The Collector of Dying Breaths (22 page)

“I think I will need to try some essences on your skin and see how they react—would you be willing?”

“If you think that it’s necessary.”

“I do, especially because the lemon rose water smells so different on you than it does on anyone else. I want to test what I prepare for you.”

It was late afternoon. The shadows in the shop lengthened. The cacophony of smells became intoxicating. And I became absorbed by the phenomenon that occurred with every essence I tried on her skin.

Isabeau’s chemistry accentuated and changed each one. What I smelled on her was not what was in the bottle but instead the aroma of that particular flower in bloom. Before it was picked! Before the effleurage process had begun.

I had never heard of such a thing; never before had it occurred.

“I don’t understand,” I said as I stroked jasmine absolute on her wrist, waited a few moments and then lowered my nose to her hand. The aroma was of a fresh sprig of the white flowers, ripe and ready to be plucked. This was not an oil-based residue of pressed petals—it was blooming flowers.

She lifted her wrist to her nose and smelled.

“Have you ever noticed this before?”

“I was not aware of it, Maître.”

I tried essence of lavender next, putting a drop of the tincture on my forefinger and then stroking it against a clean spot higher up on her arm.

“Again,” I said to her. “It’s happened again.”

She lifted her arm to her face.

“Can you smell it?” I asked.

“Fresh lavender from a garden. Is it not the quality of your ingredients?”

“They are the same ingredients I used yesterday and the day before.”

Next I lifted the bottle of lily of the valley and repeated the process to the same end.

“There is no more room on your arms,” I said to her finally after I’d tested another four scents.

With a provocative gesture, she lifted her chin, offering me her neck.

I wet my finger with the scent of violet, then slowly dabbed her skin. Leaning in, I breathed deeply.

“You are becoming a garden.” I smiled as I next applied orange blossom to the other side of her neck. My finger lingered even longer as it made its way down the elegant column.

She didn’t pull back. Nor did she comment, but she did close her eyes. With pleasure, it appeared.

I leaned in to smell the orange blossom and was overwhelmed with desire.

“I still have heliotrope to try, but the skin on your neck is all scented.”

Without saying a word she pushed out her chest, inviting me to anoint the tops of her breasts and cleavage.

I tipped the bottle over, wet my forefinger and traced the swell of her breasts with the oil. Her breath quickened. I leaned down toward her glistening skin and inhaled. Fresh heliotrope, smelling of pepper and licorice and sweetness, mingled with all the other flowers that were blooming on her skin, and then, without forethought, I pressed my lips to her flesh.

She moaned and thrust herself toward me.

I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her closer, bruising her neck with kisses as I undid the twist of her hair. The thick dark ropes fell around my face like a velvet curtain, and I was enclosed within her.

Isabeau tasted sweet. I can no more explain this than I can explain how perfume turned to living flowers on her skin. But as I pressed my lips to this spot behind her ear and that spot in the hollow on her neck, and then when I finally lifted her face and kissed her mouth, I tasted liqueur. All I could think of was that she was a creature made by bees from nectar collected from flowers and turned into honey.

My kiss was returned with a surprising joy and playfulness that inflamed me all the more. There are women who want sex to reassure themselves they are desirable. Others who use conquest as currency and allowed me to take them to ensure their ability to obtain the special scents that supposedly only the queen wore. I had a shelf of those—none of them truly worn by Catherine, of course—that I would sell for either favors or exorbitant sums as long as the wearer promised she would never tell anyone she was wearing one of the queen’s originals. But often they bragged about their exclusive scents, and word got back to Catherine, who teased me about how I was becoming rich off her.

Isabeau was not reacting like a woman who wanted anything from me. She seemed to revel in my touch and enjoy my lips and my tongue in a way that was unfamiliar to me. Few women I’d known got this much pleasure from the act.

And then, in the evening shadows, as small waves from the river slapped against the foundation of my shop, Isabeau took my face in her two hands and kissed me, pushing my lips apart with her tongue and exploring my mouth.

Her gown was a complicated affair made even more so by her undergarments, but she undressed as if putting on a show. Doing a small dance, twirling this way and that as she disrobed.

“Is this what Catherine has taught you to do?” I asked as she slipped out of the first layer of silk.

She searched my face, wondering how to answer.

“The truth, Isabeau. I am most intrigued by the truth.”

“Yes, then.”

“Does she have you do this for many men?”

“Not for many.”

“How many have there been?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t know except I want to know you.
All
of you. I need to understand what about you makes the perfume blossom. What secrets you have. So tell me how many have there been?”

“There have been five men.”

“And you spied on all of them?”

“Yes.”

“And did you bed each?”

“Four of them.”

“For how long?”

She hesitated. I went to her and took over the job of undressing her, unlacing her corset, smelling roses and lemons, smelling my scent on her clothes. My own skin was burning, my desire making it more and more difficult for me to proceed slowly. I was overcome with the need to rip off her clothes and take her quickly, but something warned me that I would be forgoing great pleasure if I rushed.

“It’s all right. I won’t be shocked,” I reassured her.

“I was with the first for almost a year. Only a few months each with the others.”

“And were you a good spy?”

She threw back her head proudly, defiantly. “I was.”

Her bravery incited me. I finished unlacing the corset, releasing her full breasts and with them a new infusion of the rose scent.

Reaching over to the table, I pulled the bottle of lily essence forward, uncorked it, wet my fingers and then very gently painted circles around her dark nipples, making her skin glisten with the oil.

“Did any of them do this to you?” I asked.

“No,” she whispered.

I could barely hear her voice.

As if she were a fragile glass bottle, I unwrapped the rest of her body oh so carefully until she was standing before me, in the twilight, completely naked. And then I anointed every inch of her skin with oils of flowers until she glistened.

“My garden,” I whispered to myself as much as to her.

Her eyes were heavy lidded, her lips moist and parted, her cheeks flushed.

“Has any man ever made you want
him
?” I asked.

“No,” she moaned.

“No one has ever pleased you without pleasing himself ?”

She shook her head.

I got down on my knees and pushed her legs apart slightly and then buried my face between her thighs. Here was the only part of her body I had not anointed, but it glistened on its own. And here was the only part of her body that did not smell of my flowers but of her own sweet honeyed essence. The odor was neither sour nor stale—Isabeau’s essence was a perfumed liqueur, and as I licked her I became drunk.

Everything about that late afternoon is emblazoned on my mind. I can remember how the candles sent red highlights dancing through her hair and how her throaty laugh of pleasure sounded like nothing I had ever heard. I thought I had pleased women before. Thought I had understood passion. But this was a thing of itself. I had never known a woman who enjoyed sex the way Isabeau did. Who luxuriated in our coming together the way I had seen others luxuriate in ermine cloaks and jewels. She gorged on it the way I had seen men gorge on food. She drank it in the way I had seen partygoers imbibe. She was joy and felt joy and made me feel it too. And with that joy, for the first time that I could remember, I felt a lightness about the world. I ceased to worry, to be anxious.

When she put her hands on either side of my head, her fingers weaving through my hair, and held me, I felt a pressure inside that I could not control.
So this was being wanted,
I thought. Every moment of my lonely life came pouring out of me, and I wept. With my head between her thighs, sucking on her nether parts, listening to her rapture, tears poured out of my eyes. That I had lived so long and not known this! That I was only finding it now—with someone who was above my station and as impossible a partner as the queen herself would be. A cruel joke.

And then Isabeau pulled me up with her beautiful little hands and kissed my mouth that was wet with her own juices. Together we fell back against the couch, and as I slid inside of her, my very life exploded.

Chapter 25

THE PRESENT

Griffin was still bent over the same book, trying to decode more of what he’d found in Florentin’s papers. Jac was sitting in the same position she’d been in—how long ago? One minute? Two? Five? However long the episode had lasted, Jac was almost certain she’d accessed someone else’s memory bank.

She’d left her own consciousness and disappeared for what had seemed like days. Jac had memory-lurched into René le Florentin’s life almost five hundred years ago.

She’d thought his thoughts and felt his love and his frustrations. And this wasn’t the first time she’d done it since she’d come to the château. There was no denying it now.

Jac fingered the red silk tied around her left wrist—the connection to the present that kept her tethered to her own time and place during lurches. She rolled the thread against her skin now and tried to focus on what she’d seen and learned. This episode hadn’t been as frightening as some in the past had been. Was it because of the bracelet?

“Jac?” Griffin sounded worried. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“We should stop. It’s almost nine o’clock, and I think we’ve found out as much as there is to know about these ingredients without going inside of le Florentin’s head.”

She didn’t say anything. Just looked at him. But he guessed.

“Is that what just happened?” he asked.

“I think so. Or my overactive imagination acting up.”

“Resistance is futile,” he said, laughing as he quoted the Borg line from the
Star Trek
episodes they used to watch when they were together. “Were you seeing another of your past lives?”

Jac hadn’t yet told Griffin about Malachai’s theory that she was a memory tool, able to tap into other people’s past lives. But she told him now. He listened and halfway through, when he heard her voice crack, he took her hand and held it until she finished.

“So you think that I’m the perfumer? And you’re the woman he was in love with? Isabeau? And you are remembering his life?”

“I’m afraid to think it,” she whispered as she nodded.

Griffin put his arm around her. “Let’s get out of here, go into town and have a late supper. We’ve done enough for one day.”

Jac went up to her room and got her handbag. She didn’t see Melinoe or Serge and didn’t look for them. She just wanted to leave the house and clear her head.

They ate at a lovely local restaurant, Le Relais de Barbizon, and afterward took a walk through the village, pausing to examine the well-preserved stone buildings.

“This is a little confusing for me,” Jac said. “Even though we’re not at the château, the sense that I’m still in the past hasn’t quite dissipated.”

“Maybe it’s because the town itself is so steeped in previous centuries. René le Florentin walked these same cobblestone streets. Passed many of these buildings.”

They walked back to the Hôtel les Pléiades, where they sat side by side on a banquette in the darkened bar and drank cognac that the barkeep had poured from an old crystal bottle.

For a while they didn’t talk. The fire was crackling, and there was no one else around. The companionable silence was soothing. After a while, Griffin reached out and brushed a lock of Jac’s hair off her forehead.

“I always miss you when I’m not with you. And when I’m with you, I always feel we belong together.”

Jac heard the words and wanted to respond, but she was still plagued with fear. If her hallucinations were past-life memories, she was his poison. And if the fugue states were not past-life memories, what were they? An aberration? Insanity?

It was the conundrum of her life. One way, she was the incarnation of Griffin’s destruction—and the destruction of all the men he’d been. The other way she was delusional or victim of some kind of brain anomaly.

Leaning forward, Griffin kissed her. For a moment her confusing thoughts fought against the embrace. She needed to figure this out once and for all. And then it didn’t matter. There was so little she could count on. At least there was this warmth searing through her. This actual want. This unquestionable urge to be with this man.

The kiss was tender and determined at the same time, it tasted of cognac and desire, and when it ended, they separated and were silent, overwhelmed by its power, by its pull.

Jac reached for her drink and took a sip. Was Griffin her fate? she wondered yet again. And then she heard her brother’s voice answer:

You are fate. Once you were Moira. The woman you dream about. That’s why you can remember other lives.

No, she almost said out loud. Greek gods and goddesses are myths. Jac had spent her whole adult life finding the seeds of those myths to prove that man had created these stories in order to explain away what they otherwise couldn’t understand or process.

She looked at Griffin. He clearly hadn’t heard anything. Of course not. Robbie’s voice had been in her head.

“It’s been such a long and strange day,” she said. “I’m going to ask the waiter to call me a taxi. I should go back to the château.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” he said hoarsely and took her hand. “You should come upstairs with me.”

Griffin’s room was on the second floor. A large corner room decorated with tapestries and heavy damask curtains in gold and blue. There was a fireplace already lit, a couch, desk, chairs—Jac saw it all in a blur as they fell onto the bed.

Slowly, carefully, Griffin undressed her. In the golden light, his expression showed the same determination that she’d felt in his kiss. He wasn’t rough, but there was a force to his actions. As if he were anticipating that she might protest.

And she did think about protesting, but her body fought her mind. She knew where they were headed was dangerous. Once they made love, once he held her naked in his arms and slipped inside of her—she would never be able to walk away from him again.

“Jac . . .” he whispered as he traced the outline of her lips with his finger. “Stop thinking. This is right.”

He kissed her. For a moment she held back, and then she pushed her lips hard against his. She wanted to stop thinking. To just be here with this man, who for better or worse she never had been able to break away from. It seemed she never really breathed deeply except when she was with him. Never really felt everything fully unless she was feeling him. Jac didn’t need a man to complete her. But he was the only man who she completely connected with.

He pulled back. For a moment he just hovered above her. Looking down. Not moving. She didn’t move either. Didn’t say a word. Just watched him watching her.

He smiled. Then stood up, unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged it off. Stepped out of his jeans and underwear. The fire outlined his body, and she sucked in her breath. Her first sight of him naked always astounded her. There was a Greek sculpture she often visited in the Metropolitan Museum that reminded her of Griffin. Long and lanky and graceful, it was a perfect expression of sexuality. But it was cold marble. Griffin was warm flesh.

He came to her on the bed and undressed her, and when she lay there, as naked as he was, she reached out and touched his mouth, traced the line of his neck. His Adam’s apple. His collarbone. She stared at him. Griffin was everything she thought of when she thought about sex, about release, about desire. All her life, no matter who she had been with, it was this man she was staring at now who she wanted, who she never had to tell what to do to her or how to move or how to touch her. It was this man who understood how to hold her and move her and move in her and what to whisper to her and how to bite gently in the space where her shoulder met her neck and how to put his hand under her and touch her while he went inside of her, who looked at her with an expression that turned her into liquid. They generated heat. They built fire. They created alchemical gold.

Above her, Griffin’s eyes closed. And then René’s opened.

Rather than being frightened, she was heady with the experience. Two men. Both different. Both the same. Her insides were on fire. Her heart was opening. Breaking. Healing. They had been apart. They were together. Joined. In the past, in the present, in the future.

The feeling was so overpowering there were moments when Jac was sure she wasn’t herself any longer but the French lady who was the perfumer’s lover, and as René, Griffin was rougher. Taking her not as an act of tenderness but as something desperate. As if this was the last time they would ever make love. The last time they would ever be together. Isabeau felt it, and Jac suffered her fears.

René thrust up inside her, more deeply, and she clenched around him. She smelled lust and honey, woods and desire. Smelled magic. The magic of what he was doing to her.

Then Griffin was back.

She was on her stomach now, and his hands were under her, teasing her as he slipped in and out, and she was lost to the rhythm of the ride. Lost to the time and the place. Swirling on herself, down and in on herself, feeling the tension building, tighter and tighter, growing in intensity, blocking out all reason and sending her into a vortex of emotional and physical response that she hadn’t felt in so long, so long, so long . . .

“René.” One word from her lips. Soft. A whisper. Jac orgasmed, or Isabeau did. Who was she? It didn’t matter. Who was he? He was her all. And he always had been. This man who had been so many men to the many women she had been. This man—her fate. Toth, an Egyptian perfumer, and René le Florentin and Giles L’Etoile, another perfumer in revolutionary France. All these men. These lips and hearts and cocks and fingers and legs and eyes. All one. All the same.

“Griffin.” Another word from her lips as she became lost in the waves as they washed over her and she emerged in the luxurious ebbing. She was shaking. Sinking deeper into exultation. Her womb was vibrating. He was playing her like a musical instrument, and every movement he made set off another trill of quivering and trembling.

“Jac . . . Jac . . .” He wasn’t just saying her name; he was taking her and giving her and being with her as profoundly as he ever had.

She had lost all ability to speak, to say his name, to say any name, to know her own name or place. She only knew that she was alive with him, through all time, and this was a celebration that they had found each other like this over and over and over again and would always and then . . . she burst.

Colors. Lights. Smells. Shuddering. Tremors. Alive with him . . . alive . . . and then even somehow more alive.