Wild in the Moonlight

Three

“No, you’re not going to be sick again,” Cameron said emphatically.

Violet met his eyes. “You’re right. I’m not,” she said slowly, and took a long deep breath.

She had to get a grip. A serious grip. She wasn’t really nauseous, she was just shook up. Her foot throbbed like the devil-that was for real. She’d been running all day in the heat even before the bee sting-that was for real, too. And normally men didn’t provoke her into behaving like a scatterbrained nutcase-but there were exceptions.

Virile, highly concentrated packages of testosterone with wicked eyes and long, lanky strides were a justifiable exception.

Violet tried another deep, calming breath. Most blondes hated blonde jokes, but she’d always liked them. She knew perfectly well how she came across to most men. A guy who thought he was dealing with a ditsy, witless blonde generally ran for the hills at the speed of light, or at the very least, considered her hands-off-and that suited Violet just fine.

It was just sometimes hard to maintain the ditsy, witless persona. For one thing, sometimes she actually felt ditless and witsy. Or witless and ditsy. Or…oh, hell.

That man had eyes bluer than a lake. She did much, much better with old, ugly men. And she did really great with children. Not that those attributes were particularly helping her now.

But that grip she’d needed was finally coming to her. Those long, meditative breaths always helped. “I have an idea,” she said to Cameron. “You’ve traveled a long way. You have to be hungry and tired-and I’m the middle of an Armageddon type of afternoon. Could you just…chill…for an hour or so? Feel free to walk around…or just put your feet up on my couch or on the front porch. I need to walk over to my Herb Haven, tell my employee what’s happening, finish up the problems I was in the middle of, get closed up for the day.”

“Is there anything I could help you with?”

“No. Honestly. I just need an hour to get my life back in order…and after that I’ve got more than enough in the fridge for dinner. I can’t guarantee it’s something you’ll want to eat, but we could definitely talk in peace then-”

“That sounds great. But if there’s running I could do for you, say. I know you can’t want to be on that foot.”

“I won’t be for long.”

It worked like a charm. She just couldn’t concentrate with all those life details hanging over her head-and with an impossibly unsettling man underfoot. An hour and a half later, though, she was humming under her breath, back in her kitchen, her one foot propped on a stool and a cleaver in her hand big enough to inspire jealousy in a serial killer.

Not that any foolish serial killer would dare lay a hand on one of her prized possessions.

She angled her head-just far enough to peer around the doorway to check on her visitor again. There was no telling exactly when Cameron had decided to sit down, but clearly it was his undoing. He’d completely crashed. He wasn’t snoring, but his tousled blond head was buried in the rose pillow on the couch, and one of his stockinged feet was hanging over the side. That man was sure long. One cat-either Dickens or Shakespeare-was purring on the couch arm, supervising his nap with a possessive eye.

Amazing how easy it was for her to relax when he was sleeping.

She went back to her chopping and sautéing and mixing. Cooking was a favorite pastime-and a secret, since she certainly didn’t want anyone getting the appalling idea that she was either domestic or practical. Tonight she couldn’t exercise much creativity, because she already had leftovers that needed using up, starting with some asparagus soup-and somehow finding an excuse to eat the last of the grape sorbet.

Early evening, the temperature was still too sweltering to eat anything heavy, but it was no trouble to put together bruschetta and some spicy grilled shrimp for the serious part of the meal. The shrimp took some fussing. First seeding and slicing the hot chilies. Then slicing the two tall stalks of lemongrass. Then she had to grate the fresh ginger, crush the garlic, chop the cilantro and mix it with warmed honey and olive oil.

He’d probably hate it, she thought. Men tended to hate anything gourmet or fancy, but as far as Violet was concerned, that was yet another of the thrilling benefits to being divorced. She could cook fancy and wild all she liked-and garlic-up any dish to the nth degree-and who’d ever care?

She’d have belted out a rock-and-roll song, off-key and at the top of her lungs, if it wouldn’t risk waking her visitor. She’d deal with him. But right now she was just seeping in some relaxation, and satisfaction. She’d kicked some real butt in the last hour, finished up the week’s bookkeeping, made up four arrangements for birthday orders and fetched a van full of pots and containers from town. Even without the bee sting, it was a lot to do for a woman who was supposed to be a flutter-brained blonde, but then, when no one was watching she had no reason to be on her guard.

Her sisters thought she was afraid of getting hurt again because of Simpson. The truth was that her ex-husband had turned out to be a twerp, but she never held that against the other half of the species. She wasn’t trying to avoid men. She was trying to help men avoid her-and for three years she’d been doing a great job at it, if she said so herself.

She was still humming when the telephone rang-naturally!-just when she was trying to coat the shrimp with the gooey mixture. She cocked the receiver between her ear and shoulder. “Darlene! Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot to call you back…and yes, you told me he was a Leo. Okay. Try a fritatta with flowers. Flowers, like the marigolds I sold you the other day, remember? I’m telling you, those marigolds are the best aphrodisiac…and you wear that peach gauze blouse tonight…uh-huh…uh-huh…”

Once Darlene Webster had been taken care of, she washed her hands and started stabbing the coated shrimp on skewers. Immediately the phone rang again. It was Georgia from the neighborhood euchre group. “Of course I can have it here, what’s the difference? We’ll just have it at your house next time. Hope the new carpet looks terrific.”

After that Jim White called, who wanted to know if he could borrow her black plastic layer. And then Boobla called, who wanted to know if there was any chance Violet could hire her friend Kari for the summer, because Kari couldn’t find a job and they worked really well together. Boobla could talk the leaves off a tree. Violet finally had to interrupt. “Okay, okay, hon. I’ve got enough work to take on one more part-timer, but I can’t promise anything until I’ve met her. Bring her over Monday morning, all right?”

She’d just hung up, thinking it was a wonder she wasn’t hoarse from the amount of time she got trapped talking on the phone, when she suddenly turned and spotted Cameron in the door.

Her self-confidence skidded downhill like a sled with no brake.

It was so unfair. Cameron had been in a coma-quality nap; she knew he had, so you’d think he’d have woken up still sleepy. And he yawned from the doorway, but she still felt his eyes on her face like sharp, bright lasers. Interested. Scoping out the territory from her disheveled braid to her bare feet.

“You’re a hell of a busy woman,” he said. His tone was almost accusing, as if she’d misled him into thinking she was too scatterbrained to maintain any kind of serious, busy life.

“I’m sorry if the phone woke you. It’s been hell coming back to the town where I grew up, because everyone knows me.” She added quickly, “Are you hungry? All I have to do is pop the shrimp on the grill and I’m ready-”

“I’ll do it, so you can stay off that hurt foot.”

Whenever she woke up from a nap, she had cheek creases and bed hair and a crab’s mood until she got going again. He seemed to wake up just as full of hell and awareness as when he’d dropped off. There was no way she could like a man with that kind of personality flaw. Worse yet, he proved himself to be one of those easygoing guys, the kind who rolled with the punches and tended to fit in whatever kind of gathering they walked into. He started her grill before she could-and the barbecue was one that could make her mother swear; it never lit unless you begged it desperately. Then he found her silverware drawer and set the table without asking. Granted, it wasn’t challenging to find anyone’s silverware drawer, but for a man to make himself useful without praising him every thirty seconds? It was spooky.

There had to be a catch.

“What do you usually drink for dinner? Wine, water, what?”

“You can have wine if you want. I know I’ve got a couple open bottles on the second shelf-not fancy quality, but okay. For myself, though, this day has been too much of a blinger to do wine.”

He grinned. The smile transformed his face, whipped off five years and made her think what a hellion he must have been as a little boy. “So you’d like to drink…?”

“Long Island iced tea,” she said primly.

He burst out laughing. “I got it now. Cut straight to the hard stuff.”

“It’s been an exhausting day,” she defended.

“You’re not kidding.”

The phone rang yet again-it was just another call, nothing that affected life or death-so after that she turned down the volume and let the answering machine pick up. She wasn’t ready to fix the sun and the moon, but she was prepared to concentrate on the lavender deal.

Still, the instant they sat down to dinner, it was obvious they wouldn’t be talking business for a bit longer. “You haven’t eaten in days?” she inquired tactfully.

“Not real food. Not food someone’s actually taken the time to make from scratch.” It was impossible to eat her spicy shrimp without licking one’s fingers. But when he licked his, he also met her eyes. “Would you marry me?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Actually, I never say it. I figured out, from a very short, very bad marriage years ago, that I’m too footloose to be the marrying kind. But I’m more than willing to make an exception for you.”

“Well, thanks so much,” she said kindly, “but I’d only say yes to my worst enemy, and I don’t know you well enough to be sure you could ever get on that list.”

He’d clearly been teasing, but now he hesitated, his eyes narrowing speculatively. He even stopped eating-for fifteen seconds at least. “That’s an interesting thing to say. You think you’d be so hard to be married to?”

“I don’t think. I know.” She hadn’t meant to sidetrack down a serious road. It was his fault. Once he’d implied that he wasn’t in the marriage market, she instinctively seemed to relax more. Now, though, she steered quickly back to lighter teasing. “Never mind that. The point is that you might want to be careful making rash offers like that, at least until you know the woman a little better.”

“Normally, yeah. But in your case I know everything I need to know. I haven’t had food like this since…hell. Maybe since never. Where the hell did you learn to cook?”

“My mom. Most of her family was French, and she loved to putter in the kitchen, let all three of us girls putter with her. My one older sister is downright fabulous. Give Daisy a grain of salt, and I swear she can make something of it. Me, though…I just like to mess around with food.”

“Well, I can cook okay. I even like to-when I’ve got a kitchen to play around in. But at my best, I never came up with dishes like this.”

That was enough compliments. The cats were circling, which he didn’t seem to mind. She’d never fed them from the table, but that didn’t mean anything. Telling a cat not to do something was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, and they’d all smelled the shrimp cooking.

Outside, evening was coming on. The crickets hadn’t started up yet, but the birds had already quieted, the last of the day’s sultry wind died down. It was that pre-dusk time when a soft, intimate yellow haze settled a gentle blanket on everything.

He’d leveled one plate, filled another. She had no choice about piling on more food. God knew how the man stayed so lean, but it was obvious he’d been starved. He even ate her asparagus soup with gusto, and that took guts for a guy.

“I didn’t see that much, driving up-but it looks like you’ve got a beautiful piece of land here,” he remarked.

“It is. Been in my family since the 1700s. My dad’s side was from Scotland. Lots of people with that background here. Maybe they felt at home with the rocky land and the slopes and the stern winters.” She asked, “Sometimes I catch a little French accent when you talk…which I guess is obvious if you work at Jeunnesse. But it’s not there all the time. Do you actually live in France?”

“Yes and no. I’ve worked for Jeunnesse for better than fifteen years now. I like them, like the work. But basically what I’ve always loved is traveling around the globe. So I’ve got a small apartment in Provence, but I’ve kept my American citizenship, have a cottage in upstate New York. Both are only places I hang my hat. I live for months at a time wherever Jeunnesse sends me.”

“So there’s no place you really call home?”

“Nope. I think I was just born rootless.” He said it as if wanting to make sure she really heard him. “You’re the opposite, aren’t you? Everything in your family’s land is about people who value roots.”

“Yes.” She suspected women had chased him, hoping they’d be the one who could turn him around. It was so ironic. She was as root bound as a woman could be. All she’d ever wanted in life was a man to love and a house full of kids. Still, discovering they were such opposites reassured her totally that nothing personal was likely to happen between them. “You’ve never had a hunger for kids?” she asked him.

“I’ve got kids. Two daughters, Miranda and Kate.” He leaned over and filled her glass. She wasn’t sure whether she’d finished two or he just kept topping off her first one. Either way she knew she wouldn’t normally be prying into a stranger’s life without the help of some Long Island iced tea. “My ex-wife still lives in upstate New York-which is why I’ve kept a cottage up there-so that I can easily come back a few times a year to see the girls. Although, often enough as they’ve gotten older, they’ve come to see me. They didn’t mind having a dad spring for tickets to Paris or Buenos Aires.”

“But didn’t you mind missing a lot of their growing-up years?”

He got up and served the grape sorbet-once he’d determined that was the one course he hadn’t tried yet. “Yeah. I missed it. But I tried the suit-and-tie kind of life when I was married. Almost went out of my mind. She kicked me out, told me I was the most irresponsible son of a gun she’d ever laid eyes on. But I wasn’t.”

“No?”

“No. I never missed a day’s work, never failed to bring home a paycheck. It was sitting still I couldn’t handle. Everyone can’t like the same music, you know?”

She knew, but she also suspected there had to be some kind of story in those lake-blue eyes. Maybe he was a vagabond, one of those guys who couldn’t stand to be tied down. But maybe something had made him that way.

She stood up and hefted their plates. His life wasn’t her business, of course, or ever likely to be. “I’ll pop the dishes in the dishwasher, and then we can talk outside.”

“Nope.” He stood up, too. “I’ll pop the dishes in the dishwasher, and you can put your foot up outside.”

She let him.

Once he called out, “Is it okay if I put the cats in the dishwasher, too?”

And she yelled back, “Why, sure. If you don’t want to live until morning.”

He banged around in there, whistling something that sounded like “Hard-Hearted Woman,” occasionally scolding the cats, but eventually he finished up and pushed through the back screen door, carrying another pitcher, sweating cold and jammed with ice cubes.

She’d already settled on the old slatted swing, with her sore foot perched on the swing arm and her good foot braced against the porch rail to keep the swing moving at a lullaby speed. He took the white wicker rocker and poured two glasses. “Two iced teas. No alcohol involved.”

“Good.” It was time they talked seriously. She knew it as well as he did, but the screen door suddenly opened as if by a ghost hand, startling them both…only to see a flat-faced golden Persian nuzzle her way outside. As soon as Cameron settled back in the rocker, the thug-size cat leaped on his lap.

“Could you tell your damn cat it’s hotter than blazes, and I need a fur coat on my lap like I need poison ivy?”

“It’s hard to hear over her purring, but honestly, if she’s in your way, just put her down.”

“Get down,” he told the cat, in a lover’s croon. But that wasn’t the voice he used with her. Maybe he was stroking the cat, but the eyes that met hers had turned cool and careful. “You think we’ve spent enough time getting comfortable with each other?”

“Enough to talk,” she agreed, and settled one thing right off the bat. “You’ve spent hours traveling and it’s too late now to find a place in White Hills. You can stay here tonight, no matter how we work out everything else.”

“I’ll camp outside,” he said.

“Fine.” She wasn’t making a big deal out of where he hung his hat. He’d won some trust from her. Not a ton. But if she didn’t feel precisely safe around him, it wasn’t because she feared he was a serial killer or criminal. The man had more character in his jaw bone than most men did in their whole bodies. “But it’s your plan for my lavender that I want to hear about.”

“Okay. Then let’s start back at the beginning. Apparently you’ve been developing some strains of lavender in your greenhouse. And over a year ago, you sent your sister Daisy a sample of a lavender you particularly liked.”

“I remember all that. I also remember her telling me that she’d passed it on to someone at Jeunnesse.”

“That was me. And initially I thought your sister was the grower. That’s why I talked directly with her instead of you.”

Violet sighed in exasperation. “Honestly, Daisy wouldn’t have deliberately lied to you. She’s just had this thing about protecting me ever since I got divorced. So she probably just tried to keep me out of it until she was sure something good could come from a meeting.”

“Well, the point is…you’ve been crossbreeding a variety of lavender strains and come up with several of your own.”

“Yes,” she concurred.

“Well, Jeunnesse has been making perfume for over a hundred years. They have thousands of acres of lavender under contract. You know the history? Provence was always known for its acres of lavender. It’s breathtaking in the spring and summer, nothing like it on the planet.”

Violet nodded. “I saw it twice as a girl. Our mom’s family was from that area. We still have cousins there, and Mom always, always grew some lavender in the backyard to remind her of home. That’s how I got my ideas to develop different strains.”

Fluffball-her biggest cat, and the one with the brazen-honky-tonk-woman character-draped over his lap and exposed her entire belly for his long, slow stroking fingers. “Maybe you did it for fun, but it’s more than fun to Jeunnesse. The lavender ground around Provence has become problematic for the perfume growers. It’s not a matter of depleted soil or anything like that, because you can always add or subtract nutrients from a soil. But nematodes and diseases build up when the same crop is grown year after year, decade after decade. So now the company seeks to acquire long-term contracts with people across the world who have the right growing situation for lavender.”

Before he could continue the educational lecture, she lifted a finger to interrupt. “Cameron. You don’t have to talk to me as if I were quite that dumb. I know most of this,” she said impatiently.

For a second she forgot how hard she’d worked to give him the impression she was a dotty flake, but he continued without a blink. “Then you also know that lavender isn’t hard to grow. It doesn’t need the pampering that lots of plants require. There are also already hundreds of strains of lavender across Europe and America and South America.”

She knew that, too, but this time she didn’t dare interrupt.

“So…now you come to my role in this. I’m one of Jeunnesse’s agricultural chemists. What that amounts to is that I have a fancy degree that gives me a chance to travel and get my hands dirty at the same time. My job is to study new lavender strains. To evaluate how they work in a perfume equation. In fact, it literally took months for our lab to complete an analysis of the lavender you sent.”

“And-”

“And it’s incomparable. It’s sturdy. It’s strong. The scent is strong and true, hardy. But more than all the growing characteristics I could test, your strain of lavender has the magic.”

“The magic?”

Cameron lifted his hands-annoying the cat when he stopped petting her. “I don’t know how else to explain it. There’s a certain chemical ingredient and reaction in lavender that makes it critical to the fine perfumes. It’s not the lavender smell that’s so important. It’s how the lavender works chemically with the other ingredients. To say it simplistically, I’d call it ‘staying power.’ And I can explain that to you in more depth another time. The point is that your lavender has it. We think. I think.”

She’d never grown the strains of lavender for profit. Or for a crop. Or for its perfume potential. She’d started puttering in the green houses after her divorce, when she’d first come home and had nowhere to go with all the anger, all the loss. Growing things had been renewing. But hearing Cameron talk, seeing the sunset glow on his face, feeling his steady, dark eyes as night came on, invoked a shiver of excitement and interest she’d never expected. “All right.”

“Initially, Jeunnesse just wants to buy your crop. However you planned to harvest it, I’ll either take charge or work alongside you, whichever you want. Obviously, your twenty acres are no big deal in themselves, it takes five hundred pounds of flowers to make an ounce of lavender oil. But I can easily get enough to analyze the quality and nature and characteristics of your lavender. Enough for me to extract some oil, my own way, under my own control, so we’ll know for sure what we could have.”

She’d stopped rocking. Stopped nursing her bee-stung foot. In fact, she’d completely forgotten about her bee-stung foot. “And then what happens?”

“Then, at the end of the harvest, we make some decisions. If your strain is as unique as I think it is, you have several choices. No matter what, you want to get started on patenting your strain. Then, if you want to grow it yourself-and can buy or rent the acreage to do it-then Jeunnesse would offer you a long-term contract. Another choice would be for you to sell the rights to Jeunnesse for a period of years. We’re talking a long-term commitment, worth a great deal of money on both sides-that is, assuming your strain of lavender lives up to its potential. But we have to see what this mysterious strain of yours can do before making any promises.”

Violet wasn’t asking for promises-from him, from Jeunnesse. When it came down to it, she wasn’t asking for any promises from anyone anymore. She’d stopped believing in luck-or that anyone would be there for her-the day she’d caught Simpson in bed with his fertile little bimbo.

Now, though, she felt old, rusty emotions trying to emerge from her heart’s cobwebs. For the lavender, she thought. It’s not that she really believed she was suddenly going to get ridiculously lucky over something so chancy as her playing around in the greenhouse. It was just that there was no reason not to go along with Cameron’s plan. Whether she got rich or not didn’t matter. She had nothing to lose-and a lot of fun and interest to be had-just to see if this crazy thing came true.

For the lavender, she’d take a chance.

Not for the man.

But then, she’d never thought for a minute that Cameron Lachlan was a threat to her heart, so that wasn’t even worth a millisecond’s worry.