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single jasmine flower in his hand, twirling it, breathing deeply of its scent, then lifting his head to gaze across the fields and up into the hills. Tristan swore that if he could ever manage a scent that captured, truly captured, the jasmine harvest and not some weak, bloated version of it in a bottle, he would have made his life’s contribution to posterity—bottled happiness and strength to pass on to the world.
    But even Tristan hadn’t managed that. No one had—the ephemeral gorgeousness of reality in a bottle. These days, it wasn’t even fashionable to try—perfumers focused on creating works of abstract art, and striving to capture reality made it seem as if your art had been stuck in the Renaissance.
    Hell, in the current state of the industry, Spoiled Brat could hold the damn number three spot on the bestseller lists. Clearly, some people’s definition of art was more abrasive and shudder-producing than others.
    “I don’t understand why Tante Colette is doing this to us,” Damien said abruptly. “I mean, what the actual hell? Okay, fine, so Jasmin Bianchi is presumably another of Léonard Dubois’s descendants. That doesn’t excuse…” disinheriting her own family , he’d been going to say. Except, fuck, maybe it did excuse it. After all, maybe the grandchildren of her adopted son, even if she did have him for only eight years before he ran away, did count as much as the grandchildren of the stepbrother with whom she maintained such a combative relationship. Except that both the part of the valley she had given Layla and this shop were Rosier heritage. From centuries past.
    “Spoiled Brat.” Tristan clutched his head. “She gave Laurianne’s shop to the perfumer who made Spoiled Brat. ”
    “I told my father,” Pépé said. “I told him not to trust any of the family heritage into her hands.”
    “Laurianne’s perfume shop,” Tristan said. “ Spoiled Brat. ” He yanked at his own black hair.
    “She gave away a chunk of my valley,” Matt grumbled. Damien’s big bear of a cousin was supposed to be heir to all the valley around them, the family patriarch in training, and he practiced for it by growling all the time. “We need to sit on that damn Antoine Vallier until he learns to quit doing this shit.”
    Antoine Vallier was the new lawyer in Grasse who kept helping Tante Colette deed over her property to random strange semi-descendants from the other side of the world. Every single one of them—besides Tristan, who had gone to school with the guy and anyway didn’t do that kind of thing—had gone and threatened him personally with the consequences of making enemies out of the Rosiers.
    And he still kept doing it. The guy must be suicidal, there was no other explanation.
    “Are you still complaining about that?” Layla asked, coming up with a wicker basket brimming with jasmine flowers over one arm. Despite her Lebanese blood and the sun-friendly skin it should have given her, Matt had covered her with so much sunscreen that white patches marked her face under the big floppy hat Matt had settled on her head. She looked entirely delighted with herself, though, and if she kept bringing great handfuls of jasmine to her face like that, she was going to get stung on the nose.
    Matt looked down at her, and his expression softened. He framed her face to rub the white blotches of sunscreen in better with the most incredible gentleness in his big, callused hands, shaking his head slowly.
    Damien looked away, embarrassed. He could not get used to Matt’s heart being all exposed like that. He kept wanting to tell his cousin to put some damn clothes on the thing.
    Thank God Damien didn’t have such a tender, easily wounded heart. A memory of a night in New York lanced through him, just like that, and he stamped it down. Shaken, not stirred, he made his heart say . My name is Bond, James Bond.
    Or would it be better if his heart had been stirred not shaken?
    It was just a cocktail, God damn