Tante Colette cocked her head and gave that some consideration. “When’s the last time someone shot at you? Threatened to shoot an entire village if that village didn’t turn you in?”
“Damn it,” Damien said. “Fine.
Never
, okay?”
Colette opened her hands. “I’m just saying. A little enrichment is probably good for you.”
“You know, more and more about you becomes clear every day in your family,” Jess told Damien.
Damien sighed. And picked a pink flower.
“Damien’s all right,” Tante Colette said. “He’s the tough one. Took after his grandfather.”
“Or after you?” Jess said.
Tante Colette gave her a sharp look. “Not a blood relation,
petite.
Or didn’t anyone tell you that yet?”
“There’s a research project on nature versus nurture to be done here somewhere,” Jess said.
Damien smiled and picked a jasmine vine, wrapping it around the stems of the flowers.
“Come here,” Tante Colette said, and Damien walked over, sitting on the stone wall of the raised bed beside Jess.
She looked up at him with a smile. And because of that smile, he didn’t feel like a complete idiot as he handed her the little bouquet of flowers.
She raised it to her face to brush her lips against it, looking so ridiculously delighted that he was deeply afraid his cheeks might be flushing. He applied a will of iron to those blood cells and resolutely did not look at his aunt.
Jess was so delighted, you’d think he’d just given her a hundred thousand dollars worth of diamonds. Hell, she liked it even better, didn’t she? Her delight in the flowers was more relaxed, not overwhelmed or unnerved, just pure, glowing happiness.
He should give her bouquets of handpicked flowers all the time. It would make her deeply, deeply happy. And him, too.
He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled that happiness in closer, glancing at last at his aunt.
“Young people,” Tante Colette said with a shake of her head. But those wrinkled lips curved. “When’s the wedding?”
Damien parted his lips to say
April
, since that was the date his extremely excited mother had thrown out, although he, personally, kind of liked the idea of a wedding day next August when they could fill the church with fresh jasmine. But he stopped suddenly, looking at his aunt. His old, old aunt who kept trying to arrange the affairs of her family. “Soon,” he said. “As soon as we can.”
Jess looked up at him and then at his aunt and didn’t say anything. She just linked her fingers with his, the diamond jasmine shining on her finger. God, it was good to have someone who knew when your secret heart might feel tender. And he tightened his hold as he realized that hers might feel tender, too. She had lost one hundred percent of her family members, up to this point.
“You’ll want this for a wedding present,” Tante Colette said to Jess. “To give to the groom.” She handed the white linen to Jess.
Something Tante Colette had embroidered for them, Damien thought with a tug of sweetness. Something special that—
The folds of linen fell apart in Jess’s hands and revealed a set of pale kid gloves, the wide cuffs heavy with exquisite multicolored embroidery, fit for a king.
He’d never seen them, but he recognized them instantly. A sound escaped him, his gut tightening as if a cousin’s punch had just landed there.
Jess lifted stunned eyes from them to Damien. “You told me about—”
“Laurianne was a glove-maker, yes.” He touched the embroidery with the most delicate of fingers. Gloves centuries old, designed to protect a mercenary warrior’s hands from injury and cold, and he was afraid that
his
touch would be the one that ruined them.
“And she made—”
“She made a pair of gloves for Niccolò, when he came out of Italy to win her. A gift for their wedding.” Damien could barely hear his own voice. Four centuries. A revolution. Two world wars. Foreign occupation. Family feuds. And those gloves had still survived?
“Her Italian mercenary,” Jess remembered softly. “Whose hands must have been so scarred from fighting everyone else’s wars. She made him the softest, sweetest-smelling, most aristocratic gloves, gloves a king would wear.”
“Try them on,” Colette said.
“Tata—”
“They’ve survived since the Renaissance, Damien. Spending a few seconds on your hands won’t ruin them.”
Damien slowly pulled on a glove. Niccolò must have been a very big man for his time, because Damien was tall for his own generation, with strong hands, but the glove still fit him, although the leather had stiffened greatly with age. The ornate and exquisite embroidery looked, of course, kind of ridiculous, against his pants and shirt, although the gloves had probably been the ultimate in manly glory as part of the Renaissance wedding clothes Niccolò must have worn.
He could feel himself getting choked up, and he fought to keep his breathing smooth and even. “Thank you, Tante Colette.”
“I thought you might want something you could actually wear, too,” Colette said. “At the wedding.”
He smiled at her as he eased off the gloves. “I’d love it if you would embroider me a handkerchief to wear in my tux.”
Colette blinked in surprise, and then a complicated range of expressions crossed her face, but he thought one of them was touched pleasure. She looked down at her lap and cleared her throat. “Of course.”
Damien smiled and laid his hand over hers. It felt so much easier to do now that he’d done it so often for Jess.
Jess squeezed his knee.
“But I was thinking of these,” Tante Colette said, turning over a small embroidered bag and shaking its contents into Damien’s palm.
Damien stared down at two pairs of rounded gold buttons, held together by a fine chain. Ornate etching on the gold, something from the Renaissance. They looked like—
“People would have called them sleeve buttons back then,” Tante Colette said. “Probably some of the earliest preserved examples, in fact. I’m sure they should be in a museum, but that’s true of most of our family heirlooms. I thought they suited you.”
Cufflinks. They were cufflinks. People always gave him cufflinks when they didn’t know what else to give him, but these…Damien rubbed them, incredulous emotion rising in him, adding to the overload of emotion from the gloves. “These were Niccolò’s?”
“Probably. They were tucked inside one of the gloves. They would have been a sign of his rise in wealth and power and social class, at a time when only the rich wore them.”
“That’s perfect,” Jess said. “That’s
perfect
for you. You can wear them all the time. When you’re out fighting for your family. When you want to remember where you belong and what matters.”
“I’m going to use another bit of jewelry for that,” Damien reminded her, touching his left ring finger.
She squeezed his thigh again but spoke to Tante Colette. “Thank you,” she said, as heartfelt as if the gift to him had been a gift to her as well. “Thank you so much.”
Damien pulled her in close to him, his hand closing around Niccolò’s cuff links for safekeeping, too moved by all of it to dare speak. His voice might squeak or something equally horrible. But he dipped his head to his aunt.
“You two look very happy,” Tante Colette said quietly, contented.
Jess held his handpicked bouquet up to her face to hide it. Damien nodded against Jess’s hair, holding her for one more second tight before he loosed her out of respect for his aunt.
If anything, Tante Colette looked infinitely more relaxed and contented because of their public display of affection, though. She sat back in her chair—a rocking chair Damien had had imported for her from America—and stroked the arm of it, letting her eyes close against the sun.
“I’ll never capture this,” Jess said suddenly. She gestured with her bouquet as if to encompass everything—the bouquet itself, Tante Colette, the garden. Him. The bouquet came to rest on Damien’s chest. “I’ll never get it into a bottle.” She took a deep breath. “But I’d like to try every day for—sixty years.”
“Best make it seventy,” Tante Colette said without opening her eyes. “Be hard on Damien to outlive you, and he comes from a long-lived family.”
Jess smiled at her almost-napping aunt. “Go for broke?” She turned that smile up at Damien.
“Only way to shoot for the stars.” He tightened his hand on hers.
She kissed his flowers, smiling at him over them.
Damn.
Sometimes his heart swelled so much it squeezed all the room out of his chest. “Be kind of a challenge to give you a new diamond every day for seventy years,” he said. “But I suppose Rosier SA could expand.”
She laughed out loud and teased his nose with the edge of the flower bouquet. “And you called me an idiot. Hugs and kisses, Damien. Every day. No cheating and trying to give diamonds instead.”
Damien smiled down at her, this great warmth spreading in his middle where once he had felt so cold and empty. “It’s not cheating,” he said. “But I think I can manage hugs and kisses.”
And he gave her both right then. Just to practice.
After all, any idiot could make a wish. But a smart businessman knew that to make that wish come true, he had to pay attention to the details.
***
FIN
Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed Damien and Jess’s story. And don’t miss more Rosier stories! Sign up
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Meanwhile, if you missed Matt Rosier’s story, you can find it in
Once Upon a Rose
.
And you might be able to catch a teeny, tiny glimpse of a particularly elusive Rosier cousin in
All For You
.
Let me know if you spot him! Keep reading for a couple of excerpts from these two books.
And I like to send out free short stories once in a while to those who sign up for my
email
for new releases, so let me know if there’s anyone you would particularly like to see more of. You never know—my creative wheels might start turning.
Thank you so much for sharing in this new world with me! For some behind-the-scenes glimpses of the research in the south of France, check out my website and Facebook page. I hope to meet up with you there!
Thank you and all the best,
Laura Florand
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Newsletter
La Vie en Roses Series
Turning Up the Heat
(a novella prequel)
The Chocolate Rose
(a prequel)
A Rose in Winter
, a novella in
No Place Like Home
A Wish Upon Jasmine
Paris Hearts Series
Amour et Chocolat Series
All’s Fair in Love and Chocolate
, a novella in
Kiss the Bride
The Chocolate Thief
The Chocolate Kiss
The Chocolate Touch
The Chocolate Heart
Shadowed Heart
(a sequel to
The Chocolate Heart
)
Snow Queen Duology
Snow-Kissed
(a novella)
Sun-Kissed
(also part of the Amour et Chocolat series)
Memoir
Blame It on Paris
To this valley!
Matt growled, lifting his glass high. No one paid any attention, even though it was
his
thirtieth birthday, and
he
was the family patriarchal heir, no matter what Raoul and Damien wanted themselves to be.
He toasted himself while he was at it. Matthieu Rosier, Jean-Jacques Rosier’s heir, owner of all he surveyed. Every petal of a rose. Every worm in the dirt trying to eat those roses. All of it.
It was all on his shoulders, but it was also all his.
J’y suis, j’y reste
, as his ancestor Niccolò Rosario had mandated over four centuries ago.
I am here and here I’ll stay.
Just for a second, that old claustrophobic feeling tried to descend on him again—that thing that had driven him to the Paris offices and into the not-so-tender embrace of a supermodel the year before, in hopes of proving that his life existed outside this valley. He drowned it in another swallow.
No, this is my place. This is where
I’m
meant to be.
Here, he could handle anything the weather or people or time threw at him, do anything that needed doing.
I’m Matthieu Rosier.
I know it now, and my next thirty years are going to be awesome!
Awesome. Definitely. Grinning suddenly, he grabbed his cousin Raoul’s girlfriend Allegra as she headed past him, placed her firmly behind him with her hands on his waist, and started a chain dance.
Which kind of had a bad effect on the tables, but it wasn’t his fault he had so many big male cousins who danced like elephants. They’d all been trained to dance properly, too—you’d think it would come across somewhat even when they were chain dancing.
No more tuxedoes and waltzes for me, thank God. I’m never putting on a tuxedo for a woman again. From now on, I’m sticking with women who like to see a man in jeans.
He bumped into another table.
One of his aunts protested, the whole chain abandoned him and wound itself the other way, and he lurched off the table, grinning and feeling a smidge dizzy. Maybe he needed to get some air. He could probably come back in and hold still more wine afterward.
Which sounded like a great idea, because he had had
excellent
taste when he set that wine aside at twenty for his thirtieth birthday.