“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.
Eleven
Cameron watched his daughter’s Jeep bounce out of his driveway. It had rained the last five days in September. His gravel driveway could have been renamed Mud Puddle Avenue. He waved another goodbye to Miranda and Kate.
The two girls were ecstatic he’d quit Jeunnesse and come home from France for good. They’d both asked about living with him-which could happen, if their mother agreed. He wasn’t that sure what the girls really wanted or needed yet, but in the meantime he was less than two hours from their home. They could visit him anytime they wanted, especially now that Miranda had a driver’s license.
When the car rounded the curve out of sight, he stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and aimed for the old shake-shingled cottage. The surrounding woods were starting to change color, picking up tips of gold and vermilion and bronze. The brook, at the back of the property, glistened in the sunlight. He took in a long clean breath, wanting to feel like he belonged here.
He didn’t.
He wanted to. He’d loved the place when he bought it, even though at the time it was only to have a house close to his daughters for their visits here. And he’d quit Jeunnesse once he’d finished Violet’s business and knew she was going to be set up any way she wanted to be in the future. At that point, though, he knew he no longer wanted to continue with that job. The work had been good to him and for him, but was nothing remotely what he wanted in his life anymore.
He’d thought-perhaps crazily-that he could recapture the feeling he had with Violet. He wanted that feeling of belonging. Of roots. He wanted a red barn and a stone fence. Rocks. Insane neighbors. A place private enough to make wild love in the moonlight with his one and only lover.
He stomped up the porch steps and pushed open the door, thinking darkly that he wanted a woman who cried at the drop of a hat, who made strange and wonderful food, who took in no end of cats and neighbors, who wore Victorian lace and neon-orange underpants.
Nothing but lonely silence greeted him in the house.
It was funny, but coming home, he’d made all kinds of foolish assumptions. For sure, he hadn’t blindly assumed that Violet was ready to talk about wild, crazy things like marriage. But it was going to be so much easier to see her now, easier to talk, easier to be together. He’d planned to try a relentless romantic assault by courting her in all the old-fashioned ways.
It had never once occurred to him that she wouldn’t answer his notes or phone calls.
In the brick kitchen he poured the last mug of coffee from this morning’s pot. The brew was now thicker than mud, not that he cared.
One of the girls had left a pink sock, and a couple of teen girl magazines zooed up the pristine neatness of the place, but otherwise there was nothing inside but wood and a stone fireplace and big leather furniture and silence.
It was tough, accepting that he’d misunderstood everything that mattered. He’d thought he was ready to settle down. He’d though
t he was ready to finally belong. He’d thought he’d finally come to terms with his father’s legacy of fearing a place could own him instead of the other way around. Instead, he’d discovered that his lack of interest in a home had nothing to do with his father.
All this time, it had simply been about finding a woman he wanted to belong with.
He got it now. He got it all. Except, he couldn’t seem to believe that he’d come this far, hurt this much, finally found himself-and found her-and then had to accept that he’d lost her.
The phone rang, a shock of sound that made him whip around and spill a few coffee drops from his mug. He grabbed the receiver and tucked it under his ear.
“Cameron Lachlan?”
He heard the woman’s scream, and immediately recognized the voice as Daisy Campbell, Violet’s oldest sister. He’d always liked her. She was breathtaking, an exotic beauty, fiercely independent, her own woman. She’d been living with some artist in the south of France, which was how she’d been in his “Jeunnesse neighborhood” these last years. But the thing was, they’d always gotten along well, so it was nearly impossible to connect the cool-eyed beauty with the woman yelling at him across the ocean.
“Lachlan, did I or did I not tell you that I’d kill you if you broke my sister’s heart?!”
“What?”
“I told you she was vulnerable. I told you to be good to her or to leave her alone. I thought you were a decent guy!”
“Um, I could have sworn I was, too-”
“Well, I’m leaving Provence for good and coming back across the Atlantic. And the very minute I get home, I’m going to kill you. I’m not sure how yet. I’ve never killed anything before. But where I grew up, buster, a man didn’t get a woman pregnant and then take off.”
“What?” This time he’d been lifting the mug to his mouth. Only, he dropped it. Sludgy hot coffee spattered all over the place. The ceramic mug broke in a half dozen pieces. “What did you say?’
“Give me a break, Lachlan! I don’t care whether she told you or not. If you weren’t going to use some protection, you knew perfectly well you were taking a risk. You know damn well how babies are made!”
“But not for your sister.” He couldn’t seem to catch his breath, couldn’t seem to think.
“What’s that supposed to mean, not for my sister?”
He opened his mouth to answer but then couldn’t. In a flash he realized that Violet had never told her family about the infertility, how her ex-husband had treated her, none of it. She loved her sisters, talked about them all the time. So it must have hurt more than she could bear to even try to share it.
Except with him.
She’d cared enough to share it with him. The thought registered, but it was pretty hard to concentrate. Daisy was still winding up, and beauty or no beauty, she could yell like a drill sergeant. “Don’t even try playing any stupid games with me, Lachlan. I’ve heard every excuse a man can make up for irresponsibility. I can smell them. I told you my sister was vulnerable. All I asked was that you be decent to her, be nice, be fair. If you two ended up in the sack…all right, I admit I thought you’d like each other. I even admit I thought an affair was a good idea for our Vi. But to get her pregnant, you scoundrel, you creep, you turkey, you unfeeling, revolting, irresponsible… Cameron, why the hell aren’t you answering me?”
“Daisy, do me a favor and don’t tell your sister that you called me.”
For the first time since the phone call started, Daisy stopped frothing fire and brimstone. Confusion silenced her-although not for long. “Do you a favor? Do you a favor? Did you want me to do you that favor before or after I murder you?!”
He didn’t mean to hang up on her. He just forgot she was there. Violet? Pregnant with his child? And once those wheels started spinning, they seemed to pick up speed nonstop.
He was in upstate New York, not Vermont. He had fresh food in the fridge, a coffeepot on, a load of clothes heaped in the washer, bills waiting to be paid on the counter, a dentist appointment two days from now. He couldn’t just take off.
Fifteen minutes later he started the car.
If everything went perfectly-no pit or food stops, no construction zones-he could make the trip in four hours.
Naturally he ran into three construction zones and one minor accident. He combined a pit stop with a run on fast food and strong coffee. Even this early in fall, the sun dropped fast. By the time he crossed the border into Vermont, dusk had fallen. Blustery clouds stole the last of daylight, and then there was only that quiet blacktop and him.
He remembered the rolling hills. The stone fences. The white steepled churches in White Hills. The pretty red barns and winding roads. Every familiar sight heightened both his anticipation and his fear.
He pulled into her yard after nine, not realizing until then how long his heart had been pounding, or that the burger he’d wolfed down was still sitting in his stomach like a clunky ball. Yellow lights glowed in her windows. A cornstalk scarecrow sat at the bottom of her porch steps, keeping two of the cats company. A pair of giant pumpkins, still uncarved, framed her door. Pruning shears sat on the porch swing, not put away.
He vaulted the steps of the porch, hiked toward the door and then abruptly stopped. Faster than lightning, he tucked, buttoned, straightened. Then he realized that, hell, he hadn’t brushed his hair since he could even remember. And he should have shaved. Still…he’d come this far, and God knew Violet had seen him in worse shape than in an old black sweater and cords. So he knocked.
Nothing. No answer.
He knocked again, louder this time.
Still, there was no response. So he poked his head in. Smells immediately swarmed his senses-apples and cinnamons and cloves. A bowl of mums nested on the hearth. A copper pot held long, tall grasses and reeds. Lavender-naturally-hung upside down from the kitchen beams. Two cats spotted him, remembered him for the sucker he was and leaped down from the rockers to get petted.
Still, there was no sight of Violet, only the sound of her. She was singing from somewhere upstairs, assuming one could call the sounds emanating from her throat “singing.” Her sister Daisy could scream like a shrew, where Vi’s singing voice, he thought tenderly, resembled steel scratching steel-at a high pitch.
“Violet?” He had to let her know he was there, didn’t want to scare her. “Vi?”
The caterwauling stopped. A hesitant voice called down, “Cameron?” But then followed through with a swift, “Don’t answer that. Obviously you can’t be Cameron.”
Oh, God. It was like coming home. Only his ditsy Violet could make irrational comments like that, and maybe he was crazy, maybe he was risking his heart and his life, but he took the stairs three at a time and galloped down the hall. He wouldn’t have known positively where that ghastly operatic voice had been coming from, if there hadn’t been puffs of fragrant steam dancing out the open door of the master bath.
He leaned both arms against the doorjamb, trying to catch his breath. Yet almost immediately he realized that he would likely never catch his breath because his heart had completely stopped.
She was in the bathtub. No longer singing the blues, just sunken in the warm water to the tips of her nipples, her long hair twisted and clipped out of the way. Two cats sat on the porcelain rim, balanced precariously but acting the part of sentinels. The bathwater wasn’t sudsy. In fact, he could see clearly to her pale white skin under the surface, the long slim legs, the white curve of her hip, the plump breasts. And the tummy.
His gaze fell on her tummy and his heart stopped all over again.
“Hi,” she said, as if she regularly greeted strange men in her bathtub. Now, though, he knew her well. Doing the unpredictable, the ditsy, the flaky, was how she’d learned to protect herself-especially from men wanting to look too closely. He wasn’t fooled anymore. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice and see the gamut of emotions in her eyes. Pain. Longing. Love.
How could he have missed that the love was there?
“Smells great in here,” he murmured.
“It should. It’s my personal recipe for a bath to take away your cares, no matter how heavy your heart is. It’s got a little lavender, a little marjoram, a little peppermint and some secret ingredients I’ll never tell anyone.” She looked at him with those clear, soft, vulnerable eyes and then took a breath.
“Except you, Cam. I’ll tell you. I mix a little lily of the valley and jasmine in there. That’s my secret.”
“Aha,” he said. And heeled off his right shoe. Then his left. His black sweater peeled off by a miracle. It had to be a miracle, because he was too fumble-fingered to do it himself. “I like the tummy.”
She glanced down. “I’ve really been on a milkshake binge.”
“I don’t think that’s the reason for the tummy.”
“No?” She sucked in a breath when he peeled off his cords and shorts. “Um, Cameron. You’re going to smell like flowers if you come in here.”
“I’d care about that if I were a sissy. But I happen to be a tough guy. A tough guy always does what a tough guy has to do.” The cats scattered when he stepped in. The water whooshed up to the top of the tub and splashed over. She didn’t notice or look. She only looked at him, pulled her knees up.
“You couldn’t get a bath closer to home?”
“Well, that’s the problem, chére. It took me this long, not to take a bath, but to realize that this is home.”
Total silence fell for a moment. He sank in, knee to knee, eye to eye, and reached out a hand. She folded her fingers with his. “I didn’t think you wanted a home, Cameron Lachlan.”
“I don’t know if I ever told you about my dad. I loved him. He wasn’t a bad guy, nothing like that. But he built his whole life around possessions. Things owned him instead of the other way around. He was never home for us. He never had time for us.”
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