A Wish Upon Jasmine (8 page)

That laughter of his seemed to catch on her face and hone in on it. The laughter faded, leaving only a trembling in her stomach in its wake. He stood, stepping toward her. “Layers.” His voice dropped into that dangerous purr. “We heat up, for example.”

His finger rubbed the hollow of his throat, where her nose had been, drawing her eyes back to that strip of flesh and the four undone buttons.

“We sweat a little. We get dirty.”

Holy crap, would her mind stop taking his words as verbalized sex.
Gets dirty…playing rugby! Or something!
Not
as in dirty sex.

“We have sex,” he said, and her brain fried.

Stop. Stop. Stop. And for God’s sake, quit saying all this in that French-on-British accent. I can’t take it!

“You can’t make a scent for a man unless you take into account how his own body scent is going to change through heat and arousal.” His finger drifted down his chest to a still-fastened button. “After all, when else should a woman even be able to smell a man’s body, except when she’s in close enough that he’s aroused?”

Thank God for the counter between them so that he couldn’t smell
her
arousal. She hoped. Oh, God. “So when I test the scents on you, I’ll make you do fifty push-ups to warm up!” she snapped.

“In your professional opinion, there’s no difference between the scent of sweat and the scent of sex?”

Oh, God, yes, there was. Sweat was part of arousal, but there was so much more. The scent of
his
arousal, the scent of hers, the way they had blended together on her hands, on her body…

“Well, maybe you could see if one of your models could accommodate you for a quickie just before you come by,” she shot at him. The words cut across her own skin, they hurt so bad.

He drew back.

His face shut down.

And that fast, he was impervious, dangerous Damien Rosier again. “I could do that, yes.” He rolled down his left sleeve. The deft move of his fingers rubbed over all the points of arousal in her body and drove her out of her mind. “Or I could use you.”

She jerked back.

“Just in fantasy, of course.” Such a clipped, perfect voice, with that sensual brush of French that drove her skin
mad.
“Dreams. I wouldn’t want to sexually harass someone who’d taken me on as a client.”

Not sexually harass
her? He wasn’t her employer. She’d quit any possibility of
that
position just as fast as he’d taken over her company. And
they’d already had sex.

“But I could think about you.” He rolled down his other sleeve. “Just to get in an aroused state.” He gestured downward and…oh, lord.

He
was
aroused.

Like…it was…he was…

She couldn’t move.

He—

“For example…” His gaze traveled over her leisurely, as if he held the mouse’s tail firmly under one paw and could take his time. “I could imagine pushing you back on that counter. You’d probably say no, of course. But this is my imagination. So I could just cover your mouth with my hand until you couldn’t say a word.”

He rolled down his right sleeve. “Your eyes would be so big just above my hand, and you’d try to grab my arm to push me off, but it would be too late. Because you can’t fight a man off in his imagination. And I’d already have my other hand sliding under that pretty white skirt of yours. And then you wouldn’t want to fight anymore.”

He buttoned the fourth button of his shirt. “But I’d hold you down anyway. Maybe I’d let go of your mouth to hold your wrists, so I could hear all the sounds you made while I played with you any way I wanted to.”

He buttoned the third button. “And I’d make you come,” he said softly, viciously, “until you couldn’t take it anymore.” The second button. “Until you begged me to stop.” The last button, the collar snug around his throat. “And I still wouldn’t stop. Until you were so weak from coming that you couldn’t even pull your thighs together when I finally let you come back down. You’d just lie there, with your skirt all up around you and that counter damp with you, while I did this.”

He picked up his coat and slid it back on.

“And this.” He picked up his watch while she stood frozen and fastened its armor back around his wrist.

“And this.” He picked up the cufflinks and neatly threaded them through his cuffs, not even fumbling.

“And walked out.”

He turned and walked to the door of the workshop and paused to look back at her. “Want to see what I smell like?”

She could only stare at him, aroused and slapped and utterly undone.

“Well.” A crisp tug to adjust his sleeve. “I suppose I could always come up with another fantasy tonight, when you’re ready to test your first blends.”

“Get out!” she yelled. “And I don’t have to work on a damn thing for you! You just took back all your down payment!” She gestured wildly at his suit coat, watch, cufflinks. Somehow, of everything that had just happened, that hurt the worst of all—that those superficial parts of him that he had given, he’d taken even those back, too.

“I’ll pay cash,” he said evenly. “It’s cheaper.”

And he walked out.

Damien had barely gone halfway down the street when he met Tristan coming up it.

Fuck.

“Are you okay?” Tristan rocked to a stop, brown eyes searching. “You look kind of…emotional.” His voice on the last word was dumbfounded.

Imagine that. I had an emotion. Don’t have a heart attack.

“I’m fine,” Damien snapped. He felt hot all over. He wanted to hit someone or something, slam his fist against glass to see it shatter…and here was one of his cousins. So convenient.

Tristan leaned to the side to peer past Damien up the street. “Did something
happen
?” he asked. “I mean, you act…” He waved a hand to try to capture the implausibility of the way Damien was acting. “…upset.”

“I don’t get upset.” Damien adjusted his cuffs. Tristan, of course, was in a T-shirt on this hot day and eating a damn ice-cream cone. Damien had business meetings. “Don’t you have work to do?”

“I’m stuck. I need to go windsurfing and clear my head. Want to come?”

God, it was so hard not to hit Tristan right this second. “I’ve got work.”

“Plus, I wanted to see this Jasmin Bianchi Tante Colette gave her shop to. You think Tante Colette might have given her Niccolò and Laurianne’s perfume recipe book, too?” Tristan’s tone grew hungry. That missing perfume recipe book from the founders of their family had gotten them into all kinds of escapades as children and teenagers, as they thought of ever more dangerous places to hunt for the war-lost heirlooms. But this past year, Tante Colette had given both Raoul and Matt family treasures that proved she had had at least two of those missing heirlooms up in her attic all that time. Either they had been really crappy at hunting in the attic when they were kids or else their Resistance-honed aunt was wilier than five wild boys raised in peacetime had ever started to imagine.

“I’m taking care of Jess Bianchi.” Damien used his mean voice.
You’re the mean one
. “If she has anything else that belongs to this family, just leave it to me.”

“Yeah, but I want to meet her.” Tristan angled to see beyond Damien again, up the street to the shop. “The woman who single-handedly destroyed an entire art form. Spoiled Brat.” He shuddered.

“It’s an industry, Tristan,” Damien said, annoyed for no reason he could define. Heat and frustration still wanted to explode out of him everywhere. “And she makes money.”

Tristan rolled his eyes. “You would say that. She’s probably just your type.”

Damien’s fingers curled slowly into a fist on the far side from Tristan. “I’m in the middle of—negotiations—to get back that shop. Stay away from her. I don’t want you to screw anything up.”

Tristan’s eyebrows went up a little. He flicked a glance over Damien’s face that made Damien tamp down on his expression all the harder. Of all his cousins, Tristan was by far the most difficult to beat in poker. Matt he could completely fleece, and with Raoul he was pretty evenly matched, but Tristan
saw
things, even when Damien didn’t have one single damn tell.

“I can play good cop,” Tristan said. “Hell, if she’s been negotiating with
you
, she’ll probably throw herself into my arms as soon as I walk in the door. I bet you I can have her selling it back to us by the time I finish this ice cream.” He took a step forward.

Damien blocked him. “I said leave it, Tristan.”

Tristan’s eyebrows flew higher. He savored his ice cream, gazing at Damien. The two were the same height, both black-haired, both with a similar long, lean strength, as they’d grown up doing the same sports together—rock climbing, windsurfing, dirt biking. Strangers assumed they were brothers, not just cousins. But Tristan played through life, and it showed in all the relaxed lines of his body. Whereas Damien…Damien suddenly wanted to grab that cone from Tristan and walk off to eat it himself, in private, sucking cool sweetness down his throat until he could calm down.

“Okay, now I
really
want to get a look at her,” Tristan said. “What is she, gorgeous?”

No. She was pretty. Like a child’s bouquet of handpicked wildflowers in the middle of a host of hothouse roses. Funny. Most of the famous actresses he knew could look past all the bouquets sent them on opening night and clutch to them their own child’s handpicked, wistful bouquet as the truest, most beautiful thing there. But nobody thought
he
could.

Like…what the actual fuck? Who on this whole planet was so jaded and indulged as to actually prefer two dozen roses to a fistful of wild flowers picked with great hope just for you?

Yet people thought
he
wouldn’t know the difference.
He’d
crush the wildflowers in his fist. His own family fucking thought that.

Yet she…hadn’t. Leaning on that terrace beside her over New York that cold February night, the fragile cocoon of warmth from the patio heaters battling the chilly air, he’d felt almost as if they were holding a single daisy between them, taking turns plucking off petals to see what dream they could find.
She likes me a little…I like her a lot.

She had a sweetheart face, and a pensive mouth, and soft, long light brown waves and curls that looked as if she just caught them in a knot at her nape when she stepped out of the shower and called it a good hair day. When she dressed up, she liked flowing, romantic dresses, as if the little girl in her had never quite gotten over playing at princess.

And ever since they’d slept together, she looked at him with a cynical curve to her lips, an ironic eyebrow, and a flippant briskness that didn’t suit her at all.

It made him want to do…well, pretty much everything he’d just been so insane as to tell her. Even the part where he walked out in a fucking temper because that flippant, cynical barrier she’d put up made him want to rend things.

Himself, maybe.

“Stay the fuck out of this, Tristan.”

“Hmm.” Tristan savored his ice cream as he contemplated Damien. “My curiosity is now killing me.”

Damien was going to shove that damn cone down his throat. “Do you want my job?”

Tristan recoiled. “No. Shit. Do you need another raise?”

“Then quit interfering with the way I do it.”

Tristan hesitated, glancing from Damien past him toward the shop up the street. “So you were working just now? That’s what got you so—”

“I’m always working.”
No heart in me ever.

“Hmm,” Tristan said, over his ice-cream cone.

***

Jess simmered. So much energy zinged off her all those molecules of scent in the shop danced in the ozone.

She would show him. Oh, yes, she could give him
exactly
the fragrance he deserved. She was perfect for it. She’d spent her entire damn career creating perfumes that drew nails down the olfactory chalkboard.

He was
not
getting this shop from her. She had lost too much already. She would go down kicking and screaming, holding onto this shop with all her might. This magic was
hers.

Usually, when she started work on a brief, that initial blank space made her stomach drop out of her, the moment when she didn’t believe she could do it, she would never get it right. She had to fight through it, doggedly start putting ideas down on paper. This time, anger surged her right past that moment of doubt.

Oh, yes, she would get him right, that bastard. She knew
exactly
what to make for him.

She needed to get some supplies. She opened bottles and sniffed them and banged them on the counter. Some molecules could survive more or less intact for decades in the right conditions—thus the trade in treasured long-discontinued or formula-changed perfumes—but for Damien she wanted all her substances to be so new they
shone.
Sunlight glittering off dark, brushed steel.

She wanted scents that rang against your knuckles if you rapped them, they were so hard, she thought as she drove to Laboratoire ElleFleur on the road outside Grasse. She wanted the kind of scent that took a woman’s butterfly dream and didn’t even use a pin to stab through it, just crushed it down with a bare thumb, sneering as the butterfly died.

Just that faint moue of a sneer, as if the butterfly was pathetic for being so vulnerable to a man like him.

Oh, yes, she would show him. She felt
singed
with the need to show him.
And that whole fantasy of yours about pushing me back against a counter? You can just look at me and salivate, you bastard.

She parked the car in the steep parking lot near the factory doors and strode up, cherishing a vision of herself as textured and real-seeming as the scents dancing in her head: her, sleek and gorgeous, in some tight little skirt, her expression imagination-brushed to be beautiful and glamorous, giving him his own moue back, making him eat his heart out.

Or whatever excuse for a heart he had. In her imagination, she didn’t just
smell
like Nathalie Leclair, she looked like her. And he was begging on his knees.

She pressed a button for entrance and waited, tapping her foot, for the factory door to open.