Wild in the Moonlight

by Jennifer Greene

  The next time Violet looked up, somehow it was well past seven. The kids had both gone home, the closed sign was parked in the window, and Cameron was standing in the Herb Haven doorway with the fading sun behind him.

  “What the hell kind of place are you running here, chére?” he murmured.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re doing the work of four men and then some. You barely had time to grab half a sandwich at lunch, and I know you had a couple of cookies. But have you had anything serious to eat since breakfast?”

  Who knew? Who cared? She had no idea how long he’d been standing there, but the silence suddenly coiled around her nerves like velvet ribbons. He looked like such a shout of male next to all the flower sights and smells and fuss, especially with his leg cocked forward and his broad shoulders filling the doorway. When she met his gaze, there was no instant thunderclap, just more of those itchy-soft velvet nerves. She was just so aware that no one else was in sight or sound but her and Cam and all that golden dusk.

  But then she recalled his question. He sounded as if he were accusing her of being an effective manager, so Violet instinctively defended herself. “I really don’t work very hard. All my running around is just an act-to fool people into thinking I have a head for business. I’d be in real trouble if the customers ever realized I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.”

  “Sure,” Cam said, but there was a wicked glint in his eyes. She had a bad feeling he was on to her flutter-brained routine-which was a foolish fear, since every guy in the neighborhood and surrounding county had been convinced for years she was a hard-core ditz. He distracted her, though, when he lifted a white paper bag and shook it.

  She smelled. “Food?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. It’s nothing like what you cook. But I made a trek into White Hills and picked up some fresh deli sandwiches, drinks, dessert. By midafternoon I figured that I’d never get you out to the lavender to talk unless I somehow wooed you away from the phone and the business. I thought you must be hungry by now.”

  She wasn’t. Until she looked at him. And then realized there seemed to be something hollow inside her that had been aching for a long time.

  “I don’t have long,” she said.

  He nodded, as if expecting that answer, too-but shook the bag again, so she could catch the scent of a kosher dill and corned beef on rye.

  “I don’t usually eat red meat,” she said twenty minutes later, as she was wolfing down her second sandwich.

  “I can see you’re not into it.”

  “And I never eat chips. They’re terrible for you.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, as he opened the second bag of chips and spilled them onto a napkin.

  She wasn’t exactly sure how he’d conned her into this picnic, but he seemed to have pulled a Pied Piper routine-his carrying an old sheet to use as a tablecloth, and the food and his car keys and strapping her into the front seat and his driving-while she did nothing but follow the scent of food. By the time he’d unfurled the sheet to sit on, on the crest of the east hill overlooking the lavender, she’d already been diving in.

  He had a kind side, she had to give him that, because he didn’t say a word when she gobbled down the second helping of chips. All that salt. All that fat. She tasted guilt with every bite, but, man, were they good. “You really ate ahead of time?” she insisted again.

  “Sure did,” he said.

  But she wasn’t convinced. He’d brought enough for two. She’d assumed he was diving in when she was, until she suddenly glanced up and noticed that he was mounding his food on her plate. “I never eat this much. You must think I’m a greedy pig.”

  “Yeah. I’ve always admired greed in a woman. Always admired meanness, too, and you’ve got an unusually mean streak. I was watching how you treated those two kids who work for you. They both think you’re a goddess.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m in awe, chére.” When she finally finished enough to please him, he reopened the bag and emerged with more goodies. “Almond cookies. And there’s a little more raspberry iced tea. Although I only bought a few cookies. I had no idea you were going to need three or four dozen just to fill you up on a first round.”

  The darn man was so comfortable and fun to be with that she had to laugh…but then, of course, reality caught up with her. She couldn’t be feeling comfortable. Not here.

  It wasn’t that she never came out to this stretch of the farm. She’d planted the twenty acres of lavender over the past few years, after all. Still, she avoided this view if she could help it. She wasn’t the one who’d tended it-her younger sister Camille had, when she’d come home early in the spring, yelling the whole time about how crazy Violet had become to neglect anything like this.

  And the craziness was true. Obviously, she knew she was coming out here with Cameron; they had to get the harvest business settled. But for whole long stretches of time, she forgot how traumatically symbolic the lavender was for her.

  A knot filled her throat as she gazed at the stretching, rolling sweep of lavender. Until Camille had come home, the long rows of lavender bushes had been an unkempt, overgrown thatchy mess. They still weren’t perfect, yet Violet-who had always nurtured and mothered everything and everyone-had thrown these plants in the ground and just left them.

  Cameron suddenly said quietly, “Tell me what you originally planned to do with this?”

  His voice was gentle, serious, nonjudgmental, but she couldn’t speak for the lump in her throat-not for that moment.

  The smell of lavender saturated the warm summer air. The buds were just barely coming on, because all the strains she’d put in were late types. Buds would keep coming from now through August, and by late summer the smell would be unbearable, invading everything, impossible to escape from-not that anyone would want to.

  The plants were pale purple, soft in the evening light, and that first blush of bud smell was like nothing else-not at all heavy, but immeasurably light, a scent that was forever fresh and frisky and clean. There was nothing quite like it. No other flower, no other herb, had a scent even remotely related to lavender.

  “Violet?”

  When he prompted her, she motioned to the field without looking at him. “Our mom-her name was Margaux-always had lavender growing in the backyard. She’s the one who taught me what I know. There are all kinds of lavender, but basically most strains fall in one of two camps. ‘Hardy lavender’ is what a lot of people call English lavender, even though it’s not from England. And the ‘tender lavenders’ tend to grow around France and Spain.”

  Cameron leaned back. “Go on.”

  “Okay. The thing is…you get the finest oil-as far as perfume-from the hardy lavenders. Which I guess you obviously know, huh?”

  “I may know just a little something about that, yeah. But keep talking, anyway. I want to know how you got into this, how you developed this strain.”

  There. She was starting to unchoke. Cameron surely knew all this stuff already if he was a chemist, but babbling was one of her best ways of covering up nerves. “Well…I knew from my mom that there are advantages to each type of lavender. The oil wasn’t really my interest, because I already realized you needed some ridiculous amount-like 500 pounds of flowers-to get even ounces of the oil. But some lavenders are stronger in color and scent. Some are hardier as far as where they can grow.”

  She wasn’t going to think about babies. She was just going to keep talking until she got a good grip and could look at Cameron with a smile again. “Anyway, after the divorce, I had time on my hands. And Daisy happened to send me some interesting strains of lavender, so then, for fun, I just started setting up some experiments in the greenhouse. I brought in some of my mom’s favorite strains from her garden, then started collecting others from around the country. What I wanted to do was just…play…see if I could blend the best qualities of all my favorites.”

  “For what reason?” Came
ron asked.

  “Just for fun. Just to see if I could do it, if I could produce a lavender where the scent stayed truer than all the other types. I always loved puttering with plants, you know? And-” She stopped.

  She was lying to him. Images spilled through her mind, mental pictures of the man she’d once married and believed was the love of her life. She’d learned everything she knew about sex from Simpson-particularly all the wrong things. Things like how guys needed to get off or they suffered. Things like how guys couldn’t wait. Things like Real Women climaxed with no problem unless they were inhibited. Also, Real Women got pregnant as long as the guy was virile, and Simpson’s sperm-he’d had that checked-were damn good swimmers.

  She was the one with the skinny tubes.

  “Violet, what’s wrong?” Cameron asked quietly.

  She stared at the field until her eyes started to clear. “After the divorce…I just wanted to grow things. Reproduce things. Everybody thought I was crazy to let this field get so out of control. They were all right. But the truth, Cam, is that I didn’t care if it was out of control.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “It was mine to love or lose. If I lost it, if I never made a dime, I didn’t care. I don’t need money from it. I can afford the loss. I don’t really give a damn if anyone thinks I’m crazy or not.”

  “Hey,” he said gently.

  Tell him, her heart said. Just tell him. Then it’s out on the table. You’ll know if it’s important to him or not.

  But she knew it wasn’t that simple. Cameron might have an already grown family; he might not want kids. But a lot of men thought a woman was less than a complete woman-less sexual, less feminine-if she was infertile.

  “I just wanted to grow something. Of my own. I wanted to make something out of land that had been barren, because this slope was rocky and nothing ever grew well here before. So it was the challenge. To create something that hadn’t existed before. It wasn’t about making money. It was just about-”

  “Whoa,” Cameron whispered, and as if he had some cockamamie idea that he was dealing with a fragile woman on the verge of a big, noisy, crying jag, he swooped her into his arms.

  Seven

  The last thing Cameron intended to do was pull Violet into his arms.

  Yeah, he’d dragged her off to the lavender field-and brought the picnic dinner-but that was only because he finally figured out the whole picture. Violet’s herb business was chaotically busy. Unless he found some way to isolate her from the phone and her neighbors and all the other people noise, he figured they’d never get the contract details settled between them. That issue was critical. Even though the nature of her lavender strains were supposed to be harvested late, the huge heat wave was bringing on the crop at the speed of sound. Within days, they needed to start the harvest.

  So he’d taken her to the one place where he knew he could talk to her privately, but not to seduce her. Not to even think about touching her. Nothing would have happened-Cameron really believed-if she hadn’t suddenly looked so shaken up.

  He couldn’t stand it. Violet was so full of energy. For damn sure, she was a manipulative, confusing woman who seemed to mislead a guy about the truth of things. She was stubborn, independent to an exasperating degree, a woman who did exactly what she wanted on her own timetable. She was a tough cookie-even if for some reason she didn’t want anyone to know it.

  And that was exactly why it killed him to see her eyes fill up, suddenly so full of hurt and sadness. He’d had to grab her. He wasn’t thinking of romance, he was just responding instinctively to a need to protect her, comfort her somehow.

  Only a split second later, all his honest, sincere, chivalrous intentions went to hell.

  The very instant his mouth came down on hers, the damn woman responded. Her lips were warm as sunshine, as soft as silver. Her head tipped back, willingly absorbing the pressure of his mouth and his first kiss…which gave him absolutely no choice but to follow through with a second kiss and then a third. Her eyelashes fluttered down and her slim fingers seemed to hesitate, then slowly climb his shoulders and curve around his neck.

  When he felt her warm, supple body slide against his…something happened. Deep inside him, there was a silent whoosh, as if the rest of the world disappeared from sight, sound, touch. She was his reality. She, and all the senses she invoked.

  He clutched her tighter. She clutched right back, and suddenly all that long, wild, silky hair was coming loose in his hands. Her bracelets jangled, one of her sandals slipped and tumbled down the slope; yet she never opened her eyes, never made out like there was a damn thing that mattered to her but him-and getting more of those sweet, dangerous, uninhibited kisses.

  Maybe he was guilty of initiating that first kiss. Maybe he knew he shouldn’t have, knew she was trouble. But how could he possibly, conceivably have guessed that she’d be this much trouble?

  He’d tasted her before. It had been intense, but not like this. Whatever had shaken her seemed to act like some kind of trigger, as if something tight and trapped were suddenly freed from deep inside her. She not only kissed him back but dumped emotional rocket fuel on the flames. She didn’t just yield but sought. She didn’t just touch but invited, demanded, his touch.

  Warm, damp skin slid against his. He smelled her hair, her ice-raspberry breath, the lick of scent on her skin. As the night dropped, with the moon showing up like a promise in the far sky, it seemed as if suddenly all those acres of lavender released a whole song of scent. The lavender flowed all around them, filling the air, filling their senses, teasing their sense of taste and smell. The scent was so like her-wild and fresh and elusive. Magical.

  “Cam,” she whispered, her voice barely a whisper, an ache of wonder.

  He felt the same wonder, tried to steal more in another kiss. His hand drifted down, shimmering over her collarbone and then to her breast, snuggling there. No matter how carefully, how reverently he touched, his body groaned that it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

  Her blouse pushed up, pushed off fairly easily.

  For a second he thought she wasn’t wearing a bra-but she was, it was just that the fabric was a teensy scrap of lace. A front opener, though, easy enough to unlatch. And then he had his warm callused hand on her immeasurably soft breast, the flesh swelling for him, the nipple perking under his palm-only that wasn’t enough, either. Not even close to enough. She groaned against his mouth, so he bent down and delivered kisses down her throat, down to her breasts, faster kisses now, rougher ones.

  Somewhere he still had a functioning conscience-a murky conscience, but one stabbing him with warning instincts. He knew he didn’t understand her. Knew she had some troubling deep waters that she hid from sight. Knew she was a worrisome maze of contradictions.

  He’d seen her supposed flaky side…yet he’d also seen how many balls she efficiently, effectively juggled, even on an average business day.

  He’d also heard her claim more than once how she didn’t care if the lavender had gotten out of control, yet that was impossibly contradictory, too, because no one accidentally experimented in a greenhouse to the tune of twenty acres of lavender.

  And then there was her wildly estrogen-overdosed house, compared to that strange, contrary shock of her austere nun-like bedroom he’d only glimpsed.

  He couldn’t be sure of anything, not around her, except for the one obvious thing-that he was here for the lavender. And to do that business, they had to be able to trust each other. To seduce her before she could trust him was as foolhardy as betting on a lottery.

  He’d never been foolhardy. Independent, yes. Self-centered, oh, yes. But never a fool.

  “Cam,” she whispered again, this time pleating his shirt open with her hands, pulling at it, reaching to touch his bare chest with her own.

  His head promptly swelled with fool’s thoughts, fool’s needs, filled so full there was nothing else but her, her taste, her profile in the moonlight, her lavender-whispered skin
, her winsome, demanding mouth.

  He had to go back for more. This pull for her-he had to get a grasp of it. What he felt with her, for the land, for everything here was alien to the Cameron Lachlan he knew himself to be. He’d sworn never to become like his father, never to become attached to a place. He’d sworn never to let any place own him. Ever.

  Yet there was something about her that made him feel this horrifying, embarrassing, stupid sense of belonging. She made him feel as if she needed him.

  As if he needed her.

  As if she wanted him-just him, not any man, not any guy, but only him.

  He wanted her, only her-not just a woman to fill a sexual need or the lonely hours of the night, but something else, something more. Cameron kept getting the unnerving, frightening impression that he wanted her the way he’d wanted no other woman. That she alone could fill a hole inside him that he hadn’t even known was there.

  The night kept coming, bringing the privacy of darkness, intensifying the scents of verdant earth and lavender. The ache inside him felt part of the night, lonely and dark, hot and urgent. He knew it was crazy, yet the drumbeat of his pulse kept thrumming the same message, that he’d lose something irretrievable if he didn’t love her, didn’t have her, now, right now.

  She lay back against the cool sheet he’d brought as a picnic blanket, pulling him down to her, communicating how much she wanted the same thing. Him. Naked. Now. For whatever reasons, right or wrong, sane or crazy, this felt so right. She felt right.

  His shirt peeled away as easily as her skirt. She made an exasperated sound, half sat up, peeled off a tangle of noisy jewelry from her wrists and ears, came back to him, damp soft skin intimately molding to his. He had to devour her with more kisses. Against the white sheet, her skin looked so golden dark, her eyes so shining, and all that wild silken hair kept tangling him closer. He thought she was naked, but it seemed she was still wearing see-through panties…panties he didn’t discover until his mouth had trailed an intense, tender path from her breast to the hollow in her navel, down to the sweet roundness of her abdomen and finally lower.