Last year, at the urging of a friend of mine who is a best-selling novelist, I dipped my toes in the "paranormal romance" genre. I didn't want to use one of the typical paranormal creatures--honestly, I'll be fine if I never see another shifter story--and I wanted my heroine to have the power, not just be "the girl" who gets dragged along on the adventure. (And I did want there to be an adventure. Straight-out romances don't really work for me.) I started thinking about the powers my heroine might have and I thought of Anton Strout's great books about Simon Canderous and Rachel Caine's "Weather Warden" series. They aren't cookie-cutter books and I didn't want mine to be a cookie-cutter story either.
I was writing an aromatherapy book for a client at the time and I started thinking about what it would be like if someone could "see" things in a person's olfactory aura. I know that sounds weird, but there are all those studies about memory being linked to scent and I decided to try. The result was a woman I called Vetiver Quinn, an aromatherapist who can read people that way. And then I came up with a story that involved a government agent named Peter Eliades who needs her help foiling a terrorist incident. And then I found a group of pictures of the couple on the left and a couple of covers came together. The first book was The Fourth Sense (smell being the fourth sense in the sequence of five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste).
The sequel is called The Oldest Sense. (Smell is the first sense we develop while hearing is said to be the lasst sense to leave us as we're dying.) The storyline for the new book is a straight up mystery, and it's been fun to write. These books are just novelettes, and the idea is to eventually put them together in a boxed set. Yes, I know, I really need to finish that novel. But in the meantime, I'm enjoying writing the shorter stuff. Here's the prologue of The Oldest Sense written under the name Delia Fontana.
The
Oldest Sense
“I
want it to smell like an NFL locker room at half-time during the Super Bowl
when the other team is winning,” my client said.
Yikes,
I thought, but what I said was, “Okay. Man tang and musk. Notes of camphor and
mentholatum.”
“And
leather,” she added. “Sweaty socks and leather.”
“Leather?”
I asked, because I wasn’t following her. “I don’t think they really make
footballs out of pig skin any more.”
She
gave me a pitying look. “The players are wearing underwear.”
Of course, I thought. The players’ leather underwear.
Of course, I thought. The players’ leather underwear.
“And
a hint of chlorine.”
“From
the showers?”
Again
I got the look, this time tinged with a bit of impatience. “The smell of fresh
spunk,” she said. “It smells like chlorine.”
Who doesn't like freebies? I mentioned Delia Fontana's 
