Mediterranean Nights: The Mistress Purchase / The Demetrios Virgin / Marco's Convenient Wife
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‘I too had a very close relationship with my grandmother,’ Leon told her quietly.
For a moment they looked at one another in silence. They were, Sadie recognised, two people suddenly discovering that they had more in common than they had realised.
‘Your grandmother was Greek, wasn’t she?’ Sadie asked hesitantly, not wanting to pry and yet suddenly desperate to learn as much about him as she could, for him to be the one to tell her!
‘Yes. Like you, with your grandmother, I was very close to her. My parents both worked in the business my father was building, and my grandmother lived with us and looked after me. She died when I was fourteen.’ His frown deepened. ‘It was a very bad time for the family.’
‘You still miss her?’ Sadie guessed.
‘Yes,’ he agreed gruffly. ‘She didn’t have the easiest of lives—’ His mouth twisted a little bitterly. ‘And that is an understatement. She had an extremely hard life. Her parents emigrated to Australia to escape from poverty at home. Her mother died before they reached Sydney and her father was so grief stricken that he began to drink. My grandmother brought up her brothers and sisters virtually single-handed, and looked after her father as well, when she was little more than a child herself! She was just twelve when they arrived in Australia, and twenty-four when she married my grandfather. She was working as a ladies’ maid when he met her, and in those days anyone in service was not allowed to get married. She wouldn’t leave her job because she still had her father to support.’
‘She must have been a wonderful person,’ Sadie told him softly.
‘She was,’ he agreed.
There was a look in his eyes she couldn’t analyse, Sadie acknowledged. A look which held bitterness and anger. A look which for some reason right now he seemed to be directing right at her!
‘You’re wearing your perfume,’ he said abruptly changing the subject
Sadie nodded her head, trying not to betray the fact she was pleased he had noticed.
‘Is it very different from the original Myrrh?’
‘A little,’ she told him, the realisation that his interest had been of a business rather than a personal nature turning her pleasure to disappointment. Rather briskly, she added, ‘The original perfume, like most perfumes of its time, was much stronger than women want to wear today—and, of course, very expensive.’
‘Expensive and exclusive,’ Leon agreed curtly. ‘In fact, a luxury that most ordinary women could never hope to enjoy!’
To Sadie’s bewilderment his expression as well as his voice once again suddenly changed, becoming closed and forbidding.
‘Have you decided want you want to eat yet?’ he asked grimly.
Sadie looked at him, tempted to ask what it was she had said that had caused him to withdraw so sharply from her, but instead she simply told him very coolly and distantly that, yes, she was ready to order.
‘How old were you when you first knew that you had a “nose”?’
Their first course had just arrived, and Sadie looked across at Leon a little warily. But whatever it was that had caused that momentary harsh bleakness to harden his expression had gone, and he was once more smiling warmly at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I just sort of grew up knowing that I wanted to create perfume. My grandmother encouraged me, of course. She was born at the wrong time, I think, looking back now. She would have loved to have taken over the business, but as a girl with a brother that was just not an option.’
‘I have gathered that there was some discord between them,’ Leon acknowledged, and he looked encouragingly at her, obviously wanting to learn more.
‘My great-uncle was a gambler, and he ran down the business to finance his gambling habit. My grandmother hated what he did, and I think she ended up hating him too,’ Sadie admitted. ‘A rift developed between them which was exacerbated by the fact that my grandmother had married an Englishman and lived so far away from him. Still, she felt so passionately about the business…’
‘A passion which she obviously passed on to you,’ Leon interrupted her.
Sadie smiled.
‘My grandmother was a very passionate person.’
‘And so, I imagine, are you. Very passionate!’
Across the table their glances met and locked. Sadie discovered she was only able to breathe shallowly, her heart bouncing frantically around her chest, making her feel as though she wanted to press her hands to her body to keep it still.
The silence between them, the intimacy of their locked gazes, was the most exciting sensation she had ever experienced, she acknowledged dizzily. Her food was completely forgotten—Leon was her food, her need, her every sustenance both physical and emotional. If he were to reach out now, take hold of her hand and lead her from the table, she knew beyond any doubt that she would go with him.
‘You can’t possibly know that. I…’ Her voice was a papery dry whisper, a muted husk of sound, her eyes huge, her pupils dilated.
‘I do know it.’ Leon stopped her. His own voice was tense, low and raw with an open hunger that made Sadie shudder violently.
‘I know exactly how you will feel in my arms, Sadie, how you will taste, how passionately you will respond to me in my bed.’
What the hell was he doing? Leon wondered savagely as he heard what he was saying almost as though he was standing outside himself and listening. From the moment he had taken over the family business on his twenty-first birthday, Leon had dedicated himself totally to its success. Nothing and no one had ever threatened to come between him and that dedication—until now!
For the first time in his life Leon could feel himself being pulled in different directions emotionally. Had he gone completely mad? Totally lost the plot? Okay, so Sadie was one delectably desirable woman. But that didn’t mean…
The way she was looking at him made his body clench, and a surge of desire as fierce as the kick of a mule powered through his belly.
This wasn’t something he had written down in his mental checklist of life goals. Not now and quite definitely not ever with this particular woman!
So why wasn’t he doing something about it? Why wasn’t he getting a grip and forcing his unwanted desire for her to shrivel into nothing? Because he didn’t want to or because he couldn’t do so? Because he was already in way way over his head and not even thinking about trying to save himself?
A small shudder ripped through Sadie, openly visible to him, and his own body reacted. Responded! Hell, but no woman had affected him like this in public since he had left his teenage days behind him. It was a damn good job that the table covered the visible evidence of his arousal.
He moved a little uncomfortably in his seat, cursing softly to himself.
Sadie held her breath as she saw the way Leon’s eyes burned with sexual awareness as he monitored her reaction.
She could hardly breathe normally, never mind think of eating! Frantically she tried to come up with something banal to say, to extinguish the almost palpable aura of sexual heat surrounding them. But her brain was simply refusing to co-operate. If she didn’t manage to break the sensual intensity of the gaze they were sharing Sadie didn’t know what might happen! Or, rather, she knew perfectly well what her body was hoping would happen!
And that knowledge was making her feel both more excited than she had ever felt in her whole life and more apprehensive as well!
Someone at a nearby table pushed back their chair, and the scraping noise caused Leon to look in that direction. Dizzily Sadie dragged great gulps of air into her lungs and picked up her fork.
CHAPTER FOUR
SINCE Leon had already determined to put things between them back on a sensible, businesslike footing at the very first chance he got, why, when Sadie had taken the opportunity to do exactly that, was he reacting as though she was somehow challenging him? And why was he actively looking for ways to break through the social barriers she had thrown up and return things to a much more personal level? Leon asked himself derisively.
He had never thought of himself as the kind of man so needy, and lacking in self-esteem as to have to verbally force a woman to be aware of him sexually, but right now…
He looked at Sadie’s mouth. It was soft and full, and if she was wearing any lipstick it was so natural as to be virtually indiscernible. He hated kissing women who caked their mouths in red grease! Kissing Sadie’s mouth, in fact kissing any bit of Sadie, would be a pleasure he would give his eye teeth for right now!
Desperate to bring her rioting emotions and desires under control, Sadie waited until their main course had been served before clearing her throat and asking politely, ‘What made you decide to buy Francine?’
For a moment she thought that he wasn’t going to reply, but then he looked at her and her heart did a foolish somersault.
‘It just seemed a natural progression. We are a luxury goods group, after all.’ Right now he didn’t want to discuss his business affairs with Sadie. In fact he didn’t really want to talk about anything with her at all. At the moment the kind of communication he wanted to share with Sadie involved using their lips for something much more intimate than phrasing words!
Although Leon had spoken naturally enough in answer to her question, Sadie had felt as though he was measuring his words, as if somehow he was having to guard what he said, she reflected. But she was guiltily aware that, although she had been listening to his words, a wickedly wanton streak in herself she had not realised she possessed had been focusing on Leon’s mouth in an altogether far too intimate way!
‘We made a deal that we weren’t going to talk about business,’ Leon reminded her.
Sadie’s heart banged so loudly against her ribs that she was too worried that he might have heard it to think about anything else.
‘This steak is the best I’ve tasted in a long time,’ Leon told Sadie enthusiastically.
He had been caught slightly on the hop by Sadie’s unexpected question about his reasons for acquiring Francine. Wanting her was one thing. Discussing his grandmother with her was another! He knew that it was his own pride that made him feel so immediately protective of his grandmother, so unwilling to discuss the real reason why he so much wanted to acquire Francine and Myrrh.
The truth was that he had never forgotten how he had felt as a youngster, when his grandmother had told him the story of how when she had been a ladies’ maid she had yearned to be able to wear the exotic and expensive perfume worn by her mistress.
‘It was called Myrrh,’ his grandmother had told him with a sigh, ‘and it was the most beautiful perfume ever.’
‘Couldn’t you have bought some?’ his younger self had asked her naïvely.
She had smiled sadly and shaken her head, ruffling his hair with a hand gnarled and deformed by years of hard domestic work.
‘Leon, just one small bottle would have cost more than I would have earned in five years,’ she had told him. ‘Perfume like that wasn’t created for women like me!’
As he had seen the look in her eyes Leon had sworn there and then that one day his grandmother would own a bottle of the best and the most expensive perfume in the world, and that he would buy it for her. Only she had died before he had been able to make good that promise. But he had never forgotten that he had made it, and never ceased regretting that he hadn’t been able to keep it. And he had certainly never forgotten why he had made it, which was why he’d felt so antagonistic towards Sadie’s original refusal to create a new perfume that would be inexpensive enough for every woman to wear and enjoy.
But fortunately Sadie had seen sense, and at last the Myrrh scent was going to belong to him! It was too late for his grandmother to enjoy, but at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing that the grandson of the woman who hadn’t been able to afford to buy the smallest bottle of the scent now owned the whole company! And if it was the last thing he did he intended to make sure that every woman who wanted to would be able to afford to wear a Francine perfume!
And so he had deliberately not told his board the reasons for his determination to acquire Francine. There was no way he was going to make himself vulnerable to anyone by admitting that he had been motivated to buy Francine out of sentiment. He would never hand out that kind of information and give others the opportunity to crucify him! As they undoubtedly would. The business world he operated in traded in financial gains, not emotional ones. And it only respected the men who made those financial gains.
Leon had grown up in a tough world, watching his parents struggling to establish the business—and then, just when the business had been on the verge of becoming very profitable, he’d seen them very nearly lose it. The shock and stress of that event had undermined his father’s health and left him permanently weakened physically. Witnessing such traumatic events had given Leon a fierce, youthful resolve to do all he could to protect his family, to make the business so financially stable and secure that he would never again have to see his father’s face grey with defeat and despair, or his mother’s eyes shining with frightened tears.
He might have taken his parents’ business and built it into the successful and profitable empire it was today, he might be a billionaire whose wealth could open any door for him, but deep down inside there was a part of him that still felt the anguish and the anger he had experienced as a fourteen-year-old, witnessing his parents’ fear, just as he still remembered listening to his grandmother describe how her poverty had sometimes humiliated her.
His children would be told all about their great-grandmother, and they would be brought up to respect and revere her memory, to understand that money could not buy spirit or character or love. If Sadie objected to that then she was not the woman he believed her to be…
Leon put down his cutlery with a clatter that made Sadie stare at him in confusion and wonder just what had caused that look of arrested shock she could see in his eyes. But before she could question him, however, he had distracted her by asking if she had as yet tried any of the hotel’s spa facilities.
‘No I haven’t,’ she admitted. ‘Have you?’
‘No,’ Leon acknowledged. ‘There hasn’t really been time.’
Sadie gave a small but very luxurious sigh. It was over an hour since they had finished their meal and come into the bar, where Leon had escorted her over to one of the seductively comfortable squashy sofas before going to order their drinks.
They were the only people left there, apart from the bar staff, and the logs on the fire had burned down to glowing ashes. She couldn’t say just what she and Leon had talked about—the time had flown by on wings of exultation and delight. It was almost as though Leon could actually sense what she was thinking—so much so that every time she had been tempted to forget their pact and talk to him about her excited plans for the future, and the new perfume she hoped to create, he’d somehow stopped her, sidelining their conversation into another direction. And all the time… all the time… every minute, every second, he had been looking at her in such a way that…
‘It looks like we’ve outstayed our welcome,’ Leon told her now, with an amused look at the barman, very purposefully cleaning up. ‘I’ll walk you back to your room,’ he added as Sadie stood up.
Outside it was cool enough for her to be glad she had brought her wrap—and she was even more pleased when without a word Leon took it from her and draped it gently over her shoulders. Was it her imagination or did his fingers really stroke slowly against her bare skin before he stepped back from her?
The path which wound up along the hillside and through the gardens was well illuminated by the strategically placed lighting. The sky was a blue-black dome of velvet, sprinkled with diamond-bright stars, with the thin sliver of a crescent moon.
The path curved and slipped between a small stand of trees into a hidden grove of scented darkness, which took Sadie by surprise, causing her to half stumble on an unseen step.
Immediately Leon reached out to steady her.
‘Thanks.’ Although the ground was in darkness there was enough light from the moon for her to see his features. The intensity of his gaze her made her heart thump frantically. ‘I didn’t realise there was a step there.’ It was disconcerting to know how at odds with the way she was feeling the bland mundanity of her words was.
‘No. I’m surprised the hotel management hasn’t had this area better lit. Surprised, but extremely pleased,’ Leon told her rawly.
‘Pleased?’ Was he actually saying what she thought he was saying? Sadie’s heart was doing more than merely thumping now; it was practically turning excited cartwheels! Instinctively she looked up at Leon, and the hungry look in his eyes caused the whole world to spin dizzily round her. She stood very still.
Slowly Leon lowered his head, his mouth seeking her own. Silently she waited, hardly daring to breathe in case she broke the spell that was binding them together in the magical and intimate darkness.
His lips touched hers, firm, warm, sure and knowledgeable, making her feel…
Making her feel like a woman, Sadie acknowledged giddily. Like a very desirable woman.
Strong male hands drew her closer, one resting in the small of her back, the other lifting to her neck, sliding beneath her hair, supporting her head as the pressure of his kiss tipped it backwards.
Sadie exhaled a disbelieving shaky whisper of breath before eagerly parting her lips to the probing thrust of Leon’s tongue. She could feel the solid trunk of a tree behind her shoulders, and yet had no memory of having stepped backwards. Leon’s hand had left the small of her back and travelled to the rounded curve of her bottom, urging her into his own body.
With a fierce thrill of delight she recognised his arousal, her body reacting to it with a sensual abandon that had her pushing her hips against him, revelling in the immediate and passionate response of his hands and his mouth as he gripped her harder and thrust his tongue deeper into the eager softness of her mouth.
Her own arms were wrapped tightly around him now, her breasts sensitised by the movement of her body against his. In her mind she could already picture his hands covering their nakedness, feel the fierce tug of his mouth against her nipples.
She shuddered violently at her own thoughts. A sharp spike of shock pierced through her, only to be overwhelmed by a fresh wave of aching longing as Leon pressed her even more closely to his body.
He felt excitingly hard and… Instinctively Sadie’s mind shied away from what she was thinking, imagining…
She wasn’t in the habit of assessing a man’s virility in terms of shape and size, and she most certainly wasn’t in the habit of getting excited about them—or him!
What had happened to her normal reserve? Not to mention the moral objections… the sheer common sense she should be heeding?
Leon’s mouth was moving along her jaw and towards her ear, leaving a trail of delicate kisses that filled her with stunning delight. Dizzily Sadie acknowledged that just the whisper of his breath… his lips against her skin… was sending her crazy. Not that he was exactly immune to the reaction he was arousing in her, judging by the way he was gripping her hips and pulling her tightly against his body, Sadie realised with a fierce thrill of female pleasure.
‘The way you’re making me feel I could take you here and now, do you know that?’ Leon groaned against her ear, confirming her thoughts and sending her pulse rocketing out of control whilst the images inside her head became even more explicit and steamy.
Again she wondered—where was her normal, sane and sensible self that should have been objecting sharply and immediately to what he was saying? Why was she moving her body even closer to his instead of pulling herself away?
Sadie didn’t know, and what was more she didn’t care. In fact, if Leon chose to put his threat into action, she didn’t think she would be able to object. Object…? She was aching so badly for him that…
Now it was her turn to moan out loud with delight as his hand moved up her body and cupped her breast. Just the feel of his thumb-tip rubbing sensuously across her tight, aching nipple made her bite on her bottom lip to stop herself from begging him to take off her top and expose her breast to his gaze, his touch and the hot, hard caress of his mouth.
Frantically she tensed her muscles, squeezing her thighs together as she felt the surge of longing rocket through her.
As though he guessed what was happening to her, Leon cupped her hip, his fingers kneading her rhythmically.
She was leaning fully against the tree now, letting it take the weight of her body whilst Leon’s hands sensitively explored every inch of her, making her quiver from head to foot in open longing.
When his hand stroked gently between her legs she groaned huskily and shuddered.
‘Sadie…’ As Leon took her hand and placed it against his own body she almost sobbed with pleasure. Her hands were long and slender, but the hard swollen length of him extended beyond her outstretched fingertips. Sadie closed her eyes, pleasure a dark velvet blanket of sensuality behind her eyelids. She ached as though she had a fever for the feel of him inside her. She’d had no idea there could be desire like this—instant, immediate, hot and hungry, a need that burned everything else into oblivion and drove a person relentlessly until it was sated.
No doubt in Leon’s eyes, she decided helplessly, she was totally unworldly and naïve not to have experienced something like this before. Unlike him!
How many times… how many women…? That thought burned through her in a hot agony of molten jealousy that stiffened her whole body.
‘Sadie?’
Suddenly they both heard voices somewhere lower down the path. Immediately Leon released her and bent to pick up the shawl which had fallen from her shoulders.
Tucking her hand through his arm, he guided her back to the path. She was shaking so much she suspected she would have stumbled if he hadn’t been holding on to her.
Unable to keep her feelings to herself, she burst out emotionally, ‘I don’t believe this is happening.’
‘You don’t believe or you don’t want to believe it?’ Leon challenged her.
Tiny tremors of reaction were still seizing her body, and Sadie knew that Leon must be aware of them. What an idiot he must think her, to get in such a state over a mere kiss. Only for her it hadn’t been just a kiss, had it? For her…
‘It’s all right, Sadie,’ she heard him telling her gently, when she was unable to answer his question. ‘Will it help if I admit that I’ve been caught as much off guard by what happened back there as you? I can’t pretend that I haven’t spent all evening imagining what it would be like to take you to bed, but…’
‘I… I don’t do things like this,’ Sadie told him stiffly, suddenly feeling exposed and vulnerable. ‘I don’t make a habit of… of this sort of thing. You might…’
‘I might what?’ he asked, disconcerting her when he guessed accurately. ‘Were you thinking that I might go to bed with a different woman every night of the week? Is that what you’re trying to say?’
Embarrassed, Sadie shook her head.
‘I don’t have any right to… to pry into your private life,’ she told him awkwardly. ‘It’s just that I don’t want you to think that I…’
‘I haven’t been to bed with a woman in over five years,’ Leon told her curtly. ‘I don’t happen to approve of anyone sleeping around just for the hell of it. It’s cheap and it’s a health hazard. What happened tonight was—’
‘You don’t have to explain. I understand!’ Sadie rushed in quickly. He was going to tell her that it had been a mistake, that things had got out of hand.