Passion Becomes You

‘You are angry with me,’ he decided after several attempts to draw her out failed.

‘What could you have done to make me angry?’ she drawled.

‘All but dumping you as soon as we arrived there is a good enough reason,’ he admitted. ‘Business, I’m afraid,’ he shrugged.

Funny business, Jemma derided bitchily on an upsurge of that evil jealousy she was beginning to feel so familiar with.

‘At least you fond some light relief with Jack Bridgeman. You enjoyed your—dance?’

This is it, Jemma thought with a slight stiffening of her spine in readiness. ‘I enjoyed his company very much!’ she stated coolly. ‘He was charming and attentive and a very good dancer, and without him I would have been bored to death!’

‘Then I must thank him next ti

me I bump into him,’ was all Leon said to her outright provocation. And changed the subject.

To her surprise and confusion, he didn’t refer to it again. And over the ensuing weeks she noticed that, wherever they went and whoever tried to make a pass at her, he never revealed any hint that it concerned him overmuch. He often left her alone while he went off to ‘discuss business’, as he called it, and, no matter whom he found her with when he eventually came looking for her, he was always aggravatingly at ease about it.

It was meeting Tom on the stairs a couple of days later that put the missing piece into the puzzle, when he asked if her boyfriend had got over his fit of jealousy. And it clicked suddenly that Leon had not liked revealing that hint of weakness in himself when he’d reacted jealously to her kissing Tom. Since then he had gone out of his way to show the opposite reaction, as if he was determined to quash any idea she might develop that he thought more of her than their relationship suggested.

Which was—what? she asked herself. Lovers. Nothing more, nothing less. Jealousy grew out of deeper feelings. Feelings that Leon just did not have for her. Or if he had, for one brief blinding moment when he’d seen her kissing Tom, he had firmly squashed them. And if he could do that so easily, then they couldn’t have been very strong feelings.

The week after the party, he went off to New York for a week. She had come to realise that his business commitments seemed to flow equally between London and New York—with a trip to his head office in Athens thrown in only very occasionally. Friction with his father, she suspected—not that Leon had ever spoken about it. But his expression was tight-lipped whenever she broached the subject of his family and, remembering what Cassie had once said about a family rift, she drew her own conclusions.

While he was in New York, she missed her period. Jemma was not overly worried about it since her cycle had never been that reliable at the best of times, and she accepted that the physical and emotional stress she had taken on since Leon had probably helped to throw her out of sync.

For the next few weeks he remained in London. And they were barely out of each other’s company. Josh had found out about them by then, and his disgust was unveiled. ‘Are you crazy?’ he cried. ‘Of all the bloody men in London you have to fall for Leon Stephanades! I just don’t bloody well believe it!’

‘He’s what I want,’ she answered simply. ‘And for as long as he wants me I’m happy.’

‘And when he doesn’t?’ he challenged brutally.

Jemma shrugged to mask the ache his words evoked. ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,’ she said.

Josh sighed heavily, but let the matter drop.

Late Friday afternoon, when she was just considering packing up to leave for the weekend, the telephone rang. Leon sounded grim and irritable. ‘Something has come up,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid this weekend is out.’

‘Oh.’ Her disappointment sounded clear in her voice. ‘So when will I see you?’

‘God knows,’ he sighed. ‘I have to be in New York on Monday and will be away the whole week. I’ll call you,’ he said, and rang off.

She went out with Trina and Frew on Saturday night, meeting up with all her old friends for the evening. But she felt restless and out of place among them. Leon occupied her whole mind these days and she couldn’t seem to enjoy anything that did not include him.

On Monday, she woke up feeling dreadfully ill. ‘Tummy bug,’ she said to Trina, and took herself back to bed. By Wednesday she was beginning to feel a bit better, but only marginally. Still, it was enough to send her back to work.

Josh took one look at her and remarked, ‘You look shocking.’

‘Thanks,’ she drawled. ‘That does make me feel better.’

‘Beginning to get to you, is it?’ he drawled out cynically. ‘Hanging on to a man like Stephanades wears a woman down, doesn’t it? And I should know,’ he added bitterly. ‘I’ve had his leftovers, after all.’

Jemma winced at his cruelty, hating the ugly twist he had put on Leon’s friendship with Cassie. And it made her realise that if there had ever been a seed of love growing inside him for the other woman, then it was well and truly dead now.

Leon noticed her poor state of health the moment he saw her. When she explained, he just continued frowning and said, ‘Are you sure it isn’t something worse than just a stomach virus? You look pale and you’ve lost weight.’

She just shrugged the question away. ‘You know what it’s like with these things. Once they get a hold of you they can take an age to go away again. I’m feeling a whole lot better, really.’ So long as she didn’t eat anything, she added grimly to herself.

He ran his eyes over her slender figure. ‘Perhaps you need a break,’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘When did you last have a holiday?’