A Scent of Magic Read online

  Within the privacy of the family, there was some conjecture that he might have eloped with his forbidden lover. Nick thumbed the pages of the diary lightly. Was John Rutledge’s story recorded here? Would the mystery of his disappearance at last be explained?

  Nick considered his ancestor’s mysterious disappearance. He guessed that an elopement was possible, but more than once, he’d suspected that perhaps John Rutledge might have been as unstable as his descendent, Horace, Nick’s own father. Had they shared in their genetics an acute fear of failure? Like Horace, had John Rutledge taken his own life?

  Lack of a corpse did not mean there had been no suicide.

  Horace’s body had never been found either, although divers had searched the Thames for days. The two disappearances differed only in the fact that Horace had left a note explaining his.

  Nick swallowed that old grief one more time and laid the diary next to the cameo. He’d get back to his uncle’s story when he could digest at his leisure the family secrets those pages might reveal. As it was, he felt almost guilty at taking time away from the important tasks at hand to indulge in this little jaunt into the past.

  The package of letters came up next. It was tied with a wine-colored ribbon, which he released with a slight tug. The faded handwriting was as delicate and feminine as John’s was strong and sure. Nick unfolded the top piece of correspondence. It was dated 15 June 1846. “My dearest John,…” it began, but the legibility became difficult after that. Had these been written by the woman in question? Nick worked his way through the first few sentences, but again decided to wait until later to finish deciphering the letter. Although he was intrigued by the trunk and its poignant contents, it could be nothing more than a diversion. At present, he had too much on his mind, too many things to accomplish, to waste time on old family gossip.

  Refolding the fragile paper, he set the stack of letters next to the other artifacts on the table. The only remaining item in the trunk was a small, amber glass vial, sealed with a cork. He frowned. A medication of some sort? Carefully, he tried to pry loose the stopper, but it crumbled under his efforts. Digging out the residue with the slender letter opener, he raised the bottle to his nose.

  A single sniff instantly filled his senses with a powerful, heady floral fragrance, a remnant of which had escaped with the staleness of the trunk when he’d first opened it.

  “Whew!” he exclaimed, wrinkling his nose and quickly reaching for a tissue to stuff into the neck of the bottle. The heavy sweetness of the solution was almost nauseating. Nick blinked, puzzled at having come across a perfume among his ancestor’s private possessions. But John Rutledge, after all, had been in the fragrance business, too.

  Then with a start, Nick realized an astonishing thing was happening to him. A tingle seemed to be spreading throughout his body. A glow. An expectation of pleasure.

  Sexual pleasure.

  He felt a warmth permeate his skin. His breath quickened for no reason, and his heart began to race. Slamming the bottle onto the table top, Nick stepped away from it, shocked and alarmed as he felt the tension of a forceful, potent arousal tighten his gut.

  “What the bloody hell?”

  And then, like demons released from that perdition, every memory he’d ever suppressed of Simone Lefevre assaulted him. She was everywhere—in his mind, his heart, his body. He was catapulted in memory back to a time ten years before, to a place among the fragrant hillsides of Provence, and into the arms of the young and beautiful French girl whom he had so brutally betrayed.

  The memories were both powerful and loathsome, and Nick groaned and left the room, fervently willing the ghosts of the past to leave him even as the residual scent of the perfume conjured them ever more clearly in his mind’s eye. He made his way back to his frugally furnished office and sank into a chair, fighting the sick, heavy feeling that always landed in his stomach whenever he relived his treachery.

  How could he have done that? he raved at himself as he had a thousand times in the past ten years. How could he have been so stupid, so naive to believe in Antoine Dupuis, and to let the crafty, unscrupulous French financier convince him wrong was right?

  Nick’s throat tightened painfully, and for a moment, he thought he might lose control over his usually closely-reined emotions. As hard as he’d tried to justify his actions, telling himself that at the time it seemed the only way out of a desperate quagmire, he’d never succeeded in quelling his guilt, and now the scent of the perfume invoked his shame all over again.

  After his father’s suicide, Nick, the sole heir to a once vast family legacy, learned that the House of Rutledge, Britain’s fragrance giant owned by his family since the reign of Queen Victoria, teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. The scandal of the suicide, combined with the threat of financial ruin, had nearly destroyed his mother, and Nick, only twenty-three and barely out of university, was desperate to set things right. In his youth and inexperience, in grief and anger and panic, he had allowed himself to believe that the end justified any means, when that end was saving what was left of the once-proud Rutledge family heritage.

  Nick’s mood blackened as he relived his degradation. He’d been approached by the French investment banker not long after his father’s death. Antoine Dupuis had offered to buy fifty-one percent of the company, for cash. He wanted Nick to stay on, to give the appearance of Rutledge family continuity to the outside world. As Nick was something of a natural “nose,” with a keen olfactory sense and a desire to work in the fragrance business, it had seemed a perfect solution.

  Nick rubbed his temples and shook his head, still incredulous that he’d actually believed Dupuis when the Frenchman had promised that Nick could repurchase the majority of shares once the company had returned to a strong financial footing. What a young and utter fool he’d been.

  It soon became clear that the problems of the House of Rutledge stemmed from the company’s failure to introduce any new products under Nick’s father’s management. Dupuis had insisted that Nick could turn the business around almost overnight by developing perfume knock-offs, cheap synthetic imitations of expensive fragrances. But rather than having Nick try to mimic famous perfumes using his nose, Dupuis proposed instead that the young man instead travel to Grasse, to the heart of France’s perfume country, and learn the secrets of a master perfumer there, one Jean René Lefevre, who was renowned for the private fragrances he created for the world’s wealthy and powerful.

  It was the first time Nick had seen Dupuis’s true colors, and also learned how low he was willing to crawl to get what he wanted. He grimaced, remembering.

  He had followed Dupuis’s plan precisely. Using a pseudonym, he’d managed to become the old perfumer’s apprentice, and shortly thereafter had stolen the formulas for Lefevre’s exclusive perfumes. A year later, the House of Rutledge introduced a new line of inexpensive perfumes called “Royalty” that ultimately set the firm back on solid financial footing.

  Yes, Nick thought ruefully, everything had gone according to Dupuis’s plan. Except for a couple of things. Nick hadn’t counted on becoming instantly fond of the old perfumer.

  Or falling in love with his daughter.

  Nick dropped his head into his open palms. He had to stop thinking about all this. It was history, and no matter how much he regretted it, there was not one bloody thing he could do to change any of it. Instead, he must look to the future.

  Despite his promises, Dupuis had refused to sell the now-profitable business back to Nick, and few months back, Nick had understood for the first time that he had become nothing more than the Frenchman’s lackey. He despised himself as much as the man who had “rescued” him and realized that if he were ever to reclaim his honor and his long lost self-esteem, he would have to leave the House of Rutledge. It had been an agonizing decision, for it had cost him almost everything. But it was the only way he could bear to live with himself.

  He took some small satisfaction that at least he’d come away with something by negotiat
ing the trade of his shares in the House of Rutledge for total ownership of a division of the company, an antiquated perfumery in Bombay. The old fragrance factory had been started by his ancestor whose diary he’d just come across, John Hamilton Rutledge. It was a worn-out scrap of a business, but the equipment and inventory were valuable, and Nick trusted his abilities to use them to start his own perfumery, Bombay Fragrances, Ltd. He believed he could propel the business into the twenty-first century as a major British player in the international fragrance industry, honestly this time, without resorting to the underhanded techniques of Antoine Dupuis.

  Nick believed he could make it, if he worked quickly and with consummate creativity. As a marketing strategy, he had decided he must develop a product line so bold, so daring that Bombay Fragrances would become synonymous with adventure and intrigue and instantly capture the imagination of the consuming public.

  But ideas for such ingenious products had sadly eluded him. Nick stood up and went to the window, not looking out but rather into the depths of his imagination, searching for inspiration. Then the obvious hit him, and he struck his forehead with the palm of his hand.

  The perfume in the antique vial.

  It had actually turned him on. Physically. Sexually. Of course, perfumes always promised sexual allure. But he knew of none that actually delivered the physical reaction he’d just experienced.

  His heart began to pound, and he rushed back into the room where he’d left the vial. What could be bolder, more daring than a fragrance that invoked actual physical sexual stimulation?

  Removing the tissue, considering that his first reaction could have been just a fluke, Nicholas Rutledge closed his eyes and sniffed the fragrance again.

  To his enormous relief, the scent again reached into the depths of his libido and stirred the fires of passion and desire. A slow smile spread over the features of his face.

  “Yes!” he whispered. “Oh, yes.” Then he raised the vial in silent salute to his long-lost ancestor.

  Chapter Three

  Relief suffused Simone when the tall, exotic man took his leave. Although she had not exactly promised him she would make the perfume for his “master,” she knew that if he was able to obtain the formula, she would hear from him again. Obviously, her father had had no luck in synthesizing the mysterious missing ingredient, and how she was expected to create a perfume from a plant that was extinct escaped her.

  She doubted, however, that the man who called himself Shamir could lay hands on the formula, if indeed it still existed. By now, Nicholas Rutledge, she supposed, had either used it or destroyed it.

  Shaking her head in amazement at the whole episode, Simone made her way to the front door of the shop to make sure the peculiar man had really departed. From the floor a glimmer of red caught her eye. It was one of the plastic jewels from his opulent coat, sparkling like fire in the strong morning sunlight from where it had fallen to the linoleum. She picked it up and gazed at it momentarily, then stepped out onto the sidewalk, thinking to return it.

  She looked to the left, then the right. There were the usual passersby…the tourists, the homeless, the early morning drunks. But no seven foot tall man dressed like a maharaja or a mummy ready for Mardi Gras. It was as if he’d just…disappeared. Vanished in broad daylight. Simone shivered despite the muggy heat and stuffed the heavy red ornament absently into her shorts pocket.

  She hoped Mr. Shamir would not come back. He gave her, as her American friends would say, the creeps.

  Returning to the job at hand, she continued to unpack the myriad of interesting perfume bottles her aunt had purchased. She carefully washed and dried each one, marked the price, and put it on display. It was a pleasant chore, as Simone had always been fascinated by the containers used to hold perfumes. Her father had told her how the famous glassmakers of Paris such as Baccarat and Lalique had worked hand in glove with the great perfumers, like Guerlain and Coty, to combine the visual and the aromatic into a work of art.

  She daydreamed, inventing in her mind the perfect container for her first grand parfum, which she thought with growing excitement might be based on the remarkable essence she’d just sniffed in the crystal bottle. Maybe she would reproduce the faceted bottle with the small robin on top. It was a charming, old-fashioned design.

  When she had finished the unpacking and her aunt had returned, ready to take command once again of her little perfume shop, Simone picked up the ornate Victorian box and took it with her to her room above the shop. She checked all of the perfume bottles inside to see if any other contained the fragrance that had so captivated her earlier, but they were empty. Only one held the precious essence, and she could see through the crystal there was little more than an inch of the liquid inside. Not much to work with, but sufficient to learn its identity, if she was careful.

  Although she had already graduated, her professor and mentor in the chemistry department had given her permission to continue to use the university’s chemistry labs, at least until she settled on her future and had other facilities available. He believed so much in her abilities as a chemist and her talent as a perfumer that he had convinced the college to purchase a used gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer and had encouraged her to experiment with both naturals and synthetics to create new fragrances. It was just a matter of time, he told her, until she was picked like a ripe cherry by one of the mega-corporations that were exploiting the current popularity of scent among consumers around the world.

  But Simone was not interested in the idea of spending her life scenting toilet paper and the like.

  Settling into her familiar surroundings in the school’s lab, the daughter of Jean René Lefevre began her investigation of the newly discovered fragrant oil, finding it disturbingly difficult to concentrate because of the strange erotic effect the fragrance seemed to exert over her. But it was that very effect that stirred her imagination. What if she could create a grand parfum that would be truly aphrodisiac in nature, not just a whiff and a promise like most other scents? No doubt, she would make her mark on the world of perfumery.

  But what of the lives of those who used it? Would they be enhanced, made more pleasurable? Or would this substance unleash dangerous desires, sending people out of control in their search for sexual gratification? She laughed to herself. No fragrance on the face of the earth could have such power, and she knew it. Scent had its place and could indeed make the wearer feel more beautiful, alluring, sensual.

  But it was all in the wearer’s mind, not in the chemistry of the perfume.

  Still, she was curious to know the name and the complexion of this substance, which as she’d thought, appeared to be a single essential oil. Her determination mounted with each failed attempt, but three hours later, she was no closer to knowing its identity than she had been in the beginning. Even using the sophisticated lab equipment, she’d been unable to mechanically define and put a name to the sweet, compelling aroma. Confounded, frustrated, and feeling disturbingly sexually tense, Simone gave up.

  Returning to her room above the perfume boutique that overlooked the small but exquisitely designed and lushly profuse garden she nurtured in the inner courtyard, she replaced the vial in its ornate holder. She stared at it for a long moment, intrigued with the possibilities it held. She felt certain this elusive substance could be the foundation for her first grand parfum. But not unless it gave up the secret of its identity.

  And it appeared adamantly reluctant to do that.

  Simone stretched and rubbed her back which ached as it often did after long hours in the lab. She looked at her watch. Four o’clock. She had time for a bath and a nap before supper with her aunt. As usual, she had no other plans for the evening.

  In the small bath across the hall, she drew hot water into the deep, claw-footed tub that took up most of the room, reminding herself that as interesting as it was to play around with things like the evocative perfume oil, she really must get on with making a decision about her future. She could not remain
here, in this tiny apartment, in this cloistered life forever. She was twenty-seven years old. There was a big world out there, and it was past time for her to join it. Ten years was long enough to hide behind the skirts of Tantie Camille.

  Simone removed her clothing and caught the fragrance of the inscrutable essence where it lingered on her apparel. Whatever its source from nature, it was a truly beautiful scent, and she could stand to enjoy some of its pleasurable effects right about now.

  Quickly, she returned to her room, picked up the crystal bottle and brought it with her into the bathroom, where she splashed two drops into the steaming water. Instantly the room filled with its sweetly provocative scent.

  Simone sank into the water, feeling totally decadent as she immersed herself and began to experience raw, sensual pleasure. Leaning back against the tub, she closed her eyes. The water became a caress, the brush of a gentle lover’s kiss. It was only fantasy, she knew, but then, her love life was nothing but fantasy anyway. Although many men seemed to find her attractive, she’d loved only one, and it had been a horrendous mistake. But that had been years ago, and she knew it was time to get on with that aspect of her life as well. She slipped drowsily into a sweet sleep, vowing she would work on that too.

  On bare feet, she stepped tentatively into the vast space. It seemed to have no ceilings, no floors, and yet she had no difficulty in moving through it. There were no walls either, she realized, only curtains of deep blue, purple almost, highlighted with red the color of claret, that swayed like mist in a midnight breeze. She felt welcome here, invited, safe, as if it were her own home or that of a beloved friend. She floated freely in the rarified atmosphere, which was scented with something wonderfully exotic but unfamiliar.