‘But that is the whole point, Raoul,’ Sadie had told him dryly. ‘The essence of the scents I want to create cannot be manufactured.’
Raoul had shrugged dismissively. ‘Who can tell the difference?’
‘I can!’ Sadie had answered calmly.
And now apparently Raoul wanted to sell Francine to someone who was as ignorant and uncaring of what real scent was all about as he was. Well, not if she had anything to do with it, he wasn’t, Sadie decided stubbornly.
As she went to the parking area to collect her hire car Sadie noticed a frenzy of anxious activity surrounding the presence of a huge Mercedes limousine, with its windows blacked out. But she had too much on her mind to do any more than give both the vehicle and its entourage of anxious attendants a wryly amused glance as she skirted past them.
Spring was quite definitely on the way, Sadie acknowledged as she sniffed the air appreciatively. The scent of mimosa was heavenly!
She knew the way to Grasse almost as well as she knew the history of Francine and although modern motorways and roads had altered things since her grandmother’s time, Sadie suspected that just from listening over and over again to her description of the place she could almost have found her away around the town blindfold.
Her grandmother’s childhood had been in her own words an idyllic and financially cocooned one; her father had adored and spoiled her, but then war had broken out and everything had changed. Sadie’s great-grandfather had died and her grandmother had fled to England with the young English major she had fallen in love with.
The quarrel between her grandmother and her great-uncle had led to a rift which had never been healed, and stubbornly her grandmother had refused to return to Grasse. Maybe she never physically went back, but in her memories, her emotions and her heart she had returned over and over again, Sadie acknowledged as she eased her hire car down the narrow maze of streets crowded with historic buildings. Here and there she could see the now disused chimneys of what had once been the town’s thriving perfume distilleries.
Other perfume houses had turned their work into a thriving tourist industry, but Francine remained as it had always done. The tall, narrow house guarding the privacy of a cobbled courtyard which lay behind its now slightly shabby façade, the paint flaking off its old-fashioned shutters and off the ancient solid wooden gates, beyond which lay the courtyard and a collection of outbuildings, linked together with covered galleries and walkways, in which Francine perfumes had traditionally been made.
Had always been made! Sadie frowned as she swerved expertly across the path of a battered old Citroen, ignoring the infuriated gestures and horn of its irate driver, swinging her hire car neatly into the single available parking space on the piece of empty land across the road from the house.
If Raoul had his way, and Francine was sold to the Greek Destroyer, then the manufacture of its perfumes would be transferred to a modern venue and produced with synthetic materials, its remaining few permanent elderly employees summarily retired and their skills lost.
Hélène, Raoul’s ancient and unfriendly housekeeper, opened the door to Sadie’s knock, her face set in its normal expression of dour misanthropy.
The few brave beams of sunlight which had managed to force their way through the grimy narrow windows highlighted golden squares of dust on the old-fashioned furniture in the stone-floored entrance hall. It made Sadie’s artistic soul ache not just to see the neglect, but also the wasted opportunity to create something beautiful in this old and unloved historic house.
The rear door that opened out into the courtyard was half open, and through it Sadie could see the cobbled yard and hear the tinkle of water falling from a small fountain into the shallow stone basin beneath it. A lavender-flowered wisteria clothed the back wall of the courtyard, and a thin tabby cat lay washing its paws beneath it in a patch of warm sunshine.
Instinctively Sadie hesitated, drawn to the courtyard and its history, the memories it held of her ancestors and their creations. Its air—unlike that of the house, which smelled of dust and neglect—held a heady fusion of everything that Sadie loved best.
Hélène was growing impatient and glowering at her.
Reluctantly Sadie turned away from the courtyard and headed for the stairs that led up to the house’s living quarters and Raoul’s ‘office’.
Hélène, who protected her employer as devotedly as any guard dog, preceded Sadie up the stairs, giving her a final suspicious look before pushing open the door.
Ready for the battle she knew was about to commence, Sadie took a deep breath and stepped firmly into the room, beginning calmly, ‘Raoul, I am not—’
Abruptly she stopped in mid-sentence, her eyes widening, betraying her, as shock coursed through her, scattering her carefully assembled thoughts like a small whirlwind.
There, right in front of her, standing framed in the window of Raoul’s office, was…was…
CHAPTER TWO
SADIE gulped and struggled to regain her equilibrium and self-control, but those perma frost eyes were trapping her in an invisible web of subtle power.
His gaze made her feel dizzy, disorientated, helplessly enmeshed in sensations and emotions that terrified her into fierce, self-protective and angry hostility. And yet at the same time beneath all those feelings lay another, stronger, and darker one too. A rush of instinctive awareness of her vulnerability towards him as a man who, at the deepest most intense level of herself, she was responsive to.
She could feel her body quickening like mercury just because he was there, her every single sense reacting not just to the sight of him but to everything else as well, including his scent, male, potent and dangerous, prickling her sensitive nose, making her want to both breathe in the essence of him and yet at the same time close herself off from it and from him. Instinctively Sadie tensed against what she was experiencing, her eyes liquid gold with the intensity of her feelings.
She gave a small inward shudder.
‘I warned you, didn’t I, Leon, that my cousin doesn’t exactly present a businesslike image?’ Sadie could hear Raoul saying.
Leon? Leoneadis Stapinopolous? The Greek Destroyer? Silver spears of hostility and wariness glinted in the gold of Sadie’s gaze as she stared at him.
‘Miss Roberts.’ A brief inclination of his head, an Olympian acknowledgement of her presence which matched the unimpressed Australian scorch of his voice.
‘Okay, Sadie, now that you’re here let’s get down to business. Leon doesn’t have much time,’ Raoul breezed on.
So he had no time and too much money. It was a dangerously volatile combination—much like the man himself, Sadie reflected inwardly. He hadn’t, she noticed, made any attempt to shake hands with her, for which she was mightily thankful, as the last thing she wante
d or needed right now was any kind of physical contact with him.
He had made no indication of having recognised her from the trade fair. Perhaps he had not done so. Maybe, unlike her, he had not suffered that feral surge of instant recognition. Maybe? There was no maybe about it! He was a man who was armoured against any kind of emotional vulnerability!
As Raoul started to talk expansively about the benefits which would accrue to them all on Leon’s acquisition of Francine Sadie had to force herself to focus on what he was saying. Deliberately she started to turn away from Leon to face her cousin, hoping that by doing so she could lessen the almost mesmerising effect Leon’s presence was having on her.
She spun round on her heel and a flurry of dust motes danced around her. Out of the corner of her eye she just caught the swift movement Leon made as he stepped towards her, his fingers curling round her upper arm, shackling her. She could feel the pulse throbbing at the base of her throat, driven by the acute intensity of the sensations bombarding her—the cool, steely grip of his hand on her arm, the sleek suppleness of his fingers, hard and strong, the dry, controlled warmth of his flesh, the steadiness of the surge of his blood in his veins as her own pounding heartbeat went wild.
Instinctively Sadie’s head snapped round. Her eyes were on a level with his throat. A drenching surge of hot female awareness roared over her, swamping her. She wasn’t used to feeling like this, reacting like this, wanting like this, she acknowledged shakily.
Wanting…How could she want him? He was a stranger, her enemy, representative of everything she disliked and despised.
He was leaning towards her, his cold gaze releasing her as his eyelids came down, shuttering his eyes away from her as his head slanted towards her throat.
It was impossible for her to stop the fierce tremor that raced through her as she felt the warmth of his breath against her skin
‘Well, at least the scent you are wearing today is a great improvement on whatever it was you were touting at the trade fair.’