Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) (57 page)
“There is that,” Joletta agreed.
Rone drew a deep breath, letting it out with a shake of his head. “Do you really think that’s the way it was?”
“I looked it all up when I got back. The dates match. More than that, there’s an old picture of Giovanni taken in New Orleans. It’s not a very good one, but there’s a strong resemblance to the sketches of Allain that Violet made in her journal.”
“And yet,” Rone said with his eyes narrowed in thoughtfulness, “it stands to reason that the agents of the czar could have traced him to New Orleans through Violet; they must have had a dossier on her by that time. But I suppose that if they believed the fiction of his death, then there would have been no further interest in her.”
“And certainly none in a child who was publicly recognized as the daughter of Gilbert Fossier.”
Rone looked at her and quirked a brow. “Which means you are — what? The however-many-times-great-granddaughter of Czar Alexander the First of Russia?”
“Something like that, I guess,” she said, “for what difference it makes. There must be thousands of people walking around with odd pedigrees; just look at all the presidents who are suddenly discovered to be the descendants of royalty after they are elected.”
“And if you’re not, if what happened to Violet and Allain was really about something else entirely, I don’t suppose anyone will ever know it.”
“No,” she agreed, her voice pensive, “I guess not.”
He was quiet for long moments, though his gaze, stringent and assessing, still rested on her face. When he spoke again, it was with an abrupt change of subject. “I left Florence before you did, though not by much, apparently. There was something I had to see about in New York. I wanted to pick up this, before somebody else got to it.”
From his pocket, he took a folded sheet of paper and two small bottles, one of the familiar type used by Fossier’s Royal Parfums, the other of deeply cut crystal with an ornate silver top. He reached to take Joletta’s hand and press them into it. He released them quickly, as if afraid she might shove them back at him, or as though he was afraid to prolong the touch.
She looked down at the things she held. With the perfume in one hand, she opened the paper.
It was a report, the breakdown of a chemical compound with the exact formulation for each component. Next to the figures was a color graph divided into pie-shaped wedges with numbers showing the percentage for each component.
It was the formula for Le Jardin de Cour.
“The report Aunt Estelle ordered,” she said quietly.
“That’s right,” he answered, his voice steady. “It’s yours, and there won’t be another one made at Camors. One of the bottles is the perfume Natalie’s mother brought to New York. Do whatever you want with it.”
She had given him the information she had; he had given her what she needed. Both had deprived themselves for the benefit of the other. It was funny if you thought about it. Joletta did not feel like laughing.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said. Her voice was without inflection. All reaction, all feeling had been erased by fear. Such gifts sometimes signaled good-bye.
“Yes, I do. You wanted it; you went to a lot of trouble to find it.”
“You wanted it, too,” she said through the tightness in her throat.
“It doesn’t mean a thing to me if I have to lose you to keep it.”
The constriction inside her loosened a little. She swallowed hard before she spoke. “Do you — is it possible that we could both use the perfume? You could take the older formula for what you need; I could have the newer version, Mimi’s version, for the shop.”
“You searched it out and nearly died for it; you should have it all.”
There was no reservation in his voice as he made the sacrifice. Hearing that, Joletta knew a deep need to show a matching generosity. “No,” she said. “You risked your life for it, too. I was so afraid Timothy would kill you. He had the knife, you had nothing. I thought there would be no reason for him to try to kill you if you had the journal — but I only made things worse. I was so afraid — so afraid.”
Rone watched her while the river wind stirred their hair and brushed like warm fingers over their faces. Finally he said in quiet urgency, “Why, Joletta? Why were you afraid?”
She met his gaze, her own wide and dark. Her chest and her heart and her whole being were crowded to bursting with the love she held inside. But though she opened her lips, she made not a sound. She had walked away from him in Florence and he had let her go, had given his word that he would leave her alone. It was up to her to ask him to stay with her now.
The words wouldn’t come. The risk was too great. To say them and have him walk away in his turn would be a loss from which she might never recover.
A slow smile curved his lips while the promise rising in his eyes deepened, grew steadier. He said in soft entreaty, “Can’t you trust me, even now?”
“Yes, I could — I do. It’s just that—” She stopped, unable to go on.
“That’s good enough for me,” he said, his voice deep and not quite steady. “Open the other perfume bottle, Joletta.”
She obeyed mechanically, with fingers that were numb and a little clumsy. The silver top was stiff; it needed such an effort to remove it that Joletta almost spilled the bottle as the cap came away, suddenly, in her hand. A small amount of liquid splashed out, running over her fingers.
The scent was rich, piercingly sweet, ethereal yet passionate and positive; common yet rare, and extravagantly satisfying. She had no need to breathe deep of it to identify it, or to love it.
“For Violet and Allain,” Rone said, his tones deep with emotion, as rich as the perfume, “it was the language of the flowers. For us, I thought the message of the perfume would be best. So I won’t fill a room with red roses for you. But because you wear Tea Rose, I thought you, of all women, might recognize the meaning of the essence of a thousand Bulgarian roses.”
Bulgarian roses, the most expensive, most prized in the world of perfume, and always rose red.
Red roses, for Love.
The scent mounted to her head, burgeoning inside her, settling in her mind and heart, inescapable, indelible, easing fear, erasing doubt.
She smiled with joy and confidence shining in her face. “I love you, Tyrone Kingsley Stuart Adamson the Fourth,” she said.
He caught her to him, safe in the haven of his arms, holding tightly, smoothing his hands over her back as if he meant never to stop touching her, never to let her go.
“I adore you,” he said against her hair. “I’ve been half-crazy trying to think of some way to make you believe me. I’ve loved you since the moment I kissed you on a dark New Orleans street, loved you more with every desperate step I took following after you over half of Europe like a devoted hound. And I mean to go on loving you and hounding you until you get so sick of it that you’re ready to marry me to shut me up.”
“If that’s a proposal,” she said, her voice muffled against his shirtfront, “I don’t think much of it.”
He drew away enough to look at her. “You don’t?”
“It may be a long time,” she said with dancing eyes, “before I get tired of being loved, or hounded.”
“Shall we see?” he said in tones rough with tenderness and mock anger.
And began.
I am deeply indebted to Loretta Theriot, perfumer, of Creole, Louisiana, for the generous loan of a wealth of material from her huge library of perfume research, and also for the tale of a hundred-year-old bottle of perfume found in an old Louisiana plantation house which still retained its fresh floral scent. Most of all I’m grateful for an early-morning phone call from her that began, “Guess what? Last night I dreamed you wrote a book about a special perfume…”
My gratitude also to Alessandra Lassabe, formerly of Bourbon French Perfume Company, New Orleans, for sharing information on her family’s involvement in the perfume business, including the story of how her grandmother failed to pass on the formula for a valuable perfume before her death. Though
Wildest Dreams
is not the story of her family, the Bourbon French Parfum Shop, St Ann Street, the French Quarter, did provide a much appreciated spark of inspiration.
The many references to the language of flowers as practiced by the Victorians were culled, in the main, from the wonderfully perfumed pages of
Penhaligon’s Scented Treasury of Verse and Prose, The Language of Flowers,
edited by Sheila Pickles.
Wildest Dreams
would not have been the same without this lovely volume.
Other books that provided background on perfume and its manufacture were searched out for me by the staff of the Jackson Parish Library, Jonesboro, Louisiana. As always, I would like to recognize their cooperation and swift answers to calls of distress.
Thanks a million to Sue Anderson for jogging my memory about views, flowers, mileage, and other details of a special trip to Europe in the spring, not to mention twenty years of dreams and other travels.
And a special thank-you to my two great assistants, Delinda Corbin and Katharine Faucheux — who also happen to be my daughters — for researching, editing, and generally making my life easier while the story was in the making.
Since publishing her first book at age twenty-seven,
New York Times
bestselling and award-winning author Jennifer Blake has gone on to write over sixty-five historical and contemporary novels in multiple genres. She brings the story-telling power and seductive passion of the South to her stories, reflecting her eighth-generation Louisiana heritage. Jennifer lives with her husband in northern Louisiana.
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CONTEMPORARY
ROMANCE
THE ITALIAN BILLIONAIRES COLLECTION
Book 1 in Jennifer’s newest contemporary romance collection,
The Tuscan’s Revenge Wedding,
was an Amazon Top 100 bestseller in 2012.
Book 2,
The Venetian’s Daring Seduction
, will be available after May 1, 2013.