A Wish Upon Jasmine by Laura Florand Read Free Book Online Page A

until they started giving him migraines. “Spray that crap in this shop? Ruin the air in this place?”
    She pressed her finger on the spray button, her eyebrows arching. He liked the way mischief and menace brought out the strength in that heart-face of hers. “Are you going to leave quietly?”
    “Centuries of our history. A family heritage. And you’re going to ruin that with one twitch of your finger?”
    “I thought you said Laurianne was a glove-maker. Meaning descended from tanners. This place has had worse scents in it than Spoiled Brat.”
    “Hardly,” he said dryly. He liked battles of wits, liked using words as rapiers, and he liked the edge of humor that ran along the blades here, a flickering glimpse of a night of happiness…kept back at sword’s point. But he wondered what he’d done that night that had made him seem so untrustworthy in close to everything soft and vulnerable of hers. When he’d thought…he’d thought… fuck.
    She drew the bottle back a little. “Did you just say my perfume smells worse than animal skins soaking in urine?”
    “At least the urine was an honest scent. True.”
    She looked at her bottle a second. “You know, if you’re not careful, I really am going to spray you with this stuff.”
    “Jesus.” He shuddered. “It probably doesn’t wash off for days. The molecules you used in that thing.”
    She gazed at it another moment and then at him, a scary look in her eye. He backed up a step. “Seriously. Don’t.”
    She gave a slow, wicked, lopsided smile that was so exactly what he’d hoped to wake up to that morning after, instead of an empty apartment, that he got caught by it. “It will make it easier for them to find the culprit if my dead body turns up.”
    He got ready to drop behind the counter. “What are the police going to do, sniff the wrists of all the suspects?”
    “They’d have to call in your own cousin as an expert witness against you,” Jess agreed mournfully. “One Rosier pitted against another. Imagine the scandal.”
    No prosecutor around Grasse would be idiot enough to expect one Rosier to testify against another. “If you inflict that thing on me, I’m going to grab it from you and spray you all over with it.”
    And that , maybe, would convince his heart to go back into that damn, dark hole. At least then, she’d smell like what she wanted him to think she was—spoiled and hard and careless, of her own heart and everyone else’s.
    She lifted the bottle, narrowed her eyes. “ Are you going to leave quietly?”
    He resigned himself to the torture and put on his game face. “No.” Show your true colors now. Spray me.
    She stood there, stuck, for a long moment. And then she frowned in something close to a sulk and looked down at the little bottle. “Damn it.” She set it down. “All those self-defense lessons are right. Never draw a weapon unless you’d be willing to fire it.”
    His hand snaked out to snag the bottle and pocket it, so he didn’t have to run that risk again. Spoiled Brat. Hell.
    “Hey. I just spent a hundred dollars on that thing.”
    He removed one of his cufflinks and set it on the counter where the bottle had been. “I’ll trade.”
    She stared not at the cufflink but at his wrist where it had been. Color appeared suddenly on her cheeks, and with it a slow heat swept up through his body. He wanted to lose another cufflink. He wanted to find an excuse to trade away every single item of clothing he wore, one by one, in this slow, deliberate striptease until she was blushing all over her body.
    That night, he’d stopped with his shirt off so that she didn’t catch fire. And he’d loved it, loved the flame and fascination in her, loved pulling her into his bare chest and kissing her in little toying kisses, seducing her, until she forgot to be unnerved.
    He fingered his second cufflink. “Not good enough? You want the full set?” She could pawn the pair of cufflinks for ten times the cost of that tiny