‘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 s
he 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.