A Scent of Magic Read online

  “It’s a bad idea, Nick. Call me a taxi, please.”

  Outside, the night held onto the heat of July with a dark passion. It radiated from the pavement, penetrating the soles of her shoes and warming her entire body. That was the only explanation Simone would allow for the flush that stained her cheeks and raised tiny dewdrops on her bare arms. Nick was close, too close.

  In every respect.

  Would the damned cab never come?

  At last the beetle-shaped vehicle lumbered into the circular drive. Nick paused before opening the door. “Are you certain you won’t at least let me take you home?”

  She allowed a smile onto her lips, easing her own tension. “To your home or mine?” she couldn’t resist teasing. “Thanks, but I’ll be better off on my own. And thank you for dinner, Nick.”

  His hand rested on the door handle, but still he did not open it. “Will I see you again?”

  Simone wished with all her heart she could say yes. A very big part of her wanted to see him again, tonight and every night. But she knew her desire was only an illusion, a remnant of feelings from days long past reawakened by tonight’s too-personal encounter. Too much had passed between them for that now, and being near him was dangerous. She did not trust that her body would not to betray her, and she did not trust that he wouldn’t either.

  And yet, as she climbed into the rear seat of the cab and heard the door slam solidly behind her, she heard an unspoken cry from the depths of her heart.

  You’re a fool, it said.

  Go to him, it commanded. You’ve wanted answers for ten years. He’s willing to tell you everything. Now. Tonight. You may not have another chance.

  She gave her address to the driver, and the taxi lurched forward. As it rolled over the curved drive and through the tall gates, Simone turned and glanced through the rear window. Nick had not moved. His tall, broad figure was backlit by the powerful beams of the building’s security lights.

  Come to me.

  Simone heard his voice as distinctly as if he were sitting beside her. As she had heard it in her dreams.

  The cab turned right and entered the main thoroughfare. “Pull over,” she said suddenly, behaving more impulsively than she ever had in her life. Her heart was racing, and her mind told her she was insane.

  The driver shot her a funny look over his shoulder. “I beg pardon, mum?”

  “Pull over, please. Don’t go any further. Just pull to the curb and wait here for a few minutes.”

  The taxi driver shook his head but did as she instructed. The headlights of several cars whizzed by them, and then a pair of beams, lower to the ground, exited the driveway from the club and turned in their direction. Simone pointed to the Triumph as it passed.

  “Please, now, follow that car.”

  “Sounds like a line from a melodrama on the telly,” the driver smirked, but he pulled into the stream of traffic again and kept within several car lengths of the classic sports car.

  What the hell are you doing? her mind screamed at her.

  Shut up, replied her heart.

  She tried to listen to neither as the meter on the taxi kept ticking steadily higher. Simone hoped she’d brought along enough money to fund her madness. How far away did Nick live?

  Sixteen pounds worth, she saw as the Triumph at last turned into a driveway in an inner suburb of London. “Go on up a few houses, then pull over,” she told the driver. “What street is this?”

  “I believe it’s Highcastle, m’am.”

  Simone fumbled in her purse for a pen and paper, and when the motion of the cab stopped, she wrote the street name down, along with the driver’s instructions on how to call a taxi to come for her later on. She paid him with a twenty pound note and told him to keep the change. She had another in her purse that would suffice, she felt certain, to get her home.

  Before she lost her nerve, Simone jerked the door open and stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “Take care, m’am,” the driver said. “It’s not good for a lady t’ be alone at this hour of th’ night, especially dressed like that, not even in this fancy neighborhood.”

  “Thank you.” Now go away, she added silently. She wanted no witnesses to her scandalous behavior.

  Keeping to the shadows, she retraced the distance to the driveway where Nick’s car had disappeared behind a tall hedge, hoping wildly that it was Nick’s car they’d followed. The Triumph was parked directly in front of the house, its metal crackling and popping as it cooled in the night air. Simone took a deep breath in relief. Yes, it was Nick’s car.

  She looked at the front door. Number nineteen. She closed her eyes. Dear God, what was she about to do? But she straightened her spine and hurried up the two steps, not giving herself a chance to change her mind.

  Come to me! His words resounded in her ears. She hefted the heavy doorknocker in one hand and rapped with it sharply, sending a metallic tattoo into the summer night.

  Nick had barely removed his coat and shoes when he heard a knock at the front door. Frowning, he looked at his watch. It was almost twelve-thirty in the morning. Who in blazes was calling on him at this hour? Just for good measure, he reached into his nightstand drawer and took his small revolver in hand before making his way down the stairs again.

  “Who is it?” he called from behind the door when the rapping ceased its third set of staccato drumming.

  At first he heard nothing, and then he couldn’t believe what he did hear.

  “Can we still talk?” came the unmistakable lilt of Simone’s French accent.

  Nick pocketed the gun and nearly ripped the door down. “What…how…what are you doing here?” He rushed onto the stoop and enclosed her in his embrace before he had time to think what he was doing. His lips were upon hers like lightning, consummating the fierce desire that had held him hostage throughout the evening. He wanted no explanation, needed no reason. All he knew was that the only woman he’d ever wanted, never thought he would have, was somehow, magically, in his arms right now.

  By her own choice.

  Nick lifted Simone and carried her into the front hallway, hooking the door closed behind him with his foot. His lips devoured hers, and hers returned his passion in kind. He felt her hands threading through his hair, drawing his head closer, insisting that he taste even more of her sweet, delectable, honeyed kisses.

  He did not deny her request.

  Her hands slid to the front of his shirt, where deft fingers began, incredibly, to pry the button there from its hole. Nick was on fire, but he knew it must only be a dream. He’d just placed the vial of the magical perfume on his bedside stand, thinking to indulge himself in an indigo rendezvous with Simone, in lieu of the real thing. Perhaps he had already fallen asleep, and this was nothing more than a lucid dream.

  Simone unfastened the second button, and Nick ran his hands down her bare back, unzipping the short fastener at the edge of the dress, opening even more of her to his touch, peeling away the petals surrounding her exotic nectar.

  But she began to peel first, edging his shirt over his shoulders and down his arms, where he hastily shrugged it off. Upstairs, he thought maniacally. They must go upstairs, where there was a proper bed for this sort of thing. If they didn’t hurry, he was likely to ravish her right here on the floor in the hallway. She clung to him feverishly, however, so he led her in a dance-like maneuver to the first step. There, one level above him, she was suddenly taller than he, her breasts level with his lips.

  Nick reached behind Simone’s neck and found the clasp that held the halter-topped dress together. In an instant, it was open, and he slid the silken fabric erotically down her throat and across her breasts before letting it drop softly on the carpeted stairs. She stood stunningly naked before him in the dim light, her dark, sultry eyes molten with desire. She arched her back and brushed his lips with one passion-tight nipple. Nick groaned and tasted her divine gift.

  Unable to stand the agony any longer, he placed his hands around her waist, lifted her
easily, and carried her up the rest of the stairs. Behind him, he vaguely heard the thud of her shoe as it hit the floor.

  His room was illuminated only by the low light of the bedside lamp, and when he placed her feet on the floor, he thought reality would set in and she might vanish into his imagination from whence she’d come.

  But instead, a very real Simone reached for the buckle of his belt, released it and the zipper beneath it, and slid away the only barriers that remained between them.

  The bed was directly behind her, and they fell together across the cloud-like softness of the comforter. There was no time for gentle love play. Nor desire for any. Urgency, hunger, and desperation drove them into one another like two broken souls mending into the one they once had been.

  Union came, flaming hot and painfully exquisite. Intimate closeness surged them forward, thrusting them onto a a great white wave, demanding that they crest it, or die. They rode the wave, climbing, pulsing, crying, burning, calling out into the night before finally crashing into the sweet release of mutual completion.

  Nick fell upon her, breath ragged, limbs weak, able to move only enough that he would not crush her beneath his weight. He heard her gasps, rapid and raking as his own, and felt the tiny, tender tremors that continued to pulsate around him in the warmth of their union.

  Unwilling to let her go, he rolled her to one side, and she curled a leg over him to prevent them from parting. She lay beside him, quiet now, eyes closed, her hand gently stroking the hair that curled between his pectorals. Nick slipped an arm beneath the curve of her neck and drew her protectively against him. He kissed her forehead, then her nose, then her lips that she turned toward him. He suckled them gently, with short, still-hungry kisses that even the strength of their climax had not sated.

  He felt her move against him, and the motion of her hips, the sensation of being drawn even more deeply into her, banked the inner fires, causing them to burn hotter, if more slowly. Simone seemed unwilling to end their intimacy, although the fluid, sensual movements of her body told him she was desirous of a more languorous lovemaking.

  Nick reached up and switched off the bedside lamp, as it was shining into their faces. His hand brushed against the vial of perfume and a wicked, delicious idea occurred to him.

  He believed he must be already under the influence of the substance. This had to be a dream. There was no other rational explanation for what had just taken place.

  What, he wondered, would happen if he used the perfume while already in a dream? Would it increase the erotic possibilities? He couldn’t imagine how making love could get any better than what he’d just experienced, but…

  Easing the stopper from the bottle, he placed a single drop on Simone’s skin, just between her breasts.

  He heard the sharp intake of her breath.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she whispered. “What is that?”

  Simone lay nearly insensate from pleasure, not believing she had found such total and complete satisfaction…in the arms of her worst enemy. She shouldn’t have come. She ought to feel guilty. Yet her body thanked her for something it had been missing since she’d been Nick’s lover long ago.

  Oh, Christ, what was she thinking?!

  But before she could gather her senses or think further, she felt a drop of something cold and wet on the sentient skin between her breasts. She caught her breath sharply. “What is that?” she asked. And then a familiar scent, floral and heady, made its way to her nose.

  The perfume!

  Nick did have the perfume.

  Simone was stunned at the knowledge and appalled at the way she had come to it. She’d wanted to know if he knew of it, and she’d used her body to find out. She was no better than Nick, her first thoughts reproached her.

  But second thoughts intervened in her behalf. She hadn’t come here for that, they tried to convince her.

  However, Simone knew that wasn’t totally the truth. She was guilty as charged…unless this was only a dream, like the rest. A bad dream, but one from which she would awaken into a safer reality.

  Her thoughts tumbled about, but she lay, torpid and unable to stir. As the power of the perfume stole over her, all cogent thoughts ceased, and she drifted away into the seductive pleasures awaiting within the indigo mist.

  Nick waited for her there, and she was surprised to see he was in a marble palace, high on a hill, rather than in the undefined twilight of their usual trysting place. She willed herself to go to him, and when she reached his side, she saw that he stood beside a placid pool that dropped into a second and then further on into a third, like stair-steps. The sound of falling water was soothing and pleasurable.

  Simone took Nick’s outstretched hand and let him lead her to a nearby bench. Beside the bench, a marble table tendered a slender flute of scented oil, a large rosebud with full, lovely deep pink petals, and two feathers from the tail of a peacock, winking at her with seductive, iridescent eyes. The bench was covered in a soft white cloth, and Simone lay down upon it, luxuriating in anticipation of the pleasure she sensed was imminent. The sun was warm, and she closed her eyes and turned her face to its radiance.

  She felt the sensual warmth of the oil as Nick poured a small amount onto the skin at the juncture of her breasts. Just beneath that spot, her heartbeat began to quicken as his hands, with a touch both light and compelling, began to massage the oil into her skin, spiraling seductively around the firm flesh of her breasts until he reached the nipples, which he stroked into hard knots of desire.

  “Mmmmm.” She felt more than heard the vibration of her voice, like the purr of a cat.

  Finished to his satisfaction with that lovely part of her body, Nick moved his ministrations to the flat plane of her belly, where he toyed with her navel. He dropped a brief kiss into it, his tongue darting there like the silky strike of a serpent.

  Flames of desire licked into her sex, flaring deeply inward.

  Simone drew in her breath deeply, filling her entire being with the light and beauty of this place, and as she did, the exquisite sensual sensations he aroused in her lower body seemed to move upward, into her belly, her heart, spreading an incredible feeling of lightness and ecstasy throughout her upper body. She’d never before experienced anything like it, and she was filled with a joy beyond explanation.

  She expected her lover to turn his attention next to the pleasure center of her, and she opened to him with a sensual craving. But she heard instead his low, tender laugh, and felt his touch move to the inside of her thighs, where he massaged the erotic pulse-points there until her skin tingled. Again she inhaled of the fragrant, fresh air, and again it reeled her senses.

  How long could this last? she wondered from some far corner of her mind.

  But it did not end, and neither did Nick’s sweet torture. He moved along her legs, anointing her feet with oil and kissing each of her toes. Then, he very slowly stroked the inside of her arches, one at a time, until they, too, responded in sexual arousal.

  Her fingers were next, and when he had finished their loving massage, he placed them against his lips. Simone stroked his soft kiss with her fingertips, which delighted in the intimate contact. He completed his journey of arousal by feathering kisses abundantly over her face and throat, then returning to her breasts, where with stronger strokes than before, he raised her inner heat to an even higher degree.

  Simone lay before him, completely open and vulnerable, but unafraid. This was a new experience, unlike what had transpired between them, on earth or in the dream state. It had an almost spiritual quality about it.

  She felt as if she wore the smile of a saint.

  Inhaling, she caught the scent of rose, and she felt the velvet petals of the rosebud beneath her nose. The sweet sensation seemed to fill every cell of her body, until she thought she might be the rose.

  And then the rose began to make love to her, as Nick’s hands and lips had moments before. With deliberate slowness, Nick traced the ripening blossom around each of her
breasts, lingering at each nipple, allowing the rose to suckle there, and to leave its sweetness in its wake. Like a magic wand, the rose moved over her body, summoning every inch of it to new heights of awareness. The curve of her waist, the round of her buttocks, the hollow beneath her arm…nothing was spared its lover’s touch. Her breath became rapid, and her desire for Nick, and completion, surged through her with each intake, intensifying the agony.

  But still he had not completed his sojourn over the geography of her body. Her eyes remained closed, but she imagined the brilliant blue-green eyes at the tips of the peacock’s plumes. She felt surrounded by a golden glow and tingled at the touch of the feathery light air that stirred across that erotic aura as Nick perpetrated his next delight upon her.

  He made love to her with the feathers, beginning this time at her sex, where first he fanned the heat of that tender furnace, then fed the fire with the implement’s gossamer touch. When Simone breathed in the sensual pleasure, he followed the intake of her breath with the feathers from the mound of her pubis, over the gentle slope of her belly, across her navel, between her breasts, up her throat and neck, past her lips, her forehead, and beyond. She felt the touch, like angels’ wings, bringing the fire energy of her human sexual desire upward, into a higher plane, sending her, it seemed, into a more sacred space.

  “Nicholas,” she cried out, wanting her lover to share this space.

  “I’m here.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Nick didn’t know where the temple had come from, or the pools of warm, scented water. Or the oil, the rose, the feathers. Nor did he have any idea how he had known to proceed in such a manner to so erotically play the instrument of Simone’s body. It was as if he’d heard a voice, either from deep within, or else from somewhere out in the blue, guiding his actions. His body, now a fiery host to sensations that threatened to overwhelm him, had guided him as well. What he’d done to arouse her had aroused him in turn, as if her body was a reflection of his own. As if they were one body, in two pieces.