A Wish Upon Jasmine by Laura Florand Page B

looks bounced off his shield, hers just sank right through him and held him. “I don’t want your money. ”
    It pissed him the hell off when people said money in that tone. He’d made a shitload of it in his life, both for himself and for his family—not to mention all the people who depended on Rosier SA for a living.
    And what he’d spent his entire career managing and growing for his family wasn’t fucking crap. It was what allowed the rest of them to act so precious and entitled over their perfume art and their valleys full of roses. Because somebody wrapped a great wall of money around them and made sure the real world couldn’t penetrate it and get its money-grubbing hands on their dreams.
    “You know what we said.” Jess put her chin up and tried a cynical curl of her lips, even while color deepened in her cheeks. “Take them off.”
    He froze. Arousal and nakedness swelled up through his brain, taking over his thoughts. Removing his coat and cufflinks and watch that morning to disturb her, and wreck himself, had been one thing. Repeating the same striptease at her command turned it into something far more exposed and vulnerable.
    And Damien didn’t do vulnerable.
    Well, he’d done it once.
    With her.
    And the day after she’d…taken herself back. The trust, the sweetness, the magic, the wishing. As if she’d made a mistake, giving it to him.
    As if he couldn’t possibly deserve a handful of wildflowers.
    If it wasn’t hothouse and expensive, he wouldn’t know how to appreciate its worth.
    His fingers were stiff on his cufflinks.
    “Do you need help?” Jess asked.
    “No,” he snapped.
    And then he realized, too late, what he’d slashed back from him—her fingers on his cufflinks, the soft hair just a bend of his head away, as she focused on that first step of getting him naked.
    Damn it.
    He got the cufflinks off and set them on the counter.
    “Cash would have been more practical.” He made his voice ironic. His back-up tone.
    “I’m not practical,” she said, as stiff as his fingers on his damn watch.
    No kidding. So you need me. You really do. I’m exactly the perfect person to protect all your impractical dreams.
    Something knotted in his chest, there, just below the hollow of his throat. He tried to swallow past it, and it wouldn’t go away.
    He got the watch off and set it beside the cufflinks. Hard and expensive and she could live a year off it, if she had the practical sense.
    But then, if she’d had that, she’d have taken a check. Idiot perfumers. All fairytales and whiffs of twenty-thousand-euro absolutes they wanted to play with as if they were free.
    It had been laughably easy to take over her little artisan company. Basically, he’d noticed rainmaker Jasmin Bianchi was part owner, raised an eyebrow, and thought, I’ll take that. She might be useful. And a few hours later, he’d had it.
    He pulled off his coat.
    God, he felt so much more naked doing this at her orders than he had the other morning. No, it wasn’t quite that. He’d felt naked that morning, but powerful in it—pushing her around with his stripping, instead of growing more and more exposed.
    She pressed her hand down on his coat as soon as he laid it over the counter, gathering it and the watch and cufflinks to her. “If you try to take these back again, we’re done,” she said, hard. “I’m not playing this game, where you promise part of yourself and then take it back the next minute because your mood changes.”
    “ You’re not playing that?” he asked incredulously.
    She checked, her fingers flexing into his coat, her eyebrows drawing slowly together as she searched his face.
    He closed his expression hard, as hard as if he was trying to beat Tristan at poker and Tristan was getting that gleam of too much perception in his eye.
    “What do you mean?” she asked, those damn dusk eyes fixed on his face.
    “ You turned it into a game,” he heard himself say harshly. “Where you pretended to