And he still kept doing it. The guy must be suicidal, there was no other explanation.
“Are you still complaining about that?” Layla asked, coming up with a wicker basket brimming with jasmine flowers over one arm. Despite her Lebanese blood and the sun-friendly skin it should have given her, Matt had covered her with so much sunscreen that white patches marked her face under the big floppy hat Matt had settled on her head. She looked entirely delighted with herself, though, and if she kept bringing great handfuls of jasmine to her face like that, she was going to get stung on the nose.
Matt looked down at her, and his expression softened. He framed her face to rub the white blotches of sunscreen in better with the most incredible gentleness in his big, callused hands, shaking his head slowly.
Damien looked away, embarrassed. He could not get used to Matt’s heart being all exposed like that. He kept wanting to tell his cousin to put some damn clothes on the thing.
Thank
God
Damien didn’t have such a tender, easily wounded heart. A memory of a night in New York lanced through him, just like that, and he stamped it down.
Shaken, not stirred,
he made his heart say
. My name is Bond, James Bond.
Or would it be better if his heart had been stirred not shaken?
It was just a cocktail, God damn it. My heart wasn’t affected at all.
Just like hers wasn’t.
“Why don’t you just ask her?” Raoul’s girlfriend Allegra said cheerfully, and Damien almost said,
Because every time I try she makes it clear she thinks it was a mistake, letting me in that close.
“Why she’s doing it,” Allegra elaborated. “You could try
talking
to her. She’s your aunt.”
Oh. She meant Tante Colette.
Allegra stopped beside Raoul to smile up at him. Raoul had returned from Africa quite adamantly at Christmas, his russet hair streaked with a premature charcoal, looking and acting like a wolf come in out of the cold to inspect the contents of the nearest warm barn. But Allegra fed him cookies, and all of Raoul seemed to ease into calm whenever she came near him. In fact, even when she wasn’t around, you could tell when he thought of her by the way his face relaxed.
Something about it twisted Damien’s middle into a tight, jealous pang, and he didn’t even know why. Allegra was not remotely his type. And unlike Matt and Raoul, he wasn’t grumpy or wild. He didn’t need anyone to help calm him down—he had control of
himself.
“
You
could ask her,” Damien said, disgruntled. “If I ask her, she’ll say something cryptic.”
“You could ask her,” Layla said sweetly to their grandfather, Colette’s stepbrother. “She’s your sister.”
Pépé gave her the look he used to crush insolence.
“Well, she might tell you,” Layla said, friendly and about as uncrushable as her exuberantly curly hair. She brought a handful of jasmine to her face and breathed deep. “In honor of all those times you two worked together to save children during the Occupation.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t go burying my nose in any pretty thing you decide is supposed to smell sweet,” Pépé told her. “It’s a good way to get stung.”
“Pépé,” Matt said, low and growly.
“Anyway, if this girl’s last name is Bianchi, she’s probably some kind of cousin of yours,” Pépé told her. “I know perfectly well who that Bianchi boy’s real father was. I don’t need to ask Colette. I’m the one who told her that boy was getting girls pregnant around here.” He grimaced. “Léonard had a mother who would give her life to save others, and her boy turned out…like that.”
Layla just stood there, dumbfounded. “I have a cousin?”
A
cousin?
Merde.
Damien had four first cousins on his father’s side—three of them standing right here—five more on his mother’s side, and so many second and third cousins that he couldn’t even begin to count them. He knew, technically, that Layla had a much more limited family than the Rosiers did, but the stunned, hopeful expression on her face at the idea of having
a
cousin really brought the difference home.
“Given the way that boy of hers behaved, you might have several. Maybe more than we even know about,” Pépé growled.
All his grandsons just stared at him. This was a little bit beyond their capacity for imagination, children trailing around who weren’t solidly embedded in the expectations of family, particularly step-cousins who might show up out of nowhere and claim all the family heritage Tante Colette held. Hell, there was her house in Sainte-Mère still, too. And God knew how many family heirlooms. She’d produced Niccolò Rosario’s war-lost seal for Matt, and an old Renaissance perfume box Niccolò’s mother had had made for him for Raoul, but so far she hadn’t shown any inclination to trust anything as heart-precious as their family heirlooms to Damien.
Even though he spent his whole fucking life fighting to protect everything that was fragile and precious to his family.
“Well, in that case, you might, too,” Layla said sweetly, not looking away from Pépé. “After all, you had a son run off, too.” Lucien’s father, although he’d done it at forty-five and not sixteen. “And are you one hundred percent sure that all those boys of yours always used their heads about contraception, starting way back in the fifties?”
Now not only might they have unnumbered step-cousins, but Layla was peopling their family with any number of unidentified half-siblings, too. When they already felt they couldn’t all quite fit together in the same valley. They stared at her, appalled and fascinated.
Matt bent his head to her ear to mutter: “He’s older than the Pope. Catholic country. Maybe let’s not talk about contraception?”
“Well,
you
know how to use con—”
Matt covered her mouth with his hand and turned beet red. Even Damien had to grin. Layla made Matt so damn happy. That happiness seemed to fill this whole valley with a radiant rose- and jasmine-scented luminosity, so that it was all he could do not to pull out his phone and start cementing another business deal right that second, to wall more money and power around that valley and keep that happiness safe.
Pépé frowned at Layla. “That is just about enough out of you.”
“Pépé.” Matt folded his arms across his chest. “She can say what she wants.” And, sotto voce to Layla, “Will you behave?”
Layla grinned.
“So who’s on this one?” Pépé asked. “Not you,” he told Matt severely. “You clearly couldn’t battle a flea.” He gave Layla a crushing look.
“I’m tougher than I look,” Layla told him sweetly. She made fists and pretended a boxing stance.
Pépé had to firm out a twitch of his lips.
Matt folded his arms and growled. “I got it back, didn’t I?”
“You got lucky,” Pépé said. “This time I want someone ruthless. Someone who can go for the kill and not go soft over a pretty face.” He turned and said that thing that always iced Damien’s heart: “Damien. It will have to be you.”
Damien moved through the empty shop, where the scent of Christmas played with the scent of jasmine and vanilla and rose, and older scents sulked in corners, wondering when their new owner would rub them awake, too. Traces of her fingerprints were everywhere in the dust on bottles pulled down from shelves and left on counters. And there, on that bottle of bitter almond oil, were the marks of his.
He made a sharp motion of his hand, trying to cut through the scents that came for him. But they curled around his fingers like a woman’s soft wavy locks.
Jess did the exact same thing his family did—surrounded him with silk and sweetness and expected him to be the hard one, who didn’t give a damn.
And yet that night, she hadn’t seemed to expect cynicism from him at all. As he leaned beside her on the terrace, they’d talked about the view like two ordinary, unsophisticated strangers trying to make a connection. About the way the sky flipped upside down in New York so that all the dazzle of the night was human, below, tense and greedy and a little harsh, for all its beauty, and about other places in the world, where the night softened human stresses away and the stars came out above.
Have you ever been to Morocco, the desert, at night?
No, but she’d driven through Texas, talked about feeling that she could reach her hand into the sky and pluck a handful of stars.
That quiet way she talked, a little shy, a little hungry for stars, and the way he’d laid his words under hers like a firm, sure path closer to him:
You can trust me with this shyness, this dreaming. I like it.
The way her forearms had pressed against the terrace wall so close to his, and the way he’d let the itch build and build in his palm to cover her smaller hand before he finally, barely yielded to it, lightly stroking his fingers up two of hers and over her knuckles. The way she’d drawn a little breath and looked up at him, dusky eyes wide.
And wanting.
As if she thought he was her wish come true.
It had felt as if he’d found his heart. That heart that he’d stashed away somewhere long ago, in the service of his family, suddenly, it was his again. As alive and beating as it once had been.
Or maybe it had felt as if
she’d
found his heart. Dug it out of its secret evil sorcerer hiding place, only she wasn’t on a quest to kill him with a dagger through it, she was holding it in gentle, wondering hands.
Yeah, right.
Nobody did that with him. Gave him gentleness or trusted him to have any of his own.
And it turned out, she hadn’t trusted him with it either. Fuck, maybe that softness was because she’d had a glass too many of champagne and he hadn’t even realized it.
He stopped in the door of the workshop.
Jess Bianchi stood on her tiptoes on the very edge of a counter, reaching for the highest shelf, her thumb rubbing away the dust that covered the label on a jar.
Her legs looked fantastic in that whimsical white sundress, her bare feet arched, the dress clinging to her torso and butt as she stretched, a wobble away from falling and cracking her head.
He moved under her and had to take a second to enjoy that round, firm butt just above his head before he could bring himself to mess up the view. “Jess.”
She gave a startled cry, clutched for the bottle as her toe slipped off the edge of the counter, and fell with a scream.
He caught her, of course, pulling her in hard to his chest.
I’ve got you. You’re okay.
The dress was a more informal style than the one she had worn that night, but the skirt had that same romantic flow of fabric over his arm, that pale color, as if he’d caught something as young and innocent as a dream.
Even though it had taken him no effort at all to catch her, the heart he wasn’t supposed to have started to beat too hard. Waking up, hopeful, like a child half asleep but just starting to remember from the scents in the air that it was Christmas.
And she yanked away from him as hard as she could, putting a good two meters between them, clutching the jar that had fallen with her. “What the hell was the point of that? To scare me? To let me know I’m in your power?”
He checked a tiny second. Not too long, he didn’t think. He just had to stop his heart beating, had to put that damn organ back away, buried under some great tree in an ancient forest, where she couldn’t get at it. It hurt, putting it back. The hole for it felt dark and small and damp.
A child being stuffed into a closet when all the other kids were opening their presents.
He had to press his lips together hard. “I was just—” His gaze got distracted on her hair, a lock pulled free from that loose knot between her shoulders and tangled over her face. He rubbed his thumb over the side of his finger, trying to scrape the sensation of that hair away. “I thought you would fall no matter where I said your name, so it was better I be right under you.”
She stared at him distrustfully, the dusk of her eyes all dark gray now, no blue.
His fingers curled into his palm. “I’d hate for you to die when I was on the premises,” he said sardonically. “Even the Rosier name might not get me off for that one.”
Jesus. Were they actually talking about whether he might
murder
her? When she…that night…that way she’d seemed to
trust him.
With everything that was soft and sweet and true.
Fuck.
He wanted to hit someone.
Maybe a mirror of himself.
“I brought Mace,” she said, and pulled a little bottle out of her pocket.
He took a step back, in a reflex against actual Mace, and then made out what she held: a small bottle of perfume. A perfumer of her caliber could definitely find oils in this shop that would blind a man or leave him coughing uncontrollably if sprayed into his face.
Then he recognized the shape of the bottle and laughed before he even realized that laugh was going to happen. It was Spoiled Brat.
Humor sparkled across her face, this flash of self-satisfaction. She waved the bottle menacingly.
“You wouldn’t dare.” The joke of it eased something in him like a flash of light. He’d always liked to laugh. He used to do it with his cousins all the time, until they started giving him migraines. “Spray that crap in this shop? Ruin the air in this place?”
She pressed her finger on the spray button, her eyebrows arching. He liked the way mischief and menace brought out the strength in that heart-face of hers. “Are you going to leave quietly?”
“Centuries of our history. A family heritage. And you’re going to ruin that with one twitch of your finger?”
“I thought you said Laurianne was a glove-maker. Meaning descended from tanners. This place has had worse scents in it than Spoiled Brat.”
“Hardly,” he said dryly. He liked battles of wits, liked using words as rapiers, and he liked the edge of humor that ran along the blades here, a flickering glimpse of a night of happiness…kept back at sword’s point. But he wondered what he’d done that night that had made him seem so untrustworthy in close to everything soft and vulnerable of hers. When he’d thought…he’d thought…
fuck.
She drew the bottle back a little. “Did you just say my perfume smells worse than animal skins soaking in urine?”