Jess stared, spoon locked in one hand. Was Damien Rosier
blushing
?
If her opinion of him got overset much more, she might have to start from zero.
Grief squeezed her. This nascent suspicion that if she had believed in him, after that first night, she might not be starting from zero but from something far richer and more beautiful. God, what if in all that loss the world had visited on her, some of it had been her own fault?
“Tante Colette—”
“For her birthday. It was her little joke, you see. Damien kept trying to get her to ask for something
special
for her birthday, instead of just hugs and kisses from him.”
Definite color on Damien’s cheeks now.
“And she finally told him she wanted the moon and the stars. She said later she thought he would
draw
them for her. Make them with glitter. Something like that.”
Damien pressed fingertips hard into the table. “I was seven,” he pointed out abruptly, almost a growl.
“Aww,” Jess said involuntarily, lifting her hand to her lips. Then
she
blushed as Damien glared at her. But…this sudden vision of Damien as a child hit her, a little, black-haired seven-year-old trying to give his mother something more than hugs and kisses. Because he wanted to be
bigger
, of course, he wanted to give her something wonderful, while his mother almost certainly thought hugs and kisses from her little boy were the best thing any woman could ever have.
God, he must have been
adorable.
“But Damien, he wanted to capture the
actual moon.
So he made this elaborate trap at the top of a tree, with a big mirror he managed to rope up there with Tristan’s help—Tristan was five—and even a cage he built out of sticks. Tristan stood at the base of the tree with a rope to pull at the right moment, which was supposed to close the trap, and Damien climbed to the very top to hold up the mirror, and—when he fell, he cut his chin wide open.”
Jess looked at the scar on Damien’s chin. So that was what it was from.
“He might have fallen on a shard of the mirror, but we don’t know for sure, because he and Tristan tried to bandage it themselves and cover it up. It was the middle of the night, and they didn’t want to get in trouble. Plus, we raised those kids to be self-reliant. And in the morning his mother came to wake him and screamed and screamed. The wound had been too big to close easily, and in the night it had soaked all through the towel they used, all over Damien’s face, all over the bed around him. Twelve stitches, he needed. The sight of him covered in blood in his bed still shows up sometimes in his mother’s nightmares.”
“It does?” Damien said, startled.
“She thought he’d been murdered for a moment, before her screams woke him up. For weeks after, she would sneak into his room to sleep on the floor, just to make sure he was okay.” A flicker of confusion crossed Damien’s face. Apparently he’d never heard that detail of his own story before, and it jarred with his understanding of it. “And Damien? He was upset that he’d fallen just before he managed to capture the moon.”
Damien glowered across the garden, not looking at anybody.
Jess pressed her fingers to her lips.
Oh, my God. You must have been so
sweet.
“From which the saying in our family: Be careful what you wish for. Damien will get it for you.”
Damien closed his eyes, looking very put upon. Jess found herself wishing she hadn’t destroyed a possible right to reach out and stroke the inside of his wrist to tease him into a better mood. God. Was it possible she would have had that right, if she hadn’t run away that morning and kept running from him ever since?
“I wish I had some of those figs for our dessert,” Tante Colette said, and Damien rose immediately, then stopped and gave his great aunt a dirty look.
Colette smiled a little.
Jess found herself fighting a smile, too.
“Maybe you two young people could pick us some,” Colette said.
“I’ll clear off the table,” Damien said, and did that instead, so that Jess picked figs alone.
She’d never seen an actual fig tree before. The green, dusty aroma embraced her, faintly milky, fresh and almost too sweet. The figs felt firm and smooth in her hand, even as they split open, showing their pink flesh. The wasps alarmed her, and more so when one buzzed to her hair to investigate the new scent. She held very still, a fig in one hand, cringing from the possible sting.
A firm breath puffed against her head. The wasp took flight. Damien appeared from behind her, moving to the other side of the fig tree without a word.
Jess tried to keep picking, but she kept looking at him, through the dappled shade and the wasps and the hanging fruit.
None since.
Of course you mattered.
Why didn’t you call me?
Her heart was starting to hurt her. It had hurt so much this past year, but this hurt was different, crueler—as if she might have snuffed out her own wish.
Such a sexy, handsome man, with so much power and so much wealth and such a reputation for ruthlessness. Who had once been a seven-year-old who tried to catch the moon for his mother, because he didn’t think his hugs were good enough.
“I saw you with Nathalie Leclair,” she said suddenly, painfully. She spoke in English, just in case their words might reach Colette Delatour.
He looked at her blankly, one hand frozen around a fig above his head. “With my cousin’s ex-girlfriend?” The British in his accent was very clipped, the Rs a rough breath.
“The next day. I don’t usually go to two perfume parties in a row. I don’t usually go to
any.
I don’t like them, and other than your cousin Tristan the actual perfumers don’t get invited to them that much. But I…guess I half hoped to run into you again.” Half hopes could be hard to kill. When she’d come to Grasse, that same half hope had
still
been struggling to come alive again, the hope that she would see him again and somehow he would make everything she knew about him not be true so that she could believe in him again. “But when I did…you seemed pretty occupied.”
He just stared at her a moment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nathalie Leclair—the model? She used to date my cousin Matt. It was a disaster.”
Jess called up the painful image again. It had definitely been him and not one of his cousins. She wouldn’t mistake him for anyone. “You had one hand braced by her head, and you were leaning into her. You might have been arguing. The two of you appeared pretty intensely engaged. Then you took her arm, and the two of you left together.”
Damien’s lips pressed tight. “And that was all it took?”
Well…Nathalie was so beautiful and glamorous. Exactly the kind of person who fit with Damien Rosier, unlike Jess herself. And everything had seemed so hard then. Grief and loss drowning her at the bottom of a well. Of
course
the one beautiful, magical night had turned out to be a grasp at a straw.
Damien had that steel look again, except for the tic of a little muscle along his jaw. “I was always trying to damage control Nathalie back then. That would have been not too long after Matt broke up with her. She was a loose cannon, and he had no idea how to defend himself from her style of attack. I don’t really remember that party, since I had to deal with her so often, but I certainly never
left
with her. You might have seen me leading her into another room, away from cameras.”
Oh. This stupid garden must be stealing all her strength, because Jess wanted to cry again. Had she destroyed something that truly could have been, so stupidly?
“You know what I would have done, if I’d seen you with another man leaning into you at the next night’s party?” Damien asked.
She shook her head.
“Stabbed him and smiled over his corpse.”
She blinked.
“Or in some other way cut him out of that picture. I sure as hell wouldn’t have watched you walk out with him and not said anything. We have a very different approach to life.”
Indeed. How did one
manage
that—so much ruthlessness, so much self-assurance? She knew perfume, but even with that, every start of a new fragrance was its own kind of anguish, that whole blank page of scent to fill and so many ways to never quite succeed with what was so beautiful in her head. And when she worked on perfume, it was in spaces of quiet, where she didn’t have to impose herself on other people. That self-confidence that could cut through other people like a knife—no, she didn’t have that.
“But most of all, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. “I would have thought, ‘What’s going on? Picking up another man twelve hours later doesn’t fit with what I know of her.’ And I would have made sure I did know what was going on, before I made any decisions to ditch you from my life.”
He’d tried to get through to her multiple times, after that boardroom meeting that Monday when he saw her again and realized he’d taken over her company. He’d tried to figure out what was going on. She’d had to shut him out repeatedly, his eyebrows drawing more deeply together each time she pushed him back.
“I wasn’t feeling very strong back then,” Jess said, low. “I
already
felt as if my whole world was crumbling down, before I saw that.”
Damien looked down at the fig he held in his hand, rubbing his thumb over its skin. He didn’t say anything, but for the first time since she’d seen him in Grasse, his lips weren’t pressed in a firm line. Softened, they looked incredibly sensual, his eyes brooding, his eyebrows drawn very slightly together. She wanted to ruffle his hair, to make that brooding look complete.
“And, you know, you’re a little bit out of my league,” she said roughly.
His eyebrows went up. “What do you mean by that?”
A flush started to climb up her cheeks. She should have kept her mouth shut. “Come on. You know what I mean.”
“No.” His eyes lifted from the fig and met hers. “I don’t.”
Her cheeks heated painfully. Of course ruthless Damien would make her spell this out, pin her mercilessly well outside her comfort zone the instant she accidentally stepped beyond it. “You’re gorgeous and sexy and powerful and wealthy, and…I’m just me.”
“One of the top perfumers of our generation?”
She dropped a fig into her basket and pushed her freed hand across her forehead, shoving strands of hair back from her flushed face. “Besides that. I’m just…me.”
“Underneath who you are to the rest of the world, you’re just you?”
She nodded. He was holding her eyes as if she was supposed to understand something, and almost, almost…she thought about him as a sweetheart of a seven-year-old, trying to catch the moon. And she thought about that ruthless steel surface of his, that casual
I’d stab him and smile over his corpse.
And she thought about the way his skin was revealed that night as he slowly unbuttoned his shirt, watching her. Kissing her. Running his hands up her arms in this stroke of reassurance and seduction…
She picked another fig quickly, too ripe.
The wasp that had been feasting unnoticed on its split flesh buzzed around her hand angrily. Damien reached out and offered his hand to the wasp instead, distracting it toward him. It buzzed around his fingers a moment and then flew off to another fruit. Damien took the over-ripe fig from her—calluses on his fingertips brushing her palm—and tossed it into the corner of the garden.
“Which of those things that you just said about me do you care about?” Damien asked. “Gorgeous, sexy, powerful, wealthy?”
None of them, that was the thing. Sure, a couple of them had been nice little pluses, but what she had
cared
about, actual care, was the way they talked, like a tale out of time, the gentle, quiet, sexy care in
him
.
She wished she could just plunge into some icy pool and hide her hot cheeks. But she’d already been enough of a coward with him, hadn’t she?
“I liked the gorgeous and sexy,” she finally admitted. Kind of. Except that it was like sleeping with a movie star. Hard to believe it was real. If he’d been a little more geeky, a little more ordinary, he would have made
sense.
She could have still believed in her luck the next day. “The
powerful
and
wealthy
are a little unsettling.”
He was silent a moment, turning a fig in his palm with a little stroking motion of his thumb that was bringing back far too many memories. “I’m quite comfortable being powerful. And the wealth protects my family. Plus, it’s essential to power.”
Of course.
A one-sided curve of his mouth. “I find you thinking I’m
gorgeous
and
sexy
a little unsettling.” The French layered over the British in his accent, roughening the R in
gorgeous
, softening the G.
Her skin prickled at the thought of unsettling him.
This faint gleam in those sea-green eyes of his as they flicked over her body, and…was that a hint of color on his cheeks again? Surely not. “But I might be able to get used to it.”
She turned hastily with her basket toward the table where Colette Delatour sat waiting for them.
“Not comfortable with it, no,” Damien said in her ear as he followed her, the French-on-British accent rubbing all up and down her spine. “But I might enjoy it, just the same.”
It was shadowy and quiet in the back room of the little perfume shop. Damien closed his eyes, breathing in the aromas of dust and shade, the forgotten scents that layered with the bright, pushy ones that had just been awoken. If he followed the threads of scents, if he took his time, he could piece together what Jess had played with that day, after she’d left Tante Colette’s house. Tristan, who had finely trained his Rosier nose, would have already known. Damien had been destined for business so young he’d never had that training.
He’d chosen that destiny, of course. Yes, it had pleased his father, but it had deeply disappointed his mother, who would have whole-heartedly backed him if he went into an artistic career like Tristan. It was just that…Tristan thought what was vital to Rosier SA was the perfume he made. Matt thought it was the valley and the flowers he grew. But Damien had always known that it was the money, the business deals, the knowledge of behavioral economics, the control.
That
was what determined their lives. That was where the real power lay.