Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) Read online

  “Bestselling author Jennifer Blake once again demonstrates why she excels at storytelling, with this fascinating intermingling of tales from the past and present that combine for a truly delightful read.”

  ~Rave Reviews

  “Some really clever plotting here, and not a few surprises when everything is neatly wound up. Get two stories for the price of one and enjoy every minute of both.”

  ~Romance Reviews

  “…a competent mix of romance, history and intrigue … Entwining Violet and Allain’s love story with that of their 20th century counterparts, Blake also provides interesting material on the history of perfume.”

  ~Publishers Weekly

  “…a spellbinding novel of two passionate women who dare to live their wildest dreams. It is a magnificent tale that only Jennifer Blake could write.”

  ~Barnesandnoble.com

  “Blake’s a master at romantic fiction.”

  ~The Chattanooga Times

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without the written permission of publisher or author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover Art by Amanda Kelsey of Razzle Dazzle Design.

  Copyright © 1992 and 2013 by Patricia Maxwell

  First Ballantine Hardcover Edition: June 1992

  First Ballantine Paperback Edition: December 1995

  First Fawcett Mass Market Edition: December 1993

  First E-Reads Publication: October 2008

  First Steel Magnolia Press Publication: 2013

  1

  THE PERFUME SHOP WAS DIM and still, lighted only by the street lamps beyond the front windows and the Venetian-glass chandelier left burning in the back. The corners and the spaces behind the glinting glass counters were thick with night shadows. Soft darkness concealed the opening to the rear work area.

  Joletta Caresse made no move to turn on more lights. She closed and locked the tall entrance door behind her with swift care. Drawing out the old-fashioned brass key, she stood still to listen.

  Footsteps sounded from down the street outside, coming along the sidewalk under the arcaded front of the building. Their cadence slowed as they drew nearer. Abruptly, they stopped.

  Joletta peered through the wavy, antique glass in the shop door. Looking past the black-bowed funeral wreath attached at eye level, she could just make out the tall form of a man standing back in the shadows of the arcade.

  Her heartbeat increased, thudding against the wall of her chest. In spite of the dimness inside the shop, she felt unbearably exposed. The impulse to run, to hide, blossomed inside her while at the same time her feet felt glued to the floor. She gripped the key in her hand so tightly that its ornate edges pressed against the bones of her fingers.

  The man outside stood unmoving. He made no attempt to conceal himself further, but seemed to be looking straight at her with an intent and purposeful stare. There was in the set of his shoulders an impression of controlled power and alert senses.

  Joletta had no idea how long he had been following her. She had noticed him only in the last block before she reached the perfume shop. Even then, she had not been sure he was not simply walking in the same direction. He had made no effort to close the distance between them, yet there was something in the close matching of his pace to hers that had set off alarm bells in her head. The dangers of the French Quarter of New Orleans at night were something she had heard about all her life, but this was the first time she had ever run into a problem.

  Joletta’s eyes began to burn from trying to penetrate the dimness under the arcade. She closed them tightly for an instant to relieve the strain. When she looked again, there was nothing but empty space.

  The man was gone.

  She leaned her forehead against the glass door an instant as she breathed a soft imprecation. She was not sure what she had thought was about to happen, but the relief that nothing had, made her feel weak in the knees. At the same time her nerves jangled with irritation at the cat-and-mouse game the man had played with her those few seconds.

  It was possible, of course, that she was imagining things. It would not be too surprising; she had been through so much in the last few days that her reactions were something less than normal.

  Then again, perhaps she was not.

  Joletta took a deep breath as she tried to relax. In the semidarkness, the smell of fragrance was pervasive, reaching out to envelop her like the embrace of a familiar and well-loved presence. Joletta turned slowly, swallowing hard against the sudden ache of grief and loss.

  Mimi. The scent was hers, the indelible signature of Anna Perrin, Joletta’s grandmother. That rich mingling of perfumes had always clung to the older woman’s clothes, to the soft white crepe of her skin and the silver waves of her hair. It had been a part of her, like the radiating warmth of her smile and the name Mimi that Joletta had bestowed on her as a child. That fragrance also invaded Mimi’s rooms above, the living quarters used in turn by the four generations of Fossier women who had owned the shop. Over the years the smell had penetrated the fibers of the draperies and rugs, sneaked into the hidden drawers and age cracks of the antique furnishings, even permeated the plaster on the walls and the wood of the floors. Mimi had loved that constant aura of perfume. She had been lucky, she said, to live always among the souls of flowers.

  There had been thousands of flowers at Mimi’s funeral, the out-pouring of friends and business associates and the many civic, social, and charitable organizations with which Mimi had been involved during her lifelong residency in the Vieux Carré, as the French Quarter was known among the descendants of the French Creoles. Their scent had mingled with the odor of sanctity during the service at St Louis Cathedral and floated on the warm, humid air that stirred the gray moss on the live oaks of the cemetery as Mimi was laid to rest in the Fossier family mausoleum. Everyone had known how Mimi loved flowers; like the ownership of the perfume shop, it was a tradition of the Fossier women.

  Joletta gave a slight shake of her head to dislodge the images. She wouldn’t think of such things. Lifting her chin, she stepped deeper into the shop.

  Her movements were assured; the place was such a part of her life, had been from childhood, that she could find her way through it in the darkest of nights. She knew the exact periwinkle-blue color that covered the walls. She had overturned the Parisian flower cart holding beribboned baskets of soap and potpourri during a rowdy game of chase with her cousins Natalie and Timothy, one rainy Sunday as they were all growing up. From the time she was twelve, it had been her duty to dust the antique armoires with their lace-swathed shelves filled with perfume containers of every size, shape, and color. Her first lessons in making perfume had been given on her thirteenth birthday, using the essences in the stoppered vials of brown glass on the vendor’s cart. She had tripped on the threadbare antique Aubusson on the floor and turned her ankle while wearing her first pair of high heels. And she had cried out her anguish and confusion over the ending of her four-year engagement while lying on the old rosewood settee covered in cream shadow-striped silk.

  The shop was full of memories, good and bad; it had been the center of her life after she had come to live with Mimi following the deaths of her parents when their car skidded off the
road in a rainstorm and overturned in a canal. She sometimes thought that was the reason she had been so determined to get away from it when she left college; the smell of perfume had seemed to dominate her every waking moment. She had been sick of it.

  She had wanted independence and personal privacy, had needed to get away from the cloying, indulgent, loving examination of her every movement, thought, and mood. She had been determined, then, to prove that she didn’t need anyone, not Mimi, not the older women who worked in the shop and who had become substitute mothers, and especially not her ex-fiancé. It was the reason she had moved into her own apartment close to her job as historian in a research library and well away from the Vieux Carré just over six months ago.

  Joletta reached the doorway at the back of the shop which led into the shelf-lined mixing room. As she stepped through, the perfume scent was even stronger, coming from the hundreds of glass decanters that shone in rows along the walls. In the center was a worktable with deep shelves underneath that held old-fashioned leather-bound ledgers and also newer ones covered with plastic. These ledgers contained hundreds of formulas for perfumes, some recording the various mixtures made under special label for the public over the years, but most with careful notations of the custom blends of customers. A large portion of the entries were recently made, though there were also notations dating back over a period of nearly a hundred and forty years, a melancholy listing of the ingredients for the favorite scents of women long dead. Each blend was set down in a complicated system of numbers and symbols developed by Violet Fossier, Joletta’s great-great-great-great-grandmother, who had founded Fossier’s Royal Parfums so long ago, just after the Civil War.

  A frown of irritation pleated the skin between Joletta’s soft brown eyes as she surveyed the ledger shelves. They were a jumbled mess, with the ancient books mixed helter-skelter with the new and all of them piled this way and that with their sheets crumpled and folded.

  Her aunt Estelle Clements, Mimi’s older daughter and sister to Joletta’s mother, was responsible for the disorder. She had been in the shop earlier with her daughter Natalie, searching for a special perfume formula. Known as Le Jardin de Cour, Courtyard Garden, it was the oldest perfume made by the shop, one that accounted for well over half its yearly sales.

  There was a family legend that said that Le Jardin de Cour, under a different name, had been the favorite fragrance of the Empress Eugénie of France in the days of the Second Republic. Eugénie, so the story went, had gotten it from a former serving woman of the Empress Joséphine, an elderly woman who had taken it when her mistress died. Josephine had received it from Napoléon Bonaparte himself, who was known to be addicted to fine perfume. The scent was supposed to have been discovered by Napoléon during his Egyptian campaign, and prized by him because it was said to be the perfume with which Cleopatra had ensnared Mark Antony, one that had come to her from the Far Eastern deserts where it had been used in ancient times by the priestesses of the Moon Goddess.

  This special formulation had always been closely guarded by the Fossier women, its exact ingredients known only to the owner of the shop in each generation and passed down from mother to daughter over the years. Mimi had been the last of the line to be entrusted with it. However, Mimi had failed to pass it on.

  They had all watched Mimi make the perfume many times; they knew most of the different essences that went into it. Le Jardin de Cour, however, was no simple blend. To put this one perfume together could take an hour or more of careful measuring and mixing. One tiny slip, a minute droplet too much of a single flower or plant essence, and the process would have to be begun again from scratch. The ruined batch might be perfume of a sort, might even be marketed at a reduced price, but it would not be Le Jardin de Cour.

  Mimi had tried desperately to give them the information they needed as she lay in ICU during the short hours between the time of her fall on the stairs and the moment when her heart stopped beating. It was impossible. She had sustained a stroke that paralyzed the left side of her body, including her facial muscles, so that her speech was croaking and slurred beyond recognition. The all-important formula was far too complicated, required too much detail and precision, to be communicated in the few sounds Mimi could manage.

  One by one they had tried to understand — Estelle, Natalie, Timothy, and Joletta herself. One by one the others had turned away, exhausted by the useless effort. Then, near the end, Joletta had made out a single word, just three difficult and uncertain syllables.

  Diary. That was what it sounded as if Mimi had said.

  Joletta had told the others what she had heard, though she told them, too, that she could not remember ever seeing Mimi keep any sort of diary. Aunt Estelle and Natalie had practically run from the hospital. The doctors had warned them Mimi could not hold on much longer, but they would not wait.

  Timothy had stayed behind to be with Joletta. He sat with his hands between his knees, interminably cracking his knuckles and sweeping his shock of overlong blond hair out of his eyes while he talked in a rambling fashion. He was loose-limbed and athletic, and might have been considered handsome if his personality had been more forceful. But he left the aggressiveness to his mother and his sister. Only a year younger than Joletta, he seemed less because he was so much under his mother’s thumb. His manner was breezy, and his hazel eyes glinted with humor. He tried to distract Joletta, but saw it was useless after a time and slouched off down the hospital hallway in search of the cafeteria and an evening meal.

  Joletta had been alone with her grandmother as the evening shadows closed in on the hospital and the hush of the dinner hour invaded ICU. She had been alone as Mimi’s pulse grew weaker, as her breathing slowed, stopped, began again, then ceased in the unbroken silence of death. For long moments afterward, Joletta stood in the isolation of the curtain-enclosed cubicle, holding her grandmother’s lax fingers with their bony knuckles and fine white skin marred by age spots, fingers that had baked and cleaned and soothed her childish hurts. She smoothed the soft silver strands of hair from Mimi’s temples, hair that still seemed so alive. And warm tears pooled in her own eyes and slid slowly down her face.

  Aunt Estelle had made a scene in the corridor outside ICU when she returned to find that Mimi was gone. She claimed Joletta had sent her on a fool’s errand, that she had wanted her and her children out of the way at the last so she could be the only one to hear Mimi’s final words.

  Joletta had been so angry and heartsick at the commotion that she could not speak even to defend herself against such vicious accusations. Still, it would be a long time before she could forgive her aunt for making them.

  Joletta didn’t like to think of that moment, even now. Moving past the ledger cabinet, she continued on toward the heavy door in the far end of the mixing room. She reached for the iron bar that closed off entry to the courtyard beyond.

  With the heavy bar in her hand, she hesitated, thinking of the man on the sidewalk. The courtyard was completely walled in, but there were two other entrances. One was a locked doorway in the great iron grate that closed off the porte cochère, or old carriage way, that led from the street, and the other was a small, wooden gate connecting to the courtyard of the building next door.

  Joletta shook her head as she pushed up the bar and stepped outside. No one had used the other door or gate in years; Mimi had preferred that everyone come and go through the shop so she could keep an eye on them. They were probably rusted shut, but even if they were not, only someone thoroughly familiar with the place could find their way inside.

  Joletta made her way along the arcaded loggia that protected the shop’s back door toward the staircase that led up to the rear balcony of the rooms above. She smoothed her hand over the worn top of the newel post of the mahogany stair as she began to climb upward. Looking out over the courtyard beyond, she thought for a moment about Violet Fossier, the woman who had first established the perfumery.

  Violet had taken as her shop the ground floor of the town hou
se that had been built for her as a bridal gift from her husband. This town house, located on one of the most famous streets in the Quarter, had been designed by James Gallier at the height of his fame as an architect to Louisiana planters. The rooms were spacious and airy, with finely carved moldings. Their furnishings — the marble mantels, the paintings and sculptures, mirrors and costly silk-tasseled draperies, silver, crystal, and fine china ornaments — had been brought back from a grand tour of Europe taken as a bridal journey of sorts by Violet and Gilbert Fossier. It had been during this two-year ramble around Europe that Violet had conceived her passion for perfume. It was also there that she had come upon the formula for the special fragrance she had called Le Jardin de Cour.

  This perfume, as Mimi was fond of telling customers, had actually taken its name from the courtyard behind the shop. Unlike the house, which had been commissioned and furnished by her husband, the courtyard had been the creation of Violet Fossier. To Joletta it had always been the most serene and satisfying place in New Orleans. The high walls of cream plaster with Roman arches under the loggias along the lower floor of the house blended harmoniously with the geometric-shaped flower and herb beds lined with boxwood in the French style. These, with the paths radiating from a central fountain and a stone arbor covered with ancient grapevines, showed the influence of that long-ago tour of Europe. The plants chosen by Violet years ago were all scented, from the climbing roses and wisteria on the walls and huge old sweet olive and cape jasmine shrubs that filled the corners to the groupings of petunias, nicotiana, and early lilies in the beds. Their sweet fragrance, along with the gaslights that cast flickering shadows across the center fountain while leaving secret alcoves of pleasure here and there in darkness, gave the impression of a sensual, even seductive, retreat.

  Joletta had always been curious about Violet, what she was like, what she had been thinking of when she built her courtyard garden, what had happened to her to cause her to open her shop with this fragrant haven behind it. As a historian, Joletta had a special interest in the Victorian period with its momentous events as well as its strict mores and conventions. Violet’s conduct in that time had seemed so unusual, especially among the aristocratic Creoles of French and Spanish descent in the Vieux Carré, where trade was repugnant as an occupation for a man, much less a woman.