A Wish Upon Jasmine Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’d been the perfect height for the jasmine and too small to properly reach the roses.
    But he couldn’t calm down. Tension ran through him, this tight, angry urge to fight a battle, this incipient headache, as if someone had locked him in a room not with fresh jasmine but with that damn Spoiled Brat.
    He lifted a handful of his flowers, breathing deep to clear his head, and a bee stung him on the knuckle.
    Aïe . Damn it. He went to the truck for some spray.
    His grandfather snorted. “Still say lavender oil works the best. Smells better, too. Sure you don’t want some?”
    With a wry smile, Damien held his burning knuckle out to his grandfather. Pépé dabbed lavender oil on it, and he brought his hand to his face a second, breathing in the blend of jasmine and lavender, tension unknotting all down his back. Sometimes you didn’t even know you were tense until the first day of the jasmine harvest, when that smell hit you and everything loosened and the world made sense again.
    Even down to the bee stings.
    All the battles for dominance with other businesses around the world, all the boardrooms and meetings and accounts…it all comes back to this. These petals sliding over my fingers, this scent in my hands. This is where it all started. And this is what it’s all about.
    Even if his job was always the boardrooms. The business. Taking out family enemies, building empire. While Raoul and Lucien ran off to explore the world, while Tristan spent his life sunk in perfumes, while Matt pretended this valley was what the family could depend on for centuries more, Damien did what had to be done: fought the business battles and won them.
    That was his job. No threat to Rosier SA got past him.
    While other businesses shrank and closed doors, left their empty, broken windows in the heart of Grasse, he spread the power of Rosier SA to every continent on the globe, anchoring not only Grasse’s economy but local economies everywhere. While fragrance producers in the valleys around Grasse gave up, sold out to real estate developers because they had no other economic choice, Damien gave his family choices. Power. Wealth.
    He, like his father before him, froze his heart and got it done.
    And no one, no one in this world, believed he had any softness or warmth to his heart. He looked down at the jasmine flower, delicate and scented against his tan hand. White as his sheets, across which soft, pale brown curls had spread like a gift. As if she trusted him with sweetness and softness, vulnerability and hope.
    Raoul came up to them with a basket of jasmine on one arm, his fingers running gently through the flowers before he emptied them into the larger basket at Pépé’s feet. The expression on Raoul’s face was profoundly eased, like a man who had just sat down in an old comfy armchair in front of his own fireplace after years away at war. Since there was no urgency to the first morning and they weren’t getting paid by the weight of what they picked, the other cousins drifted up with their jasmine as an excuse to join the social gathering, the way some men might show up with a couple of extra beers in one hand.
    Matt, big and growly, turned to watch his fiancée who was incompetently picking jasmine flowers at the end of a row, picking one or two, then pausing to bury her face in her basket and breathe the scent, obscuring the basket so completely that it looked as if her basket had turned into a hedge-hog of bronze-tipped curly hair. Across from her, Raoul’s fiancée Allegra picked, and beside them, a couple of bushes farther down the row, Léa and Jolie. The four women had hit it off so well that they turned just about every event into a social occasion, where they talked about anything from careers to politics to silliness and occasionally the men.
    Damien looked down at the jasmine in his basket. No woman was over there gossiping about him.
    And that didn’t bother him in the slightest. Of course not.
    Tristan held a