Scent of a Woman (16 page)

“Wait.” She held up a hand, cutting him off. “I have reached a point in my life where I do not wish to play games. I must ask you a question first.”

“Fire away. I’m all about cutting to the chase.” He’d done the same with Joe a month ago when he told his brother his new game plan. Sometimes it worked best to get everything out in the open.

Maybe clearing the air would take away this awkward tension between them so he could tell her why he was here. He’d thought about her so much the last few weeks that it was tearing him up not to be able to just hold her. Taste her. Bury his face in her hair, which he knew smelled like jasmine.

She took a deep breath as she met his gaze head-on, her violet eyes serious.

“I found out Ahmed is booking a cruise to launch a new fragrance line next spring.”

Ah, hell. He hadn’t meant for her to find out this way.

“Are you sure?” He’d wanted to tell her under different circumstances when they weren’t looking at one another as rivals.

“I have it from a very reliable source. Furthermore, the new fragrance line is scheduled to be Arabian-themed.” He couldn’t miss the wary look in her eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“I need to come clean about a few things.” He’d hoped to tackle this part of the conversation last, but she’d moved it to top priority. “Maybe we should sit down.”

He gestured toward the chairs in front of her desk but she shook her head and pointed toward a window seat overlooking the street. Tourists, locals and cruise ship passengers hurried by on their way to cafés and shops during the lunch hour. Silk drapes in a soft shade of pink were tied back with golden rope, giving the whole room a girly appeal that charmed him. He wondered if she would ever be persuaded one day to pull the shade on the window and the silk curtains to indulge in a private moment on those gold tapestry cushions.

Wordlessly, she slipped off her heels and folded her legs under her in the window seat.

“I am ready, Adam. Tell me what has happened.”

He took his seat more slowly, wanting to push aside the tempting vision of window seat intimacies to concentrate on what he had to say. He needed to push the odds in his favor and make sure he didn’t upset her. It was a foreign sensation, putting someone else’s feelings before his own like this, but it seemed right.

“After Ahmed awarded me the contract we both wanted, he approached me about designing a line of perfumes with distinctly local appeal, preferably with a nod toward the Arabic world’s colorful history.”

Her jaw dropped open.

“That was my reaction exactly,” Adam assured her, recalling how pissed off he’d been during that phone call. “I knew he was basically asking me to recreate an idea you’d pitched him because I’d seen your sketches. Can you imagine what unhappiness this would have caused if I had been oblivious to your ideas? I would have just gone ahead and done exactly what the client wanted.”

“Which was to steal my ideas.” Her voice held a cool note.

“More or less.” He watched a couple across the street in a crowded café as they fed each other bites of a croissant and wished he could get back to that kind of easy intimacy with the woman beside him.

“So what did you say?”

He could hear the tension in her voice even if he wasn’t looking at Danielle. Sitting this close to her, he needed to maintain enough mental distance to say the right things so he wouldn’t push her even further away. He’d give his right arm for some of his brother’s smooth-talking prowess today.

“I told him Prestige wasn’t the kind of company that co-opted other people’s ideas for profit.”

She nodded, her silky dark hair brushing the lapel of her pink jacket.

“So Ahmed just found someone else to implement my idea.”

“Not exactly.” He dredged up his plan and hoped she thought it had as much merit as he did. “I suggested he contact you about working in tandem with Prestige so that he could pull from our global marketing office and your original concepts for this line. The rest of our contracts would remain the same, except you’d receive a larger cut as of the spring and Prestige would scale back their role for the launch.”

She arched one eyebrow as a group of older cruise passengers walked past with a woman Danielle recognized as
Alexandra’s Dream
“expert shopper.”

“You lobbied for a more lucrative contract for Les Rêves?” Her tone conveyed her skepticism and he regretted that she’d seen so many shady business moves that she found this hard to believe.

“He wanted to use your idea anyway.” The guy would have felt no compunction about taking all of her carefully researched fragrance names and packaging ideas, not to mention a few of her core scent bases for the line. “I made it clear I wouldn’t support that kind of corporate backstabbing and he seemed to understand my position.”

She held herself very still for a moment and he could almost hear her searching for a hidden agenda. Finally she acknowledged his efforts with a slight nod.

“That was very—generous of you.” She waved out the window at the shopping coordinator. The woman had put Danielle’s shop on her list of recommended spots to visit, increasing the traffic in the Nice story to almost double.

“Your ideas deserve to be carried out with you behind them, Danielle.” He’d admired her passion for perfume, her dedication to her business, ever since they’d met. “You worked hard for this opportunity.”

“But I would not have had it without your help.” She didn’t seem in a hurry to finish their conversation, even though the store sounded busy. “I know that business deals are not always fair.”

“Neither are shipboard flings that are cut short, but what can you do? Life has a way of interfering.”

Some of the stiff tension seemed to fall away from her shoulders.

“Did you come all the way to Nice to tell me about Ahmed’s desire to expand Les Rêves’s role in Dubai?”

For the first time since his arrival, Adam detected a hint of softness in her voice. When did he get to know her so well that he could recognize that kind of shift in her moods? The knowledge surprised him even as he counted himself fortunate to have that kind of edge in today’s bargaining.

Closing this deal—getting what he wanted from Danielle—would be tougher than negotiating any business agreement he’d ever been involved in.

“I decided to make a few changes after I got back to New York.” To put it mildly. He’d had to scrape his brother off the ceiling a few times while Joe freaked out, accusing Adam of being crazier than their old man. “I think I told you that I never felt any real connection to my work other than the foundation, which means a lot to me.”

“I remember.” She watched him intently now and he hoped he wouldn’t come across as crazy in her eyes, too.

“I handed in my resignation to my brother after working for the company part-time through college for four years and full time for sixteen years after that. I’m done.”

“You walked away from the family business?” Her eyes widened and he could tell she hadn’t seen that coming.

But then, he’d never been good at sharing what was in his head let alone what was in his heart. He took a lot of pride from accomplishing his work, but he didn’t go out of his way to talk about it with other people. Maybe because he never had time. Perhaps that would change once he started working in a field he could really embrace.

“Our family business doesn’t exactly have the grass roots appeal of what you’ve got with Les Rêves. Burns Inc. is a massive conglomerate with companies all around the world and I’ve worked my butt off to make it a powerful contender in the global marketplace. I’ll have dividends coming in the rest of my life and the business will give back to the Burns Foundation whether I’m there or not. So I figured it was time for me to find what things in life I was passionate about.”

“And what did you come up with?”

Deep breath. Exhale. Time to take the biggest risk of his trip.

“Well, for starters, there’s you.”

Danielle blinked through all the other news Adam had surprised her with today to focus on what he just said.

“Pardon?” She wanted to be sure she’d heard this part correctly.

“When I thought about what things I was passionate about in life, I came up with you.”

The compliment could only be genuine. He had nothing to gain from idle flattery, and he’d already proven he wasn’t a man who operated out of selfish motives, judging by his refusal to steal her idea for the Arabian Nights line. In truth, she should have known that all along. His sense of honor and fair play had been evident in the way he respected her wishes when she’d needed space on the ship. In the way he’d sent off his publicity-seeking starlet when other men might have made the most of both the cameras and a willing woman.

Adam Burns was a man to be trusted.

“I am flattered.” More than that, she was teetering on the brink of a vast sea of feelings for him, but she was not ready to admit it quite yet. “But you can hardly make a profession of
me,
Adam.”

“No. But I can spend some time with a woman who inspires me while I figure out what else in life does. Life seems more interesting when I’m around you, Danielle. There is a lack of cynicism in how you approach the world and the people around you, and I think if I could convince you to let me stick around for a while, I might see what other professional avenues I’d like to explore.”

“You don’t think I’m a wild child because I attend parties all over Europe?”

“I think you’re a canny businesswoman who knows her target demographics.”

“You don’t think I’m naive about my company for trusting someone who cheated me?” This fear had bitten her hard in the last month, and as long as she had Adam’s ear, she thought she’d see what he had to say.

He seemed to have a knack for cheering her up today.

“I think you’re wise to focus your energies on your strengths and you just need to surround yourself with people who will be as dedicated to their jobs as you are to yours.” He reached out to her, and when his hand grazed her shoulder she felt her insides go boneless. “No one would ever fault you for trusting a family member. That’s an admirable quality, too, even if sometimes the people we care about let us down.”

Her heart felt so full, so rich with feeling for him, she could no longer contain it.

“I wanted to rejoin the cruise,” she confessed, regretting sorely that she had not been able to take advantage of their time together. “But after I learned Les Rêves would only receive the smaller contract, there was truly no way. I had my hands so full with refinancing and liquidating assets to save the business that it consumed every second of my time until I realized you were already back in New York and I had missed my chance to be with you. To congratulate you. Because no matter how much I believed in my pitch, I respect that you had the better resources for the Dubai account at that time.”

She did not want him to view her as a sore loser. She’d just been so overwhelmed by real world concerns that the cruise had felt like a million lifetimes away.

He threaded his fingers through her hair until he cupped the base of her skull. The warmth of trust, of intimacy, of happiness, filled her.

“We were both dealing with a lot of business issues.” He brushed a kiss along her lips. “I missed you those last few days, but they only helped me realize all the sooner that I needed to spend more time with you if you’ll have me.”

“Here?” She feared sounding selfish after all the ways he’d compromised already. “In Nice? I only ask because the business still flounders until I can secure a couple of stable quarters for earnings.”

“Yes, in Nice.” He kissed her again, more deeply this time. “Didn’t you get my resumé?”

Her train of thought derailed and she tried to put the pieces together again.

“You gave me a resumé. I do not understand why.” She kissed him back, honey flowing sweetly through her veins as she thought about having time to explore this feeling and so many others she harbored for him.

“I can afford to be cheap labor while I oversee Prestige’s partnership with Les Rêves on this one project. I can put you in touch with our global office and act as a liaison while you develop the scents. At the same time I can check out life on the other side of the pond.”

“Even though you have resigned, you would do this for your company?”

He shrugged.

“My stock options are worth more than my salary, and I figured a good way to discover what I want to do will be by taking on work I know I’ll enjoy. So I’ll work with you for a few months and practice my golf swing. If you want, I can take on some of the day-to-day responsibilities here until you hire someone else. That would give Les Rêves a financial break and would let me develop some more international connections, because I have a feeling that my future is going to be over here.”

Joy exploded inside her like a fireworks display of hearts and scented flowers.

“But you are offering to give up so much for me. I can hardly imagine what to give you in return that would match this beautiful sacrifice you suggest.”

“It’s actually a little more than a suggestion since it’s already done. I took a suite at a hotel a few blocks up from here while I test out life abroad. I plan to do some traveling, but I can make my home base here as well as anywhere.” He reached for her, gently edging her whole body closer by another inch or two. “Besides, you already gave me something better than any offer to relocate. You gave me your trust.”

Something melted inside her at his perceptive words and a deep feeling of connectedness flowed through her. He understood her and he valued her.

“I would not dream of refusing such a generous offer.” She could scarcely believe he’d made it. He could live anywhere in the world and do anything he chose with his wealth and talent. Yet he wanted to be here. With her. “Les Rêves would be honored to have you.”

“What about you?” He ducked his head into the crook of her neck and inhaled. “How do you feel about having me?”

“I would be more than honored. I would actually be really excited. Flattered. Thrilled.”