“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
“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
