Read A Wish Upon Jasmine for Free Online Page B

always used their heads about contraception, starting way back in the fifties?”
    Now not only might they have unnumbered step-cousins, but Layla was peopling their family with any number of unidentified half-siblings, too. When they already felt they couldn’t all quite fit together in the same valley. They stared at her, appalled and fascinated.
    Matt bent his head to her ear to mutter: “He’s older than the Pope. Catholic country. Maybe let’s not talk about contraception?”
    “Well, you know how to use con—”
    Matt covered her mouth with his hand and turned beet red. Even Damien had to grin. Layla made Matt so damn happy. That happiness seemed to fill this whole valley with a radiant rose- and jasmine-scented luminosity, so that it was all he could do not to pull out his phone and start cementing another business deal right that second, to wall more money and power around that valley and keep that happiness safe.
    Pépé frowned at Layla. “That is just about enough out of you.”
    “Pépé.” Matt folded his arms across his chest. “She can say what she wants.” And, sotto voce to Layla, “Will you behave?”
    Layla grinned.
    “So who’s on this one?” Pépé asked. “Not you,” he told Matt severely. “You clearly couldn’t battle a flea.” He gave Layla a crushing look.
    “I’m tougher than I look,” Layla told him sweetly. She made fists and pretended a boxing stance.
    Pépé had to firm out a twitch of his lips.
    Matt folded his arms and growled. “I got it back, didn’t I?”
    “You got lucky,” Pépé said. “This time I want someone ruthless. Someone who can go for the kill and not go soft over a pretty face.” He turned and said that thing that always iced Damien’s heart: “Damien. It will have to be you.”

Chapter 4
    Damien moved through the empty shop, where the scent of Christmas played with the scent of jasmine and vanilla and rose, and older scents sulked in corners, wondering when their new owner would rub them awake, too. Traces of her fingerprints were everywhere in the dust on bottles pulled down from shelves and left on counters. And there, on that bottle of bitter almond oil, were the marks of his.
    He made a sharp motion of his hand, trying to cut through the scents that came for him. But they curled around his fingers like a woman’s soft wavy locks.
    Jess did the exact same thing his family did—surrounded him with silk and sweetness and expected him to be the hard one, who didn’t give a damn.
    And yet that night, she hadn’t seemed to expect cynicism from him at all. As he leaned beside her on the terrace, they’d talked about the view like two ordinary, unsophisticated strangers trying to make a connection. About the way the sky flipped upside down in New York so that all the dazzle of the night was human, below, tense and greedy and a little harsh, for all its beauty, and about other places in the world, where the night softened human stresses away and the stars came out above. Have you ever been to Morocco, the desert, at night? No, but she’d driven through Texas, talked about feeling that she could reach her hand into the sky and pluck a handful of stars.
    That quiet way she talked, a little shy, a little hungry for stars, and the way he’d laid his words under hers like a firm, sure path closer to him: You can trust me with this shyness, this dreaming. I like it. The way her forearms had pressed against the terrace wall so close to his, and the way he’d let the itch build and build in his palm to cover her smaller hand before he finally, barely yielded to it, lightly stroking his fingers up two of hers and over her knuckles. The way she’d drawn a little breath and looked up at him, dusky eyes wide.
    And wanting.
    As if she thought he was her wish come true.
    It had felt as if he’d found his heart. That heart that he’d stashed away somewhere long ago, in the service of his family, suddenly, it was his again. As alive and beating as it once