by Jill Jones
Eagerly, Dupuis snatched up the white fibrous blotters and raised them one by one to his nose. “This will not do,” he said, frowning.
“No, this will not do,” Simone agreed, collapsing into her chair again and rubbing the ache in her forehead. “But I do not know what to do next. I have tried everything…from what I learned in school to tricks my father showed me.” She raised her eyes, feeling fatigue weigh heavily on her shoulders. “I need to know from what plant this essential oil was derived.” Simone had used all of Esther’s sample in her work. She picked up the only remaining vial of the scented aphrodisiac. “Otherwise, I am defeated.”
“You do not know what plant it came from?” Dupuis raised his eyebrows in surprise. It was a little detail she had not shared with him. “You must find out what it is!”
“I’ve tried everything.”
“Surely there must be some way.”
Simone hated to divulge what little she knew about the origin of the perfume to the onerous man, but she was tired of arguing with him. “There is only one possibility I have not explored. I…I have reason to believe that the name and the description of the plant might have been recorded in a book kept by the woman who created the oil, an ancestor, sort of, of the person I, uh, got my sample from.”
Dupuis brightened visibly. “Terrific! Then why don’t you just look in the book and find out what it is?” He looked at her as if she were a simpleton.
She almost laughed in his face. “Because I don’t have it.”
“Where is it?”
“I think Nick Rutledge has it.”
“What!?” Dupuis almost exploded. “Impossible. What makes you think that? Have you been with him, told him about my perfume?” Simone watched in amazement as he went from suave businessman to raving madman. The man was a chameleon, and she steeled herself against his diatribe.
“You’re a fool if you think that,” she said quietly. “You know that I have no use for Nicholas Rutledge. But quite by accident, I ran into him when I first came to England.” Simone saw no reason to withhold her story from Dupuis. If anything, it would make it clear that the perfume indeed belonged to her before she became a part of the House of Rutledge. She told him about finding the first sample of the essence in the shipment of old bottles purchased by her aunt, of having traced them to England, to a particular estate, which coincidentally turned out to be Brierley Hall, owned by Nick Rutledge.
She read the skepticism on his face, but she didn’t care. “I stayed in a B-and-B in a nearby village, and the woman who ran the place also had a sample of the perfume,” she continued. “She claimed that it was originally developed by a woman who lived on Nick’s estate over a hundred and fifty years ago.”
Dupuis’s eyes widened in disbelief. “What? Why that’s astounding.”
“Yes, it is. But I believe it to be true.”
“What makes you think Nick knows about it?” He glowered at her suspiciously.
She told him about Esther’s claim that something called a Book of Shadows might still exist in which the originator of the perfume would likely have recorded the formula, and then told him of her visit to the garden, just after Nick had had it cleared of overgrowth.
She did not tell him about her twilight encounter with their mutual rival. She still did not know what to make of that.
“I think he had the garden cleared because he was looking for something there. Possibly the same Book of Shadows. When I arrived, I found a niche in the garden wall that looked as if it had been recently unsealed. It’s my guess that if the book existed, he found it there.”
She looked up at Dupuis and was surprised by the look on his face. It was as if his mental wheels were turning furiously. Finally and surprisingly, he smiled.
“This is beautiful,” he said, coming around to her side of the worktable and kissing both cheeks. “Fantastique!” He laughed uproariously.
“I don’t understand,” Simone said, thoroughly confused.
“Listen carefully,” he said, edging his body onto the table top. “I can understand how terribly hurt you must have been when Nick betrayed you and your father all those years ago. Would you not like to take revenge on him for that?”
Revenge.
The word wrapped around her heart like a thick, dark cloud. Oh, yes, she’d longed for revenge. That was one reason she remained at the House of Rutledge, in spite of her growing antipathy to Antoine Dupuis. And why she was killing herself to discover and recreate the ancient perfume. So she could kill Nick in the marketplace.
“What do you have in mind?”
“How was Nick able to win your father’s trust when he first came to the perfumery in Grasse?”
Simone’s cheeks burned. “He…he was most charming…” She saw the edge of Dupuis’s mouth edge upward in dry amusement.
“To whom? Your father? Or you?”
“What are you getting at?” she snapped, acutely uncomfortable at the direction his line of questioning was headed. His insinuations brought back entirely too many unquiet memories.
“I am not blind, Simone. You are a lovely woman. You must have been a beautiful girl when he met you. It is my assumption that he used seduction as his weapon, that it was you he charmed, you who encouraged your father to accept him as an apprentice.”
Simone thought she might get sick. She hated Antoine Dupuis at the moment more than she’d hated anyone in her whole life, including Nick. What right, or reason, did he have for bringing all this up? “You’re out of line again, Monsieur!”
“Am I? Perhaps. But consider this. Suppose he did seduce you and use you for his own greedy ends. But suppose also that he fell in love with you, too.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Not at all. Men do such things all the time. Stay with me.” He hopped off the table and began to pace aimlessly around the large room as his thoughts tumbled out. “Would it not be poetic justice for you to use against him the very weapon he used against you?”
Simone was aghast. “What do you mean?”
He stopped his pacing and turned to face her, an odd little smile on his lips. “Seduce him, my dear. Two can play that game. Gain his trust, learn his secrets, and then…steal them.”
Almost a week later, Simone was no closer to success with the perfume, and with each day that passed, her doubts mounted. At home, she sought comfort after a hard day, trying to forget her boss and his licentious approach to solving her problem. She poured water from a large plastic jug into a tea kettle provided in the corporate flat and placed it on the burner of the toy-sized stove. Everything in the place seemed to be a miniature of what she was accustomed to in the United States. She knew she should be more aggressively seeking a place of her own to live, but something held her back, warning her against believing that she would be living in London for very long. Perhaps it was her failure to recreate the perfume. More likely, she thought, taking a cup and saucer from the cupboard, it was her intrinsic distrust of Antoine Dupuis.
The man was amazing. She shook her head at the suggestion he’d made about stealing the Book of Shadows from Nick. Had he been serious? Did he really think she was capable of a calculated seduction of Nicholas Rutledge? Seduction, followed by theft.
She poured hot water over a tea bag, and a profound sadness washed over her at the same time. Sure, Nick had done that very thing to her, years ago, but even her deep-seated desire for revenge wasn’t strong enough to make her lower herself to exact revenge in kind. Were all men so dispassionate about using sex to get what they wanted?
She thought about the most special man she’d ever known in her life—her father. He would never have done such a thing, nor asked a woman to. She was glad he never knew that she had allowed Nick into her bed.
With a lump in her throat summoned by memories of her father, she added milk and sugar to her cup and took the tea to the small table where she thumbed idly through a magazine that lay there. Her gaze lingered upon the many ads for perfumes that glittered from the glo
ssy pages, and she shook her head. Would hers ever be there alongside them?
Simone knew each of these perfumes, could conjure their scent easily in her imagination. In her mind, she could take them apart, note by note, and put them back together in a different formula if she wished. Thanks to her father’s training, and his genes, there were no secrets from her nose.
Except one.
She slammed the magazine shut. Damn it all, what was wrong with her? Was she not a nose after all? Maybe she never should have signed on as master perfumer at the House of Rutledge.
Simone considered her options. She could quit. Simply tell Dupuis she’d made a mistake in taking the job, jump a plane back to New Orleans, and figure it out from there.
But in her gut, that did not feel like a valid alternative, just a coward’s way out of her frustration. If she admitted defeat so early, she was a loser without the backbone it took to survive in the highly competitive, cutthroat business of perfuming. Her career would be over before it had begun.
Second option. Give up on the stubborn substance and move to something else before she lost her self-confidence. But to do this, in her mind, would be to admit failure, and to Simone, who wanted badly to become a perfumer of the stature of her father, failure was not an option.
But what was it going to take to succeed? She slammed her palm on the magazine. She’d never been so frustrated in her life. She stood and moved about the apartment, straightening the minimal clutter, while Dupuis’s contemptible suggestion flirted with her conscience.
Did she have it in her to seduce Nick to gain the answers she needed to break the secret of the perfume? The very thought brought a cold sweat to her skin. She couldn’t do such a thing.
She drummed her nails on the Formica table top, her frustration simmering into a low boiling anger. She might not have the nerve to seduce Nick to get them, but by God, she wanted answers! And not just answers about the perfume. She allowed the anger to boil higher. She wanted answers to all the old “whys” that continued to haunt her. Nick had refused flatly to discuss it both times she’d tried to get those answers from him. But it was worth another try.
She bit her lip, thinking. Seduction was out, against her principles. But maybe a date, where they could meet on neutral ground, around others, where they could at least talk civilly, at a safe distance from one another…
The phone was ringing as Nick walked in his front door, but he couldn’t get to it in time to answer before the machine responded to take a message. His heart almost stopped when he heard the woman’s voice, hesitant, unsure, speak to the machine in English that was softened by a lilting French accent. “Nick, this is Simone. I would like to talk to you. Please call me at…”
Simone.
Why on earth would she be calling him? Red flags went up all around him. Dupuis must have set her up to call, after his own lunch time snooping had failed to uncover Nick’s perfuming plans. He found it laughable that the Frenchman seemed to be so threatened by Nick’s new little venture. But he also found it disgusting that he would use Simone as his spy, and also that she apparently was his willing partner in intrigue.
The perfume industry was rife with industrial espionage, however, and he had no reason to believe that Simone was above participating in it, other than his ardent wish that such activity was beneath her. But where Simone was concerned, Nick had lost the ability to be objective.
He picked up the receiver and dialed the number she’d left on the answering machine.
“Hello?” The woman’s voice on the other end was soft, perhaps a little nervous.
Nick felt his stomach do a flip, but he summoned his most professional tone. “Simone? This is Nick, returning your call.”
“Nick. Uh, yes. Well…” She paused, and he heard her exhale an audible breath. “Look, Nick, I’m not very good at this sort of thing, but…but I need to talk to you.”
Nick closed his eyes, felt his heart hammering. Oh, God, how he wished she wanted to talk to him, not to probe about his business or spy on him for Dupuis. He knew better, but…
“Can you meet me for dinner?” he heard himself say.
A long silence. Then, “I…I suppose so. Where?”
“My club isn’t far from the corporate flat. I assume that’s where you are temporarily lodged?”
“Uh, yes.”
“I could pick you up there. Would that be suitable?”
Another quiet stretch. “No. I mean, your club would be fine, but I can take a taxi.”
Not knowing how the evening would go, Nick didn’t argue. It was best if she wasn’t obliged to ride with him. It gave them professional distance. And he was quite certain this was a professional engagement. He gave her the address of the gentleman’s club in the heart of London, they agreed to meet at eight, and he hung up with sweaty hands.
Two hours later, he stood in the lobby of the venerable “In and Out Club,” as it was known, formerly a military club now open to general membership. He joked with the doorman, cast a glance in a mirror and caught his own image, that of a confident, well-dressed gentleman, and swallowed his fear. Moments later, a black taxi swung through the front gates of what in Regency times was Lord Egremont’s private residence, and Nick’s élan vanished the moment Simone Lefevre stepped out.
Dressed in a red, long, slender, body-hugging gown of shifting soft fabric, with slim straps and no back at all, she looked like a model stepping from the pages of a fashion magazine. Her hair was piled in curls atop her head, leaving a creamy expanse of neck, shoulders and back exposed to view. Long, exotic earrings dangled to her shoulders, and crimson caressed her lips, matching the hue of the dress.
Nick groaned aloud, not because she was overdressed, which she wasn’t, but because of the incredibly erotic vision she presented. Not even in his dreams had she ever appeared so drop-dead gorgeous. How could he survive the night?
He clenched his jaw, took a deep breath, and stepped from the building to greet her. “Good evening,” he said, trying to find his tongue. She turned her large, dark eyes on him and gave him a demure smile.
“Hello, Nick.”
Chapter Eighteen
Nick’s insides melted even as his throat constricted. He swallowed hard. My God, what he had walked away from those many years ago? He did not know what punishment Simone had in store for him this evening, but it was a torture he would happily endure just to be near her.
He led her into the staid old building, where next to the other rather somberly dressed patrons she looked like an exotic flower amongst a funeral arrangement. Heads turned as he escorted her, hand on elbow, to the courtyard. “Would you like a cocktail out-of-doors before dinner?” he asked. “It’s very pleasant out this evening.”
“That would be nice. Gin and tonic please.”
Gin and tonic. How quickly she’d become British, Nick thought as he hurried to the bar, not wishing to delay their drinks by depending on the services of the elderly and legendarily plodding bar waiter. When he returned, he paused a moment in the doorway. Simone was seated next to the gently rippling fountain, and he stood there mesmerized, captivated by her inexpressible beauty. She looked up and caught his eye, and his collar suddenly seemed too tight about his neck.
“Here we are,” he said, trying for a recovery but feeling very much a schoolboy as he handed her the cocktail. He took a seat opposite her, to give her the comfort of distance between them, to give him a better view. He raised his glass. “To what should we propose a toast?”
Her eyes riveted his. She held her glass up between long, slender fingers. “To honesty.”
It would have been easy for Nick to laugh, for he suspected she was here on a distinctly dishonest mission, but something about her demeanor stopped him short. Either she was serious, or she’d been taking acting lessons from Dupuis.
“Honesty? I’m surprised you think I’m capable of it.” His cynical answer slipped out before he could stop it.
But it was an honest answer.
Nick was not so reserved in consuming his drink, and he hoped the cocktail waiter would make an appearance soon. One tonic would not suffice for long. But he did not flinch at her question, nor drop his gaze.
“Only recently have I learned the art.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Whatever possessed you to acquire the trait at this late date?”
Nick pondered her sardonic question a moment, but he knew the answer. “Living a lie can be exhausting.” He saw a frown of curiosity light momentarily on her delicately arched brows.
“Is that what you were doing, Nick?”
“It’s what I have been doing since…since my father died.” She wanted honesty? He guessed it was time he gave it to her. She deserved to know what had motivated his contemptible behavior where she was concerned, no matter how shameful it was for him to reveal.
She didn’t press him verbally to explain, but her questions were evident in her expression. Nick shifted in his seat and caught the eye of the octogenarian who had served drinks at the club since before Nick was born. He signaled for another round, knowing it might be half an hour before they were served.
Then he faced Simone. He’d thought she would have her moment of truth the night she’d been caught snooping around the cottage, but at the time neither had seemed able to deal with it. He’d avoided it then, but it had been only a postponement. He glanced around and was relieved to note that the other tables were almost empty now.
“It…won’t excuse what I did,” he said at last, the words tasting bitter on his tongue. “But perhaps it will explain why.”
“I have waited ten years to understand what happened,” she replied, her own voice tight with emotion. He took courage, however, from the fact that he saw no hatred on her face at the moment.
“My…my father didn’t die a normal death, like most fathers,” he began. “He…took his own life. I was only twenty-three at the time. I wasn’t that close to him. I spent most of my adolescence in residence at Harrow and later at Cambridge. I knew little about him, his personal life, his profession. All I knew was that I was supposed to grow up to be just like him, and my grandfather, and his father before him, in other words, to be a Rutledge.” He laughed contemptuously. “Lord Rutledge, to be exact.”
