Her hand brushed over the—ah, this was the scent that Damien had from his soap. Not lemon verbena but lemon balm, with soft but faintly rough leaves. It smelled
heavenly.
Bees buzzed in the lavender. She ran her fingers up the sprigs, and they buzzed gently around her hand as the lavender scent released into the air.
“This is beautiful,” she whispered. She could smell the stone. It framed this place, held all these scents safe in a thousand years of strength. She could smell the dirt, rich under the brightness of the herbs and the buzzing of the bees.
“You’re just like Tristan,” Colette Delatour said, amused but gentle about it, and Jess looked back at her.
“Is that who you said I looked like?” Although what resemblance there was between Jess and any of the sexy Rosier cousins, she had no idea.
“Oh, no,” Colette Delatour said. “No, you’ve no blood shared with Tristan. Or with Damien,” she mentioned, so unnecessarily that Jess flushed. “You look like
him.
My son. Or I tried to—be his mother.” That old, strong, quiet voice faltered unexpectedly. But when Jess looked at her, her eyes were steady, her body straight.
This woman was ninety-six? Geneticists should be in here begging for DNA samples.
“And you look like her,” Colette said quietly. “His real mother. Élise Dubois. Those same soft brown curls and that tender mouth that let her go everywhere, because soldiers always forgot she could be strong. She forgot it, too, sometimes, even when she was in the middle of acts so strong and courageous they cost her life.”
Jess stared. Was this part of her history? She carried the blood of a woman who was a hero? “In the Resistance?” she hazarded.
Colette nodded. “He had them, too, her son. That tender mouth and that soft hair. He wasn’t a bad boy, you know. He was just a boy who had been very hurt. Most of us were, by the war. Trying to heal, to grow back to normal, but sometimes it was like trees that had been broken in a storm trying to grow up straight no matter how many other fallen trees were holding them down.”
Jess kept one hand curled loosely around a lavender stem for strength as she faced this old, strong woman. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry you had to live through that.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Colette Delatour said simply. “But it makes your generation hard to understand sometimes.”
Yeah, she bet. They must feel like freaking marshmallows to an old Resistance war hero. Jess looked down at the herbs, petting the lavender with one hand and the lemon balm with the other, and then knelt to breathe them in, drawing in her own strength before she asked for more details of this story.
A thump and a step. “Tante Colette, is this what you wan—” The male voice broke off abruptly.
Jess flushed dark as she stared at Damien, just stepping out of the door into the garden, an old trunk that made her think of steamer trips braced on one shoulder, his head angled to accommodate it.
He stared at her, not moving.
The moment drew out and out, Jess on her knees with her hands in plants and her hair brushing the leaves, Damien tall and strong and with a great weight balanced on his shoulder. A position that made his biceps look fantastic.
“Yes, that’s the one,” Colette finally said calmly. “Thank you, Damien. You can set it on the picnic table.”
Jess came to her feet as Damien moved jerkily, crossing to the table and setting the dusty trunk down with a thump. His hands rested on its handles, as he stood without moving.
Jess found she’d approached the picnic table somehow, and she stopped abruptly before she let herself walk right up to him. “You’ve, ah, you’ve smudged your shirt,” she said absurdly.
He wore dress pants but only a white T-shirt with them, as if he’d stripped down for his aunt’s trunk-fetching task.
Damien brushed at the smudge on his shoulder indifferently, eyes still fixed on her.
“Here.” Colette Delatour handed him a drape of white fabric that had been lying on the other end of the picnic table. “I fixed that button while you were up in the attic.”
Damien looked away from Jess at last, focusing on his aunt. That hard mouth softened just a little. “Thank you, Tante Colette.” He squeezed the tips of her old fingers gently once and took the fabric, which turned into one of his white dress shirts as he shook it out and started to pull it on.
“You make your aunt do your mending?” Jess challenged dryly, just for something to weaken this moment, to make it safer.
Stupid.
Of course Damien Rosier, with his Dior tailoring, didn’t
need
his aunt to do his mending.
At least…maybe he did need her to do it. Maybe she needed to fix that button for him. But it was a different kind of need. A need that could be satisfied by the little act of making five or six strong stitches, the little act of squeezing old fingers to say thank you.
Her throat tightened inexplicably. She wanted to sew on a button or have someone sew one on for her.
Damien shot her a dark glance, but he didn’t respond, buttoning his shirt. God, every time she saw that man he was dressing or undressing in front of her.
She swallowed, fighting back hot and insistent memories.
“What good timing that you could stop by,” Colette Delatour said. “Damien was just telling me that he had a free hour before his next meeting. Let’s have lunch in the garden.”
***
Damien didn’t want her here. He didn’t know what to do with it—this woman to whom he had felt as if he could offer himself like a fucking falling star, caught mid-fall and held out carefully, with hope. And she’d seen nothing but…titanium.
A man with no heart, who used everyone he saw.
He didn’t know what to do with that opinion of him from her here, in this garden, where he already felt like one of those damn ripe figs half the time—splitting open while the wasps zoomed in. His aunt always made him feel that way.
But he had a duty. They used to be a little more lax about visits, letting a few days slip by between them, but Raoul had chided them when he came home, woke them up to how old their aunt was growing. An ironic reprimand, given that Raoul hadn’t been around for visits for fourteen years, but still…he’d been right.
Now at least one of them checked in on Tante Colette every single day at lunch, and another swung by in the evening. Not just him, Matt, Tristan, Raoul, but also Gabriel and Raphaël Delange, who had their restaurant only a couple of medieval streets away, and Layla and Léa and Jolie and Allegra, his own parents, Tristan’s parents, more distant cousins. They stopped by. They helped with whatever needed helping. They gave her their company and soaked up hers like a precious resource that might one day run out.
And just because his aunt’s opinion wounded him didn’t mean he left her on her own. Hell, if he avoided everyone in his family who treated him as if bullets bounced off him, he might as well act like Lucien and run off and join the Foreign Fucking Legion.
Maybe that would get rid of these damn migraines his family brought on so often anymore.
Or teach him what real bullets felt like.
Damn you, Lucien. Are you ever going to come back?
“Are you all right, Damien?” Tante Colette asked, laying pressed, hand-embroidered napkins on the table. Of course she had made them use the little round table instead of the rectangular one, so that he wouldn’t be able to shift without his knees bumping into Jess’s or his forearm brushing hers.
“I’m fine.” He set the tray down, unloading wine glasses, a bright yellow Provençal pitcher of cold lime-infused water, the crisp cucumbers that Tante Colette had just had him slice for their first course.
“You don’t need anything for your head?”
Damn it, he should never tell his family anything. “It’s fine.” He refused to look at Jess, his lips pressed together.
“What’s wrong with your head?” Jess asked.
Yeah, right. As if you care.
“Migraines,” Tante Colette said. Traitor.
Traitor was too dirty a word to use around an old Resistance fighter, though, so Damien just had to lock the temper up there where it could pound on the inside of his skull with the rest of his tension.
Jess stood looking at him with her eyebrows pleated as if he’d suddenly confessed to being half-unicorn. Damn it. He turned to lean the tray by the base of the fig tree.
“Do you need a cool cloth for your eyes or something?” Jess asked. “Should you go lie down?”
He shot her an incredulous look. “I’m fine.” He jerked out her chair and his aunt’s and stood behind his aunt’s, slipping it forward correctly as she sat. Jess took her own seat before he could move to her chair.
He took the pitcher and filled their glasses, and it was all he could do not to press the cold condensation on the ceramic against his forehead. He did
not
have a migraine. He just had this incipient pressure against the back of his forehead, running in a line toward his temples and tightening around his skull.
Jess dug in the small purse she had hung over the back of her chair, twisting so that his gaze followed the curve of her neck, the stretch of her bare arm, the soft curls twisted loosely at her nape. She was wearing golden-pale capri pants today and a sea-green drapey thing that looked romantic and wistful. She must not have expected to see him.
“Here.” She held out a small plastic bottle, its contents rattling.
He took it. Advil. He recognized the brand from his time in New York. “Modern medicine? Tante Colette won’t approve.”
Tante Colette gave him an ironic glance. “I approve of modern medicine very much, as would anyone who went through a war. But in your case, you’d do better to just take the afternoon off and go windsurfing with one of your cousins. Then you wouldn’t get the migraine at all.”
Yeah. For a second, the thought of the waves and the wind filled him, of laughing with and challenging his cousins as they raced, and he took a slow breath, that line of tension easing.
When he opened his eyes, Jess was leaning a little forward onto her elbow, nibbling at her thumbnail, studying him as if that unicorn horn was sprouting from his head. Which was about what his skull felt like it was fighting to contain, when he got a migraine. She had eyes the color of dusk, a little blue, lots of dark gray.
He looked away.
“To finding my family again,” Tante Colette said, lifting her lime-water glass, and he sighed at the reminder of her familial priorities but made the toast and did it properly—meeting her eyes and then Jess’s as he clinked glasses, because it was rude not to. Most people thought not looking into the eyes of the person you clinked glasses with brought bad luck, like a subtle curse of the other person.
Jess flushed a little as their eyes met and drank a long swallow from her glass, and that flush for some reason made the tension in his forehead ease again. Maybe the migraine was going to stay away after all. Maybe all it had needed was a quiet lunch in this garden.
With the bees buzzing, and the cool water, and the scents, and the thick medieval walls wrapping them in peace. “I’m sorry, did you want some wine?” he thought to ask Jess. Tante Colette drank very little these days, and he never drank alcohol during a business day. He won battles by having the sharpest wits in the room. “I can open a bottle.”
“No,” she said quietly. “No, this is…nice.” Her fingers stroked the condensation starting to form on her glass.
Was it? He hesitated, not sure how to feel. It was going to sneak into him, this quiet garden. Its scents and calm and the way she was looking at him were going to get to him. And then he’d have to go back out and be her bad guy. She’d tricked him that way before.
But, God, it was so nice to let the tension relax out of his temples.
He slowly set the small bottle of painkillers by his plate, not yet opening it.
“I was telling Jasmin—Jess—about her great-grandmother and her grandfather,” Tante Colette said as Damien started to serve the cucumbers. Jess first, as the guest, Tante Colette second as the oldest—and only other—woman present, himself last.
He glanced at his great-aunt. She had been sixty-six when he was born, three months after Matt’s birth, and he’d grown up on stories of her and his grandfather’s exploits during the war. And never realized how much wasn’t being told. How many parts of sixty-six years of life he never thought to ask about, and no one dug out and told him, perhaps because they were too painful.
Matt had heard the story of Tante Colette’s adopted son with Layla and filled the rest of them in, and of course after what she’d done to Matt—stealing part of his valley like that and giving it to some random rock star—Damien had tried to find out everything he could, so he would be ready to protect the family the next time.
But he’d never heard the story from Tante Colette.
She told it simply, the story of a schoolteacher who saved one Jewish child in her class and then found that she had to save another, and another. Élise Dubois had ended up helping them save dozens of children whom Tante Colette and Pépé and their cell had ferried across the Alps into Switzerland. And when the Gestapo had arrived at her house, she’d taken cyanide and died, rather than risk torture and her ability to withstand it.
At this point, according to Matt, Layla had been sobbing in his shirt. Jess was biting the first knuckle on her finger, her eyes red, but she didn’t turn to him for support.
Damien looked down at his hands, strong and flat and empty on the table, his left wrist naked. He needed to get a new watch.
“So I took her boy,” Tante Colette said. “I took him and tried to raise him.”
“Where was his father?” Jess interrupted softly.
“He died in the first six weeks. On the front, before the surrender.”
Jess’s face worked. “Oh.” She bit hard at that knuckle.
“Léo was a sweet boy,” Tante Colette said. “Tender. Very bruised. He was only eight when his mother died. She’d sent him to hide up in the hills behind the house, and he’d crept back down after the SS left, and of course one of them was waiting for him. An eight-year-old child who’d just lost his mother. They took him in. The local SS captain made a pet of him, and you can only imagine how that might have affected him, when the SS was responsible for his mother’s death. And any information he let slip about his mother’s friends, they used that, of course. It was six months before we could get him back, when the war was ending, and we never knew how much guilt that little boy let eat him up, for things he might have let slip that he never dared tell us.” The old woman stopped and shook her head, silent a moment, before she took a breath. “If he went wild, then that’s on my shoulders, that I couldn’t save him. But yes, he had an affair with one of the teenage perfume factory workers here, when he was sixteen and she was fifteen.”