Page 88 of The Scent of Happiness

“Brooke…”

“I’ll make a liquid bodywash.” She jumped from her chair and pulled fragrance bottles from the cupboards. Not too many scents, and those she did use would be poured with a light hand. Anything she made would combine with Theo’s skin to smell great anyway, so she didn’t have to use a lot.

“Brooke?” Emma said. “Brooke, listen to me.”

“Yes?” Brooke started gathering her base ingredients.

“Brooke.” Emma took her by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “You’re supposed to be getting ready for the biggest craft show of the year. You’re supposed to be making things to sell. Tried and true formulas? Bath bombs and bubble bars? Come on, now, don’t go off on one of your tangents.”

“I’m not.” Brooke tried to wriggle out of Emma’s grip. She’d start with botanicals. It had to begin as a floral, but she’d deepen it right away with some heart notes of—

“You called me.” Emma interrupted her thoughts.

“Uh-huh.”

“To help you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Because on some level you know you need my expertise to keep you from…Brooke?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yeah.” Brooke strained toward the fragrance oils.

“No, you’re not.” Emma dropped her hands. “You’re going to do this, aren’t you?”

“I have to.” Brooke had never been more certain about anything in her life.

“Well, in that case, I’ll start making labels for Toasted Coconut.” Emma gave her one reassuring pat on the shoulder and then went back to the dining nook. “And also labels for whatever you’re calling this little bar of lust. What are you calling it?”

“Legal Trouble.”

“You are not.”

Brooke slid her safety goggles over her glasses. “You got a better name?”

“Legal Trouble. I can work with that.” Emma fired up Brooke’s computer. “Let me design something.”

“Thank you, Emma. You’re the best.” Brooke returned to her fragrance oils, sniffing and measuring and pouring, selecting some fragrances and discarding others. She had a lightness in her chest and her mind felt clearer than it had in days. This would work. It had to.

She built the scent a drop at a time, never doubting herself as it came together. She made it confident and smart, like Theo. She made it intuitive and trusting like she was. She distilled everything that was good about their relationship—tenderness, clarity, commitment—and bottled it with love.

Could she say that word? She hoped she could. But as she capped the bottle of liquid soap, she also hoped she wouldn’t have to. She hoped that this fragrance would do the talking for her, and that Theo’s nose would tell him what his other senses couldn’t.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Dixie said.

“I can’t believe it either,” Theo said. “But here we are.”

They were standing in Buckets of Bows, the local craft store that sold materials for every hobby from cake decorating to crochet. After pulling an all-nighter, Theo had organized Brooke’s journal in spreadsheet form. But just because it was logical to him didn’t mean it would be logical to her. What if his categories didn’t make sense? What if he’d made things worse? He needed a professional soapmaker to check his work, and he only knew one of those. He’d swallowed his pride and called Dixie.

It was a challenging conversation, with both of them dancing around certain issues. Theo needed Dixie to trust him. He needed to trust her too, if he was going to show her Brooke’s revamped journal. He planned on blurring out the recipes themselves—he just needed feedback on the layout. But Dixie laughed when he implied that she’d steal Brooke’s original formulas.

“I’m getting out of the soaping business,” Dixie had said. “It never made me happy.”