“You excused the meeting,” Jesse said in shock.
“Because nothing was getting done!” Dave exclaimed. “I didn’t expect this from a vice president at Procter & Gamble.”
Jesse’s jaw twitched. He was used to Dave’s demeaning manner, but being reamed out in front of a new employee brought in a whole new need to stand up for himself. “I never had one failed quarter at Procter & Gamble,” he said quietly. “Not one.”
“I didn’t get to corporate by making excuses. Anybody can make it at a company where they have money to throw at every problem. Figure it out, Jesse.”
Dave got to corporate by marrying the owner’s daughter, but what good would it do Jesse to say that? He felt two feet tall, getting chastised in front of Daphne. His skin seemed too small for his body, and he took a swig from his coffee, which was cold. He turned back to face his boss and met Dave’s hard glare. “I have a plan, and you’ll see results or I’ll quit the job myself and spare you the trouble of firing me.”
Dave left without another word, tapping the door frame twice as hard as usual on his way out.
A cold shadow of air brushed Jesse. Daphne stood and faced him. She swiped the scent strip from the table and sniffed it. Her eyes filled with liquid, and she tried to blink the would-be tears away.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, feeling like a sorry excuse for a man.
She breathed deeply in and out. “You did that for me.” Her soft voice barely registered. “Why?”
“I did it for both of us. We’re going to win, Daphne. It’s our turn.”
Daphne’s bright eyes sparkled with hope, and he wondered what she must have been like before Mark. She possessed enough resilience that she’d learn from her experience. In contrast, he still wanted to rescue every person in need because he couldn’t save his wife.
“I was so selfish this morning. You were trying to tell me about Hannah.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. The past doesn’t matter. Winning is what matters now.”
“The past matters to you, and so it matters to me.”
He nearly teared up at her words. It felt so good to have empathy.
He pulled the cologne bottle she’d given him out of his pocket. “Can I keep this?”
“I wouldn’t wear it if you don’t want to be married. It’s pretty potent,” she said with the essence of a smile.
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
“Ben’s a lucky boy.”
The depth of Daphne’s blue eyes stunned him. Each time he looked deep within them, it was like seeing them for the first time. He couldn’t allow her innocence to capture him; it wasn’t fair to her. But he loved the idea of their newfound alliance. For once in his long career at Gibraltar, he felt as if he could actually win.
Chapter 9
Daphne piled her bags and her bow into the back of Jesse’s small, electric-blue hatchback. He’d insisted on taking her to her new house, and she was grateful for the company. She’d clutched Mark’s letter in her pocket throughout the day, but she still hadn’t read it. He’d stolen her life right out from under her, and his only attempt at an apology was a letter to her new employer. She hoped it was an apology, at least.
“This works out well. I have to get home early for Ben today.”
“I’d like to meet him,” she said.
“You will.” He grinned all the way to his eyes.
They were silent as Jesse drove onto the freeway and they left the high-rises of downtown behind them.
“Your dad bought in a good area, near the university. It’s one of the better neighborhoods, so I guess we won’t have to worry about your being home alone.”
“My dad is good at real estate.” He wasn’t great at being there, but he was good at business. “Jesse, did you do anything with packaging yet? Did you ask them about my scent?”
“You didn’t read the letter yet?” Jesse looked at her. “From Mark?”
She shook her head and noticed how uncomfortable he seemed with her answer.
He pulled the car off the freeway and to the side of the road by the brown grass. He met her gaze with his steely blue-green eyes, and she realized that she trusted him. But then, she’d trusted Mark too. Maybe, as Sophie suggested, she wasn’t the best judge of character. But she had no reason to mistrust Jesse, and he was only her boss.
“What’s Mark’s story?” he asked.
“Pardon?” she asked, wondering why he’d pulled the car over.
“What’s Mark’s background? How was he suddenly able to qualify for your job when he couldn’t originally get a job in Paris—or at Gibraltar?”
“He’s a brilliant chemist.” She turned in her seat to face Jesse, who looked skeptical. “He really is. But he grew up poor, and he had this deep need to follow the money. At first he thought the money was in big pharma, but he gave up that dream when he saw the prices on designer fragrances. He thought he could produce them more cheaply and start his own business.”
She didn’t tell him why pharma had rejected Mark and killed that dream. She vowed that she’d be more careful with whom she shared things from here on out. She’d given Mark all the ammunition he’d needed to take her job and her fragrance. She wouldn’t make that mistake again no matter how trustworthy someone appeared.
“Why did you pull over?” she asked.
Jesse looked at the road. “I wanted to give you a chance to read Mark’s letter. I want you to reassure me you haven’t given up the fight for the life he stole.”
“Why?” she asked. Jesse’s personal interest in her seemed strange at best.
“Because I know what giving up a dream does to a person, and I need to know I’m not helping steal yours. It may not make sense to you, but you just have to trust me. I don’t want you to stay for the six months if it’s going to cost you the dream.”
In his eyes she saw truth, but also something more that she couldn’t identify. “I haven’t given up the dream. I won’t give up the dream, but I’m a woman of my word and I’ll stay until the stockholders meeting.”
“I appreciate that.”
“What about your dream? Is that what I am? A reminder of what you gave up?”
A shadow fell across his eyes. “My dream is for Ben. That’s enough for me.”
“I hope so,” she said, but she thought his voice seemed awfully hollow. Grief hadn’t left him for a moment, and she prayed that if her presence did anything, it would teach him to dream again.
“I don’t want to make this about me. You were telling me Mark wanted to start his own business. Did he?”
She squirmed in her seat, anxious for him to get on the road and take the attention off of her. She was afraid she’d let it slip that she couldn’t smell, afraid he already had an inkling of her issue.
“Mark needed capital to get started. He was doing sales for that reason, and he thought I could support the rest with my job here. That’s why I was a little worried he’d steal the formula for Volatility!”
“Does he have the formula?”
“Most of it. I kept one ingredient out of it. It’s my favorite scent. One I’ve never told a soul.”
“Why would you keep that from him if you were marrying him?”
She shrugged. “I must have had an instinct, which tells me that maybe I overlooked a few things about my fiancé. It’s the top note. It would be the first thing he smelled, and if he ever really knew me, he’d have known it from the beginning. I never made a secret of why I loved this scent. My guess is that Mark has claimed Volatility! as his own. That’s why my best friend, Sophie, sent the sample to my old boss. They won’t produce it if there’s even an inkling that another nose designed it.”
“What is the note?”
“If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.”
“You want to get back to Paris. I want to keep my job and feed my son. For now, we have to trust each other. I trust you to keep your scent to yourself.”
She swa
llowed past the lump in her throat. She didn’t think she had a choice. Not at least until she patented the packaging for Volatility! Which Mark may have already done. He had stolen her last shred of dignity; what wasn’t he capable of?
“Jesse?”
“Yes.”
“I—” She bit at a fingernail. How could she tell him she didn’t have the skills he needed to save his job? “Is there an archery range in town?”
“A—what?” He started the car up again and merged back onto the freeway.
She felt oddly comforted by Jesse’s triumph over tragedy. Life went on. His situation made hers feel relatively mundane, and she vowed to pray for his full healing and understanding that there was nothing he could have done to save his wife.
“I shoot when I’m nervous and need to think. I want to shoot until I figure my way out of this. I need to regain Arnaud’s trust, and yet I feel so betrayed by my mentor. How could he give my job to Mark, of all people?”
“Don’t you have to move in first?”
She realized she sounded crazy, but in her defense, he wasn’t sounding like the sanest man on the planet either. The two of them had been thrust into each other’s lives, and for now, they needed one another. “I guess.”
“I’m not going back to the office today. Do you have a ride in tomorrow morning?”
She paused. She didn’t want to be any more indebted to Jesse than she had to be. “Yes,” she said. A taxi was a ride.
Jesse’s cell phone rang. “Excuse me a minute.” He glanced at it, then pressed a button. “Hey, Abby. I’m driving; let me put you on speaker.”
“Jesse, do you think you could swing by earlier than five? Spike is already here, and he’s rented out the dance studio for us tonight. Can you believe it?”
Daphne liked the sound of her—and her voice sounded remarkably like Sophie’s.
“He’s so romantic!”
Daphne had to admit, she couldn’t imagine a guy named Spike renting out a dance studio. Sometimes people didn’t fit their names.
“Where’d he get the money for that?” Jesse sounded just slightly judgmental.
“Jesse! It’s none of your business where he got the money. Can you come by earlier or not? Spike wants to get me a new pair of dance shoes before we go.”
“I was already planning to work from home, so yes. I’ve got one errand to run and then I’ll be there.”
“Okay, but hurry!” Abby’s voice radiated joy.
Daphne remembered when she used to sound like that. She wondered if she ever would again. “She’s in love!” Daphne said.
“Don’t remind me.” Jesse rolled his eyes. “Why do women want the bad boys?”
Daphne laughed. “He can’t be too bad if he rented out a dance studio. That’s all Dancing with the Stars, not Kid Rock.”
“He wears a lot of leather and chains. Rides a motorcycle.”
Daphne smiled, imagining the likes of Spike in Jesse’s house. “He sounds like a picture. I’m not sure about the bad boy fetish, though. I tend to go for the clean-cut sort who have trouble keeping jobs and other big commitments. Like their wedding day. Then I shoot arrows at a target and pretend it’s their faces.” She shrugged. “If I figure out the bad boy thing, I’ll let you know.”
Jesse raised a brow. “But that sounds like a bad boy. He just came in sheep’s clothing.”
“Then I haven’t figured it out yet,” she said.
“This is Highway 48. You’ll take this to work.” He paused for a minute. “What are you going to do for a car? You said you had a ride?”
“I, uh, meant a taxi. I figured I’d do that, or find a bus route. That’s what I did in Paris.”
“Something tells me that our public transportation isn’t quite up to the Metro.”
“Jesse, if we’re going to trust each other, you have to trust me to take care of myself and get to work on my own. I’m a big girl.”
He nodded. “Fine. But the last time I left you to yourself, you came back to work with a giant lip.”
She laughed. “I went to find an ear, nose, and throat man. I mistakenly found a Botox man.”
“And you let him do that to you?”
“He said my lip was cockeyed, and I thought, you know . . . maybe Mark had noticed and—”
“Say no more. I get it. Sorry. I tend to baby people.”
“It’s nice to be babied,” she said honestly. “But I’ll be fine.”
“You must be close to the country club in this house.” He stared at the GPS system on his car and exhaled. “You have no idea how great that is. I can tell Dave you’re safely part of Dayton society.”
She smiled. “I thought Mark might show up at the house, but I guess if he’s safely in Paris at my job, I don’t have to worry. Apparently he and my dad had a disagreement about whose house it is. My dad left a message on my phone not to let him in.”
“That’s why you didn’t come here. Here I’ve been pushing you, and it’s not safe.”
She waved her hand. “It’s fine. My dad left for Europe on business, so he can’t be too worried. If Mark did care to fight for his share of the house, it might be epic. He loves a good battle. Though I’m sure there’s a mortgage attached to the house, and that will be all mine.”
As they drove into the neighborhood shaded with canopied trees, Jesse stared at her. “Do you always just settle with what you’re dealt?”
“I might ask you the same question. If we didn’t both take what was handed to us, would either one of us be here right now?”
Daphne couldn’t look at Jesse’s handsome profile any longer. His presence calmed her like the scent of freshly cut flowers. If only she could truly capture his scent and know who he really was. His warmth and the depth of his own background made her want to succeed at Gibraltar. Not simply as a stepping-stone back to Paris and the fragrance industry where she belonged, but because she wanted good things for Jesse Lightner. He seemed to deserve it.
“This is your street,” Jesse said. “Does it look like you imagined it?”
“It’s gorgeous! I wish I could smell that tree!”
“What?” His face contorted, and he opened the window.
“You know. I don’t know what kind of tree it is, so I wouldn’t know its scent.”
“It’s a honey locust. They’re everywhere here in Ohio. You’ll have to get familiar with the scent. Maybe it will inspire something like Volatility!” He laughed. “How does Honey Locust Mist sound?”
“It sounds very romantic.” She giggled. “Okay, it sounds like a trashy air freshener, but I admire you for trying.”
“Atta girl. Bring me some of that Paris snobbery. That might save Gibraltar yet.” He pulled the car to the high curb and got out. He left the car running while he pulled a branch down and ripped off a twig. It was the second time he’d stopped the car, and she marveled at the gesture. Mark never stopped the car. No matter how she might have needed to stop, he always had an excuse to keep going.
Jesse brought the twig back to the car and handed it to her with a flourish. “My lady.”
She lifted it to her nose, but nothing happened. “Mmm.” She focused on the row of trees at the curb and pointed. “Look at how the houses are set up off the street. It’s perfect.” All of the houses seemed old and well maintained. They were two-storied and clapboard on the outside and had a cottage feel to them. “I feel as though I’ve just entered Mayberry.” She raised her hands in the air. “I can’t believe I own my own home! Well, and a mortgage too, but I own my own home, Jesse!”
He grinned. “Tell me how excited you are after you shovel the driveway the first time.”
“I can afford to be independent here. Maybe that’s why Mark walked out on me. I didn’t need him, but I was too swoony to see it. He did me a favor.” The way she felt around Jesse only highlighted what had been wrong in her relationship with Mark. She’d never felt at ease with him but always as though she had something more to aspire to.
“Swoo
ny, huh? Gibraltar didn’t need him either.” Jesse smirked.
“The address is 2250. Oh, Jesse, it’s that white one there!” Her mood dropped as he rolled into the cracked asphalt driveway and she got a closer look. “That’s it?” She suddenly wanted to shoot her bow. Preferably straight into the house.
The roof was missing a few shingles and bowed slightly in the middle, like a slightly over-loved sofa. The garage stood separate from the house with its door askew. The regular door to the house hung on its hinges in an unnatural way, and she turned her head to get some perspective. She tried to remain upbeat. “I’m sure it has great bones.”
“Yeah. It’s the best neighborhood.”
“Is it just me, or is the state of the foundation a bit wonky?”
“I’m sure it’s just our perspective. Let’s go see it.”
But Daphne was just sitting, staring wide-eyed at the For Sale sign. It had AS IS written across it like a bad beauty pageant sash.
“It’s like it reads Miss Congeniality,” she murmured. Her hands were moving strangely in her lap, as though she was knitting with invisible needles.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh. I knit when I’m nervous. I don’t really knit much anymore, but my hands still go into action when I’m nervous.”
He stared at her as though he couldn’t believe she could get any stranger.
“I know,” she said. “I’m a knitting, bow shooting, human bloodhound. You were expecting normal?”
Jesse laughed and got out of the car. He came around and opened the car door for her and held out his hand. She felt his touch like an electrical pulse to her system. She looked to him, and he pulled his gaze away immediately.
“It’s absolutely the best neighborhood,” he said, sounding like a used-car salesman. “Let’s go see these great bones, shall we?”
The change in his tone completely shut down the sense of intimacy they’d established in the car, and to Daphne it felt like a stinging rejection. Suddenly she just wanted to be alone. She’d been stupid to think that she was ready for even a working friendship with a man.
The Scent of Rain Page 11
