A Scent of Magic Read online

  Where was he? What was this place? But it didn’t seem important. It was no place, and every place. She was no woman, and every woman. As he watched her move, he felt desire begin to build, the yearning every man has known who has ever sexually longed for a woman.

  Come to me.

  His command was not voiced, but he knew he’d spoken to her. She appeared to be walking toward him, but she did not seem to be getting any closer.

  Come to me!

  Nick felt a desperate urgency that she be in his arms. Why was she remaining so distant? Would she not be his? He held out his arms, beckoning her with every ounce of his will.

  She must have heard his silent appeal, for suddenly she was there before him, skyclad, wearing only the deep shades of red and purple and blue that floated and swirled around them. Still he could not see her face. He reached for her hand and brought her fingertips to his lips. He grazed their softness with his kiss, begging her with all his heart to allow him to make love to her. He raised his eyes to hers and saw the raw sensuality reflected in those dark pools. He’d seen those eyes before, he was certain of it, but the rest of her face was veiled in the mist. Those eyes gave him the permission he needed, however, and he closed his own as he drew her body next to his.

  In her embrace, he was enfolded in an unfamiliar but intensely pleasurable sense of well-being, pure happiness, as if the lover for which he had always subconsciously longed had at last appeared.

  He wanted her, and the pleasures she brought him that had eluded him his entire life. He wanted them now. He wanted them forever.

  His lips found hers and hungrily fed on their honey. His heart raced as he felt them open to him, returning his kiss with liquid fire.

  Their bodies began to sway together, as if in a slow, sensual dance, skin meeting skin, touching, releasing, touching, releasing, then touching again. Burning.

  He moved the sensitive palms of his hands over her body, exploring the velvet skin of her neck, the gentle ivory descent of her shoulders, the silken slenderness of her arms. All the while, his lips possessed hers. When his questing hands reached hers, he brought her palms against his and entwined their fingers, drawing her body closer.

  He fitted her hands softly against his lower back and left them there, and a thrill raced through him as he felt her begin to trace tiny circles on his sentient skin. With maddening, deliberate slowness, each orbit dropped lower in evocative invitation. His own hands began to imitate her motions on the rounded flesh of her derrière, but his hunger grew fierce, and he was unable to keep his touch light.

  He drew her hard against him, pressing his arousal into the softness of her lower body. She responded by beginning to move in a primal rhythm, arching her back, stroking his chest with her breasts, his midsection with her navel, his flat abdomen with her belly, making him burn for her in a ruthless seduction. Nick cried out from both pleasure and pain, his desire desperately in need of satisfaction.

  He wanted to bury himself in her, become one with her, at that very moment, but there seemed to be no bed or pallet upon which they could lay to consummate their passion. But suddenly they were together, prone side by side, on the softest of clouds. There was no bed beneath them, for there was no need. Only the two of them existed in the entire universe.

  His lips found hers again, and he whispered his longing to her. A murmur, a deepened kiss was her reply, along with the opening of her being unto him. Long legs entwined him, and he felt himself being drawn into what surely must be heaven. Darkness enveloped him. And warmth. The warmth of her arms, the warmth of her woman’s body, of her spirit’s soul. He moved into that warmth, that home he’d hungered for, deeper, deeper, wanting to deliver his own soul into its eternity. She moved in rhythm to his seeking, until at last he exploded into a thousand shards of exquisite sensation.

  His last impression before he rocketed into the star-sprinkled midnight was a glimpse of his lover’s face. A sob escaped his lips upon recognition of the fullness of her mouth, the delicate shape of her nose, those dark, absorbing eyes, and emotions long-buried erupted from deep within. Fear and shame comingled with ecstasy that seemed to know no bounds. In exquisite agony, he cried out her name.

  “Simone.”

  Less than a week after Simone’s discovery of the perfume, fate intervened to nudge her toward the future she’d been avoiding. Out of the blue, she had received a phone call from a man in London who spoke to her in her native French. His name was Antoine Dupuis, and he had urged her, of all bizarre things, to consider becoming the master perfumer at the House of Rutledge.

  At first she’d thought it was a sick joke played by someone who knew her history with Nicholas Rutledge. But Dupuis quickly informed her that Rutledge was no longer part of the business, and that she had been suggested as his replacement by a member of the Board of Directors.

  “Not only do we feel you are a highly qualified candidate for the position,” he’d told her, “but having only recently learned of how Rutledge came to acquire the formulas he used in our Royalty line, we thought offering you the job might in some small measure make up for the unforgivable crime he perpetrated against you. On behalf of the Board of Directors of the House of Rutledge, I offer my sincere apologies, Mademoiselle Lefevre. If we had known what he planned, we would have taken measures to stop his contemptible action. Perhaps,” Dupuis had concluded, “you will consider this an opportunity to reclaim what was taken from you under grievous circumstances years ago.”

  Simone was considering it, seriously. That’s why she was on board the jetliner, winging her way toward London, sipping an icy chardonnay in the first class section. The wine tasted sweet and good, a little like the flavor of revenge. She just might take Dupuis up on the offer, in spite of her trepidations that she was not experienced enough for the job. It would be sweet indeed to be in a position, if Dupuis had described it to her correctly, to finally destroy Nicholas Rutledge.

  But the thought, as appropriate as she deemed it, surprisingly did not fill her with any great joy.

  The position at the House of Rutledge, however, had another attraction for her. It would give her the corporate structure she needed to develop and market her dreamed-of grands parfums. And if the first part of her journey proved successful, her dream might come true sooner than she could have imagined.

  After experimenting with the mystifying perfume oil for three successive nights and experiencing in her dreams the same kind of delicious erotic passion and sexual fulfillment as in her first, Simone was driven to learn more about the substance. She warned herself not to become obsessed with it, nor to use it indiscriminately, regardless of the pleasures she’d enjoyed in the arms of her dream lover. A fragrance should not replace reality.

  If only she knew that kind of reality!

  Still, she recognized the importance of the oil’s intriguing qualities, and already it was clearly the inspiration, the basis in theory as well as in substance, for her first grand parfum.

  Hoping to learn where the fragrant oil had come from, Simone had traced the shipment of the old bottles in which she’d discovered the perfume. They had been part of a consignment to a firm called Ryder and Company of London by a person who was liquidating a property in the country southeast of London. Unable to find out more than that, she’d already decided to travel to England to search further for the source of the perfume, and had been trying to figure out a way to afford the trip when Antoine Dupuis had called. It was he who had paid for the first class ticket.

  Indeed, a strange twist of fate. Maybe some of that serendipity she’d been reading about lately.

  Chapter Five

  Nick drummed his fingers on the mahogany of his desk, wishing like hell the shipment of the remnants of the Bombay Spice & Fragrance Company would arrive, giving him something at last to occupy his restless mind. He had experimented several nights in a row with the perfume, each with the same unsettling results. No, the dreams had not just unsettled him, he admitted, they seemed to have comp
letely unhinged him. He could not concentrate on the details of his plans that were so vital to his future success. He could not think about packaging or marketing, or any of that big-picture stuff either. In fact, he could scarcely think at all, except about the woman in the perfume-induced dreams.

  It had been Simone, he was certain.

  Simone Lefevre.

  It didn’t surprise him that he would dream of her. She’d come to him often in dreams, albeit tormented ones, those first years after he had betrayed her. Nick shook his head, still astounded that he could have been so stupid. So cruel. Simone was the one woman he’d every truly loved. So easily, she could have been his. But now, she was the one woman he could never, ever have…except in his dreams.

  Damnation, he did not want her in his dreams! He slammed his palm against the desk. It was over and done with. He’d made a terrible but irrevocable mistake. He did not want the image of those eyes, dusky and passionate, haunting him. He did not want to remember the silken touch of her skin, the natural sweet scent of her body.

  His thoughts raced on, tormenting him anyway, as he relived in his imagination that hot, torrid night in Grasse, when she’d willingly, trustingly given herself to him, her first lover. He could almost feel her body surrounding his, her warm, dark heat pulsing around him as he plundered her virginity.

  Oh, God, he groaned aloud, furious at himself for allowing those thoughts to enter his mind, for losing his normal control and composure. All because of the dreams. He thought he had successfully blocked Simone Lefevre from his mind, even from his subconscious. He’d worked at it very hard for ten years.

  But she had crept back to him in the night, every night, and their dreamtime together remained so vivid he could feel his desire rising again in spite of himself. And also in spite of himself, he wondered briefly what had ever happened to her? He’d heard she’d gone to America, and he’d halfway expected her to surface at some time, taking on some role in the perfume industry. Actually, he had dreaded that happening, for if it did, he would likely encounter her sooner or later at some conference or international meeting.

  Hopefully, she was married now, maybe had children, and somehow had either forgiven or forgotten “Nathaniel Raleigh,” that lying, deceitful bastard.

  She might be married, have children. But he doubted if she would ever forget, certain she would never forgive, what he had done.

  Nick’s tie seemed suddenly too tight, the air in the room too close. He had to get out of here, go someplace where he could pull himself together. His presence in these small offices was not necessary, wouldn’t be until the freighter arrived in London bearing the equipment and records of the dismantled perfumery in Bombay. Until then, there was nothing toward establishing the new enterprise that he couldn’t accomplish on his laptop from his study at home, or better, from Brierley Hall.

  Brierley. Just the thought of it relieved some of the tension that had its claws deeply embedded into his shoulder muscles. He took a deep breath. Yes, he decided, he would escape for a few days to the ancestral country estate that now remained virtually his sole link to the aristocratic heritage of the Rutledges. As derelict as it was, it was the one place in which he could find inner peace.

  A trip to the country would give him the opportunity to read the diary and letters in the tranquility of his favorite chair in Brierley’s drawing room, or perhaps outside in the garden, beneath trees that had been there longer than the stately but crumbling manor house. While he was on the estate, he could also check on the renovations that had finally been completed on the old servant’s quarters at the edge of the property. Although he hated having had to resort to such commercialism, he had decided to turn the quaint old cottage into a holiday rental to raise money for his new enterprise. His first tenant was due to arrive shortly. Perhaps he would stop by to say hello.

  But should he take the perfume with him to the country?

  Nick was convinced the fragrance had triggered his unquiet dreams, and although he was not afraid of it, he allowed it due respect. He’d been around perfumes most of his adult life, and he knew that scent was the sense of memory. He knew how a single odor could travel through the nasal passages, past the olfactory receptors, and drop directly into the limbic region of the brain, the domain of the emotions. There, it was capable of stimulating memories, no matter how old, how buried.

  But never had he known a perfume to stir up such an intense sexual experience. Fragrances were simply pleasures for the senses, like art or music. They had limited power over one’s mind, virtually none over one’s body.

  And yet…

  If indeed the perfume was capable of conjuring up erotic, sensual, sexually-explicit dreams, Nick thought for the hundredth time in a week, would it not be the perfect product to launch Bombay Fragrances, Ltd.?

  Was not the world starved for some magical elixir to mend its universal broken heart? Did not fashion designers prey upon everyone’s apparent desperation to attract the opposite sex? Was that not why there was such big money in plastic surgery these days? And in fragrance?

  This craving, this demand for beauty and sexual acceptance was what drove fragrance and cosmetics giants like America’s Revlon and Estée Lauder, France’s Lancôme and L’Oréal, Britain’s House of Rutledge.

  A redder lipstick.

  A fairer skin.

  A sexier appeal.

  Why not a perfume that, if nothing else, caused incredibly evocative dreams? Would that not provide at least some satisfaction for the hunger to be loved?

  Nick picked up his laptop and his jacket with a sneer. A damn lot of good it had done him. If anything, it had made his hunger worse, whetted his appetite for a morsel he could never savor.

  The English countryside in late spring was an explosion of flowers, and despite her weariness, Simone drank in the beauty of it all from the window of the train that took her from London’s Gatwick Airport through the green countryside to the small town of Redford. From time to time, she felt inside her purse, making sure she had the address of the estate agent’s office where she was to pick up the key to the place she had rented.

  Excitement and expectation thrilled through her. She would be staying in the same cottage from which the secretary at Ryder’s had told her the Victorian perfume bottles had likely come. Actually, the secretary had kindly arranged the lease for her, telling Simone that the owner of the house was a friend of Mr. Ryder’s who was eager to let it out for holiday rental, as he needed the money.

  Whether or not she came across any evidence of the origin of the fragrant oil there, Simone would be within walking distance of the village of Redford, where she thought she might discover something in the library or historical archives. At any rate, it sounded like a lovely place, the price was within her means, and a few days there would give her time to sort out her thoughts concerning Dupuis’s offer before meeting with him in London.

  The cottage did not disappoint her. It was very old, built in the Tudor style, its whitewashed walls crosshatched with dark timbers. Protecting it from the weather was a thick, neatly trimmed thatched roof, the fairy-tale kind she had seen only in picture books. Charm dripped from its setting as well, with purple lilacs, blue columbine, brilliant white daisies and dapple-faced pansies nodding their bright blossoms in greeting. “It’s lovely,” she murmured to the agent who had brought her from the village, thanking her profusely and following her into the house for a quick tour.

  Inside, the rooms were tiny but cleverly appointed in modern reproductions that lent authenticity as well as the practicality of sturdily built furniture for a rental property. “The owner sold the valuable antiques,” the agent apologized, “and replaced them with inexpensive replicas.” She sighed. “It seems a shame, although the impoverished aristocracy is doing that a lot these days.”

  At the moment, the furnishings of the house and the owner’s apparently dire straits became inconsequential as Simone was overcome at last by the fatigue she had been battling for the past
several hours. She said goodbye to the agent, shut the door behind her, and went into the bedroom. She did not unpack her suitcase, but took out a ruby red satin chemise sleeping gown and matching robe, her toiletries, and the ornate Victorian box that held the precious perfume. She placed the box on the nightstand, carried the rest with her into the shower, and twenty minutes later emerged refreshed and ready for a nap.

  Sitting on the bedside, she lifted the vial containing the perfume from its velvet nest and ran her slender fingers across the silver bird roosting on top. Should she? With each use, which before she had rationalized to be in semi-scientific experiment, the amount of the precious liquid that remained available for analysis dwindled. She knew she should not indulge frivolously in the sensuality of it, but maybe, just one more time, to celebrate the good fortune that had brought her to this place.

  She set the bottle down on the nightstand, brushed her silken ebony hair and removed her gown, laughing at her preparations a little self-consciously. It was as if she were readying herself to meet a real lover in this bed. As she slipped between the crisp linen sheets, she allowed one deep inhalation of the magical fragrance, then slipped easily, eagerly, into her dreams.

  Seated beneath the tall trees in the garden of Brierley Hall, Nick held the small diary in both hands to keep the eager breezes from fanning the pages. Although he’d read it through twice, the tale held him spellbound. The entire account of his uncle’s bizarre and unhappy life in India fascinated him, as did the letters from Mary Rose that told the other half of their mutual misery. Together, the relics revealed a haunting, heart-breaking story with an astounding, altogether unbelievable resolution. After his first reading, he’d come away convinced that his uncle was at best unstable, at worst insane.

  And yet, there was a truth and a passion that ran through the diary that gave Nick pause. It wasn’t so much what was said toward the end, rather what his uncle had left unsaid, that disturbed him. There was more here than could be comprehended without further study. Nick looked down at the page where his thumbs served as bookmarks and reread a passage: