Read Wild in the Moonlight for Free Online Page A

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.
    â€œSo…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 thesame 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.”
    â€œAnd—”
    â€œAnd 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.”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œInitially, 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?”
    â€œThen, 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