And what mattered to him? The pretty crayons he spilled on the floor. The drawings he slid across her desk. The perfumes he made, to offer her.
Tristan stiffened at her silence, and for the first time, it looked as if he had been wounded in this conversation. As if something had shaken his confidence. And she almost felt glad—because maybe, if he was wounded, too, he could halfway understand how much this hurt.
“It wasn’t,” he said. His face emptied.
Oh, God, she hated to see that empty look on his face. She squeezed thumb and forefinger below her eyes. “Of course it was,” she said low. His perfumes were the most beautiful thing he could imagine. And he gave them to her.
Sometimes she wanted to shove him off a tall building for being so blithe and oblivious. And yet…she never wanted him to have to hit the ground. She liked it, that he was so damn happy in who he was.
“No,” Tristan said. “It wasn’t.” He was searching her face, his expression growing…tired? As if he was never, ever going to find what he wanted, when he searched her face.
Malorie’s jaw worked. She didn’t want him to pull this out of her. She didn’t want to. He didn’t deserve it. She knew he was just clueless sometimes. She knew it. She knew he loved the crayons more than the math sheets.
And that was all this was.
It was just—“Twenty percent, Tristan. Twenty percent.”
“I haven’t been able to convince the old Monsard board members or their heirs to sell. For now, we still need your sisters.”
“And I still need you!” she snapped suddenly. “If you have twenty percent.”
His expression flickered. “Well…yeah,” he said, staring at her.
She didn’t want to hurt him. She really didn’t. He wasn’t her father. He was such a good guy. But her arms hugged her middle, where all of this hurt her so damn bad. “Twenty percent. Tristan. That’s how much I have. My entire legacy. Everything I have from my family. And all you needed was to use your Rosier money and connections to scoop up the same amount on the open market, which is only out there in the first place because my father and his father and grandfather were such bastards.”
The box he’d held so excitedly when he sprang into the office dropped to bump against his thigh. His other hand flexed as if it wanted to find a tricky cliff face to grip. Far away from here. “Malorie,” he said persuasively. “You’re making too big a deal out of this. It—”
The exact words her father had used over and over, about and to her mother, who was always making too big a deal out of things, and only when Malorie got older had she realized her father’s modus operandi. To do something horribly damaging to the family, cheat on her mother, steal their financial security to show off in Monaco—and then diminish her mother’s right to be mad about it. Shift the blame onto her, for overreacting.
“No,” she said very quietly. “No, I’m not.”
Something about her tone stopped Tristan cold. He stared at her.
She straightened her shoulders. Lifted her chin. “I’m not making too big a deal out of this,” she said. “To me, this matters.”
“It shouldn’t,” Tristan said quickly, brushing her claim aside. “I didn’t think about it at all. It was just someth—”
Malorie’s jaw tightened until it felt as if it would snap. “I know you didn’t think about it at all, Tristan,” she said, locking eyes with his. “Trust me, I figured that out.”
His eyebrows knit slowly as he stared back at her, as if they were speaking two different languages and he could only make out one word in ten of hers. “I thought about the perfumes I gave you. I thought about those a lot.”
Oh, God. Were they right back to Fugace? She pinched her brow.
“But then, you still don’t think those are important,” Tristan said, his voice so…flat. As if that uncrushable little boy in him had been crushed. By her.
Her insides tightened even more in a kind of panic. She didn’t want to hurt him. She really didn’t. But if he didn’t hurt, too, then he didn’t understand. And over and over her father had shifted the blame for the hurt in a situation from him to his wife or daughters. It wasn’t that he had done anything wrong. It was that they hadn’t considered him.
Of course Tristan wasn’t her father. Of course he wasn’t. But all of this, the past and the present, snarled inside her and made such a huge, painful mess.
Malorie didn’t know how to handle this and keep her center. It was as if Tristan had stolen not only shares but that most important thing of all to her—her sense of who she was and who she wanted to try to be. She’d worked so freaking hard to establish that.
“I don’t know why you never think the perfumes are important.” Tristan sounded numb. “I mean, merde, Malorie, did it ever once occur to you that those perfumes are worth more than your shares?”
She recoiled, feeling as if Tristan, of all people, had just found the one point where she was most vulnerable and shoved the knife in.
Tristan. The one person in the world she’d been learning to trust.
“They are,” he repeated, stubborn and hard. “I picked those shares up at bargain basement prices, and if you properly marketed those perfumes they’d make you millions. But by all means, dismiss them as the art of someone who never works.”
What?
“That’s not what I’m doing!” she blazed. She never said that kind of thing about him—well, maybe she used to. But only when she was trying to fight him back. To his family, she’d made it crystal clear how highly she thought of him. He had to know it, merde. Tristan had more self-confidence than anyone she knew. “And I don’t need you to tell me how much more every single damn thing you have is worth than anything I have. I think you’ve clearly established that.” She slashed her hand through the air to indicate those shares.
Or maybe to indicate him. The prince. Who always seemed to be worth so much more than she was, every time. Even right down to emotionally, the one with all the heart, while she was the mercenary one. Heartless.
Tristan made a hard gesture, as if he wanted to shove every emotion in this room out the window, and rolled his shoulders, that old gesture of shaking water off a duck’s back. “Malorie.” He tried to make his voice calm. “This is ridiculous. I think it’s all just a misu—”
Hurt and fury surged up, obliterating her last grasp of sense. Ridiculous? “Damn you. You steal twenty percent of my entire family legacy, and you think that doesn’t even matter.”
“I didn’t steal it. I bought it, with the money I earned from making those perfumes you think are so worthless. And I was going to g—”
“I don’t care what you were going to do!” she yelled, all control abruptly breaking. “I don’t want you to have that much power in my life in the first place, to be the one who decides. I don’t want to depend on you, can’t you get that through your fucking patriarchal head? I don’t want to need you!”
The words dropped into the room as if a church bell had been rung right there, reverberating too loudly, all other sound stopping. Tristan stood very still.
Malorie stared back at him, trapped by the truth of what she had just said. She’d gone too far. She’d gone way too far. She was going to break them. Oh, God. She didn’t want to break them.
And yet to apologize, she would have had to pretend that she didn’t mean it.
And she did.
Tristan’s eyes crinkled up as if she’d hurt him hard enough to make them sting. He took a long breath. “Malorie.” His voice sounded rough. “Do you really think I’d ever use those shares in any way but to help you? That’s all I wanted to do. Help.”
He didn’t wait for her answer. Didn’t wait for her to absorb or recover. He turned around and walked out.
He still had the box from the storage room under his arm, but of course he didn’t notice. Like he didn’t notice that he walked out with her heart and her happiness. A man who assumed the world was his by birthright would never notice that he was taking some
thing so minor that didn’t belong to him.
Chapter 25
“You were right,” Tristan said. “I should have told her about those shares.”
Matt slammed the sledgehammer down on his head. Okay, not quite on his head, but on a wrought iron post about a meter above his head, the impact ringing all the way through the iron, through Tristan’s bones, and almost certainly contributing to premature deafness. Jess had decided that she wanted to line the drive to the old mas where the post-wedding party would be with hanging pots of jasmine for the wedding celebration, which sounded very pretty and all that, but somebody had to drive all those thin, graceful wrought iron poles into the ground. When it was your turn to be at the top of the ladder swinging the sledgehammer it wasn’t so bad, but being the man holding the post steady was crappy.
“What was that?” Damien called, pulling two more posts out of the back of the truck. “I couldn’t hear you.”
Tristan gritted his teeth. “I said you were right.”
“Sorry, one more time?”
Bang went the sledgehammer. Tristan clenched his jaw, but it still shook from the vibration. “You were RIGHT. Happy now?”
Above him, Matt let his hand slide up the sledgehammer handle to loosely grip it near the head, promising a moment of reprieve. He gazed at Tristan in open astonishment.
“I’m generally right,” Damien said. “But could you be more specific?”
“About Malorie,” Tristan said between his still-vibrating teeth. “And the shares.”
“Hell, I could have told you that,” Matt said. “No one likes to find out someone else has something that’s valuable to him. Or her.”
Just after Matt met Layla he had discovered Tante Colette had gifted her a part of this valley, Matt’s heritage, which he was supposed to guard for the family. He had not handled it well.
“Layla was a stranger,” Tristan said. “It’s not the same thing at all. And you got over it. You didn’t even make her give it back.”
“That’s because by then I knew I could trust her,” Matt said.
Tristan scowled.
“Face it, Tristan, no one likes to feel as if she trusted you and then you stole from her,” Raoul said. And frowned, brooding. “Even if you weren’t stealing from her. I mean…not really. Well…it was complicated.”
That’s right, Raoul had tried to steal that perfume box from Allegra when he first met her. For God’s sake, his cousins were crazy. And Tristan was the one who couldn’t get the woman he wanted to trust him. He squeezed his furrowed brow, but it refused to relax.
“Or feel betrayed,” Damien said. “No one likes to feel he—she—made herself vulnerable and then was betrayed.”
Damien’s idea of betrayal seemed to have been having a woman walk out on him after a one-night stand. Tristan, who couldn’t really think of a single one-night stand on which he would want to build a relationship but who had known Malorie his whole fucking life, did not see the similarity.
“I did not betray her!” he snapped. “I was trying to help.”
“Where have I heard that before?” Raoul said.
“Remember when he knocked down our fort when he was five?” Matt said. “He was trying to help then, too.”
“Or that time he nearly started a forest fire and our grandfather discovered we’d been building bonfires in the middle of the night?” Raoul said. “Oh, yeah, I remember that help.”
Seriously, it was such a damn pain to be the youngest sometimes. “You could try remembering all the times I saved you three from acting like total idiots and ruining your lives,” Tristan said. “Instead.”
Matt grinned at him. “You know, you could try listening to your wiser older cousins once in a while. Instead of assuming we’re total idiots.”
Tristan gave him an incredulous look. “This from a man who can’t even put a T-shirt on correctly when he’s got a crush on a girl?”
Matt started to blush.
“And don’t even get me started about you,” Tristan told Damien.
“Hey, I did all right,” Raoul claimed. “With Allegra.”
Tristan gaped at him. “You tried to steal from her—” He broke off. Frowned. “Well, she thought you tried to steal from her—” He broke off again. Damn it. “You’re just lucky she was so generous and trusting.”
And Tristan was not lucky. Malorie was not trusting. She didn’t believe anyone in this world had her back, not even him.
Shit, she was nursing her wounds somewhere thinking he’d stabbed her in the back. And even though that hurt like hell, that she would think that of him, he knew he was going to have to go fix it. Because…how did you nurse a wound in your back? You needed someone else to help you recover from that.
“But just to make sure we’re clear on the basics,” Damien said. “You are hereby acknowledging that you do, in fact, screw up with women at least as much as we do when your heart’s involved?”
Tristan gave him a disgruntled look. “As much might be exaggerating.”
“Fine.” Damien dropped his poles on the gravel with a clatter. “Then I won’t help you out.”
“I do not need help,” Tristan snapped, although he slid a glance at Damien. Damien had a good idea? “I know exactly what I need to do.”
All three of his cousins looked at him expectantly. Like hyenas waiting for him to toss them a juicy tidbit.
Tristan ground his teeth. “Apologize, okay? It’s not that complicated. I’m not one of you idiots.”
Damien gave him a faint, cousin-cruel smile. “Then why are you here miserable? If it’s that simple.”
Okay, you know what—? Tristan stepped back from his pole, shaking his numb hands and wrists. “One of you guys can hold this thing for a while. I want to hit things with sledgehammers."
Matt yielded his sledgehammer and his place on the ladder, while Raoul dragged the second ladder into position to start another pole on the other side of the drive. “Apologizing always works,” Matt said. “I mean, if it doesn’t, you need to rethink whether she’s the person you’d want to spend your life with.”
Spend your life with. Tristan felt heat climb all the way from his shoulder blades up to his hairline. Oh, hell.
All three of his cousins stilled, staring at him in greedy delight. Yes, the hyenas had just gotten a very tasty morsel.
“Did you just blush?” Matt elbowed Damien. “Did you see that? He just blushed.”
“It’s the exertion.” Tristan hefted the hammer. “Are you sure you want to provoke me while I’m holding a sledgehammer above your head?”
Matt grinned up at him and gripped the pole. Then stopped grinning in favor of clenching his jaw as the first bong went through him.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Tristan said abruptly, with another hard slam. “So why the hell should I apologize?”
From his own ladder above Damien’s head, Raoul stared at him from across the drive. “Apologizing isn’t about whether you did something wrong or not,” he said incredulously. “It’s about whether something you did got her hurt. You didn’t know that?”
Yes, of course he knew that. Damn it. He was the one who was good at emotions. His cousins were the ones who were bumbling, blindfolded bears. But…Tristan tried hard to unclench his jaw, but the effects of holding that iron post while it was battered with a sledgehammer seemed to have permanently tightened it. “She doesn’t care if I’m hurt. She thinks I’m just…I don’t know. That I’m just the same kid I was in school, and that my perfumes are worth nothing.”
He hated it, he hated it, when Malorie dismissed what he did as silly and inconsequential. It made him think of all those times in school, when teachers had told him, Arrête de faire ton imbécile, while Malorie had bent studiously over her work and tried to ignore him. She’d always been in the right, and he’d always been in the wrong. The kid who goofed things up.
“Well, if she thinks you’re still the same kid you were in school, she sure as hell liked the kid you we
re in school,” Damien said.
Tristan tightened his grip on the sledgehammer, trying to search Damien’s face from across the drive. “What do you mean?”
“Please.” Damien touched his flat belly. “I’ve got a weak stomach. I can’t repeat that kind of thing.”
Tristan controlled a very strong urge to drop the sledgehammer and go for Damien’s throat so he could strangle it out of him.
Damien looked amused. “She thinks you’re some kind of wonderful.”
Tristan blinked a moment.
Matt made a noise like an indignant bear. “If someone could explain to me why Tristan manages to fool all of the women all of the time, I would really appreciate it.”
Tristan knew he was supposed to make some gloating I’m so hot I sizzle kind of gesture right about then, but his heart wasn’t in it. He took a step down the ladder, closer to Damien. “Could you be more specific?”
“Merde, non,” Matt said. “I just ate.”
Damien laughed. “Tristan, why don’t you focus on getting these posts done, and who knows? By the end of it, maybe some sense will have been pounded into your head.”
Tristan hesitated. But there was something very satisfying about pounding things with a sledgehammer right about then. He couldn’t stop thinking about Malorie. No cousins around her to help her process things, just keeping her shoulders as straight as she could and trying her best to handle everything life threw at her—even the emotional curveballs—all by herself.
Chapter 26
Malorie slapped mortar onto the wall of the old orange orchard, mending cracks. You had to keep up with these things. If you didn’t pay attention, walls fell down on you. It was almost as if something in nature didn’t love a wall.
But she did. You could get along with people better if you had a good wall between you. You didn’t have to trust them.
The wet dust and stone smell of mortar rose around her, making her eyes wet, too. She was not crying. She was too mad to cry. It was just that mixing the mortar had made her want to sneeze, and she couldn’t quite shake the sneeze out.
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 24
