by Jill Jones
16th February 1847
India is infernal. Never have I seen such wretched poverty juxtaposed against obscene wealth. And I believed our class system was rigid! It is nothing compared to the caste divisions in this unholy land. I have dwelt here six months, and each day my aching loneliness mounts. My mind is constantly upon my green homeland, and the woman who awaits me there. I hear from Mary Rose often, but each letter only makes me long for her more. How can I bear to remain here for another year and a half?
My young assistant, a native, is witness to my torment, and he has been urging me to visit his relative who lives in a monastery high up in the mountains. He tells me the monks there concoct some kind of potion, an oil made from the blossoms of a so-called magical plant, that massaged into my skin will take away my pain and relieve the loneliness. Thus far I have fought his suggestions, as I doubt it not the liniment must contain some opiate derivative, and I do not need such dulling of my senses. But the idea is tempting. As is my latest diversion.
I have been in discussions with others in my station concerning the possibility of developing a private enterprise. I have heard stories of Englishmen deriving huge profits from organizing shipments of the exotic products of this land—tea, spices, fragrances such as sandalwood and patchouli, madras cloth & etc.—to England. The thought intrigues me, and I am investigating the possibility of participating in that trade. It could buy my freedom perhaps. With a substantial private income I could afford to estrange myself from my family ties and follow my heart’s desire…straight to the altar with Mary Rose Hatcher.
Nick allowed the book drop to his lap, his gaze to wander to the lush green meadow just beyond the garden gate, his mind to consider this woman who appeared to have held his uncle so spellbound that he was not only ready, but eager to renounce what Nick was fighting with his life to repossess, his family name and heritage.
Mary Rose Hatcher.
M.R.H.
The woman on the cameo? Perhaps not, but surely it was her hair entwined with John’s that was secured in the old-fashioned locket. It was a common practice in those romantic times.
As was the creation of scent by Victorian ladies. It was not remarkable that Mary Rose would have created a perfume for her lover, as she’d written in these letters. Nick knew the Victorians loved pomanders and potpourris, flower waters, bath oils and tonics. The Victorian garden, such as the one behind the servant’s quarters where Mary Rose had lived, furnished not only vegetables for the table but also herbs and flowers for creating beautiful scents and home remedies.
But he doubted seriously if any Victorian lady, no matter how talented at such things, had ever created a substance the likes of which was recorded on these ancient pages. If this tale was true. He shook his head. It was just too implausible. Perhaps John Rutledge had gone insane, and to cover his disgrace the family had kidnapped him or something. It made more sense than what he’d written in his diary, especially the last entry. It read like a piece of science fiction.
But the rest of it…Mary Rose had written of a “perfume essence” she’d derived from something she called the mahja. Nick supposed this was the fragrant aphrodisiac oil he’d discovered alongside the diary and letters. But what in bloody hell was a mahja plant? Even if its claimed magical effects were only the wistful wishes of his demented ancestor, Nick could not deny the essence had unusual powers. Every time he had used it, he’d experienced incredibly erotic dreams.
But unlike what it did for John Rutledge, who claimed that the “balm” of the mahja had assuaged his heartache, it had done just the opposite for Nick. It had wrought havoc with his emotions, for the lover in each of his dreams had been Simone Lefevre. Although he made love to her with fiery passion in his fantasies each night, his torment upon waking was unspeakable. He was tempted at one point to empty the vial down the sink and be done with it.
Yet Nick sensed that he had at last inherited something of value from his Rutledge lineage. If he could recreate this perfume, even get close to replicating it and its sensual effects, he would have what he needed to make his comeback.
Nick rose and returned to the house, considering the dilemma he faced. He must find out more about the plant known as the mahja. His nose had been of little help in identifying the source of the essence, and he had not come across any reference to such a plant in his own botanical books. He was certain he could chemically analyze and identify the substance, but not until the lab equipment arrived from Bombay and was set up in his London office.
Wait. All he could do was wait. But waiting was not something Nick did well.
He paced. He drank a cup of tea. He cursorily scanned the newspaper. He jumped a mile when the phone rang. The elderly housekeeper, whom he’d hired for the fortnight he planned to be here, summoned him to the phone.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Rutledge, it is so good to speak to you again,” a feminine voice cooed at him. “This is Virginia Stuart, with Stuart and Sutherland Estate Agents.”
Nick frowned, vaguely recalling having met some woman by that name who came by to have him sign the contractual agreement for the agency to represent the rental of the carriage house. “Ah, yes,” he half-lied. “Miss Stuart. I understand we have our first tenant.”
“Indeed. The American woman I told you about. She arrived early this afternoon. I believe by now she should be settled in. She plans to stay for several days.”
“Very well,” Nick said, glad to know his strategy for offsetting at least part of the upkeep on Brierley Hall through tenant rentals was working. He regretted, however, that he had so hastily disposed of the original antiques that had furnished the servant’s house. It had been home to Mary Rose Hatcher, and quite possibly, the information he needed to recreate the perfume oil might have been among the items he’d turned over to his friend Jeremy Ryder for sale. Well, it was too late now. “Thank you for calling, Miss Stuart. I hope you are able to keep the place occupied for the entire summer.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You have my gratitude. Goodbye then.”
Nick hung up the phone, considering his new role as landlord. He was ashamed to have to stoop to renting out part of the Rutledge estate just to try to make ends meet, but if nothing else, Nick prided himself on being a survivor, and he would do whatever it took to get past this latest challenge. Meanwhile, if he was to be a landlord, at least he would be a courteous one.
“I’ll be back in time for dinner,” he told the housekeeper, heading for the stable where he kept his one indulgence, an Arabian stallion with blood so blue he earned his own way in stud fees. Mounted, Nick felt the power of the horse beneath him, which somehow transferred to him, raising his spirits, and together man and animal took off at an energetic pace, both glad of the exercise. He’d planned to go directly to the renovated cottage to greet his first tenant, but he decided instead to allow himself a good ride first. His visit to the half-timbered house at the edge of the estate would, after all, only take a moment.
Chapter Six
Indigo mist, soft as baby’s breath, enfolded Simone as she slipped out of consciousness and into the space that had become her familiar trysting place with the man whose face, like Eros, had remained hidden from her view. His identity did not matter, for she knew he would not hurt her, indeed, that he would fulfill her every desire in a way no man ever could outside this fantastic realm of dreams. Eagerly she searched the vapors, drifting ghostlike through the rarified atmosphere, breathing in a scent both beautiful and haunting as she mentally summoned her lover to her.
He was a knowing before he became a being. She sensed his heat first, a physical fire that flickered and licked against her skin, inflaming the desire that already glowed red hot in her sex. She felt him brush her lips with the tips of his fingers, as he had done in each dream, a signature greeting, a sensual salutation. She tasted the size of his fingers, felt their masculine texture against her impatient skin, and she kissed them with hungry invitation.
But he was not to be hurried. He traced the outline of her full lips, then let one finger slip between them, bidding her to nibble. Even as she allowed her tongue to play with his touch, she felt the whisper of his other hand moving down the length of her throat, the back of his fingers tracing lightly from just beneath her chin to the rise of her breasts. She arched her back and bit harder into his finger when his hand cupped her breast and his thumb began caressing her nipple in slow, firm strokes.
No words were spoken between them, and yet the message she heard quickened her already racing pulse. He wanted her, now and for all time, he told her. He loved the beauty of her body, the softness of her flesh, the roundness of her breasts, the scent of her hair. He loved the dark passion he saw in her eyes, the ripeness of her lips.
And suddenly, she wanted to see his eyes as well, to read their passion. She wanted to know his face, to view the man whose touch she craved so fiercely she thought without it she might die. She attempted, slightly, to pull away, to demand of him that he reveal himself, but his hand slipped to the warmth of her sex, and she lost all reason and determination.
With his lips, he trailed kisses across her face and along her throat, stopping in his tender travels only to suckle at the dark berries of her nipples, all the while allowing his fingers to explore the dark wet heat of her.
She felt him part the petals that folded around the doorway to her inner being, and her body quaked as he knelt before her and kissed those feminine flowers.
Simone Lefevre ceased to exist at that moment. The spirit that possessed her body was of another nature, an animal nature, a creature stalking a quarry, seeking consummation of its fiery hunger. The creature divested the woman of all inhibitions, filled her with feral energy, turned her from acquiescent to aggressive.
With her hands on his jawbones, she drew the man closer and moved against his own now voracious attack with seductive rhythm, feeling the intensity of her desire become almost unbearable with each stroke of his tongue within her heat. He seemed innately to know the circle of pleasure to trace, and he suckled the sensitive clitoris the way he had made love to her nipples moments before. The wild woman cried out just before she was rescued from her torment by the waves of sexual release that at last engulfed her.
She felt his hands upon her buttocks, drawing her down into a gossamer pillow, where she lay, momentarily sated, until he began again to arouse her again with deliberate slowness. “I am not through with you, my lovely wanton.” She heard his words although they were not spoken aloud, and instead of offending her, they only reignited her desire. For in them, she also heard his love, his own aching need, and she became again an aggressor in the game.
Determined to inflict upon her lover the kind of exquisite pain, and then release, he had perpetrated upon her, she rolled onto the man’s broad chest, holding him beneath her with her will more than her weight. With the flat of her hand against his skin, she felt his heart thundering and knew it would not be an extended torture. She placed her lips to his pectorals and tasted the salt of his sex-sweatened skin. She inhaled the scent of him, trying to fill her consciousness with his essence. Against the inside of her thigh, she felt his hardness, and she aggravated it by stroking it with the sensitive skin of her leg. She let her hand slide to his belly, and then lower, to allow her fingers play among the dark curls that adorned his sex. She traced a path along the crease of his groin, all the while placing kisses ever lower on his body, moving deliberately slowly in the direction of his virile erection. When she attained her objective, her lips moved naturally and skillfully along its fine skin, although she had never before tasted a man thus.
At her touch, she felt him take in a sharp breath, and suddenly, she was no longer in command. He lifted her up and away from him, then settled her against his swollen need. She opened to him and felt a fierce thrust that took her own breath away. She sat astride him, her hands splayed across his chest. He filled his own hands with the fullness of her breasts, and they moved in a race to completion until at last, together, they found the end to their impassioned agony.
Gasping for breath, Simone leaned her full weight into her arms, which she still held stiffly against his chest, and like a starving person who has just enjoyed a feast, allowed herself to lick the plate, to luxuriate in the lingering pleasure of the tiny pulsations that continued to throb where their bodies were intimately joined.
From somewhere far away, she heard a sound like thunder, and she wondered vaguely if it ever rained in this place. With infinite love in her heart, she looked upon her lover, who felt her movement and rolled her to his side. She caught at last a glimpse of his face, the solid jaw, the broad forehead, the fine nose. It was an unutterably handsome face.
And it was a face she knew.
It thundered again, and Simone jerked out of her lover’s arms. She stared at him aghast, her heart pounding, her face draining in horror.
“You!”
But her lover only nodded and gave her the dimpled smile she remembered so well, before his face, and the rest of the dream, dissolved.
Simone bolted upright in bed and threw back the covers, frantic to get away from the man. Then she gradually regained her senses and remembered where she was. But the face in the dream remained crystal clear, and she began to gasp for breath, hysterical at the revelation.
“Nat,” she croaked over the tightness in her throat. “Don’t do this to me.” Anger flared. “Nat or Nick or whoever the hell you are!” She flung a pillow across the room as if it would dispel her anguish. Only then did she hear the sound again, the one from her dream, and she realized that it wasn’t thunder, but someone knocking at her door. Probably the grocer, delivering the order she had left in the village. At any rate, she was glad for a diversion from the appalling discovery of the identity of her dream lover.
She sprang out of bed. “Coming!” she yelled toward the door as she donned the floor length satin robe, not having time to put on the chemise that lay in a carmine puddle by the side of the bed. She hurried on bare feet to the door, hoping the delivery person was a woman.
It was her worst nightmare.
Instead of groceries, hell had just arrived at her door.
Hell, or a cruel hallucination. She stared at her caller, frozen between horror and fury.
“You!”
She was even more beautiful than he remembered. More lovely than in his dreams. Standing before him, her supple body shimmered in a sensual, lace-trimmed robe, its deep red satin hiding nothing from his imagination. Her hair flowed around her shoulders in a soft, dark halo, and her eyes, wide now in surprise and shock, were the eyes that in his dreams invited him to ravish her with abandoned passion.
Nick felt as if he’d been hit in the stomach with a brickbat, and it took every ounce of will power to maintain an outward calm.
“What…are you doing here?” His voice grated the question that screamed through his mind.
Simone stepped back slightly and pulled the robe closer to her, covering her breasts with her crossed arms. “Obviously, I have made a grievous error,” she replied, her quavering voice revealing her own shock at seeing him. “Why…how…what…are you doing here?”
He did not reply right away, his voice lost in long buried emotions, his eyes lingering on her loveliness. He couldn’t help himself. At last he gathered his wits and replied, “I own the place.”
He saw her eyes widen even further, just before her expression turned to disgust and she visibly regained her senses. “That figures,” she snapped. “You must be very content, Mr. Rutledge,” she went on, emphasizing his real last name with a curl of her lip, “to have such a lovely country home, along with everything else you have managed to accrue in your life. Tell me, did you steal it, too?”
Nick flinched beneath her righteous castigation, but his blood began to boil. He didn’t need her censure to remind him of his crime. Not here. Not now. Not after ten long years of bitter self-recrimination. Would he never be free of it? “G
et out,” he told her.
“With pleasure. Had I known this place had anything to do with Nicholas Rutledge, I assure you I would have planned my holiday elsewhere. You are the last person on earth I wish to see!”
The door slammed in his face.
“Go to hell!” she called from behind it.
Simone Lefevre was the last person he wished to see as well. Nick stood for a long moment, staring in shock and disbelief at the oaken door that was all that stood between them. Simone, once his lover, now his bitter enemy, was in there, in his house, just the other side of this portal.
His mind had difficulty grasping that reality.
Stunned, he turned away and strode to where he had tethered his horse by the garden gate. He mounted the steed as if in a daze, then his initial shock began to turn to dismay. What was she doing here? Nick did not believe in coincidence, nor that she was here on holiday. There was only one thing that came to his mind.
She knew something about the perfume.
She was here because this was the place where Mary Rose had created the magical essence.
No way, his reason argued as he spurred the horse out onto the lane, taking the short way home. There was no way she could know anything about the perfume, or Mary Rose, or any of it. He was just paranoid. It had been a fluke that he had come across it when the old trunk had surfaced from the basement of the Bombay Spice & Fragrance Company after a century and a half. No. Simone Lefevre must be up to something to have turned up here at Brierley, but, he decided, she did not, could not, know about the perfume.
But what in God’s name was she doing here?
His thoughts clashed like Titans as he gave the horse free rein.
How could anyone be so lovely? His body had jolted in immediate response to the voluptuous vision she had presented at the door, the sensations of which lingered yet. She’d always been beautiful, but the intervening ten years since he’d seen her last had added the finishing touches to her womanhood.
