Free A Wish Upon Jasmine by Laura Florand Page B

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,