Wild in the Moonlight

Ten

Violet felt completely bewildered when Cameron suddenly grabbed her. She’d been trying to seriously talk to him. She was all riled up and upset that the whole crappy story about her skinny tubes had come out. She’d never wanted Cam to know. It was fine the way it was. Good the way it was. He thought of her as a whole, sexy woman-she knew he did. She didn’t want him to see her differently, and she’d been afraid all along that he would if he knew the whole blasted picture.

Yet suddenly his arms swept around her, tighter than a noose, and his mouth swooped down on hers, slapped hers, crushed hers…then almost immediately lightened. Slower than honey, a taking kind of kiss became a wooing kind of kiss. A coaxing, wooing kind of kiss suddenly became an ardent, I want you need you have to have you kind of kiss. His tongue found hers. His hands sieved into her hair. She felt his long, hard body throb against hers, and suddenly she was trembling from the inside out.

He was going to take her. She knew it in the flash of an instinct, a burst of heat and fear and excitement streaking through her pulse. Right here, right now, right under the deep, dark shade of the maple. No one was around, and the sun was setting fast now, but heaven knew strangers and neighbors both drove by and drove in at all hours.

It was as if he didn’t care. Didn’t notice.

And then neither did she.

She’d never felt like this. As a young girl, she’d dreamed incessantly all that tedious stuff about the prince who’d find her, who’d make her the center of his world, who’d slay dragons for her. But obviously she’d grown up. There were no fairy tales, and she’d wanted a flesh-and-blood guy and not a fake prince anyway. But Cameron…oh, Cameron.

He pushed at clothes, buttons, zippers. Heeled off his shoes, lifted her out of hers. No one had ever swept her away like this. Made her feel as if he couldn’t breathe without her breath, couldn’t survive without touching her, couldn’t live. Without having her.

His eyes were open on hers, intense, unrelenting. Yet his mouth kept coming, even as he swooped her down to the ground on their makeshift nest of clothes. A car went by, maybe saw them, maybe didn’t.

Pagan kiss followed pagan kiss, each more fierce and wild than the last. A button dug into her spine. Grass tickled. Her hair tangled-her darn long hair was always tangling-yet only one thing mattered to her. Cam. And what they seemed to be creating together.

When he suddenly lifted his head, she tried to say something, but the way he looked at her dammed all the words in her throat and her heart was suddenly hammering, hammering. “I love you,” he said roughly. “Love, Vi. Do you hear me?”

Again she tried to answer, but he moved so fast. One instant he was taking her mouth, the next he’d twisted around, all naked and bronzed and bare, and started over completely at the other end. He kissed her right foot, from arch to toe, then worked his way up. Kisses wreathed from ankle to knee to the inside of her thigh to the core of her, and when she was gasping for breath, he flipped her over. He kissed her fanny; bit softly, tenderly, then laved a silken path up her spine to the nape of her neck. Then flipped her again.

His tongue dove into her mouth, mated with hers, even as he reached down. He wrapped her legs around his waist, intimately tight, and then dove in, drove in, taking her high and tight and intimately. Desire suddenly developed sharp teeth. Need clawed at her, ached through her. The need for completion, but even more, the need to love. Him. To be loved. By him.

“Come with me,” he rasped. The sun dropped so fast, as if understanding they needed privacy, yet the darkness so stealthily brought voyeurs. Crickets. Frogs. Lightning bugs. Cats. And then the moon.

Their moon.

She saw his face above her, so sharply honed, so full of passion and emotion, even as she could feel herself losing any last ounce of control. Love reeled through her, whipped through her senses and heart.

“Now, Vi,” he said.

She came with him, feeling as if she were freefalling from the top of the sky. But not alone. She fell with Cam, wildly, from the heart. Even minutes later, even hours later, she couldn’t shake the flushed, joyous sensation of feeling totally complete. Totally whole. As if she were the most powerful woman ever born, woman with a capital W, the woman she’d always wanted to be.

Cam’s woman.

And at that moment she couldn’t imagine feeling any other way.

Cameron couldn’t sleep.

It had to be well past two in the morning. They’d eventually made it to her bedroom, dozed for a while, wakened to make love all over again. Now, oddly, he was more wide awake than a hoot owl. She was lying in his arms, damp, warm, draped all over him-or he was draped all over her. Who cared who was doing the draping as long as every inch of his skin was touching every inch of hers?

His eyes were used to the darkness now. He kept staring at the silver moonlight flooding in the open window, the quiet stir of curtains, the pale light falling on that strangely austere bedroom. “Vi,” he whispered.

“Hmm?”

He’d been pretty sure she was awake, just not positive. Her voice was sleepy, sated, content-but awake. “Chére, are you absolutely positive about the infertility?”

She didn’t stiffen in his arms this time, which told Cameron that she was okay talking about the subject with him now. The trust was there. For him. For her. “Let’s put it this way,” she said with a wry touch of humor. “Originally I learned everything about sex from Simpson-which means that I learned almost everything wrong. From the time we were in high school, Simpson made me think that a guy had to get off or he suffered terribly. That guys couldn’t wait. That sometimes girls made it and sometimes they didn’t, but overall, that Real Women did.”

“As in…it’s the woman’s fault if she doesn’t have a climax?”

“Yup. I can’t believe I swallowed a lot of the things Simpson used to tell me. And on the baby subject, he really believed that it must be the woman’s fault if she couldn’t get pregnant, if the guy was virile.” She sighed. “Some things he didn’t have completely wrong. He had his sperm checked. And they were all aggressive little swimmers. I was the one with the skinny tubes.” She snuggled closer. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to tell you about all this, but…somehow it’s opened my eyes to just air it all out. It’s obvious to me now what I was doing with the lavender. I needed to create something that was totally my own, something that came specifically from me. And I guess I did go a little batty with enthusiasm.”

“A little?”

He heard her soft chuckle in the darkness. “Okay. So I went hog wild. But the thing is-I never thought all my experiments would take. I thought most of them would miscarry, you know? Why should they work? I was a novice at this, no more than a closet gardener. It just seemed to be luck, that everything I touched reproduced with no problem. It was so ironic.”

“Ironic in what way?” He stroked that long hair, knowing she’d be annoyed in the morning she hadn’t braided it, but loving it loose.

“Ironic, because all I had to do was love it. And nurture it. And it thrived.” She sighed. “Same with cats. I took in one stray barn cat three years ago. He was starved, crippled. I didn’t think he had a chance of making it, and the next thing I knew, he’d miraculously turned into a she-cat and had kittens on me.” She stroked his neck, as if somehow instinctively knowing where he liked being touched most. “My mom had this theory, raising kids.”

“Which was?”

“Which was that everybody’s powerful in some way. We just have to clue in to who we naturally are. My mom taught us girls that each of us had something in our nature that we needed to listen to, develop. For me, I thought it was to be a mother. To grow and raise and nurture. To feed. To caretake. That’s part of what was so hard. Knowing I couldn’t have kids. I’d just always been programmed to believe that was a natural part of me.”

Cameron hesitated. He’d never been afraid of wading into touchy waters, but this time, he desperately wanted to say the right thing. It’s not like he knew anything about infertility. Or that he had any way to make her loss any less painful. But he had to find something right to say. The jerk she’d married had made her feel less than a woman, as if she were less than whole because of those “skinny tubes.”

“Chére, I think you were a born nurturer. Just like your mother said. But I don’t think that’s just about children. It’s about everything and everyone around you. Always will be. Although…”

“Although what?”

“Although I think there’s a definite danger you could get overrun by cats.” There, he’d made her smile. “If you started adopting elephants…well, the potential problems boggle the mind.”

And there. He’d made her really laugh now. Feeling high on those successes, he pressed toward touchier ground. “I’m relieved you went for the divorce,” he murmured, and kissed her forehead. “I’m sorry that he was such a blind idiot and hurt you. But if he hadn’t had all those stupid ideas, who knows, maybe you’d have stuck with him. And then I’d never have found you.”

“You think it’s fate we found each other when we did?”

Her voice was getting sleepier, her cheek rooting for just the right place on his shoulder. “Not fate,” he said quietly, bluntly. “Love. The kind of love that’s actually freeing for us both. I mean-I already have two kids, so I don’t need to start a formal family all over again. This is perfect. I’m a free spirit. So are you. We can both do anything, go anywhere we want. There’s nothing to hold us down. Nothing to hold us back.”

She seemed to go very still when he said the “love” word, but she didn’t immediately answer. Moments later, he realized she’d fallen asleep.

That was okay, he told himself. He just wanted to reassure her that he loved her for her. Maybe he’d hoped she would say something to indicate she wanted him to stick around in her life. But she’d just revealed that huge hole in her heart. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Maybe she needed to think about that “love” word for a while. They had time yet.

Surely they still had time yet.

“Girls. Could you keep quiet for a full three seconds?” Both girls whirled around in surprise at her sharp tone. She never yelled at them. She never yelled at anyone, but darn it, August had blown in on a hot, mean wind. A few days ago she’d picked up a stomach bug she couldn’t seem to shake. The cats were crabby; she hadn’t been sleeping; and the girls had been talking for hours about school coming, boys, clothes, boys and then more boys.

“We need to make some more insect repellent. Remember the recipe? Ten parts lavender, ten parts geranium, five parts clove-”

“Hey, I remember it, Vi, not to worry.”

“All right then, if you two’ll make up two dozen of those vial-” She tried to finish the sentence, couldn’t. Suddenly every smell in the Herb Haven seemed to fill her nostrils. She loved those smells. Every single one of them. Always had, always would. But just then, she put a hand over her mouth and ran like a bat out of hell for the back bathroom.

Twenty minutes later she decided that she wouldn’t die, even found the strength to fumble in the medicine cabinet for her spare toothbrush and toothpaste. She worked up a good foam as she stared in the mirror. Her cheeks were pinch-pink, her eyes bright, her hair wild as a witch’s but certainly glossy and healthy. Yet over the past week, she’d found an excuse to cry every day and hurl at least once.

Of course, crying was nothing new. She cried for the national anthem and for dog food commercials. But usually her stomach was cast iron. Last night they’d had fish with a spinach sauce and peachy sweet potatoes. Nothing a normal man would eat, but Cameron, par for Cameron, ate anything she put in front of him and asked for seconds. For herself, they were old favorites, comfort foods, no matter how weird they might be for someone else. Nothing, for damn sure, to inspire an upset tummy.

If she didn’t have those skinny tubes, she might fear she was pregnant.

“Hey, Violet.” Barbara rapped on the bathroom door. “We think you should go up to the house. Just forget all this. We’ll make up the vials and those sachet things and handle the customers.”

“You just want to talk about boys.”

“Yeah, so? Go on. Go lie down or something.”

She didn’t want to go home. Cameron was up there packing. He wasn’t leaving for another couple of days, but the lavender harvest was over and it was not as if he could get all his stuff ready in a second. Between her missed period and her upset tummy and the insanely radiant cheeks she kept seeing in the mirror, Violet kept finding the “pregnancy” word sneaking into her mind. But skinny tubes didn’t suddenly disappear, so she figured she was simply emotionally upset about his leaving.

“I’m not leaving you two kids alone in the shop,” she said firmly.

Barbara opened the door, took one look and popped a bubble. “Yeah, you are.” She aimed her thumb at the house in a clear-cut order. “Go on. It’s hot. Go drink some lemonade or something.”

Violet winced. “Don’t say lemonade. Don’t even think it out loud.”

That’s it. They pushed her out. And the heat was too searing and sticky to just stand there, so she had to traipse up to the house. The back door was open, the phone ringing, but hell’s bells, the phone was always ringing. She opened the refrigerator and then just leaned into the cold smoky air with a sigh.

“Oh, God. Let me waste some electricity along with you.” Cameron suddenly appeared from the dining room, shirtless and shoeless, just wearing low-slung khaki shorts and carrying packing tape. Now, though, he tossed the tape and hiked over to the open refrigerator. Faster than lightning, he dropped a soft, lingering kiss on her mouth. “Mmm. Fresh toothpaste. What an aphrodisiac.”

“I hate to say this, Lachlan, but you could find an aphrodisiac in a dust bunny.” Oh, God. Even that light kiss and she was not only fine again, but her pulse was soaring like a hummingbird’s. He’d changed her so much. Healed her. Made her feel like a whole woman again. And all because of those long, wicked nights and wild, sneaky kisses. Because of the way he loved her.

And the way she loved him back.

“Have you been out to our lavender? You know how it needs to be cut back, hard, as soon as the crop’s taken. Well, old Filbert and the crew finished an hour ago. She’s all tied up and pretty again.”

Bad news. She closed the refrigerator door-after filling a cup full of ice-and headed for the couch in the living room. It was too hot to stand up. Too hot to hear bad news anywhere near that bright, happy sunlight. “You talked to Jeunnesse?”

“Yup.” He didn’t sit on the couch, instead, pulled up the old round ottoman and plunked down, facing her. “You know what has to happen now. I’ve tested all I can here. The rest has to happen in a bigger lab.”

“I know.”

“The next part of the testing takes time. Perfumes have a top note, a middle note and a base note. Lavender is used for all three. But the top note is usually the most volatile-the scent you pick up when you first put on perfume. And the base note-that’s the scent that lingers even hours after you’ve been wearing the perfume.”

He was talking as if she didn’t know these things. As if he believed he needed to carefully cover them again. He was looking at her as if she were some kind of fragile treasure. Searching her face the way he’d searched her face for days-even though she’d never told him, and never would, how strangely sick she’d been.

“The middle note in the perfume isn’t so much about smell. It’s about staying power. About chemistry. It’s what makes one perfume last and another completely dissipate. It’s what makes the best perfumes endure. And the right lavender is the key to that enduring power. It’s what we’re hoping your lavender has.”

She had no idea why he was telling her this. She knew it all. He knew it all. Somehow, though, every darn time Cam brought all this up again, all she could think of was how something was terribly wrong with her. Because unlike a good lavender, she seemed to have no enduring power for men. It wasn’t just Simpson who’d left her.

Cam was leaving her now, too.

Simpson, she’d just loved. But Cameron was about to take her heart and soul with him. It was definitely some kind of flaw in her-she just seemed to attract men who didn’t want to stay. For three years now, she’d blamed her infertility, but Cam had certainly proven that theory wrong, because he didn’t care if she could have kids or not. He’d made it more than clear that he needed no more children.

“Vi, I have to go back to France. To the Jeunnesse labs.”

“Of course you do.” Because her voice sounded so hollow, she said more strongly, “I’ve known that from the start.”

“There’s a good staff of chemists there, and they can run most of the tests. But I know the lavender. I need to take charge of it.”

“Cam, why are you telling me this? I’ve known from the beginning that you were only going to be here for a few weeks. We both knew.”

“I just want to be sure you realize…that this isn’t about wanting to leave you. It’s just about the work.” He waited, as if hoping she’d ask him something, say something.

And Violet knew exactly what he wanted to hear, so she put on her best ultraviolet smile and touched his cheek with love. “Didn’t I tell you I never wanted ties?” she asked fiercely. “I love you, Cameron Lachlan. Just the way you are. Just the way we’ve been together. I wouldn’t have given up a second of our summer for the world.”

She saw his jaw clamp tight, and a light seemed to deaden in his eyes, but she couldn’t fathom what else he might conceivably have wanted her to say. “There’s no reason we can’t see each other again,” he said.

“I hope we do. But I don’t want you worried about it.” She couldn’t tie him down. Wouldn’t. Cam was who he was, a heart-free vagabond, a lover and a giver and a healer of women-but he’d tried marriage before, already had two daughters. He’d been terribly unhappy, and if there was one thing she wanted for this man who’d become her whole world, it was to love him. There was no way she’d ask him for anything he hadn’t clearly offered.

“Have you picked a time to leave?” she asked lightly.

He nodded, then had to swallow as if something thick were stuck in his throat. “Tomorrow morning at daybreak. I can’t wait longer than that.”

So, Violet thought. Now I know the exact minute my heart’s going to be broken for all time.