Cursing beneath his breath, Leon tried again—and this time, to Sadie’s relief, the engine fired.
The farmhouse Leon was planning to rent for the summer was in the Massif de l’Estérel region of Provence, a beautiful mountainous area made up of the volcanic rock porphyry. The sides of the mountains were cloaked in forests of pine and cork oaks. Sadie felt a thrill of excitement at the thought of visiting such a beautiful area, and an even sharper one at the thought of visiting it with Leon.
However, because of some roadworks in the centre of Mougins they had to take a circuitous route in order to get to the road that would take them up into the region. As they drove through the countryside surrounding Mougins Sadie couldn’t resist pointing out to Leon the fields full of flowers grown for the perfume industry.
‘How can anything made in a laboratory come anywhere near rivalling the scent of these?’ she asked him passionately, gesturing towards fields of roses and jasmine.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Leon agreed with a glinting look towards her. ‘For one thing with a chemically based scent there’s no risk of the final product differing from batch to batch because the sun shone for three days less one year! And that means that when a woman buys a chemically created perfume she can be sure she is getting exactly the same scent that was in her previous bottle—and at an affordable price!’
Sadie’s forehead puckered into a frown. From listening to Leon it would be easy to imagine that he had not changed his stance at all on the creation of the new perfume. Or was he simply trying to bait her?
She opened her mouth to vigorously defend her own stance, but Leon shook his head and gave her a meaningful look.
‘Remember our pact?’ he warned her.
Sadie laughed, but inwardly she couldn’t help wishing that she could talk with him about her excitement and enthusiasm for her work on creating their new perfume. Their new perfume…She was also aching to get to work on the old-fashioned men’s cologne produced by Francine, to update it, to make out of it a scent that was intensely male…a fragrance that would for ever and always be for her the mark of the man she was so passionately drawn to. Leon’s scent…
Dreamily she let her imagination go to work! She would name it Leon—in her own secret thoughts if not in public—and it would be topaz-dark in hue, leonine, discreet, sensual, strong, earthy and rich, yet with a touch of coolness and hauteur, a fragrant suggestion of the pale green ice that was Leon’s eyes! Leon…Leon…The bottle would be tall and round, wide enough for a man’s hand to grip comfortably and feel at ease with…
Guiltily Sadie snatched her recklessly wayward thoughts back to reality.
Leon was an excellent driver in whose care she felt extremely safe, and she was pleased when he praised her map-reading skills and thanked her for finding them a shorter route to the motorway.
‘I dare say this wretched slug of a car will mean that it will take us longer to get there than I had expected,’ Leon warned her once they reached the right road. ‘And heaven alone knows how it will cope with climbing the mountains.’
Sadie gave him a rueful look. Although he was complaining, he was not doing so in a bad-tempered manner, rather a wryly resigned one. It increased her growing respect for him to see that he could control his reaction to difficult situations.
In fact, as she was quickly discovering, time spent in Leon’s company was such a blissful experience that merely sitting beside him inside a car made her feel happier than she suspected, as a sane modern woman, she had any right to be feeling.
As Leon had predicted, the small car laboured wretchedly up the steep mountain roads, but Sadie was too entranced by their surroundings and her companion to care. She had read in the guide book provided with the car that the porphyry rock that formed the mountains held colours which ranged from the deepest red in Cap Roux through to blue in Agay, where the Romans had made the column shafts for their monuments in Provence, to green, yellow, purple and grey. But to actually glimpse these rich colours through the deep green screen of the forest made her catch her breath in awe, unable to resist drawing Leon’s attention to what she had seen.
‘They are awesome,’ he agreed, his expression deliberately teasing as he added, ‘That is unless you have seen Ayers Rock!’
‘Oh, you.’ Sadie pulled a face at him and then stopped, her eyes misting a little with emotion as she realised how easy and natural she felt with him—just as though she had known him for years…
From somewhere deep inside her the words ‘soul mates’ rose up and would not be denied. Soul mate. Wasn’t that truly what every single human being longed for? To meet their own one and only soul mate? To be with their special-once-in-a-lifetime person who was their fate and their destiny?
A tiny little shiver quivered through her.
‘Cold?’ Leon asked, frowning and reaching out to the air-conditioning control.
Sadie shook her head, but a small perverse part of her was pleased when he turned his head to give her a searching look, and then, and only then, seemed prepared to accept her statement. Ridiculously, she knew—given her age and the fact that she had looked after herself for so long—it gave her a tiny thrill of pleasure to know that he was so concerned for her comfort. Perhaps another woman might have accused him of being stereotypically male but Sadie admitted she was actually enjoying the sensation of being cared for.
‘Does it look from the map as though it’s much further?’ Leon asked with a small frown as the car crawled up yet another steep hill.
Obligingly, Sadie checked the map. Ironically, it gave her as much pleasure to be treated as an equal partner in their shared venture as it had done only seconds ago to feel he regarded her as someone in need of his care and protection.
‘Well, it’s going on for twenty miles to the village you mentioned,’ she told him.
‘In that case we’d better stop for some lunch. Is there anywhere before then?’ Leon asked.
‘We should be coming up to a place called the Auberge des Adrets soon,’ Sadie informed him, looking at the guidebook again. ‘It was once supposed to be the favourite haunt of some highwayman named Gaspard de Besse. But there’s a small town a little bit further on,’ she added. ‘Why don’t we stop there and buy some food? Then we can eat when we get to the mas.’
When Leon shot her a surprised look Sadie backpedalled a little, telling him, ‘You said that it was unoccupied, so I thought in view of the time it’s taking us to get there…But if you would rather eat at a restaurant…’
‘No…buying our own stuff is fine by me. In fact I think it’s a great idea,’ Leon assured her immediately.
‘Well, we should be reaching the town soon,’ Sadie assured him.
Watching her as she concentrated on the guidebook, diligently checking that they were travelling in the right direction, Leon admitted that he could not think of a time when he had last enjoyed himself so much—couldn’t remember a time when he had enjoyed a woman’s company so much. Back home, the women he occasionally dated would have thrown a fit had he suggested taking them anywhere other than the most expensive and fashionable places to eat. And when he did, eating was the last thing they actually did.
They tended to parade up and down in their designer clothes, apply lipstick to their already vermilioned mouths whilst checking out the other occupants of the tables in their compact mirrors. They’d wave to th
eir friends with long polished nails, whilst pouting complaints to him that they couldn’t possibly drink anything other than the most expensive champagne. Oh, yes they did all that! But eat? Never!
Oh, they would certainly order the most expensive dishes on the menu, all right, but then refuse to eat them, protesting about calories and fat content. If there was one thing Leon hated it was seeing good food wasted—a hang-up from his upbringing, no doubt, when his grandmother had often regaled him with stories of how poor she and his grandfather had been, and how one joint of meat had been made to last a whole week.
Sadie wasn’t like the spoiled society women he had previously dated, though. Last night and this morning she had eaten her food with every evidence of enjoyment. And somehow he found just watching her doing that far more sexually stirring than watching a stick-thin model-type toying irritably with a piece of designer greenery.
And surely a woman with a healthy appetite for food would have an equally healthy appetite for life’s other sensual pleasures?
Leon recognised that his thoughts were about to surge dangerously out of control.
‘I think the town is coming up now,’ Sadie warned him
As he nodded his head in acknowledgement, Leon reflected ruefully that the town wasn’t on its own!
‘You’ve bought enough food to feed at least a dozen people.’ Sadie laughed, shaking her head in mock disapproval as she and Leon headed back to the car. Both of them were carrying the purchases Leon had insisted on making.
He’d excitedly bought long sticks of French bread, freshly baked that morning, some local cheese and fruit, some olives, and some cold meats from the local charcuterie, some delicious delicacies from the patisserie, and even a bottle of red wine, as well as some water. It was a feast fit for any king
But Leon wasn’t a king, he was a billionaire, Sadie reminded herself as they reached the car. No wonder he had looked at her in such surprise when she had suggested they buy food and virtually picnic at the mas.