“What was it,
droit de seigneur
?” she said. “Is that how you always seal the deal? I got to be your little bottle of champagne to toast yourself in your victory? Did you sleep with Tara, too?”
He stopped stock still staring at her. This sick, great hollowness opened, and he felt like he was falling into it. That whole night of tenderness and wonder, and…
that
was what she thought of him? “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that. Jess, the company doesn’t matter—”
Her eyes lifted from her phone and locked with his. “It does to me.”
“I’ll buy you a new one,” he said roughly, impatiently. “It’s just a company, Jess,
merde
. I—”
“I’ve got to go.” She pocketed her phone.
“I didn’t know you were Jasmin Bianchi, Jess,” he said quickly, struggling not to just grab her and hold her in place. “Not that who you are matters, none of this matters, Jess, but—”
“Ciao,” she said, and walked out.
And this great hollow emptiness had expanded inside him, icing him everywhere, this loss, this incredulous
wait, what? What? How could this have just happened? Either it was just a hook-up or it was life-changingly special, but it can’t—surely it can’t have been both?
And yet it had been both. One thing to her and one thing to him. He’d tried several times—tried to initiate a conversation the next day as she packed up her supplies and walked out, tried to call her two weeks later after she might have had time to think—but he’d never gotten through to her at all. She’d been crystal clear on it:
You’re just not that important.
Everything that he had thought so special—not worth her time. Because she thought he was just a bastard with money, a taker, a user.
Sitting on the limestone now, with his cousins, he rubbed his bare left wrist. When he slid behind the wheel of his car dressed for business, just the assets within that space—the Aston Martin, the watch, the suit, the cufflinks, the damn platinum pens people gave him—were worth half a million dollars.
So it was stupid to feel so empty. As if he had nothing that was actually his.
Shit. Jess clenched her fist on the counter the next morning, restless with a rage that had kept her tossing on that new mattress half the night.
He’d called this scent
shit
? When she’d captured so perfectly that steel quality to him that he liked to show the world. It should be
exactly
the kind of scent he would want to wear as he strode into a meeting to let those present know that he’d bought up all their dreams and ambitions because they’d made such easy, stupid targets out of themselves.
Not that anyone in a boardroom should be able to smell his scent, of course. It wasn’t the Renaissance. A man these days must wear fragrance with restraint. A touch of it at the base of his throat or the nape of his neck, a spritz perhaps in the lining of his jacket, so that when he took it off, you got just an elusive waft of the man he wanted you to know.
A vision of Damien Rosier, removing his suit coat in a boardroom as he moved in for the kill.
A vision of Damien removing his coat in a restaurant and turning to offer his arm to Nathalie Leclair.
A vision of Damien removing his coat in his bedroom, his eyes on her…
No steel in that moment, or at least none that he’d wanted to telegraph.
Seduction then. Was that what a fragrance for him needed? Did he prefer to soften what he was with his scent rather than advertise it?
Her fingers sank into the folds of his coat, and she lifted it to breathe inside the lining, around the collar. Her whole body clenched as everything came back to her—the way his body had felt, braced over hers in his bed, the hunger in his eyes, the care of her, that
This is our first time and I don’t want to scare you away
care, how much he held himself in check, and how that restraint honed his cheekbones and made his mouth severe and passionate, his eyes glittering with so much intensity. The way his lips had felt, as he buried his face in her throat and kissed her all…down…her…
“Excuse me,” said a voice from the door to the old-fashioned laboratory, and she jerked out of the memory, dropping the coat.
The woman who stood there had bronze-tipped hair so curly that it was the first thing Jess saw. The second was the raised eyebrow and the curious way the woman’s green eyes rested on the coat. With intrigued recognition.
Jess just managed not to shove the coat guiltily behind her back. “May I help you?”
“I’m Layla Dubois,” the other woman said, and Jess thought:
I know that face.
She’d seen it just last night, while researching the Rosiers online to give herself greater knowledge of her possible enemies here.
That’s Belle Woods. Yet another of the glamorous, famous women the Rosiers date.
Before Damien’s cousin Matthieu Rosier had started appearing on celebrity sites with Belle Woods, he’d been on them a lot with model Nathalie Leclair, which was…nauseating, if
both
cousins had hooked up with the same model. But confusing, too—like…what was Damien’s relationship with Nathalie? Had he possibly not been hitting on the model that evening Jess had seen them?
If so…if so…she couldn’t think about it. It hurt her stomach too much to think that she might have actually had a chance at something beautiful and destroyed it because she was too afraid to believe.
“I like your music,” Jess said to Belle Woods, instead of any of this, with more dryness than that music deserved. “Wish for Me”, which hadn’t even been released yet but which had gone viral on YouTube from a recording made at a festival, was the kind of song that made an already lonely woman just want to hang her head and cry.
The irony of a musician who’d had all her wishes in life come true having the musical ability to twist lonely hearts like that. She’d probably win another Grammy for the damn thing. And God, did anyone in this family ever date someone ordinary?
The rock star smiled wryly at having her incognito immediately blown. “You’re Jasmin Bianchi, right?”
“Most people call me Jess.”
“My family call me Layla,” the other woman said. Her head tilted. She kept studying Jess in a way that made Jess want to check a mirror to fix her hair and make sure she could support such a searching gaze. Layla took a deep breath. “Which, um, I think we might be. That is…I think we might be related.”
What?
Jess stared at her.
“Have you talked to Tante Colette yet?” Layla asked.
Colette Delatour? The woman who had given this to her? The ninety-six-year-old woman Damien didn’t want to accuse of dementia in a court of law? “I should,” she said uneasily.
She should have done it
already
, before she got caught up in this shop and a battle with Damien. She just wasn’t used to having…well, relatives. Generations. Someone behind her to whom she could and should turn and talk.
“Do you want me to take you to see her?” Layla asked.
Jess hesitated. That felt so…supported. To have someone there for her, when she faced an unsettling time. She tested the idea, but it felt like pressing her feet into sand while standing in the waves. “There’s no need,” she said quickly. “I can go on my own.”
“Oh.” Layla’s expression flickered. “You, ah…you don’t get lost around here? I always used to,” she said ruefully. “In fact, I still do, half the time.”
“No, I’m fine on my own,” Jess said.
Again Layla’s expression flickered. “Oh. Okay.” She hesitated, visibly uncomfortable, and then shifted to look at the shelves. “What an amazing place. I didn’t know the family had this. Tante Colette never showed it to me.”
“You thought it should come to you, too?” Jess asked warily.
“What?” Layla gave her a confused look. As if Jess didn’t quite make the sense Layla had expected her to make. “No, not at all. I’m still trying to adjust to the inheritance she gave
me.
I just didn’t know Tante Colette had more of these shocks for the family up her sleeve. Her idea of a magic wand is more along the lines of a cattle prod.”
Jess waited, trying to figure out what in the world Layla meant.
“Fairy godmother hardened Resistance war hero style,” Layla said, waving her hands. “You know?”
Jess looked at her blankly. Maybe Layla would start making sense if she kept talking long enough.
“I also didn’t know I had a, you know, a…cousin.” Layla peeked at her, keeping her body facing the shelves of bottles but her glance lingering, studying Jess again.
“A…” Jess stared at her.
“I’m pretty sure,” Layla said. “That is—I mean…well, we should ask Tante Colette. If you’re descended from Léonard Dubois, too. If that’s why she gave you this place.”
Jess’s eyebrows crinkled together. “My father was illegitimate. I think it was part of what drove him to the U.S. That sense that he could never find his place here where…the big perfume families hold sway.” Notably, the Rosiers.
“Monsieur Rosier says Léo was a very wild teenager, running around a lot before he ran away.”
“Monsieur...? Louis Rosier?” Damien’s father, the formal head of Rosier SA, who got his son to do all the dirty work?
“Jean-Jacques Rosier. Matt’s grandfather. And Damien’s,” Layla added, with a little gleam in her eye as she glanced at the coat Jess still held.
Jess shoved that coat farther down the counter. “There are a lot of Rosiers around here,” she said dryly. All that mass of family and power against…just her. All by herself. Her father had made his way in life alone, too, and she’d been luckier than he had. Until six months ago, she had at least had him.
She couldn’t even imagine what it must be like for Damien to have a support system reaching out infinitely, through centuries of networking and extended family, so that on that damn phone of his he probably had five hundred people he could call for help removing any given problem.
A problem like her, for example.
“Yes,” Layla said happily, hugging herself and then spreading her arms. “So much
family.
”
Well, somebody certainly felt welcomed into that family, didn’t she? Jess rubbed a cufflink between her fingers, feeling exposed and alone.
She glanced up to find Layla eyeing her wistfully again, sidelong. Layla looked quickly away.
“Thanks for coming to meet me,” Jess said awkwardly. She could feel it, that effort on Layla’s part to reach out to her. And yet trying to reach back across the gap between them with her own hand extended felt so risky. Like…to not be exposed and alone, to create a new family, she would have to try to believe in the scariest and most impossible things.
Expose herself to infinitely greater possibilities of hurt than the one of being lonely.
“Of course,” Layla said, confused and uneasy. “I mean, I…I’ve never had a cousin.”
Oh. Jess stared at the other woman a moment. Layla knew what it was like to be alone, too?
Jess hesitated, rubbing her hand over the counter. Memory stirred, all the times her father had made her perfumes that smelled like dragon’s wings or fairy dust, all the ways he had reached from his world into hers as a little girl, to hold them close.
There was something Jess could do. Something that could reach out to this alien cousin. It was its own kind of risk, but it was a risk she knew how to take. “Would you like me to make you a perfume?”
***
A great, bare vine climbed up the street of stairs like a banister, or like massive roots leaving a path for humans to follow as they reached for the sun. In the hush of thick medieval walls, the stairs lay in shadow. Jess’s stomach hurt as she stopped in front of an ancient oak door with a rose-shaped brass knocker.
You’re just hungry
, she told her stomach sternly. She hadn’t yet had lunch.
She took a deep breath and grasped it, knocking with the flower on that ancient door to let her in.
Yeah, and
that
didn’t feel like wishing on a star at all.
There was no answer. Of course not.
She swallowed finally and turned away, the hurt in her stomach relaxing into something more empty.
The door opened. “Yes?”
She turned around so fast she tripped on the stairs and had to grab the old vine for balance. An old, old woman stood in the door. Straight and tall, with white hair and a face as wrinkled as paper that had been crumpled in a fist time after time and then spread out. She wore a thick rust-colored tunic over dirt-stained black yoga pants and held gardening gloves in one hand.
Jess’s heart started to beat too fast, and she gripped the vine more tightly. Thick as a man’s wrist and more reliable, that vine. “I’m…I’m Jess Bianchi. Jasmin Bianchi.”
Light flared in the old woman’s dark eyes. “Jasmin.” She held out her hand.
Jess clasped it carefully, afraid of delicate bones, but the old woman’s grip was strong. She smelled of lavender and lemon, a hint of dirt and a little bit of onion, as if she’d been pulling onion grass in the garden or cooking in the kitchen.
“You look like him,” the old woman said. “Like her.”
“Are you…are you Colette Delatour?”
“Of course. Come in.”
Jess followed her down a hall of dark old wood hung with photos, past a kitchen in which she glimpsed orange-red pots hanging on the wall and a window full of light, through to a garden in the back.
Jess took a wondering breath when she stepped into it. Entirely surrounded by great, old walls, one of which must be the medieval fortifications of the town, it was like stepping into a witch’s garden out of an old tale. Pick a plant without permission and you might find yourself owing your firstborn child.
A fig tree grew in one corner, laden with ripe figs around which a few wasps buzzed. Herb beds lined the walls, thick with green and silver and the purple sprigs of late lavender. A clothesline was hung with washing.
“Oh,” Jess said very softly as scents—living, vivid scents—rushed in and embraced her. As if life itself had surrounded her in one great hug.
“Oh, the smells.” She moved toward the beds with her arms outstretched. She’d grown up in New York. She visited gardens, of course, to study scents, but for the most part, the scents of herbs and flowers she held in memory were wishes she pulled together from bottles, sending formulas down to labs to have her latest idea sent back up to her for testing, in the hope that this time she would hit on the formula that would make that wish of a scent come true.