A Wish Upon Jasmine by Laura Florand Page A

Ready for another hook-up. He wasn’t the man she had wished he was, that night. He was the man who hooked up with a different model every night, the man who had slept with her while stealing her company, without a second thought.
    Jesus, she must be in Damien’s little black book now. One of his resources of women in New York who might be up for good sex when he was in town and had the urge.
    A wild vision of herself at that restaurant, crumpled and stale from the hospital, no shower in two days. She stank of dying.
    “No,” she said.
    A tightening of frustration in his voice. Women must not tell him nothat often. “Jess. Don’t you think this is important ?”
    More important than her father dying ? How the hell self-centered was he?
    God, of course she couldn’t throw herself into his arms and ask for help. Of course she had to handle this all alone.
    The nurse came to the waiting room door and nodded to her. Jess’s hand tightened on the phone.
    “Jess. I know you have a lot going on right now, but don’t you think it’s at least worth seeing each other again?”
    At least it put things into perspective. Was it important, a hook-up that had seemed beautiful and had turned out to be with one of the industry’s ruthless players? Was it even worth thinking about, right this second? Let alone risking repeating in a desperate grasp after a fantasy?
    “No,” she had said as she shifted her thumb to disconnect. No, although it hurt her heart, added one last Gordian twist to the knot in her stomach. “I really don’t.”

Chapter 8
    “Nice skirt,” Damien said. It wasn’t. It was a perfect little pencil skirt, featured in the display window of a shop just down the street, which she’d paired with a tailored white blouse, exactly the kind of thing newly hired women at Rosier SA wore to prove how professional they were.
    Of course, they also usually carefully curled or straightened their hair, a step in glossy perfectionism she seemed to have entirely missed in her education in things feminine, and most of the time they remembered to put on their shoes when he came into their office.
    Jess was moving very briskly among the bottles, test blotters, papers, and moleskin journal she had laid out on the counter, but she’d forgotten she was barefoot. She was such a geek. Way worse than Tristan, who’d learned to disguise his own nerdiness with social skills when he was very young. She’d probably played at being Galadriel when she was a teenager. Her perfumes were her magic potions or something.
    “Did you get it just for me?”
    A tiny streak of color on her cheeks. So, yeah.
    Instead of, say, the soft, playful, romantic sundress she’d been wearing the day before.
    He was going to break one of these damn glass bottles around him. Just strike out and slash its head off.
    “I’ve put together a couple of things I want to test on your skin,” she said briskly. Her fingers tightened around one of the bottles. She tried to spear him with a look. “I expect you to stay professional.”
    Hell, he could see why she’d hidden in a perfumer’s lab instead of taking on the business world as a career. She couldn’t spear a marshmallow with that look.
    Which made it all the more pathetic that he, the man whose heart was made out of titanium, felt as if he’d not only been speared but was now being roasted just a little too close to the fire and was about to go from burnished gold to crispy black in a sudden catch of flame.
    “Do you?” he said coolly.
    Her flush deepened.
    So no.
    She didn’t really expect that.
    And yet here he was anyway, instead of knocking on a locked door she refused to open to an asshole like him.
    Interesting.
    He pulled out a checkbook and a pen made out of platinum that had been somebody’s idea of what he’d want for Christmas. “How much did we say?”
    A bottle clicked on the counter. Suddenly her eyes did spear him. It was the oddest sensation. Where everyone else’s much sharper