguin colonies in the southern tip of Argentina and Chile and in Antarctica. “I wish she’d give up on saving the world and go somewhere safer.”

  Yes. Even at the far end of the world, even though they’d all chosen to make their own road, Angèle still had some latent instinct to keep an eye on her younger sisters. Hell, she probably kept an eye on penguins because of that instinct—penguins were something she actually could take care of.

  “You’re not going to do it, are you?” Malorie had to speak carefully. Her tongue felt clumsy. Tristan had been trying to accumulate shares in La Maison de Monsard. Tristan had been asking her about her shares in Monsard. Tristan had shown an eager, possessive interest in restoring Monsard, had talked about it like he would be part of it.

  “Well, not if you want them, of course not,” Angèle said. “But I still think you’re crazy. Chasing after som
e windmill from our past. Merde, Malorie, who do you think you are, Don Quixote?”

  Okay, Angèle was trying to save penguins from global warming. And she claimed Malorie was tilting at windmills?

  Wasn’t that just like her oldest sister’s convictions she knew best. And could take control, keep her charges safe, fight the world for them. Maybe she’d chosen penguins because she’d known she’d never, ever manage to keep human charges safe.

  “It matters,” Malorie said. “I want this. It matters to me. It matters to us.” She had to believe that. One day, surely, it would matter to Angèle and Lise. Or to their kids. Or to her own kids. If she ever found anyone to have kids with.

  A vision of Tristan Rosier, gorgeous and half naked and strewn with flowers.

  Tristan. Who could charm anyone out of anything. Her pants. Her shares. Her dreams.

  Who had switched from fighting with her to flirting with her right about the time he had learned she had Monsard shares.

  “Did he say why he wanted them?” she asked.

  “He didn’t have to,” Angèle said blankly. “I mean…it’s Tristan. Obviously the Rosiers are thinking of going into direct perfume sales, and Tristan’s name is the one they can do that with.”

  And so, just like that, because he wanted it and he couldn’t conceive of a world that didn’t do everything he wanted, Tristan had decided to take over her family company? I’ll take it, he’d said, what seemed like years ago. But was really only a few days.

  Had he only needed a few days? To wrap her around his finger and take it from her?

  “Look, don’t worry,” Angèle said. “If you want the shares, they’re yours. You can have my proxy. I’ll send the signatures you need so the banks will work with you. But you’d better get in touch with Lise somehow, because you don’t know how many other shares he already has. He might only need one of us to sell to him to get the majority.”

  Malorie sat for a long time after they cut the connection, staring at the amber hearts bottle. When she was a little girl, she at first used to love it when her father brought her mother romantic gifts. They meant he loved them, that he was going to convince her mother to stop being mad at him. When she was very little, she hadn’t understood the real causes of her mother’s anger—his cheating and his draining of all their income for his show-off purposes. She’d only been happy that their father was doing all that work to keep them together, and she’d often been taken into his confidence behind her mother’s back, as he explained how difficult her mother was being over nothing, how much more the family mattered to him than it did to anyone else. Didn’t she care about the family? he would say. If she did, she should tell her mother.

  As she got older, she’d learned to hate the gifts. She learned to see through her father’s lies, learned what was going on behind the fights. She learned that staying together would only keep them stuck in the same situation, that the presents would just weaken her mother’s conviction yet again. Weaken even her grandmother’s, because how could her grandmother stay stern against her son acting so sweetly? Even if he was stealing away their financial security to feed his own addiction to showing off in Monaco.

  She’d never liked gifts, as an adult. In fact, she’d never liked relationships, because how could you, if everything nice the guy ever did made you worry you were about to be caught in the clutches of a narcissistic spider? Someone who just wanted to suck the blood out of you for his own ends and, if you were really unlucky, keep you alive enough to give him more blood the next time he needed it?

  She buried her head in her hands and took deep breaths. While her entire past rose up in her like the girders of a great building and twisted in a scream of rusted metal.

  Tristan bounded in with a carved wooden box in his hands. “I think I found it!”

  Chapter 24

  Tristan stopped short just inside the door as he took in her expression.. He cocked his head, concerned. “Is everything okay? Angèle’s okay, isn’t she?”

  Malorie stared at him. It would help so much if her father hadn’t been capable of exactly the same expression of concern, when inside he didn’t give a damn about anything but what he wanted.

  It’s Tristan. Not anybody else. Him. Think.

  It was so hard to think when everything hurt.

  She spoke slowly, having to sort through each word and choose the next one with care. “Tristan. Have you been trying to buy up Monsard shares?”

  “Oh.” The smile just slid off his face. “She told you.”

  Oh, God. It was true.

  “She’s still my sister, Tristan. I know we’re only Monsards, but that still means something.”

  “She could have kept her mouth shut about this at least,” Tristan said, irritated. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  That side-swiped her. She couldn’t figure out what it even meant. “A surprise?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t get the concept either.”

  “You were buying up shares in my family company as a surprise?” From the screaming rust-girders of her past, she felt as if she’d just found herself instead strolling through the candy cane structures of la-la land.

  “You’re the one who’s always focused on business, Malorie. I thought you’d appreciate it.”

  “Appreciate it?” Her fingers pressed so hard into the desk she hurt her knuckles. “And when were you going to share this surprise with me?”

  “I don’t know! I couldn’t figure out the right moment.” He frowned. “It’s just so…dry. I mean, when would you have said it?”

  Malorie shoved to her feet. “As soon as I got them?”

  “But you were barely speaking to me back then. I bought the first ones two years ago when your grandmother was going through a tight spot and didn’t want to tell you girls.”

  That one was like a punch in the gut. Malorie had trained her whole life to be good at finances, so she’d never be helpless before someone else’s misuse of them again. But when her grandmother had needed financial help…she hadn’t even known.

  “Of course you three are women, now, and should have been told, but she was your grandmother. I guess you were always girls to her.”

  And Tristan had known. And she had two ways she could think about that—he had either exploited an old woman’s weakness, like every man in her grandmother’s life had ever done, or he had seen someone who needed help and offered it.

  Like Tristan would have done.

  That emotion he kept rousing in her swelled up to press in her chest. This wondering, panicked love of him that was so freaking painful.

  Terrifying. She’d seen it over and over as a child. It was so, so easy to love someone who could never love you back. Someone who would always be out for himself.

  But that’s not Tristan. You know it’s not Tristan.

  Although…although…he did really like to get his way. His mother had said it herself, had said to never make the mistake of thinking he’d been distracted onto other toys.

  Toys. Her heritage. Her life. Her? He had so much, how could he ever value her as much as she did? He had everything. She was all she had.

  “And anyway, I didn’t think you were interested in anything here then,” Tristan was saying casually. That casualness made it worse. This struck at the heart of her world, and to him it was nothing. His pocket change. Her whole fortune. “Once you came back and told me you were thinking about restoring the place, I figured I’d tell you once you were sure you wanted them. If you were going to decide to sell the place, I wanted to keep them so we could buy the rest of the shares from you more easily.”

  “How many shares do you have?”

  “Twenty percent.”

  A cold shock. Twenty percent. That was how much she had. Her entire inheritance. Tristan had acquired the equivalent of her entire inheritance so casually he hadn’t even thought it was important to mention it. All those treasures of which he had been so possessive in the storage room really were just as much his a
s hers.

  “I got Damien to sell me Rosier SA’s, and I got Tata Colette to sell me the ones she had from a long time ago, when your grandmother was struggling as a young single mother, I guess.”

  Oh. Malorie had never known that Colette Delatour had tried to help her grandmother. Her teenage grandmother had needed all the help she could get, having had her life swept out from under her by her father’s fecklessness, and then given another life to take care of on top of it, by the fecklessness of some man who had left her pregnant. Charming men, who got what they wanted, and left the women to pick up the pieces.

  “I got the ones your father signed away in Monaco to cover gambling debts.”

  A sick vulnerability knotted in her stomach. Tristan had managed to exploit every single weakness the men in her family had created. Malorie could feel herself tightening and tightening, like a guitar string about to snap. She hadn’t been able to control the damage her father did to their family, because she was a child.

  And now she still couldn’t control it. Because of Tristan.

  “And I was trying to get Angèle or Lise’s twenty percent, which would between us have brought us up to a safe majority so the banks would deal with you, but your sisters are a lot harder to negotiate with than perfume bottle collectors.”

  Between us.

  Right. Right. Malorie struggled to breathe past that knot that seemed to grip her whole torso. It’s Tristan. Tristan. Not your father. Tristan.

  Between us.

  Tristan doesn’t think of it as him against me. He thinks of it as “us”.

  And that was vital.

  Still her voice felt harsh, parched, words peeling off one by one. “You have a fifth of Monsard shares. And you thought it was more important to give me perfumes?”

  Tristan’s expression flickered. “Wasn’t it?”

  Tristan. It’s Tristan.

  Of course he would think perfumes were more important.

  Malorie fought that knot in her, fought to make herself breathe. Long breaths. Think. Think past the past. Stay in the moment. It’s Tristan.