A Wish Upon Jasmine (20 page)

A destructive rage.
God,
what an idiot.

The last two times he’d reacted so purely on what he
felt
had been that night in New York and earlier today when he couldn’t stand to leave her alone with the memory of her father’s death and had to pull her into his arms. Both of which times he’d gotten fucking burned.

Although…although…something good had come of this afternoon. He drew a slow breath and sank his hand into the basin of water—cold against hot skin.

Some degree of understanding. Of forgiveness. Of willingness to try again.

Which he had just screwed up.

He couldn’t believe he’d said
fuck
to her.

God.

Not just said it, but said it as a
verb.
Put it together with objects, turned her body into this crude field of his victory, and
told her about it.
Some fantasies a man should shut the hell up about and
never
let out.

He wanted to wind back time, put them back at a table with a chilled rosé in his hand helping him stay calm, put them back at the parapet of the esplanade, talking as if they were starting over.

Way to screw up a do-over. In some self-immolative punishment for the past.

He splashed a handful of water over his face, dragging his wet hand down slowly until his chilled fingers rested on the hollow of his throat. Just where he had dragged her fingers. See,
there
he’d been on the right track.

Now his pulse there beat hard and frantic. He lifted his wrist to his nose again. The sun and stone and time still lingered.

Like his life. The great old bones of his world—the land, the old medieval and Renaissance buildings, that had seen the rise of his family and might one day, if he or his cousins or their heirs ever lost their battles, see it fall.

He closed his eyes a moment. She’d gotten
something
of him. Something important, too. It was far better than that first shallow titanium. Couldn’t he have been content? Did he have to wreck everything in his desire for more? In his desire to have her look him in the eyes and say, as if she could believe in him,
I wish for you
.

Idiot.

He let himself into his building on the
place
, climbed up steep old stairs to the top floor, which was all his. He pushed open the gray-blue shutters and stood with his hands around the iron railing, gazing toward the distant sea. Then he turned around and looked at his empty bed.

What a damn idiot he was.

***

Jess gazed warily at Damien through the window beside the old shop door early the next morning. She kept seeing that brooding mouth shape the word
fuck
over and over. Sensual, controlled,
fuck
and
fuck
and
fuck
until the panties she’d just pulled on fresh two seconds ago were already getting damp.

She swallowed, blinking his actual, unmoving lips back into focus, and his black lashes lifted so that he met her gaze through the panes.

Brooding, wary, almost sullenly apologetic.

She hesitated, then unlocked the door, stepping onto the threshold rather than letting him in. “You own jeans?” Well-worn ones, too, that rode low on his tight hips with a casual affection, as if he and those jeans had been friends a long time. His T-shirt, a sea-green that brought out the green in his eyes, clung to broad shoulders and tight abs, the sleeves riding the swell of his biceps. His shower-damp hair did unfair things to her erogenous zones.

His lips did that pressing thing that she’d learned indicated she’d flicked his temper. “It’s Saturday.”

Well, that explained the number of people in the streets late the night before. She’d lost track, with the travel. “Thanks for the update. Now go find some other woman you think you can get to beg.”

Her own words jerked through her, the thought of some other woman—a beautiful model, of course—begging him for every fuck he wanted to give. The image wrenched her stomach to nausea.

Damien shoved a hand through his wet hair, his lips tightening. “I’m sorry about that.”

He should be, of course. No man she knew had ever said
fuck
like that to her. Like a verb, with her its object. The men she attracted were
sweet
, quiet. She’d never known a word could heat her entire body like this, for hours and hours, make it heat again the instant she saw him.

“You apologize to me a lot.” And there was something to be said for a man who had the grace to apologize.

“And you never apologize to me at all,” he said rather grimly.

Oh. She folded her arms over her chest. Under the hoodie she’d pulled on when his knocking woke her, she wore only a cami and yoga pants and no bra. It was a very disconcerting state of attire, for facing off with Damien Rosier. Even, or maybe especially, when he was in a T-shirt. “
I
didn’t say I wanted to fuck
you
,” she said angrily, before she thought.

One corner of his lips twisted up. “If you had, trust me, I wouldn’t be asking for an apology.”

It clenched in her stomach, rubbed over her nipples as if the words were his two thumbs taking control. She tightened her arms, desperate to get a bra on as some token armor. “Just spit it out. Why did you drag me out of bed at this hour?”

His gaze swept over her hoodie and messy hair, until all she could think about was a bed. Her body being dragged across one by strong masculine hands taking her over…

“Funny,” Damien said dryly. “I thought you were an early riser.”

Why in the world would he think tha—a memory of sneaking out of his bed at dawn while he was fast asleep, his arm still stretched over the part of the mattress where she had been. The sight of his full name on an envelope on top of a stack of mail by the door, as she let herself out, and the shock of the realization.
Oh, good God, he’s
that
Damien
. The whole walk of shame home in her heels and silly flowing evening dress, in New York at six in the morning. The calls and knowing commentary from men, until she found a taxi. Taking a shower, when every inch of her body felt sensitive, and getting dressed in jeans, and hurrying to her father’s apartment so she would get there in time to talk to the hospice care nurse.

“It’s six hours earlier, in the time zone I was in until six days ago,” she said, to avoid all that.

“So you must have had a hard time falling asleep,” Damien purred. “Tossed and turned until all hours of the morning.”

Well…not exactly. But only because she’d cracked under the torment of the images and dragged her own hand down her body and…She glared at him. “Don’t make me bring out my Mace.”

Dark, dangerous humor. “Don’t make me rub you three times to see if I can get my wishes to come true.”

Oh.
She took a step back, on the impact of it. Damn it, her body was already frantic for him. And it had taken him less than a minute. “Go to hell,” she said, which was a total lie. That wasn’t what she wanted to have happen at all.
Fuck
, those chiseled lips said in her head.
I want to spread your legs and do whatever I want to you.

“I’ve got flowers,” he said.

What?

“That’s what a man offers, right, when he needs to apologize?” Something still faintly sullen around the press of his lips, as if that need to apologize went against the grain.

“You think
flowers
can do it?” she said scathingly. But she scanned for his flowers nevertheless, with a little kick of hope in her heart. She didn’t see any sign of anything but hot male in a T-shirt, empty-handed. “Go to hell.”

“You haven’t seen the flowers yet.”

She drew her eyebrows together suspiciously.

“Your namesake.” He reached out to pick a small white flower from the thick mass of them growing near the door and held it to her in two fingers. “Jasmine.”

Okay, that was kind of lame, as an offering of flowers went. He could have at least brought a proper bouquet. She did love jasmine, though. Her scent. But if he tucked that flower behind her ear, she was going to bite his fingers. Hard. “Thanks,” she said very dryly, not taking the flower.

“A whole field of jasmine, in fact,” he said. “The biggest field in France.”

She blinked at him a second. And then an inkling of what he might be talking about started to work through her, and her eyes widened.

“It’s the harvest. And we are its biggest harvesters. Come see. Better yet”—he brought the little flower to just below her nose, caressing her with its rich, sweet, moonlit scent—“come smell.”

Oh.
She stared at him with her lips parted. Oh, that was just…impossible.

Utterly impossible to refuse this, no matter how much she should throw his flowers back in his face.

“The jasmine harvest,” she whispered.

The corners of his lips eased upward. He nodded once.

“The actual jasmine harvest.” Flowers stretching everywhere, full of their rich, whole scent, before the distillation process changed it. If she had been a visual artist, this would have been like giving her a glimpse of the actual sun instead of just paintings of it. As she was a perfumer, there was literally no greater or more sensual a gift he could have offered her. “Can I touch the flowers?”

He slipped his hands in his jeans pockets, the waist tugging down against his hips, drawing her eye to flat abs and—she yanked her gaze back up to his face. That subtle, dangerous smile. “Jess,
chérie
. If you’ve got the guts to reach for it, you can touch anything you want.”

“Are you going soft on me like your cousins?” Pépé demanded, locking faded blue eyes on Damien as if he was looking at him through the scope on a rifle. A talent Pépé had not lost, in seventy years of
not
holing up in the hills with a rifle.

“Me? Soft?” Damien barely bothered to raise his eyebrows. When family didn’t believe it was possible for him to have emotions, it took astonishingly little to dissuade them of any doubts.

Pépé narrowed his eyes. Smooth away the wrinkles, change the white hair to black, and those blue eyes could have belonged to the head of a Resistance cell realizing one of his operatives had been subverted. Actually, hell, if his country got occupied again, Pépé would be right back at the head of a Resistance cell today, white hair and wrinkles and all. He’d kick some serious
ass.
“You brought your aunt here.”

It had been an easy matter to stop and pick up Tante Colette, giving pleasure to both her and Jess. Jess’s aloneness scared the hell out of him. As if she was just floating in this dark void, with no human connection to keep her from being lost in it.

His family might drive him crazy, but without them, he would be completely adrift, no meaning to his life at all.

“I knew how much you missed your sister,” Damien said dryly.

Pépé gave him one of the looks he used to sit on his upstart grandsons. “
And
you brought that girl she’s using to get to you.”

“Admit it, Pépé. Secretly you and Tante Colette exchange texts in plots to get us all matched up. We all know what’s really going on here.”

Pépé…wait. Did Pépé blink? Hell. Seriously? Damien typically overestimated his opponents’ ability to strategize—it was one of his greatest weaknesses, in fact, his tendency to assume his opponents actually had a chess-master level of strategy behind their actions—but in his grandfather’s and great-aunt’s cases, overestimation might not be possible.

“You can’t bluff me, kid,” Pépé said grimly.

Yeah, and Damien also probably couldn’t outsmart two people who had saved thirty-six kids and fought the German occupiers all while pretending to the world that they couldn’t stand each other and that Tante Colette wasn’t even considered part of the family.

Hmm.

Damien narrowed his own eyes at his grandfather. The crossing of steel blades.

A very faint smile touched Pépé’s mouth. He pressed it out immediately. “So. You’re going to just let this girl steal Laurianne’s shop from our family? The shop where we all started? That’s been in our family since the Renaissance?”

“I’m working on it.” Humor flickered. “Of course, Jess would say that we’ve had it much longer than our fair share.”

Pépé transferred that narrowed gaze to Jess. Her head was buried in a jasmine bush, her hair, still damp from her shower, spilling against the green leaves. Her sensual happiness charged through Damien erotically. He’d given this pleasure to her. He’d thrilled all her senses.

A faint smile curved his mouth. Knowing perfumers, she might even prefer it to an orgasm.

But just in case, he’d liked to give her a few orgasms, too. Press her back up against an oak tree in the
maquis
and make her come surrounded by scents of sun and time and shade and pine and herbs. Pull her down on top of him between these rows of jasmine tonight, while the moon gilded over their white petals, and make her come surrounded by the rich, sweet scent of her namesake flower and the scent of her own sex. Take her up those stairs above the perfume shop and crowd her backward onto that bed and make her come amid lavender-scented sheets that had been embroidered a hundred years ago…

He dragged his focus back to his grandfather. The last thing a man needed to do when dealing with Pépé was get distracted.

“And I hate to point this out, Pépé, but I believe the shop was passed to Tante Colette before my parents were even born. Now whose watch would that have been on?”

Pépé gave him one of those sharp glances that said,
Oh, are you doing battle with me? Good.
“You boys have no respect.”

Damien smiled. “And here I thought that lying to you and acting as if you couldn’t fight your own battles anymore would be a lack of respect. Getting old?”

That curl to Pépé’s lips. Damien’s mother said he smiled just like his grandfather. A statement that was always accompanied by a resigned shake of her head. “I can still take you, kid.”

Damien glanced from his grandfather to his great-aunt, at some distance from them and busy ignoring Pépé completely. Tristan had just tucked a jasmine flower into Tante Colette’s hair.