Damn Tristan. He was never going to understand her ever, was he? His life had been too different. Too warm, too happy.
She wanted to make up, and yet she wanted Tristan to realize what he’d done, too. To understand how much she couldn’t bear to let him have that big a piece of her control over her life, and that her need for independence didn’t make her a bad person.
Did it make her a bad person? She’d always tried really, really hard to do the right thing. But she’d never been good at self-sacrifice. Growing up, it had been too much expected that the women and little girls in her father’s life sacrifice everything about themselves to him.
Sleep on it. It will feel better in the morning.
Plus, you can’t break you and Tristan. Surely you’ve figured that out by now?
Figured out that she and Tristan had known each other all their lives, a relationship that had grown far too big for them to just yank it out casually by the roots over a fight.
Her breathing calmed as she thought about it. She stopped slapping mortar quite as recklessly, slowing to smooth it out. Mending. A wall that would protect this space for a long time, for anyone in her family who needed refuge here.
It was true. She really could trust Tristan. He was probably right this second drawing up a transfer of those shares to her, because he’d seen how she reacted.
Signing away his hope of a role in the company to her. All that bright enthusiasm and energy withdrawing.
How eager he’d been to reveal those floors and make them shine. How his imagination had engaged with the whole story of the place, trying to capture it in a perfume bottle for her.
Her spade slowed in its thrust into the wheelbarrow and she looked at the mortar she brought up. He was so fragile where his perfumes were concerned—the only area in which he was easily hurt. And for Tristan to walk out on her, she was pretty sure she had really hurt him.
A scraping sound came from the top of the wall. She looked up as a long, lean figure swung over it easily and dropped down beside her, the sight of him so unsurprising that she didn’t even startle back.
Tristan. His hair gorgeously mussed as always, his cheekbones so perfect, his eyes such a rich brown. He shrugged a small backpack to the ground and took in her spade and her wheelbarrow of mortar.
“Oh, you would,” he said, with a mix of resignation and exasperation.
“So would you,” she said, unexpectedly wry, looking up at the top of the wall he had just cleared so easily.
She barely had time to drop her spade as he closed his hands around her hips, pulled her in to him, and kissed her.
It obliterated all her defenses in a warm wave of human touch. And she probably shouldn’t remember all the times her father had done that kind of thing to her mother, treated her mother’s anger as something easily dismissed as soon as he himself was over it. But a part of her did.
“I’m sorry,” Tristan said, and she drew a rough breath. His apology struck another crumbling blow to her defenses.
But she tried to keep them strong. “You don’t even know what you did.”
“I know it hurt you,” he said simply.
Tears filled her eyes that fast. Oh. That did make all the difference. That he cared.
He pulled an envelope out of the backpack he’d dropped to the ground and handed it to her. “I had to go pound things with a sledgehammer for a while with my cousins, and then I had to get this drawn up. That’s why it took me so long. It signs the shares over to you.”
Her face crumpled. All her emotions tangled, the morass of them swelling out of control. This should have been the perfect thing for him to do. And yet it felt so wrong. “Tristan. You can’t just sign these over to me. Don’t you even care about them?”
Tristan stared at her incredulously. “Oh, bon sang.” He rested his forehead against hers. “Now you’re just messing with me.”
“I’m not, I just—” He tangled her emotions up so much she couldn’t even pull a single one clear from the mass and figure out what it was. “I thought Monsard mattered to you.”
His fingers flexed into her hips. “I’m starting to understand why Matt growls so much.”
“Is it this easy for you to give them up?” As easy as it had been for him to acquire them. This huge part of her.
That she’d thought he cared about.
Hell. How had what she wanted out of him become the quintessence of a Catch-22?
“No.” Tristan lifted his head to gaze into her eyes. “It’s not easy. It makes me sad, Malorie. I loved feeling part of this with you. Being there at the new beginning, the idea we were starting something beautiful together.”
Yeah. She had loved that, too. Her fingers crumpled the edge of the envelope. Tristan had made relaunching Monsard sound not lonely but happy.
“But are you ever going to understand that when I gave you those perfumes, when I moved on after Fugace and still gave you more of me, doing that was a much bigger gesture than giving you these shares ever could be. No, the shares don’t matter to me that much. I got the shares because I knew they mattered to you.”
Oh. Those tears threatened to spill through her lashes. She dropped her forehead to his shoulder, seeking steadiness. His steadiness.
That shoulder obliged by staying steady, even as his chest moved in a big sigh. He pulled a strand of her hair free and twined it around his finger.
Her breath released against his shirt, slow and soft. “The perfumes do matter to me, Tristan,” she said. It stuffed up her throat with emotion how much they mattered. “They really do. They’re beautiful. I just…you’re never going to understand.”
His arms wrapped around her. “Yes, I am,” he said quietly to the top of her head. “You’re explaining it to me right now.”
“You think I’m just a mercenary.” She was starting to cry. It was his damn warmth that did it, loosening everything. “You always think that. You never, never understand that when somebody else has control of your company or your money, it’s, it’s…like standing on one of those damn beaches they have in America, where all the sand gets pulled out from under your feet every time you try to brace.”
Tristan’s arm snuggled her more closely into him. His lips touched the top of her head. “I’m more like Mediterranean sand. I tend to stay somewhat in place.”
He was like a damn granite cliff face was what he was like. Or, as his mother had said, like a giant tree, that just grew and grew. He doesn’t know how to do that—change, let go. I know he seems very distractible on the surface. But emotionally he’s very constant. I just told you.
She closed her eyes, focusing on the feel of his arms around her, on his shoulder under her cheek.
The emotional constancy of his. Sturdy. Solid. Forever.
“I just wanted to be part of it,” he said quietly. “I guess I did get the shares as a lever, to try to make sure you had to let me in. But I wasn’t trying to make you feel vulnerable at all. I guess I overestimated how much you understood you could count on me.”
Sometimes, she could know something intellectually and yet still, emotionally, never quite lose the scars.
He kissed the top of her head. “I’ve always wanted to be part of you, Malorie.”
Tears flushed to her eyes again. “You have not,” she said roughly, even though she at least partly knew she was wrong to pretend not to believe him.
“I’m pretty sure I have, Malorie. I asked you to marry me when we were just five years old. And you’ve still never told me yes or no.”
She flushed all through her, too many emotions all at once, as she pulled back to look at him. “We were just kids.”
He nodded. “But we’re not kids anymore.”
Her throat clogged so much. His emotions always seemed so simple and honest, and hers were always so dammed-up and afraid.
Honest. Funny how she could think that about Tristan when he’d been buying up shares behind her back to give himself leverage in her family company. And yet…
>
He stroked her damp hair back from its tangle in her lashes, his hand cupping her cheek. “I don’t think you’re just a mercenary, Malorie. I think you’re the hottest, most capable, most amazing mercenary out there.”
She blinked rapidly, lashes smearing dampness, at the completely unexpected nature of that compliment. “Uh—”
“Do you think I’m just an artist?” he said.
She slowly shook her head. “I think you’re the hottest, most annoying, most amazing artist out there,” she said huskily.
He smiled a little, his thumb stroking her cheekbone. “So maybe you can hire me sometimes to make a perfume for you? Because I’d really like that.”
To be part of it. Him and her, together against the world.
Oh, hell, this guy made her cry so damn much. She scrubbed her face. “Do you know I never cry where anyone can see me?”
“I figured. But then I never thought I was ‘anyone’.”
No. No, he wasn’t just anyone.
She managed some kind of smile. “So I guess crying all over you is a way of letting you in?”
“I guess it is,” he said quietly and squeezed her body into him a little more snugly. For a little while, they were quiet. She listened to the thud of his heart. A little faster than usual, showing his emotion. But still steady. Still strong.
“What about nineteen percent?” she said abruptly, pulling back to look at him. “Could you sell me one percent? So I can have twenty-one percent and you can have nineteen?”
One of those supple eyebrows went up a little. He smiled. “You’ll feel better if you have them all, Malorie.”
She hesitated a long moment. Then met his eyes. “No,” she said very slowly. It was amazing how unscary this felt to say. Not like jumping off a cliff. But like finding her grip and climbing up it, toward the sun. “I wouldn’t feel better.”
That alert stillness ran through him. His eyes held hers.
“I want you in this with me,” she said helplessly. It went against her whole life policy. And yet… “You’re the life of the place,” she said softly. “You know all the sunlight in that perfume you made me yesterday? That’s you.”
An astonishing wave of color ran up Tristan’s cheeks, a startling flush of vulnerability. His smile grew awkward, his expression reminding her of nothing so much as the gangling fourteen-year-old he had been just before he started to fill out. Or of the little boy who had spilled crayons at her feet, over and over again.
She ran her palm down his forearm until she reached his hand and could pull it from her hip, linking her fingers with his and lifting it between them, gazing at the two hands together.
It was kind of the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. Their two hands together.
Her breathing calmed. Slowing, settled.
His fingers flexed gently on hers. “You don’t have to bribe me with shares. I’ll still be here.”
She shook her head slowly. “But those are what matter to me, Tristan. Those shares. So I want you to have them. The way you wanted me to have your perfumes.”
“Aww, hell,” he said helplessly, and lowered his forehead to hers again, gazing down at their entwined hands. “Malorie. Don’t you dare make me cry.”
“Keep them,” she said. “They’re yours. We’re”—she gave him a quick, searching look, hoping he agreed—“we’re in this together.”
His fingers flexed gently on hers. “Ours,” he said, his voice deep and warm. “That’s a nice word. Why don’t we say they’re ours.”
Ours.
Oh. That sounded right.
Ours.
Yes. It might be the very nicest word ever invented. Warm. Solid. Together. She tried it, carefully: “Ours.”
Chapter 27
For a long time after that, they lay under one of the orange trees, not speaking. Tristan played with her hair, freeing it from the clasp at the back of her head, drawing his fingers through the strands of it. A white flower drifted slowly down with the setting sun, and he caught it and tucked it in her hair.
In that hush of space, you could let things out. Open up secret spaces inside you into the safety of that evening. Propped on one elbow, watching the edge of color over the sea, he spoke thoughtfully, words slow. “I guess I wanted them as a lever because I never could trust you would just let me in for what I am.”
“What?” Malorie jerked into a sitting position.
He sat up, too, opening his hand. “I never could trust you’d…admire me, too. See any good qualities in me. So I wanted to have something I knew you cared about.”
“What?” Malorie stared at him for a full ten seconds before she smacked both her hands to her face. “Oh, my God, you people are so dumb.”
“Hey.”
“You’re all so freaking entitled and so spoiled that even you can’t see what a good thing you’ve got in you.”
Tristan parted his lips as if to say something, then clearly thought better of it and came up with something else. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. For half our lives, you’ve barely been able to stand me.”
Malorie ground her teeth. “Tristan. You’re sexy, sweet, gorgeous, you can just smile and it warms entire rooms, you’re hardworking and creative and a freaking genius, everyone says so, and you have this gift for reaching into the heart of things and making that heart feel okay. And you don’t even realize how rare that is? What a freaking miracle of a person you are?”
Tristan looked as if he’d been strolling with Tristan-like confidence along the edge of a cliff and she’d just shoved him off it. Well, she always had wanted to shove him off a cliff, but who knew a compliment was the way? He opened his mouth and closed it, and a delicate hint of color came into his cheeks. “…That’s what you think my qualities are?”
“Some of them,” Malorie said sulkily. Sometimes the Rosiers just pissed her off so bad.
“Some of them?”
“Well, I didn’t want to go overboard.” She folded her arms.
Tristan gaped at her. The flush deepened, dramatically. He shoved his hand through his hair. “Wow.” And then, “I am going to fucking kill them.”
“What?”
“Well, not Tante Colette, I can’t kill her, but Damien, I am definitely going to kill.”
“Why are you talking about murder all the sudden?”
“I just think certain people could have passed on certain essential information. Instead of leaving me to fumble around in the dark.” He suddenly pulled her back into his arms again and just hugged her, very hard. “Wow,” he murmured again, low.
She leaned her head against his chest, listening to the thump of his heart. It was such a reassuring sound. She’d gotten scarily close to panicking and breaking everything, and…well, maybe he wasn’t that easy to break. Trees weren’t, after all.
His chest moved in a slow breath against her cheek. He spoke softly. “The perfumes are the best thing I can be. So when you can dismiss one of those…”
She lifted her head. “You’re the best thing you can be, Tristan. Your juices are a lovely expression of that, but if I make them more profitable, I am not dismissing you.”
A funny little smile on his face. He kissed her. “I love you so damn much.”
A shock of joy straight through her. She stared at him.
He was playing with her hair. She wasn’t sure he’d even considered the impact of what he’d just said. “You know I’ve always been insecure about you,” he said.
“Tristan. You have not.”
He shrugged a little, but met her eyes. That way he did sometimes, that insisted that she really look at him. “Sometimes the scars you acquire as a child never really go away.”
“I scarred you?” she whispered, horrified. She’d never meant to.
He shook his head. “It wasn’t you. You were hard to attain, but you were never mean about it. It was that sense that I was never good enough. That I could never live up to you. Or live up to what anyone wanted of me, re
ally.”
What? Oh, because…if he’d learned to charm his way out of so much trouble, it was because he was always getting things wrong. She’d kind of forgotten that. Everything about him seemed so right now.
Because he’d polished himself. Done what he needed, to make his society accept him. They both had had their battles, just different ones.
Her hand tightened around his. “You might have been a pain sometimes, Tristan, but…I always thought you were amazing.”
His smile warmed until it was this great ray of sunshine in her life. He kissed her. “Likewise, Malorie.”
He made her feel so good. Whole and held, both at once.
He linked their fingers, gazing at their hands. “We’re going to butt heads over production costs and perfumes so damn much.” The way he said it, it didn’t sound like a bad thing.
Did Tristan have as enticing a vision of that as she did? “I bet it will be fun,” she said, wistful for a future that seemed as if it might really happen.
That brilliant smile of his. He kissed her hand. “I’ll make you some commercial perfumes if you’ll let me play around with a niche line, too.”
“All right.” She was starting to smile, too. Tristan had that gift, of helping, when emotion got too utterly overwhelming, to give that emotion a little outlet of humor and warmth, before it burst a person. “Don’t go crazy with the oud.” One of the most expensive perfume components in the world.
He held up a finger. “Local jasmine. From Matt.”
“Hmm.” She liked the idea of local, but Matt was freaking expensive. “Maybe he could give you a family discount.”
“Maybe Rosier SA could give us a family deal on all of production, since they’re family. It will be a while before you could get your own production facility set up again, if you want to do that.”
Rosiers would be family?
Okay, wait…what were they assuming here?
“Could we call it Rosier-Monsard?” Tristan said.
Her eyebrows shot up to the top of her head. “No. We could not. You’ll only have nineteen percent of the shares, Tristan.” To her twenty-one percent. But she had her sister’s proxy. Forty-one plus nineteen—even without Lise, they could go forward, if she and Tristan could agree. Sixty percent would be enough to convince the banks.
Crown of Bitter Orange Page 25
