A Wish Upon Jasmine Read Online Free PDF

meant. “And you didn’t think it would have been at least polite to correct that?”
    “You didn’t tell me your last name, either. You didn’t even tell me your proper first name.”
    She tightened her stomach muscles and lifted her chin. “What, if you’d known I was the one who made Spoiled Brat, would you have held your nose while we made l—?” She bit the word back. Stupid, screwed up vocabulary, always letting slip her secret wishes.
    “Had sex?” Damien said flatly.
    Yeah. There was the right vocabulary word. She swallowed, trying to force the sickness down into a tight ball inside her where no one could find it, particularly not herself.
    “I don’t know what I would have done.” Damien picked up a delicate perfume bottle—this fantastical romantic whimsy of crystal and fragility—and stared at it in his masculine hand. “Perhaps worn armor.”
    What did that even mean? Was he talking about condoms? “Good God.” She pressed a horrified hand to her belly. “You didn’t wear—yes, you did.” She definitely hadn’t gotten that stupidly romantic.
    He gazed at her for a blank second. And then, very ironically: “Don’t worry. I remembered that kind of armor. Jesus.” His hand closed hard on the little crystal bottle.
    “Well, yeah,” she said. “You must be in the habit.”
    He’d been gazing broodingly at his fist around the perfume bottle, but his head turned and he stared at her. “What?”
    “I mean, it must be an automatism. Otherwise, you’d have a disease by now.”
    That muscle started to tick in his jaw again, just this fine, subtle proof of tension. “Well. Sex ed in the States must be better than its reputation.”
    She was growing so sick to her stomach she was afraid that any second she might do something horrible, like cry. She pressed her hands into the counter. “I need you to leave now.”
    He made an abrupt move toward her, stopping on the other side of the counter from her. “Jess—”
    She fisted her hands on the counter. “This is my space.” She asserted it adamantly. Damn you, I don’t care what you do, there is one good thing in my life I’m going to keep. A magic little shop where she could hide away and make scents out of the world. Dream. Wish again. “I know you don’t like it, but until you bring that court case, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. I want you to leave.”
    She couldn’t make him, though. Hell, she didn’t even know what number to dial for the police in this country.
    Black eyebrows drew slowly together. “Jess—”
    “I wish you would leave,” she said desperately.
    He stilled, taking a deep breath. Slowly, he released it, searching her face. And then his fist unfolded from that delicate crystal bottle, and he set it down in the middle of the counter. She caught a glimpse of red indentations from the pointed facets before he slipped his hands in his pockets. He nodded briefly and was gone.
    She stared down at the counter, his big handprint in the dust pressed just across from her two small ones. And the exquisite, fragile, gleaming perfume bottle, polished by the grip of his fingers, set precisely halfway between them.

Chapter 3
    The morning started soft, dew on the jasmine, the first day of the harvest. They really didn’t need all hands on deck in this way, but all the Rosier cousins always turned out the first day, the same way everyone always turned out for Christmas and the harvest of the roses. It was special. It reaffirmed who they were.
    Damien’s hands moved automatically, a pinch of a jasmine flower, dropped into the wicker basket. The jasmine that they harvested from August into October was more delicate than roses. It required care not to damage the fragile, precious petals. It was also backbreaking, because the plants were so low you had to bend or sit on a stool all the time. This should have been familiar, reassuring work to him. They’d been working these fields since they were children, when