Crown of Bitter Orange Read online

  Not that he wasn’t difficult. But he was exasperating in such a charming way. So good-looking that he got away with murder. That dark hair of his, those great cheekbones, the supple, sensual mouth, the warm brown eyes, the easy muscled looseness of the way he moved…it all worked to make the prickles of anger something more sparkly. Like the bubbles in Perrier.

  You could not stay mad at Tristan. You just could not do it. She’d tried, because, first of all, he’d wanted her to shaft her own career for him. Way better to stay pissed off about that than give in. But also, she’d always known that coolness and distance were far preferable to falling into the trap of believing in him.

  He acted as if she could. Not that it was an act exactly. Tristan was just so used to being considered Prince Charming that he probably took it for granted that fairy tales existed and he was the hero.

  She snorted faintly and brushed a spiderweb off her face. Which he might be, if you were Cinderella. But somehow those stories always glossed over how many other women were at that ball—the ones who didn’t matter, who weren’t chosen. As every single Monsard woman could attest, counting on a handsome charmer to give you a secure life was a lousy career plan.

  And hamstringing your own career because he asked so passionately and persuasively? Yeah, right.

  Cinderella could keep him. Malorie preferred to wear the kind of shoes in which she could go far. Climb over obstacles. Forge her own path.

  An Über driver picked her up at the trailhead, and she gazed out the window at old familiar countryside—oaks and herbs and maquis and limestone cliffs—as he took her to her grandmother’s old place near Vallauris. About fifteen minutes south of Grasse, still solidly in the pays grassois, the Grasse region that had once been full of flowers and liked to pretend it still was.

  Her smile twisted. She had to hand it to the Rosiers. At least they were doing their part, to keep this region full of flowers. They hadn’t sold off that land of theirs to the highest bidder and retired rich. Even Tristan, who from all appearances would have made a natural playboy, was actually one of the top perfumers of his generation, a creative genius who brought in millions a year for his family company and, through them, for the region. He worked. He made it look easy, but that was probably the way those gymnasts at the Olympics made it look easy. Prince Charming, to be that damn charming and accomplished at fighting his way through thorny hedges and dragons, dancing, and waking women with a kiss, probably had had to work his entire life at it.

  She figured it was a status thing for the Rosiers. If they sold out, well, what were they, other than handsome men with a moderate fortune and no purpose? They would be rootless, pointless. Charming, minus the Prince. But if they kept the land, kept making Rosier SA a powerful player in the region and the industry, they were still the Rosiers. Grasse royalty.

  Like her family used to be. Once upon a time.

  Her mouth turned down, and the driver pulled up in front of a hedge-lined wall. Shouldering her backpack one last time, her feet and calves aching from the two weeks of hiking, she waved him off and turned to face…what?

  Her past? Her happily ever after? La Maison de Monsard had been dormant for over a year, and long before that, it had stopped earning more than a modest supplement to her grandmother’s retirement income. But the Monsard storefront in Grasse, plus all the beautiful collector’s items in storage there, would bring in a tidy sum if Malorie used her power to dissolve the company. Some of that would go to shareholders outside the family—ten percent to a distant cousin who had agreed to serve as board member out of reluctant family obligation post-war and who was now in a nursing home, ten percent to be divided among the heirs of the third board member if the legal battle between those heirs ever reached a conclusion. Another twenty percent floated out there, and she would have to track down the owners, or at least the holding companies that protected their identity. But sixty percent would still provide herself and her sisters with a not insignificant lump sum.

  And then there was this place. The private land that had been in the family since the end of the nineteenth century.

  The orange blossoms from this land no longer earned enough to cover its taxes. But it had a gorgeous view to the coast, and over the years of decline in the Monsard company, the land itself had increased in value. Sell it all, give the government its cut, and she and her sisters would each end up with close to a million.

  At the cost, of course, of yanking out the last roots any of them had. It wasn’t so different from the Rosier choice, really—except the Rosiers had pulled together as a family and made it work. Hers had failed and dispersed.

  She stopped at the ivy-covered gate.

  Leaves had piled around the old bronze robin. Malorie pushed them away and rubbed the robin’s shiny head, then picked it up to take the key, there where her grandmother had always left it for them. Malorie and her sisters had flown home when their grandmother’s health failed, of course, although it had already been too late for her to say much to them. But after her death, they had all had to go back to work, and the key had been left one last time. The leaves had piled up. While Malorie was trying to negotiate a more extended leave from her work, no distant cousin in the area had come to care for the place, because unlike the Rosiers no one in her family did know how to care for each other anymore.

  And the orange garden and my shares in La Maison de Monsard I give to my granddaughters, in case they might care.

  Her throat ached, and she sniffed hard once and straightened. She had to push the ivy away to find the old square of iron and fit the key into the lock. It opened with that same heavy clunk that it always had when her grandmother was wielding the key and Malorie was beside her, her school backpack weighing on her shoulders. Maybe her father had found it so easy to justify his absences in their lives, the way he disintegrated and left nothing to hold them up, because her grandmother, in her quiet and even humble way, was so strong. So there.

  She’d stayed here for them, keeping this place, even when all her granddaughters were leaving her as if everything she’d tended and tried to maintain had no value to them at all.

  Malorie’s eyes stung so badly. She pushed the door open, ducking under the ivy, and stopped still inside, taking a deep breath.

  The old orchard of bitter orange trees stood a couple of miles from the sea, but all the land here sloped steeply from the Alps to the Mediterranean, and standing here at the top terrace of this great, walled garden, she could see straight out to the water and the island of Corsica blurry in the distance.

  A breeze wafted in off the Mediterranean, catching the sweet, warm scent of orange blossom as it passed through the trees. Small white blossoms clustered among glossy green leaves. It was mid-April, and the trees were just starting to bloom.

  She had to push through tall grass and scraggly brush to reach the smooth trunk of the nearest tree.

  One of the last stands of bitter orange in France, and no one had taken care of it. Another sign, like the showroom across from the museum, of how far her once-great family had fallen.

  Her grandmother had taken care of them, all their childhood, and then they had set out on their own, teenagers determined to become something other than a shameful last name. They hadn’t thought that she was growing older and they were leaving her all alone.

  “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 wondered how you unlearned selfishness, when it was such a fundamental survival instinct in her family. She wondered how you became someone like her grandmother, willing to be the roots three granddaughters had needed, no matter how lonely it left her.

  Loneliness. That was another thing Malorie knew all about. If you had to forge your way alone, then you were…well. Alone.

  She rubbed the back of her neck, fighting grief and guilt and the memories it woke of that deeper, underlying shame that her family always carried with it.


  The past stayed alive here. New York was a brash, brisk city, too many buildings, too many people, too much concrete and steel. It wasn’t always easy to live in New York, but there no one cared where you came from. Not only didn’t they know, but it would never occur to them to even wonder.

  Here where you came from…was where you were.

  She stood there, her backpack weighing on her shoulders, dusty and tired, the youngest daughter returned from a long quest to find her fortune and now wondering what good the fastest horse or a firebird did when there was no one to show them to.

  Slowly, she slipped her backpack off and set it in the tall grass. She picked an orange blossom and took a deep breath of the fresh-honey scent of it and tucked it into the coil of hair at the top of her head. The grass was too tall and itchy under the orange trees, full of weeds, but she sank down into it anyway and curled against a trunk, wrapping her arm around it.

  The orchard was entirely empty of human life.

  No one was left here now. Only Malorie.

  She didn’t realize she was crying, until the tear slipped down her cheek and plopped on the back of her hand. She scrubbed her face automatically. She’d made her own decisions, and this profound grief that shook her now that her grandmother was gone seemed…so much too late.

  Her grandmother would have loved to have one of her granddaughters stay. Stay and prove that everything her grandmother had lived for, fought for, had value to them, had meaning.

  It did, Mémère. I just—I couldn’t get any traction here. You of all people know how closed this place is. You’re born to the right family or you can just forget about entering the perfume industry here. It would have been like churning my wheels in mud for ten years. I had to get out of this rut.

  Now I can do something.

  Now that her grandmother was no longer alive to see it, and her sisters and mother didn’t care.

  She wrapped in on herself against the loneliness, releasing the tree to hug herself, as she’d had to do when loneliness struck in her Brooklyn apartment.

  And as always, Tristan slipped in. That guy never let her be alone. He’d been picking on her since they were only a few years old and her teachers always made her sit next to him to try to get him to behave. He’d been such a pain when they were little. Not mean, but always jumping out of his seat and trying to get her to play with him instead of paying attention. It was only as she got older that the way she’d thought about him had changed.

  Well, he’d still been a pain, and he’d still wanted all her attention and everyone else’s, but as he got older, all that energy and charm and restlessness in him had packed itself into a body that grew increasingly hot as he grew taller and taller and filled out and started to shave and just grew so…male.

  But he kept that fundamental sweetness he’d had even as a boy who hated to sit still. Every single time she was homesick or upset in Paris and New York, he was there. So solidly freaking there it was ridiculous for someone who was a figment of her imagination.

  You know that’s not who he really would be in a relationship, right? He just can’t focus on a woman that long.

  But in her imagination he did. Amused, laughing, inviting her to quit focusing on her work and play with him. Friendly, supportive, encouraging. A wink, a smile, a touch of her cheek, a stroke of her hair. Exasperating, maddening, distracting her from darker thoughts with her desire to strangle him.

  She was such an idiot that he had even been there that night after their worst fight over his stupid Fugace, telling her he didn’t mean it, a warm figment of a presence she could curl up against.

  She’d always been good at fantasizing about Tristan. When they were little kids she’d fantasized about beating him over the head with her stuffed animals, and when they were teenagers, well…

  That hot, sexy body. The wicked, amused invitation in his eyes. His warmth and fundamental decency. What was there not to fantasize about?

  She didn’t have to let him know that she was one of the scores of women who fantasized about him, of course. But he had made her feel better, less lonely—helped her get through, persist, succeed—more times than she could count. To be honest, when she was by herself she didn’t even bother to fight it anymore. The fantasies of Tristan were her refuge.

  In a way, just the fact that he existed had helped her survive. Grow stronger. Deep in her heart, in secret, she owed him something for that.

  Chapter 3

  “Wait.” Matt paused with the cochonnet, the little yellow jack, in one hand, and an unholy grin spread across his face. Big, rough, and growly, Matt was the middle cousin in age but the only child of their grandfather Jean-Jacques Rosier’s oldest son, and thus the family patriarch in training. He had a heart like a marshmallow but an exterior as rough as his farmer’s hands, and he also took his responsibility for interfering in his cousins’ lives far too seriously. But then, so did Damien and Raoul, if you asked Tristan. “Malorie Monsard is back?”

  Tristan had no insecurities.

  He’d made peace with his failures in school as a child. He’d proven exactly how much he could do when he was freed from a desk and allowed to be him.

  He’d survived being the youngest of these cousins. He’d even flipped it so that he was the one who was always amused at their emotional eccentricities, not the one being teased into crises of rage and tears like he’d been at four and five.

  He’d become one of the top perfumers of his generation, and despite all the pressures from family and society to become someone else, he’d done it entirely his way. He hadn’t had a choice, in fact. Try as he might, he had never been able to fit into any other mold than his own.

  He was good with that. He was entirely—entirely—secure in who he was.

  But trust his cousins to still, unerringly, find his one damn weak spot.

  He took a sip of his Ricard. “Are you going to throw that jack any time soon?”

  “Who’s Malorie Monsard?” Matt’s fiancée Layla asked, and at the other end of the court, their grandfather looked around at the last name.

  Above them, the great branches of an old plane tree shaded their game, leaves spring fresh. In the late Saturday afternoon, the April air was gently warm not hot. Around them were the original old stone building of the mas, the outbuildings that had once housed farm animals, and, at a little remove, the extraction plant and a couple more buildings associated with it. Past that stretched the roses, leafing out but not yet in bloom, and steep slopes framed the valley. The Rosier valley. Not Tristan’s—his house lay high on the slopes, the fields themselves destined for Matt—but home. The apricot and almond trees planted around the house were in bloom, the amandiers releasing that incredible sweet scent from their fragile white flowers. And under that, the scents of stone and green, the softer, humid scents of spring that would soon dry in the summer, baked under the sun. The tingle-sharp scent of his apéritif, the faint hint of dirt stirred up by their feet in the gravel as they threw.

  “Only Tristan’s worst enemy,” Damien said, gray-green eyes glinting in amusement. He exchanged a glance with Raoul. Merde. That never ended well for the youngest cousin, when the oldest ones started exchanging glances with that grin on their faces.

  Plus, Damien’s wedding was only three weeks away and Matt, like an insane man, had agreed to having his and Layla’s right at the tail end of the rose harvest a month later, so they both were probably just dying to relieve their stress levels on someone. Damien had originally tried to have a quiet, quick wedding last fall, but Tante Colette, his mother, and pretty much everyone connected to the family from here to Québec had all sat on that one hard. There were people who had been waiting thirty-five years for the next Rosier wedding. It would have been impossible for the first wedding in a generation—or any of their weddings—to invite fewer than five hundred people. The hurt and disappointment would have been terrible. Since Tante Colette was the person insisting on this and Damien could hardly articulate to her in response his
profound fears that she might die before the ceremony, he had lost that battle.

  And Tante Colette was going to live to be one hundred twenty-three. Tristan was positive of it. She’d see his children get married. If he ever found the right person to have them with.

  “Malorie is not my worst enemy,” he said.

  “She eats him for breakfast.” Matt held up a hand and made enthusiastic munching motions with it, grinning.

  Tristan tried to keep his cool, the number one most essential thing to do for surviving being the youngest of this crowd, but his eyes narrowed just a little. “She hardly eats me for breakfast.”

  Just ripped his heart out and gnawed on it absently for a snack was more like what she did, but he’d be damned if he’d let his cousins know that. Unless they’d already guessed, in which case he was screwed.

  “Makes him pay attention to bottom line and shit,” Raoul volunteered, his arm across Allegra’s shoulders, rubbing the curve of one shoulder idly as he sipped from a small glass of their grandfather’s walnut wine. “It’s horrible.”

  The oldest of the cousins—but not the son of the oldest son—Raoul had had a difficult relationship with Matt and an even more difficult one with their grandfather, and he’d run off to Africa at nineteen and eventually taken charge of their overseas operations. He’d come home Christmas before last to stay, his sienna hair streaked prematurely with charcoal gray, the only cousin besides the absent Lucien who didn’t have black hair.

  Of course Lucien didn’t…that is, he wasn’t…never mind.

  “Tristan has an enemy?” Allegra said blankly. Slim and vivacious, an Italian-American who had originally come here while doing research for her dissertation, never-met-a-stranger Allegra had taken one look at Raoul when he came home for Christmas and just snatched him up, and he’d fallen head over heels for her.

  It was kind of alarming how hard Tristan’s older cousins had fallen when they’d fallen, in fact. Up until then, Tristan had been under the conviction that it was possible to fall in love and stay relatively sane.