Again, a little caution ran through him. Sometimes, he couldn’t shake the feeling that out-plotting their descendants while pretending not to even speak to each other would be child’s play for two Resistance veterans.
“Pépé.” He opened his hand in the nearest thing a man of his generation could come to a bow. “Losing to you would be an honor.”
***
Jess had died and gone to heaven. No wonder her father had always lived New York like exile. No wonder some part of him had always missed his homeland so badly. The
scents
. They had
texture
, they had feeling, they had
life.
The silk of the petals and gloss of leaves brushed her face, and the oils, when she carefully picked a flower and placed it in the basket Damien had given her, caressed scent onto her skin. Dirt under her feet released its own scents, and she wanted to take off her shoes and sink her toes into it.
Shaky and vulnerable with sensuality and pleasure—as if she’d just been experiencing multiple orgasms—she looked up to find Damien and a tall, old man approaching her and tried to pull herself together. She had changed into a sleeveless top and capri pants for this excursion, but now she wished for her hoodie again—just to be able to pull it over herself and not show how naked she felt.
“Jess. May I present my grandfather to you? Jean-Jacques Rosier.” A small smile curved Damien’s lips. “Your great-uncle.”
Jean-Jacques Rosier shot him a sharp look. “By adoption,” he said firmly.
“So you still have your limited view of family, Jacky?” a cool, rusty voice said, and Jess looked around to discover Colette Delatour coming up on them.
Jean-Jacques Rosier glared at his stepsister. “Laurianne’s shop is all the proof I need of the danger of not keeping what’s of value to us in the hands of the real—the blood family.”
Damien’s hand curved under Jess’s elbow. “You know how in films someone pulls the pin on a grenade and everyone dives for cover? This would be a similar cue.”
Those old sniper blue eyes snapped back to Jess before she could go a step. A man whose experience of live grenades probably wasn’t confined to films. “Running?”
Her backbone turned to adamantine just at the glance. She lifted her chin. “No. I think you Rosiers have shut out enough people who didn’t fit your ideas of family.”
Colette smiled faintly.
“You think you deserve a shop that has been in our family for centuries?”
Jess locked eyes with Jean-Jacques Rosier. “Just call me Robespierre.”
Damien made a little choked sound, his hand flexing on her elbow. “Told you,” he said to his grandfather.
“Besides,” Jess added, “if I’d risked my life day after day for five years in that shop making perfumes to send messages across Europe in a fight to save my world, I guess I’d think I had the right to do exactly what I wanted with it, when I was done.” She turned and inclined her head to Colette. “I’m honored.” And, as she thought about it more and it really hit her, this choked feeling grew inside: “Deeply.”
Both sets of white eyebrows went up a little, not quite in surprise or doubt, but in some kind of thoughtfulness. Colette and Jean-Jacques glanced at each other and back at her and Damien.
Damien’s hand was warm under her elbow. “On that note,” he murmured, and led her down the row of jasmine, “would you like to meet any more of my family? I promise that they’re exactly as difficult as our elders might lead you to expect.”
Jess tilted her head back, still adjusting from the impact of the previous meeting. “That’s amazing. You look
exactly
like him.”
“White-haired, blue-eyed, and wrinkled like a note from the past?”
“It’s in the bones. The mouth.” The lean hardness. And most notably in that ruthless, do-whatever-it-takes look in the eyes.
“In my defense, then, can I mention that he also helped get thirty-six children over the Alps, and that he met our grandmother while doing it—she took them on into Switzerland. He was faithful to her until the day she died, and still is.”
“You’d do that,” she said definitely.
Damien actually tripped. Just this barest stumble on a clump of dirt, quickly smoothed out. “Be faithful?” he asked oddly.
“If your country was occupied by a deadly enemy, you’d organize a cell to fight them off and save everyone you could. And you’d do it
well.
You’d outsmart them over and over. I can see you doing it.”
He stared down at her a moment. He looked utterly confounded—embarrassed and honored and completely confused. Finally he rubbed his hand through his hair. “What about the part about falling in love and loving that one woman for the rest of my life?”
Heat flushed up her cheeks. She felt vulnerable and full of wishing. “I’m sure your grandmother deserved it.”
“Very much so, yes.”
She loved how much he loved his family. It made her intensely hungry. “
Have
you ever been in love?” she asked wistfully.
His expression grew distant. “I fell in love once.”
A little pang in her heart. She shouldn’t have asked.
He looked away from her to hold out his hand to a big man who needed to shave before he turned into a bear. “Jess, my cousin, Matthieu Rosier. Your cousin Layla’s fiancé.”
The bear bent and kissed her cheeks, brown eyes assessing, and then Layla appeared, slipping under his arm. Layla hesitated over her greeting, but then went with the French cheek-kissing thing.
A happy scent, Jess thought as Layla’s exuberant curls brushed her nose. For her cousin, she definitely needed to make it a happy scent. Full of life and joy.
My cousin
. She tested the phrase again.
My cousin Layla.
“My cousin Tristan.” Tristan’s brown eyes leapt with laughter as he leaned down.
Jess, who had started to reach for his hand, which was how she usually greeted professional colleagues, adjusted wryly to kisses. Tristan straightened, winking at her. Any woman who dated this guy had to have more hormones than sense. He was
obviously
trouble.
“You know,” Tristan said, with that gleam of laughter in his brown eyes, “I am
very
intrigued to meet you.” He glanced at Damien.
Damien gave him a blunt
back off
look.
“Make that fascinated. Riveted. Compelled.”
“Tristan,” Damien said between his teeth.
“Words fail me,” Tristan said, holding his cousin’s eyes.
“They will, in a second,” Damien retorted. “Or at least the ability to speak will fail you.”
Tristan grinned. “You know, I wouldn’t have matched you with Spoiled Brat in a thousand years,” he told Jess, as if they were meeting for the first time. “There’s something about an unexpected streak of cynicism behind a sweet face, isn’t there? That perfume was brilliant. The most brilliant send-up of modern society in our generation. And you were only twenty-four.”
Damien stared at Tristan as if he had dropped off the moon. And Damien was about to punch him right back to it.
“
Enchanté. Tout à fait enchanté.
” Tristan bent over the hand she had offered for a shake, as if to kiss it.
Damien grabbed his cousin by the shoulder and shoved him back two steps. Tristan laughed out loud.
“Excuse him.” Another big man stepped in front of Tristan. “It always did take all four of us to sit on him. And even then he usually wiggled free.”
“Raoul,” Damien said to her.
Amber eyes and slate-streaked russet hair and an edge to this big man like a feral wolf. The man who had helped Damien carry the mattress in. He bent his head and kissed her cheeks.
“His fiancée, Allegra.” A small woman with glossy dark hair and bright brown eyes.
“Aren’t you forgetting someone?” a voice asked behind Damien.
He started. “Maman?”
A woman in her fifties, trim and tanned, her sun lover’s skin older than her physique, smiled at Jess, lifted her eyebrows at her son, and then kissed Jess on each cheek, four times total. Gold bracelets chimed faintly on one wrist, and large, artsy red glass earrings caught the sun. Her short hair was dyed a stylish, gold-streaked brown.
“Véronique Rosier,” his mother told Jess. “You can call me Véro. I’m sure Damien was planning to introduce you to his mother first but got distracted.” A minatory sidelong glance at her son.
Damien let out the slow, restrained breath of a man dealing with far too many family members at once. Kind of the pained breath of a man who was…worried what the girl he was bringing home might think of his family?
“Maman,” he muttered, in the tone of someone who really wished he could discreetly kick his mother’s ankle under a table to make sure she behaved. “I didn’t see you were here.” And quite possibly might have turned that Aston Martin of his around and driven them the other way if he’d spotted her before he parked.
“So
you’re
the woman he tried to catch the moon for!” Jess realized all at once, delighted.
“Oh, please, don’t remind me,” Véro said, with a dramatic flinch.
Damien closed his eyes briefly, that tiny touch of color returning to his cheeks.
All Jess’s caution and reserve dissipated when he looked like that. It made her want to tickle his ribs. Tease him. Just
relax
with him and make him relax with her.
“I thought you and Papa were in Paris,” Damien said.
“Oh, I can’t run up to Paris every time your father has a business meeting.” Véro dismissed the idea with a perfectly manicured hand that had paint splotched across a knuckle. “I’d never get any of my own life lived. But we’ll have you both over to dinner as soon as he gets back, how about that?” She smiled at Jess.
Damien stared at his mother a second. “I—”
His mother kissed him firmly on his cheeks, four times, and then pinched one of them for good measure. “Next Saturday. I’ll make your favorite.”
Jess found his inability to handle his mother so adorable that it was all she could do not to kiss him. “That sounds wonderful,” she said firmly, before she realized that she’d essentially just assumed a place as Damien’s date before his family. A place he might have been trying to refuse her—that might have been the reason he found it so awkward to handle his mother’s assumptions.
She hesitated, uncertain all at once.
Damien slanted a thoughtful look down at her, but he didn’t say anything to argue.
Of course, he
did
have exquisite manners when he wasn’t angry. So what could he say, now that she’d accepted?
“I’ll have to check my calendar,” Damien said. “I may be out of town.”
Oh. That. That was what he could say.
All her pleasure deflated like a limp balloon.
“Then check it.” His mother reached into his pocket to pull out his phone.
“Maman.” He locked his hand over his pocket.
“Hey, if he’s busy, you should come hang out with us,” Tristan told Jess.
Damien pivoted like a knife striking.
“All of us,” Tristan told Damien guilelessly. “That concert Layla’s friend is doing, remember?”
Jess bit her lip on a surge of amusement. “Are you by any chance getting a migraine?” she murmured to Damien.
“Not quite yet,” Damien said, while Tristan’s mobile eyebrows shot to the top of his head, and Véro Rosier frowned in surprised concern at her son.
“You get migraines?” Tristan said to his cousin.
“I internalize the desire to give you a headache,” Damien retorted.
Tristan gazed at him a moment. “You know, that explains a lot about you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Damien muttered.
“So,” Tristan said cheerfully to Jess, “are you helping him relax?” A teasing lasciviousness in his eyes.
“I’m not sure he does that,” Jess said wryly, and Damien shot her a sudden sideways glance.
Images ran through her: Damien, his eyes closed on that uncomfortable chair in the little shop, the expression on his face as she had been preparing the fragrance strip. Damien, asleep on a big white bed, his lean, muscled body so lax it was almost innocent, as if all his muscles had lost their tension.
“Not even for you?” Tristan looked disappointed in her.
“Tristan,” Damien said between his teeth.
“Want me to sit on him?” Matt asked Damien in a growly voice.
Tristan sighed and shook his head. “Never,” he told Jess firmly, “be the youngest of five cousins. They gang up on me.”
“It’s the only way to beat him,” Matt growled. “He’s uncrushable
.
”
Tristan looked smug.
Which she supposed he could be, if all four of his older cousins had to gang up on him to beat him.
Where was the fifth cousin? “It looks kind of fun,” she said wistfully. “I mean, I know I’m not supposed to like you Rosiers, but…”
“Why are you not supposed to like us?” Tristan demanded, with the offense of someone who was liked by most of the world.
“Snobs,” Jess said. “Think you own the perfume industry. Shut everyone else out.”
Tristan looked indignant. “That’s what people say about us?”
“My father couldn’t even stay in Grasse. He had to go to New York to have any chance, and he always felt exiled.”
“Okay, your father must be twice my age,” Tristan protested. “I take issue with the claim that my cousins or I drove him out of Grasse. My uncles…I don’t know. It’s true about the old-boy network around here. But hell, Chris Bianchi is one of my role models. I love his work. It’s not commercial, but
merde
, it’s fascinating. If he wants to come work in our perfume division, it would be an honor to have him as a colleague.”
Damien made a little motion with the hand on the far side of Jess. Tristan’s gaze flickered to it, and his eyebrows flexed together as he gave Damien a quick, questioning look.
“I’m sure he would have been honored to know that,” Jess limited herself to saying, her throat tightening.
“Would have—” Tristan broke off. “Oh, hell. Is Chris Bianchi—”
“Six months ago,” Damien said, again with that motion of his hand, as if to push this conversation away.
“Fuck,” Tristan muttered, and looked to Jess, a quick, sincere sympathy in his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Oh,
ma pauvre petite
.” Damien’s mother reached out to clasp both her hands.