A Wish Upon Jasmine (11 page)

The nurse came to the waiting room door and nodded to her. Jess’s hand tightened on the phone.

“Jess. I know you have a lot going on right now, but don’t you think it’s at least worth seeing each other again?”

At least it put things into perspective.
Was
it important, a hook-up that had seemed beautiful and had turned out to be with one of the industry’s ruthless players? Was it even worth thinking about, right this second? Let alone risking repeating in a desperate grasp after a fantasy?

“No,” she had said as she shifted her thumb to disconnect.
No,
although it hurt her heart, added one last Gordian twist to the knot in her stomach. “I really don’t.”

“Nice skirt,” Damien said. It wasn’t. It was a perfect little pencil skirt, featured in the display window of a shop just down the street, which she’d paired with a tailored white blouse, exactly the kind of thing newly hired women at Rosier SA wore to prove how professional they were.

Of course, they also usually carefully curled or straightened their hair, a step in glossy perfectionism she seemed to have entirely missed in her education in things feminine, and most of the time they remembered to put on their shoes when he came into their office.

Jess was moving very briskly among the bottles, test blotters, papers, and moleskin journal she had laid out on the counter, but she’d forgotten she was barefoot. She was such a geek. Way worse than Tristan, who’d learned to disguise his own nerdiness with social skills when he was very young. She’d probably played at being Galadriel when she was a teenager. Her perfumes were her magic potions or something.

“Did you get it just for me?”

A tiny streak of color on her cheeks. So, yeah.

Instead of, say, the soft, playful, romantic sundress she’d been wearing the day before.

He was going to break one of these damn glass bottles around him. Just strike out and slash its head off.

“I’ve put together a couple of things I want to test on your skin,” she said briskly. Her fingers tightened around one of the bottles. She tried to spear him with a look. “I expect you to stay professional.”

Hell, he could see why she’d hidden in a perfumer’s lab instead of taking on the business world as a career. She couldn’t spear a marshmallow with that look.

Which made it all the more pathetic that he, the man whose heart was made out of titanium, felt as if he’d not only been speared but was now being roasted just a little too close to the fire and was about to go from burnished gold to crispy black in a sudden catch of flame.

“Do you?” he said coolly.

Her flush deepened.

So no.

She didn’t really expect that.

And yet here he was anyway, instead of knocking on a locked door she refused to open to an asshole like him.

Interesting.

He pulled out a checkbook and a pen made out of platinum that had been somebody’s idea of what he’d want for Christmas. “How much did we say?”

A bottle clicked on the counter. Suddenly her eyes did spear him. It was the oddest sensation. Where everyone else’s much sharper looks bounced off his shield, hers just sank right through him and held him. “I don’t want your
money.
”

It pissed him the hell off when people said
money
in that tone. He’d made a shitload of it in his life, both for himself and for his family—not to mention all the people who depended on Rosier SA for a living.

And what he’d spent his entire career managing and growing for his family wasn’t fucking
crap.
It was what allowed the rest of them to act so precious and entitled over their perfume art and their valleys full of roses. Because somebody wrapped a great wall of money around them and made sure the real world couldn’t penetrate it and get its money-grubbing hands on their dreams.

“You know what we said.” Jess put her chin up and tried a cynical curl of her lips, even while color deepened in her cheeks. “Take them off.”

He froze. Arousal and
nakedness
swelled up through his brain, taking over his thoughts. Removing his coat and cufflinks and watch that morning to disturb her, and wreck himself, had been one thing. Repeating the same striptease
at her command
turned it into something far more exposed and vulnerable.

And Damien didn’t do vulnerable.

Well, he’d done it once.

With her.

And the day after she’d…taken herself back. The trust, the sweetness, the magic, the wishing. As if she’d made a mistake, giving it to him.

As if he couldn’t possibly deserve a handful of wildflowers.

If it wasn’t hothouse and expensive, he wouldn’t know how to appreciate its worth.

His fingers were stiff on his cufflinks.

“Do you need help?” Jess asked.

“No,” he snapped.

And then he realized, too late, what he’d slashed back from him—her fingers on his cufflinks, the soft hair just a bend of his head away, as she focused on that first step of getting him naked.

Damn it.

He got the cufflinks off and set them on the counter.

“Cash would have been more practical.” He made his voice ironic. His back-up tone.

“I’m not practical,” she said, as stiff as his fingers on his damn watch.

No kidding.
So you need me. You really do. I’m exactly the perfect person to protect all your impractical dreams.

Something knotted in his chest, there, just below the hollow of his throat. He tried to swallow past it, and it wouldn’t go away.

He got the watch off and set it beside the cufflinks. Hard and expensive and she could live a year off it, if she had the practical sense.

But then, if she’d had that, she’d have taken a check. Idiot perfumers. All fairytales and whiffs of twenty-thousand-euro absolutes they wanted to play with as if they were free.

It had been laughably easy to take over her little artisan company. Basically, he’d noticed rainmaker Jasmin Bianchi was part owner, raised an eyebrow, and thought,
I’ll take that.
She might be useful.
And a few hours later, he’d had it.

He pulled off his coat.

God, he felt so much more naked doing this at her orders than he had the other morning. No, it wasn’t quite that. He’d felt naked that morning, but powerful in it—pushing
her
around with his stripping, instead of growing more and more exposed.

She pressed her hand down on his coat as soon as he laid it over the counter, gathering it and the watch and cufflinks to her. “If you try to take these back again, we’re done,” she said, hard. “I’m not playing this game, where you promise part of yourself and then take it back the next minute because your mood changes.”

“
You’re
not playing that?” he asked incredulously.

She checked, her fingers flexing into his coat, her eyebrows drawing slowly together as she searched his face.

He closed his expression hard, as hard as if he was trying to beat Tristan at poker and Tristan was getting that gleam of too much perception in his eye.

“What do you mean?” she asked, those damn dusk eyes fixed on his face.

“
You
turned it into a game,” he heard himself say harshly. “Where you pretended to give something, and then you changed your mind and took it back.
I
wasn’t
playing.
”

She stood very still on the other side of the counter, blinking slow, great blinks at him.

Fuck this. He threw himself in the chair, stretching out his legs, lounging there, the man in power waiting for his enemy to beg. Yeah, he knew body language and how to use his own. Essential in power plays, every time. “Let’s have it.”

She hesitated another long moment, until he almost started to believe she might actually
say
something to him, instead of just shutting him out, but instead she pointed wordlessly to his cuffs and his collar.

He had to flip this situation somehow. So he raised his eyebrow at her, lazy and ironic. And slowly rolled back each double cuff, one, two turns. Slowly, holding her eyes, unbuttoned four buttons on his shirt to expose his throat.

She looked down. And suddenly shifted awkwardly and grew five centimeters taller.

Damn, she’d noticed her shoes.

And it really wasn’t fair that she was just a tiny bit awkward in them as she came around the counter toward him, either from unfamiliarity with those particular heels or because he was getting to her.

It got to
him
, that awkwardness. Made him want to push all this stupid game of rapiers and shields away and pull her into his lap. Say,
Shh. Come here. Let’s talk. I’m not as bad as you think.

The instinct ground to a halt, this great, screeching of brakes and rebellion against having to say those last words. Against having to
defend
himself against her assumption that he was a heartless asshole. Even after he’d held his own heart out to her like…

…like a pitiful bouquet of wildflowers.

Lured into believing that she would see how much more valuable they were than the hothouse flowers. Or diamonds, or whatever the hell he was supposed to have given her instead.

She stepped to the side so that she didn’t have to stand right between his sprawled legs, dipped a strip into a tester, and held it out to him. “What do you think?”

He made sure his hand brushed hers as he took the
touche
from her. Masochist.

The scent smelled…like his damn titanium watch. Hard, impenetrable elegance and perfection, no softness in it anywhere.

He kept his expression exactly like that scent.

“It’s a bit harsh,” Jess said. “It will need a long maturation period. But this can give me an idea.”

Damn her.

“Remember, you’re just getting the top notes right now,” Jess said uneasily.

His jaw set. “I know how perfume works.”

“Can I try it on your skin?”

He held out his wrist, not looking at her. Fuck, she hadn’t even
tried
to get at him. None of that evening on the terrace, none of that
night
was in that perfume at all.

Or was he really just so titanium hard that what had seemed like magical warmth and sweetness to him had seemed this cold and shallow to her?

Granted, his behavior since she’d gotten here probably hadn’t been the best demonstration of the soft side of his character, but…

Just fuck.

A cold spritz of that heartless juice on his wrist. She hesitated. “What about—?” She gestured to his throat.

Merde
, he hoped the synthetics she’d put in the thing weren’t the kind that would cling to his skin for days, no matter how hard he tried to scrub them off. He pulled aside his shirt, still not looking at her.

Like exposing his throat to a cobra bite. Another spritz, at the hollow of his throat.

She stepped back.

They stared at each other, her eyes uneasy, his jaw set and hard.

“Are you going to do your, ah, fifty push-ups?” She waved toward the floor.

Oh, sure, hell, why not. He needed something to do.

He stood, and she immediately retreated to the other side of the counter. Rage rode under his skin at how different her reaction was from the last time he’d unbuttoned his shirt in front of her, how she’d been a little shy and a lot wondering and so carefully trusting. Not like she trusted easily. Like she trusted rarely—and yet he had been the recipient of that trust.

He yanked his shirt off and tossed it on top of his coat.

He felt ridiculous, and then he felt mad, and then he felt mean, as he dropped to the floor and hit those push-ups. One, two, three, four, he couldn’t work his mad out, no matter how many he did, it just built in him, with every breath of that steely scent being woken by the growing heat of his body.

By the time he’d worked up the hint of sweat that she wanted, he was feeling so mean that he shoved himself to his feet in one hard lunge, ready to stride out of there before he did anything else he could regret.

And then he got a look at her face.

The deep pink in her cheeks, the vulnerable plumpness of her lower lip, as if she’d been biting it, the way she’d pulled one lock free of the knot at her nape and was twirling it around her finger, her eyes dark and dilated and locked on his torso…

The mad went right out of him. His mouth curved. But the mean—oh, yes, the mean still held.
You think this scent is me? Well, let’s see how you like it.

“What do you think?” He held out his wrist to her.

“It’s really about what
you
think,” she said, but she leaned across the counter and brought his wrist to her face, her nose brushing his skin as she took a deep breath.

Her eyebrows crinkled together. She shook her head. “Maybe it needs more citrus.”

“What about here?” He touched the base of his throat.

She swallowed.

He waited, increasingly conscious of his pumped muscles, naked torso, and the faint glow of sweat over his skin.

That night, he’d taken off his shirt before he started undressing her at all. Exposing himself first. Making it easier for her to expose herself in turn, luring her in. And also just because…he’d really liked the look on her face as he took off his shirt. It had made him feel…pretty damn hot, to tell the truth.

Like now.

She came slowly around the counter. He didn’t sit down, and her breath grew shorter and shorter as she came in close to him.

Just for a second, standing a few centimeters from his chest, she looked up at him, so vulnerable that he wanted to soften.
It’s all right. Remember? Remember me?

She went up onto her tiptoes and rested her hands on his chest to balance as she took a breath of the hollow of his throat.

And after that he didn’t have a soft cell left in his body.

Everything about him went hard and hungry and determined to get what he wanted.

“We’ve still got the arousal test,” Damien said, with that dark velveted steel voice of his, like a black panther’s paw just before the claws sprang out.

Jess’s fingers curled into her palm as she stepped back. “Well,” she said sharply, “after whatever hook-up you’ve got set for tonight, send me a text and let me know what you think.”