PUNGENT LOVE

She hung his trench coat in her locker and leaned in to take a deep breath. It smelled like Irish Spring and a little bit like potpourri and like something she couldn’t describe any way other than boy.

She tried not to notice the way his chest rose and fell beneath the crisp linen of his shirt and the soft wool of his jacket. The way his breath came in long, slow inhales and exhales. The way his strong thighs engaged as the carriage rocked along the cobblestone streets. The scent of him—clove and thyme and Temple.

Lady Emeline smelled of lemon balm.

The hints of starch and expensive cologne mingled with the salty-clean scent of his skin.

He also automatically registered how nice and feminine she smelled, a stark change from the men he’d worked with on his two weeks of ranch work.

The soap fragrance he had noticed last evening was coming most noticeably from her hair. She must have washed it recently.

'Why do you always smell so good?' he murmured. 'I use'—she caught her breath as he did something particularly ingenious with his lips—'Meredith Beauty’s finest cold-process soap, made with oil of honeysuckle. It is expensive and impractical, but then, I can be.'

He’d dragged himself from the arena into Caro’s bed, sealed the grime to his skin with sweat from their lovemaking, and then crawled under the covers to stew in the resulting miasma— only to dress, this morning, in soiled flannels and set about working up a new sweat to season the old. He smelled like a meat cellar.

Hunter turned her over and smiled, his lavender-scented hand splayed over the frame of her collarbone.

She was like a cream-cake with an added hint of lemon. Familiar and comforting in aroma…and yet when one got close enough, one realized that all that sweetness was balanced by something deliciously tart.

It was no hardship to place his face so close to hers that he could breathe the perfume of her hair. 'It isn’t Pearson’s soap you use,' he murmured.

It was the alarm, surely, the fright of her near brush with ruin that had loosened her hold on reason and shrunk her world down to the touch of his hands on her elbows, the ardent vibration of his apologizing voice, the familiar clean smell of his soap.

With a growl, he buried his face in the curve of her neck, inhaling her sweet fragrance along with the earthy scent of her earlier exertions.

An image of her wearing her strawberry perfume and those red glasses— and, let’s be honest, not much else— popped into his head unbidden.

He smelled of sweat, but not in a bad way— rather, in a way that was virile and pleasing.

That decadent scent reminded her of sandalwood, potent and somehow masculine. The scent transformed into a taste and filled her mouth. Musky. Man. Him.

He’d never touched a woman like her, all clean and pale and sweet-smelling.