good friends could not support you?’ Gareth asked, the concern in his voice almost upsetting her careful control.
‘One—a vicar—did offer to take me into his home, but I do not care to be beholden.’ And certainly not to a pious hypocrite who preached virtue to his flock while visiting Mama every Saturday night! And there was always the fear that those men might expect her to carry on in her mother’s footsteps.
Mama had done the shocking, the unthinkable thing and had sacrificed her virtue and her reputation to give her daughter a future. Jessica could only guess at what that had meant for a woman who had loved her husband, with all his faults, and who had been brought up in the strictest respectability.
‘You do what you have to do, darling,’ she had said once when Jessica had protested that the Honourable Mr Farrington was anything but honourable. The reality of what Mama had been to those men had never been spoken between them, the fiction that Mama was merely keeping them company was always maintained, even when Jessica dabbed arnica on bruised wrists or listened to her mother’s stifled sobs late at night.
You do what you have to do. And now she was all but standing in her mother’s shoes, only she was doing it to gain her own independence, once and for all, and to repay a debt to a man who had rescued her from degradation and shame.
‘I see.’ Gareth poured himself more wine and sat back, loose-limbed, relaxed, in the high-backed chair. ‘I must confess to even more admiration for you than I was already feeling. Your independent career and high standards are to be applauded.’
‘Thank you.’ Jessica felt embarrassed. She knew, without false modesty, that she deserved the praise and yet it was strange to have someone recognise what she had achieved, what it had cost in sheer hard work and determination. ‘Now, tell me about tomorrow.’
He smiled, obviously recognising that she was trying to turn the subject. ‘I will go and buy your jewels and you and Maude can go and have your scent designed.’
‘Designed?’ Jessica stared at him.
‘But of course. When you pass by, men will inhale, entranced, and know it is you, and only you.’
‘Poppycock!’ Jessica retorted roundly. ‘You are teasing me.’
‘Not at all.’ Gareth regarded her for some moments, then stood up. ‘Will you come here, Jessica?’ Wary, she stood and walked towards him. ‘Give me your hands.’
Biting her lip, she placed her palms in his outstretched hands. His fingers meshed with hers then lifted, carrying her inner wrists up to his face. His breath feathered the fragile, exposed skin and her own breath caught in her throat.
‘You have your own, unique, fragrance. I can smell it now, warm and female and Jessica.’ His voice was husky, the words, spoken so close to the sensitised flesh, was like the brush of feathers across her pulse. ‘But it is subtle, a scent only a lover will know and recognise.’ And you, she thought, unsteady on her feet. You will know the scent of me again. ‘We need to give you a scent the hunting male can find and then seek out.’
‘That is a disconcerting thought,’ she murmured.
Gareth’s eyes lifted, met hers across their conjoined hands, and she thought she glimpsed the hunter there, in front of her, dangerous, more of an animal than a man. She drew their hands towards her, pulling down until his knuckles were level with her mouth, then inclining her head until she could inhale the heat from the back of his hands.
‘Warmth and man and Gareth,’ she murmured. His very stillness told her she had startled him, even without the sudden hammering of his pulse against her wrist. She kept her eyes on the clean lines of his tendons, the blue veins under the skin, the healing graze on one big knuckle. A man’s hands engulfing hers, and yet, at this moment, who was the stronger? She rather thought it was she.
‘You learn your lessons well, Miss Gifford,’ Gareth said after a moment, and she admired the control in his voice. ‘You are going to become a very dangerous huntress.’
‘Count upon it, my lord,’ she promised, releasing his fingers and turning on her heel to walk to the door. As she opened it she turned to see him still standing there watching her, a smile of reluctant admiration on his lips.
How I dared, Jessica thought, distracted, as Maude’s carriage drew up in front of a small bow-fronted shop entrance. Todmorton’s it read in spindly gilt lettering above the door. Craftsmen Perfumers. At a gesture from Maude she pulled down her veil and stood to follow her out of the carriage.
It had been keeping her awake all night, tossing and turning. How she had dared turn the tables on Gareth like that, behave like a woman of the demi-monde, how it had felt to hold him in her thrall for those long, shimmering moments while his blood raced in his veins and his skin heated in her clasp.
It was power and it was dangerous power and he was not the man to practise it on. There were no men it was safe to practise such wiles upon and certainly not the one with whom she had to act out this masquerade. She did not need to seduce, only to give the impression of seduction. But it was all becoming too real.
‘What did you say, Jessica?’ Maude turned from her contemplation of a display of giant bath sponges in the shop window. ‘Did you say frightening?’
‘Er, yes. Frightening being out like this, in disguise,’ she extemporised as the footman opened the shop door for her and they entered into fragrant gloom.
‘Not to worry, no one will know you veiled, and afterwards, no one could make any connection with you wearing that frightful stuff gown,’ Maude reassured her, blissfully unconscious of the fact that such dreadful gowns were Jessica’s everyday uniform. ‘Mr Todmorton, good morning. Yes, I am in the best of health, thank you. Now, this is the friend of mine for whom we require a scent. Something unique, something tantalising, yet discreet. Can you help us?’
‘Lady Maude, an honour to assist a friend of yours. Clarence, a chair for her ladyship and show her our new range of triple-milled soaps while she waits.’ The man who bustled forwards, stirring the air into a swirling rainbow of scents as his long apron swished across the floor, was of an indeterminate age. His bald pate gleamed, his white hands were clasped across his rotund belly and his smile was wide and ingenuous.
‘Madam, please, come into my workshop.’
* * *
Jessica felt awkward, sitting disguised by her heavy veil in front of the neat, professional figure of the perfumer in his workroom. She looked round, curious at its ordered rows of labelled drawers from floor to ceiling, its racks of bottles and phials and its clean, bare surfaces. She had expected to smell a riot of perfumes like the fragrant shop outside, then realised he must need to work with nothing to distract his sensitive nostrils.
‘Would you mind removing your glove, madam?’ With the coolly impersonal tone it was like going to the doctor. Jessica stripped off her right glove. ‘And holding out your hand, palm upwards?’
It was like the encounter with Gareth last night, and yet utterly unlike. This man made no attempt to touch her, merely leaning forward until his nose was above her bared wrist and inhaling. He might, she thought with an inward chuckle, be a cook smelling the soup to adjust the chervil.
‘Hmm.’ Mr Todmorton sat back, nodded sharply and reached for a notebook. ‘You wish for a scent for evening and for day, madam?’
‘Yes.’ She supposed she did, although a daring dab of lavender water, or essence of violets on her handkerchief was the sum total of Jessica’s experience with perfume.
‘And the impression you wish to create?’
She stared at him, failing to understand, then realised he could not see her expression for her veil. ‘I am sorry, I do not quite comprehend.’
Again, she might have been with a medical man, she embarrassed to discuss some feminine problem, he entirely at his professional ease.
‘Do