purple blouse. The silk flowed around her arms and hid her extra weight. She’d cover it with a white jacket that would give her polish and class, but she didn’t need to wear that until the last minute.
She stepped into a tasteful pair of navy heels and clicked her way into the kitchen to make coffee. She draped her jacket over the back of a dining room chair and went over her notecards while her coffee brewed. She sipped half a cup before her stomach told her to stop as it was boiling enough already.
Armed with the vase of flowers she’d arranged yesterday, her notes, and her jacket, she went to the perfumery. She made sure everything was sitting just-so, and she stood back and snapped a couple of pictures of the room to send to Ginny.
Her carefully constructed happiness stared back at her on her screen, and she wanted to scream and start throwing the nearest objects she could get her hands on.
That’s beautiful! Ginny sent back. Good luck today. I can’t wait to hear all about it.
Olli couldn’t wait to tell her about it. She looked up after confirming that she’d call as soon as she could, and she found herself wishing she didn’t have to handle or entertain Frank Renlund alone. If she’d known that from the beginning, she’d be ready, but she’d been counting on Spur being at her side.
“It’s your fault,” she whispered, and the clean perfumery seemed to capture the words and echo them back to her.
She couldn’t stand the thought of him being hurt and upset, and she knew he’d be both. Spur was a big man, but that only meant he felt big things too. He possessed a big heart to go with those hands she loved so much, and she spun and went outside, the air inside the perfumery suddenly too heavy and too full of the wrong scents.
She pulled in breath after breath until she calmed down. She brushed her hair off her forehead, hoping she hadn’t ruined the gentle wave she’d put in it that morning. She hadn’t cried, so she knew her makeup was still flawless.
An alarm sounded on her phone, and she straightened her spine and her shoulders. “You can do this,” she said. “You opened this perfumery with eight scents and three hundred dollars in the bank.”
In the past seven years, sometimes her bank account had been lower than that. Olli had dug in and worked harder. She ran sales on her perfumes to get more product out into the world. She learned online ads and started profiting more and more.
She’d fixed up the old equipment shed on her property, turning it into the perfumery over the course of a year as she continued to work out of her kitchen and save money for the renovations. She’d never looked back.
If she didn’t get this grant money, she would not be beaten. She would find another way to develop her men’s line and get it out into the world.
“You can do this,” she said again, silencing the alarm, which had signaled she had ten minutes before Frank Renlund and his assistant, Benjamin, would arrive.
She went back into the perfumery and tossed her notecards into the garbage. She put her top five samples of colognes on the far table, where she distilled scents into oils. She was ready.
Good thing, too, because she’d only taken one more breath before the sound of tires crunching over gravel met her ears. She quickly put on her jacket and made sure every layer of fabric lay in precisely the right spot.
Then she went outside, painting a perfect smile on her face. Spur had said that her smile could light up the whole state, and she’d never gotten such a great compliment from a man before.
A man wearing a dark suit had already emerged from the driver’s seat of the car, and he stood at the back door of a shiny, black Towncar. They exchanged a glance, and Olli assumed him to be Benjamin.
He opened the door, and another man straightened. He also wore a suit that couldn’t get any blacker. Frank Renlund stood taller than Benjamin, and while he had a pair of broad shoulders, he was very thin.
He buttoned his jacket and smiled at Benjamin, who came toward her first.
“You must be Olivia,” the man said, and Olli recognized his voice from the phone calls she’d had with him.
“Yes,” Olli said, just as smoothly. “You can call me Olli.” She shook