The sound of their breathing, the soft little sighs and moans of pleasure Sadie was giving and the thick, raw muffled responses from Leon filled the air around them.
Dizzily Sadie acknowledged that if this was war no way was she going to sue for peace!
When Leon’s hand cupped her breast she moaned an appreciative response. When she tugged his shirt free of his jeans and allowed her hands the pleasure of caressing his warm bare skin he returned the compliment by sliding his hand beneath her tee shirt with gratifying impatience and eagerness.
Her nipple pushed eagerly against the thin fabric of her bra, seeking the skin to skin touch of his hand just as eagerly as his erection was demanding hers.
Between hungrily passionate kisses their clothes were quickly and mutually discarded. The desk was behind them and Sadie murmured in approval as Leon made good use of it, by lifting her onto it.
The warm sunlight through the window dusted gold over Leon’s warmly tanned skin, finding in the dark shadowing of hair glints of tawny warmth. Sadie clung to him as he reached for her, wrapping herself tightly around him, welcoming each hungry thrust of his body within her own, encouraging his deeper and deeper penetration of her as her need for him rocketed out of control.
They came together quickly and ferociously, the explosion of pleasure inside her leaving Sadie’s body trembling.
As the heat left her body and the red burst of need clouding her brain lifted, she wondered bleakly what on earth she had done. But as she made to pull away from Leon he pulled her closer, cradling her against his body.
‘No. I want you here with me, Sadie. In my arms. Heaven knows I’ve dreamed about holding you in them damn near every night since we’ve been apart.’
Silently Sadie looked at him. Her heart had begun to jump giddily around inside her ribcage, and she wanted to tell it to stop, to realise as she did that Leon was afraid of the commitment it ached for them to share.
‘And in my bed!’ Leon was continuing, his voice growing thicker with every word. ‘Not just now, tonight, but every night, Sadie. You were right when you accused me of being afraid,’ he told her abruptly. ‘But what I’m most afraid of right now is loving you, Sadie. I want you in my life full-time, with all that entails. You could never be another Miranda. I knew that all along. But to have you back out of the deal I’d spent so much time putting together, knowing how my board were likely to react when some of them had been against the whole thing from the start…’
‘What happened to your father must have been hard for you,’ Sadie said quietly.
She could see from the look in Leon’s eyes that a part of him wanted to back off from this kind of discussion, but to Sadie it was important that they talked about it. ‘Very hard for you,’ she added with soft encouragement, waiting, wanting him to open up to her and allow her into his pain.
The look on his face said that she had gone too far, trespassed too far, but Sadie wasn’t about to back off!
They had shared one very important kind of intimacy, the kind of intimacy where she had opened herself to him as a woman, and now it was time for him to open himself to her as a man!
‘Hard?’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘I was fourteen and my father was my hero. He had worked damn near a ten-hour day seven days a week to get the business off the ground. You should have seen the pride in his face the day he took my mother and me to see the house he had bought for us. That meant so much to him. That he was able to provide for us, to give my mother all the things she’d had to do without whilst he was getting the business up and running. He told me that one day I would take over from him…but not until I’d been to college and seen a bit of the world. He wanted me to have the opportunities he hadn’t been able to have himself! And then Andy died, and Miranda…’ Leon paused. ‘That was hard, seeing my father going virtually overnight from a man of pride and self-respect to someone…’
Unable to stop herself, Sadie reached out and covered Leon’s hand with her own in a gesture of womanly comfort and understanding.
‘You must have felt very angry, and very afraid.’ she said gently. When he looked at her she added, ‘You were only a boy, Leon. Fourteen…’
‘Fourteen is only four years off manhood,’ Leon told her curtly. ‘What happened then made me the man I am today, Sadie. A man who always puts the security of the business ahead of everything else in my life.’
He paused to look at her before adding gruffly, ‘And then you came along, and suddenly…What was happening between us wasn’t in my game plan—and you were a woman I was involved with on a business footing. When I was with you, you blew my ability to rationalise clean out of the water. All I wanted…all I needed was you. Don’t you see?’ he growled. ‘What was happening between us pushed me off base and made me feel…’
‘Vulnerable?’ she suggested softly.
For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to reply.
This man, her man, she acknowledged with a tiny shiver of fierce pleasure, was quite definitely one tough alpha male.
‘If you want to put it that way,’ he agreed, almost grudgingly.
‘And that was why you rejected me?’
Sadie didn’t wait for his reply; she could see it in his eyes. The best way to teach someone was by example, she reminded herself. And, that being the case, if she wanted Leon to talk to her about his feelings perhaps she would talk about her own first!
Taking a deep breath, she asked him slowly, ‘Have you any idea what rejection does to a woman, or at least to this woman, when she’s given herself in love to the man she thinks shares her feelings? When she’s already planning their future together, even imagining having his babies? Only to be told that she’s got it wrong, that he doesn’t want her; that he doesn’t share her feelings?’
‘You were doing that? Imagining having my babies?’ His voice was thick with awe, raw with emotion. ‘You were imagining…?’
As he took her in his arms, Leon whispered against her mouth, ‘We’ve got to find a way to make this work, Sadie. We will find a way!’
Pushing him away, Sadie warned him, ‘I won’t change my mind about the Myrrh formula, Leon. Nor about working with synthetics.’
Leon brushed his thumb against Sadie’s lips.
‘No words now, Sadie. Not when there is so much I want to communicate to you in so many other ways—with my hands, with my mouth, with my body!’ he added sensuously as he felt her lips open to caress the hard pad of his thumb.
Tomorrow he would tell her about his meeting with the chemist, and that he planned to put to his board the proposal that they invest in creating a scent which would combine the best of both natural ingredients and synthetic that could be afforded by women all over the world. But right now he had far, far more important things on his mind than mere business!
As her tongue probed the ridges of flesh on Leon’s thumb, Sadie opened her arms to him, moaning with pleasure as he bent his head to her breast and started to feather delirium-inducing caresses against its taut peak.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘YES, Raoul. I’ve told Leon that I’m prepared to sell him my share of Francine,’ Sadie confirmed patiently into her mobile.
She was still in Leon’s suite at the hotel, having spent the entire night with him, and her body throbbed blissfully with that very special physical ache that comes with sexual fulfilment.
Leon had left half an hour earlier, telling her that he had a meeting to go to but insisting that she was to stay until he returned.
‘We have a great deal to talk about,’ he had whispered as he kissed her. ‘And I do not mean the Francine contract!’
Sadie’s mouth curled into a happy smile now as she spoke to her cousin.
‘I’ve also told Leon that I haven’t changed my mind about either the Myrrh formula or creating a new synthetic scent for him,’ she warned Raoul.
‘Well, he won’t be bothered about that,’ Raoul interrupted her carelessly. ‘I’ve heard that he’s already in negotiat
ion with Arnaud Lebrun, and he’s supposed to be the best chemist in the whole of the perfume industry. If you want my opinion, you’ve been a fool to turn down the kind of opportunity Leon would have given you and your career, but it was your choice! Lebrun will give Leon what he wants! But at least you’ve had the sense to agree to sell your share of Francine to Leon,’ Raul continued, oblivious to the deathblow he had dealt her.
Numbly, Sadie ended the call. Logically there was no valid reason why she should feel the way she was right now! Leon had every right to hire someone else to do what she had refused to do. But last night he had told her that they would find a way to work things out, and she had believed that he’d meant he was prepared to compromise, just as she was herself.
But she could not have been more wrong.
Once again pain, anger, desolation and a feeling of betrayal filled her. These were now familiar, destructive and unwanted feelings for Sadie. Feelings she had told herself—and believed—in Leon’s arms last night that she would never experience again.
And what made it all so much worse was that Leon hadn’t even warned her what he was planning to do. In bed last night he had as good as told her he loved her. But how could he when…?
She was on the point of leaving when Leon walked into the suite.
When she made no move to go to him, and then stepped back out of arm’s reach when he came to her, he stood still and frowned.