Crown of Bitter Orange Read online

  A CROWN OF BITTER ORANGE

  Book 3 in La Vie en Roses Series

  Description

  Childhood friends

  Tristan Rosier might have asked Malorie Monsard to marry him when he was five years old, but things had only gone downhill from there. She’d spent the rest of their lives ignoring him, abandoning him, and destroying his perfumes. Now she was back, to wreak who knew what havoc on his life.

  Lifelong enemies

  Tristan might choose to dismiss the generations-long enmity between their two families, but Malorie didn’t have that privilege. Like all the other privileges wealthy, gorgeous Tristan took for granted that she couldn’t. But if she was going to restore her family company to glory, she might just need his help.

  Or the perfect match?

  They’d known each other all their lives. Could these childhood friends and lifelong enemies ever uncross their stars and find happily ever after?

  A CROWN OF BITTER ORANGE

  by

  Laura Florand

  Chapter 1

  Well, look at that. Prince Charming. Malorie should have known she’d stumble over him the instant she set foot back in his kingdom. The man was the bane of her existence even when she was halfway around the world.

  She put her hands on her hips and looked down at him, so peacefully dozing out in the open that he hadn’t even stirred at the sound of her feet in the great white pebbles by the river.

  Tristan Rosier asleep looked exactly how Malorie had always imagined. Gorgeous. Insouciant. Not vulnerable in the least, except to being over-kissed by the sun. A wicked little smile curving his mouth as if that sun was a woman and he was quite used to this kind of treatment.

  Shirtless and completely ripped, the definition of his muscles visible even relaxed in sleep. He’d probably just come down from that beautiful limestone cliff face rising on the other side of the gorge and his muscles were still pumped from it. One hand held a half-eaten apple, the other a small white paperback—Giono’s Hussard sur le toit—and they had both slumped to his torso when he dozed off. In full sun.

  She sighed. It would serve Tristan right to have his nose peeling for a week, but then forty years from now, if he got skin cancer, it would be all her fault, and the last thing a Monsard needed was more lives on her conscience.

  Plus, knowing Tristan, a peeling nose would probably improve his ability to flirt with hot actresses, not weaken it—he always managed flips like that. And his ability to flirt with hot actresses was already freaking annoying.

  Fine. She dipped her hands in the milky green river, high from the recently melted snow in the peaks, limestone giving it that beautiful color. She carried the water back across the round white pebbles, tightened herself and double-checked her buttons to make sure her clothes weren’t going to melt off as soon as he winked at her, and then tossed the icy water over his bare torso.

  Muscles flicked like a cat’s—powerful, lean, surging awake—and he opened his eyes, blinking sleepily at her as if she was all shadow in too much light. “Malorie Monsard,” he said, with a sensual, lazy pleasure, as if he’d just woken up on a Sunday morning and was quite happy to see that she was the woman draped in his bathrobe bringing him coffee in the hopes he would ask her to stay.

  She had to dive fast into irony to protect herself, as she always did with him.

  “You make a good Sleeping Beauty, Tristan.” She used the masculine beau au bois dormant. “Or should I say Snow White?” A nod to the half-eaten apple resting against his washboard abs.

  Tristan sat up, blinking, his eyes clearing. “Malorie Monsard.” His voice flattened. He shifted to sit on the rock against which his head had been resting, cushioned by his backpack. “Trust you to replace the kiss in the story with ice water on a man’s skin.”

  Yeah. Tristan had been as friendly to her as to any other female on the planet when they were in high school, but when they met again in New York, it had not gone well. For him.

  Supple, expressive eyebrows that could lilt up subtly in amusement, invite a woman in with laughter, tease her wickedly, did what they always did when she was around. They drew together. “Malorie,” he said for the third time, looking around them at the limestone cliffs and the rushing spring river as if finally processing it. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I used to live here, you know,” she said dryly.

  A flicker in his eyes as his mouth popped open for the automatic response, and he caught it, pressing his lips together. Ha. He’d been such a geek in his younger days, despite his inability to actually care about school, and even in high school a little of that geekiness had clung to him. He’d shaken it off quickly once he started focusing on girls, though. Or made it seem like the ultimate in sexy hotness, rather.

  These days, it gave her a warm, fuzzy feeling somehow to think of sexy, world-is-my-oyster Tristan as a kid, watching Return of the Jedi with his cousins with the same excitement that everyone else in the world felt.

  She gave herself a mental kick in exasperation. Every time Tristan blinked those brown eyes it gave women warm, fuzzy feelings. The last thing she needed was to join the packs of females eating out of the palm of his hand.

  “The last I saw you, you were in New York.” Tristan shook himself, like a cat at the touch of water. Yes, of course, memory of interactions with her would be like water on a cat to him. “What, are you stalking me? Trying to figure out more comprehensive ways to ruin my life?”

  “I know you’re used to being the focus of most women’s attention, but there must be something wrong with me, Tristan. I’ve been hiking for ten days now, and haven’t thought of you at all.”

  Well, mostly not at all. Maybe thought of his face, when she came into her own again, made Monsard a name to be proud of, right there on the old perfume street by Rosier SA. Thought of, maybe, the way he might look at her when she walked into one of those ghastly parties of the Grasse fragrance elite, only this time, she wasn’t an ignored member of a ruined old family with her dress from a cheap department store, she was one of the elite herself, and wore her clothes with all the confidence she’d gained in ten years far away from Grasse’s crushing weight of social class and history.

  Instead, in the vision, she was sexy and glamorous and outclassed all those models he dated and…okay, in ten days of hiking, the mind could wander a bit far off the trail.

  “Besides…ruined your life? Seriously, Tristan? You look as if you’re having a pretty good life to me.” He was so damn entitled. Just never even realized how lusciously wonderful his life was, all its power and strength and confidence showered down on him by the gods who seemed to want to turn every single cobblestone in Grasse gold before a Rosier foot had to step on it.

  He gave her a burning, dark look. “I gave you the most beautiful perfume created in a decade, and you smashed it into bits on the floor.”

  Fugace. Here we go again. “You listed absurdly expensive components and no average consumer could tell the difference between them and the substitutes that cost a tenth—sometimes a hundredth—of the price. Abbaye likes to make money off its perfumes. We’ve been through this, Tristan.”

  He gave her a bitter look.

  “Now, in your head, you gave the perfume to me directly and I threw it on the floor? I was head of accounting. I was doing my job, Tristan.”

  “Do you think accountancy is one of those careers that draws a high percentage of sociopaths?”

  “I think perfumery draws a high percentage of narcissists.”

  “A narcissist?” Tristan’s head jerked back. “Me?”

  Yeah, probably not. He sure as hell was charismatic, though. And adept at getting his own way.

  Thus his incredulous f
rustration with her.

  The only woman in his entire life to have ever thwarted his desires.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Tristan said. “Why are you hiking up here? Nostalgia? You never come back home.”

  “I come see my grandmother every Christmas,” Malorie said, offended. How heartless did he think she was? “And whatever other family is around.”

  Past tense, she remembered on a wave of sadness. No more making the thirteen desserts with her grandmother for Christmas.

  “You do?” Tristan said blankly.

  What did he think she was, just a calculator in a pencil skirt? Probably.

  “But your grandmother is—now she’s—” He broke off. Studied her, his face growing serious, and with it, gentler. “I’m sorry. Is that why you’re here? To…think about her?”

  Not a single Rosier had been at the funeral. Which was normal, of course. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for any of them to come. But…well, that showed what it showed.

  “This is how I left.” She gestured to the hills. Hiking out of Grasse with friends to celebrate passing her bac. Except that after a week, her friends had come back as planned, and Malorie…she’d kept going. She’d liked it too much out there where the wind blew all that dusty dirty past of her family away and she could just be her. The world stretched out below her and all around her, beautiful, dramatic, adventurous, hers for the taking.

  She’d hiked her way north, and eventually made friends at a gîte with a family of four and ended up in Paris as their au pair for the summer. Started school there in an alternance program, where she worked part time for a company and got her degree in finance and management, and was desperately poor, as students were, and scraped by, and flourished.

  And now what she needed to decide was whether this would be perhaps her last visit to Grasse—whether she would sell everything her grandmother had left and continue to bloom where she had not been planted, or whether she would come back here and save her roots.

  “I remember,” Tristan said with an inexplicable grimness. “It was in fashion there for a while. People leaving me.”

  She gave him a confused look. She remembered his older cousins, of course. Half the girls in school had had crushes on either Raoul or Lucien (the other half preferring Damien, Matthieu, or, already even at fourteen, Tristan; Tristan’s percentage of those crushes had grown bigger every year, too). And when Raoul had gone off to Africa and Lucien had disappeared into the Foreign Legion—just given up his name and vanished—it had sent a shockwave through the entire school. Hell, through the whole pays grassois.

  Obviously, to Tristan, who had always quite visibly loved his cousins, their disappearance must have been a brutal blow. He’d been quiet that year. Very quiet, in comparison to the way he’d developed in future years.

  But what relevance her leaving should have to Tristan, she had no idea.

  “You were never tempted?” she asked. He’d spent quite a bit of time in New York and Paris, she knew, but never really established long-term residence.

  “I travel. I love to travel. But I like to come back, too,” he said with a hint of accusation. As if she’d personally attacked him by not liking to come back.

  “Well.” She gave him a faint, challenging smile. “Here I am. Back.”

  That athletic body that always seemed so supple and so on the brink of movement, as if he could fling himself up a rock just to stretch out his kinks when he got restless, stiffened subtly. “Back?” Brown eyes swept over her face. “You mean…back? To stay?”

  “I’m thinking about it.” She’d arranged for a three-month leave from Abbaye to try to get affairs in order here. Now she just had to make up her mind how she wanted to do that.

  Tristan’s eyebrows knit. “Who would you work for?”

  They both knew that economic options around Grasse were still limited. The best jobs were in the fragrance industry, but around here, most of those were tied up in a Gordian knot of family. Meaning he’d had every opportunity he wanted here, but she’d had none at all.

  La Maison de Monsard hadn’t seemed an opportunity back then. Now…well. Her grandmother had “put La Maison de Monsard to sleep” fifteen months ago, letting it go legally dormant, and in retrospect…maybe that should have been a sign. Malorie had thought it normal a seventy-nine-year-old woman would want to retire from that thankless job, but maybe her grandmother had also been feeling her health fail. She’d equally divided her shares in her will among her granddaughters, twenty percent each, but she’d assigned to Malorie, the only one with business training, the responsibility as legal representative. Now Malorie had to decide whether to bring the dormant company back to life or dissolve it, before the two year time-limit on inactive companies ran out. “I’m thinking over my options,” she said.

  Tristan clapped his hand to his forehead. “Bordel, please don’t tell me Damien offered you a job. Surely he wouldn’t do that. Even to me.”

  She stiffened. “Rosier SA should be so lucky.”

  Tristan’s breath left him in a collapse of relief.

  Okay, you know what…? “What do you guys have to pay your finance people to put up with you?”

  “Most of our accountants put up with me just fine,” Tristan retorted.

  Only if they were thinking with their hormones. “You flirt with them, don’t you?” She could see it now. Handsome, utterly charming Tristan Rosier strolling into someone’s office, winking at her, giving her some flowers, telling her what a godsend she was…and never having anyone sit on his extravagances at all.

  Hell, she didn’t even have to imagine it. He’d tried it with her. And not reacted at all well when it didn’t work.

  “No,” Tristan retorted. “I treat them like human beings. Not everyone is a sociopath.”

  “Able to think rationally and control emotional responses?” Malorie raised her eyebrows.

  He bared his teeth. “No heart, no conscience, no consideration for the pain you wreck on others.”

  “Other than the amusement and sense of power it affords me, of course,” she said blandly.

  His eyes narrowed. “I knew it.”

  “It’s Sociopathy 101. I got top marks in gloating.”

  He glared at her. Their conversations always seemed to revert to the mean, didn’t they?

  “Well. I just stopped to save you from skin cancer,” she said, rising. Actually, she had meant to picnic in the shade of the trees by the water. But she’d find another spot. “You might want to put a shirt on. There’s nobody around here to faint over your physique anyway.”

  A dark glance. He stood and pulled a fresh T-shirt out of his backpack, one of those flimsy athletic shirts that rolled up into the size of a fist. Another one lay stretched out over a rock, drying—from the sweat from a recent climb, or the river, or a combination of both. “Not the fainting kind, Malorie?”

  “Over you?” Malorie said incredulously. What, did he have to have fawning attention from everybody? Even a woman he hated and with whom he’d sat in class as a skinny fourteen-year-old geek, no muscle mass yet but all height and great cheekbones and gorgeous brown eyes that had a way of looking at a girl, when the teacher made them work on some group project together, that just…

  Tristan had stilled. His eyes locked with hers, and on those lips that had long ago stopped smiling for her, there was a little curl of pure anger, like a panther baring its teeth.

  Her last words re-played in her head. Over you? Maybe that had come out a little rude. But for God’s sake, it was Tristan. Outside an assault on his perfumes, any other stick or stone the world could throw at him just turned to water against the quintessential duck.

  “Not your type, Malorie?” he said, with an edge.

  “Tristan.” She shrugged helplessly. You’re any woman’s type. Didn’t he have enough proof of that? “Is it true what they say about narcissists? That you have this black hole inside you that kind of sucks up all the praise and attention you can get, so tha
t you truly feel as if you never have enough?”

  His lips pressed into a thin line. The last time she’d seen him that furious, she’d just won the battle to change the formula on his Fugace juice. Unlike his cousin Damien, Tristan was terrible at coldness. But with her, and only with her, his ability for pure rage came out.

  “I wouldn’t know, Malorie,” he said icily. “And the fact that there were so many fucking narcissists in your family doesn’t mean you’ll find them everywhere else you look.”

  She recoiled, shutting down entirely. God, she hated the Rosiers. Not even all the way back in Grasse yet, just set foot inside the region’s extended territory, and already her family history was being thrown in her face. Yeah, her father had been a narcissist, desperate to fill some hole in himself with other people’s attention, even if he gained it through affairs and gambling and eventually drugs. Her grandfather had probably been a narcissist—he sure as hell hadn’t been a good guy, to leave a sixteen-year-old pregnant and disappear. And her handsome, charming great-grandfather had sold out human lives to feather his own nest.

  Yeah. She got it. Letting a charming man into your life was like snuggling all your fragile baby dreams down in a nest of vipers for warmth.

  “Next time, Snow White, I’ll let you choke on your damn apple.” She pivoted, a harsh sound in the big pale pebbles of the bank, and strode toward the trail. “Or get a sunburn and die of skin cancer.” Whatever.

  “You’re supposed to kiss not douse with ice water!” Tristan yelled after her. “You should try it sometime, Malorie. You might get better results.”

  Chapter 2

  It was two days more hiking before she reached the end of the trail. Two days of Tristan twining himself around her head like an elusive whiff of one of his perfumes.

  He’d always done that to her. Whenever she didn’t want to think about difficult things, it was so much easier to think about Tristan.