The Mistress Purchase Read online

  When she paused, Mary urged her to continue. ‘But?’

  Sadie gave a small sigh.

  ‘Well, Raoul is pressing me to produce a new perfume. The one he tricked me into wearing at the trade fair was one of his late father’s “mistakes”. Grandmère always said her brother did not have a “nose”, and her nephew seems to lack one also! Now he wants me to create a new perfume for Francine.’

  ‘But you don’t want to?’ Mary guessed.

  Sadie gave an exasperated sigh.

  ‘I do want to. I want to very much. In fact it would be a dream come true for me to create a new Francine perfume. But…’ Sadie lifted her hands expressively.

  ‘As you know, my perfumes come from wholly natural materials, and are made in a traditional way, whereas Raoul favours modern procedures and chemically manufactured products. And it’s not just that! I just hope that I can persuade him not to go ahead with this sale, Mary. Raoul is the majority shareholder, of course, but we are one of the last few remaining traditional perfume houses, and to sell our birthright for—’

  ‘A mess of pottage?’ Mary interrupted obligingly, tongue in cheek.

  ‘I just don’t want to sell the business to this Greek billionaire, and I have said as much to Raoul.’

  ‘Mmm. All this talk of potions and lotions reminds me—how about mixing up a little something special and man-attracting for me?’

  ‘I make perfume, not magic potions,’ Sadie reminded her sternly.

  Mary gave her a wicked look.

  ‘Same thing, isn’t it?’ Her expression changed when she saw how sombre Sadie was looking. ‘Something else is worrying you, isn’t it?’ she guessed.

  Sadie frowned.

  ‘Everything is so complicated, Mary. As it stands now Francine is worth very little in financial terms. The business is almost all dried up, and the staff are mainly freelancers. In reality all that is left is the name. And it is the name that this Greek Destroyer wants to buy.’

  ‘Just the name?’

  ‘I don’t know! Raoul rang me last night and told me that he has informed Leoneadis Stapinopolous that I am working on a new scent, and that my scent and my skills will be part of the deal. I told him that he had no right to say any such thing. I am a minor shareholder in Francine, that is all. I do not work for the house!’

  Angrily Sadie paced the floor.

  ‘Raoul accused me of being deliberately difficult and of not realising what a wonderful opportunity this sale is. But an opportunity for what, Mary? Granted, it will give us both a considerable sum of money—especially Raoul, since he is the majority shareholder. But it will destroy the true essence of Francine and I just cannot agree to that. Never mind create a new scent. Raoul is putting so much pressure on me, though…’

  She gave Mary a wry smile. ‘If I do what Raoul wants me to do I shall be selling my birthright and my creative soul! Raoul reminded me last night that I was very fortunate to have been left the formula for Francine’s most famous perfume by my grandmother. In actual fact he made me feel a little bit guilty about it, Mary.’

  ‘Guilty? You? What on earth have you to feel guilty about?’ Mary demanded robustly. ‘Sadie, I know strictly speaking it is none of my business, but we have been friends for a long time and I just think that you should perhaps be a little bit cautious where your cousin is concerned,’ she added forthrightly.

  Sadie smiled in pleasure as she stepped into the foyer of her hotel. She had booked it on the recommendation of a client, who had raved about it to her, and now she could see why!

  Although its location in Mougins meant that it was some distance away from Grasse, which was where the tall narrow house which was home to both the business headquarters and her cousin Raoul were situated, Sadie did not mind.

  The hotel-cum-spa was the kind of place she loved—it was a positive haven of tranquillity and charm, unlike the glitzy Cannes hotels favoured by Raoul, who had been openly angry and bitter when he had told Sadie how much he resented the fact that the Paris premises the family had once owned were no longer in their possession.

  ‘Why the hell did our great-grandfather choose to sell the Paris house and retain the one in Grasse? When I think what that Paris place would have been worth now!’

  Sadie had said nothing. Her own grandmother had told her that the elegant family apartment and shop the family had originally owned in the capital had had to be sold in order to pay off her brother’s gambling debts, and Sadie had no desire to reopen old family wounds!

  She had booked into her hotel for the whole week, having decided to combine her business meeting with Raoul with visits to the flower-growers in the area from whom she sourced some of her supplies of natural ingredients for the perfumes she made.

  As she checked in and signed the visitors’ book Sadie hid a small smile as she saw the elegant French woman behind the reception desk sniff discreetly in her direction. The perfume Sadie was wearing was unique, and one she had steadfastly refused to supply to anyone else, no matter how much they pleaded with her to do so.

  It was based on the original secret recipe her grandmother had left her, but with a subtle addition that was Sadie’s own, which lightened its original heaviness just enough to make sure that it wasn’t in any way oppressive and at the same time enhanced and echoed the scent of Sadie’s own skin. It was Sadie’s own favourite creation, her very personal signature scent, and she knew without false vanity that it was a perfume that—if she had wished to—she could have sold over and over again.

  In its bottle the perfume always reminded her of her grandmother; on her own body it was entirely and uniquely her.

  The instructions she was given by the hotel receptionist took her to a low complex of rooms separate from the main building, set close to the adjoining spa block.

  Her room itself was everything she had hoped it would be—luxuriously comfortable, elegantly simple and totally peaceful and private.

  She had just enough time to unpack and change before she had to make her way to Grasse to meet Raoul, so that they could talk through her objections to his plans to sell the business to Leoneadis Stapinopolous—or the Greek Destroyer. Her mouth curled a little disdainfully as she reflected on the billionaire’s motives for wanting to acquire Francine.

  He would no doubt have seen that several of his competitors in the high-stratosphere business world they all occupied had already recognised the financial advantages that came with marketing a successful perfume—especially in today’s climate, when so many women wanted to follow the example of actresses and models who had expressed their preference not for a modern perfume but instead for one of the rare and exclusive signature perfumes of the traditional perfume houses.

  Her disdain changed to a frown, and she paused in the act of pulling on a comfortable pair of jeans. Formal business clothes were not really her thing, and after all this was not a formal business meeting, simply a discussion with her cousin and co-shareholder.

  Francine had once produced some of the most coveted scents of its time, but Sadie knew that her grandmother’s brother—Raoul’s grandfather—had sold off the rights to virtually all of those scents, using the money to finance a series of disastrous business ventures and settle his gambling debts.

  Today the only scents of any note Francine still produced were an old-fashioned lavender water and a ‘gentleman’s’ pomade—neither of which, in her opinion, did the name of Francine any favours. For Sadie, the fascination and inspiration of working with old scent was in sourcing the necessary raw materials—some of which were no longer available to modern-day perfume makers, for reasons of ecology and for reasons of economy, in that many of those who grew the flowers needed for their work had switched from traditional to modern methods of doing so.

  Sadie considered herself very fortunate in having found a family close to Grasse who not only still grew roses and jasmine for the perfume industry in the old-fashioned labour-intensive way, but who also operated their own traditional distillery. The
Lafount family produced rose absolute and jasmine absolute of the highest quality, and Sadie knew she was very privileged to be able to buy her raw materials from them.

  Both in their seventies now, Pierre Lafount and his brother Henri actually remembered her own grandmother, and delighted Sadie with their stories of how they could remember seeing her when she had visited the growing fields and the distillery with her own father. The Lafount family’s rose and jasmine absolutes were highly sought after, and Sadie knew that it was primarily because of their affection for her grandmother that they allowed her to buy from them in such small quantities.

  ‘Virtually all that we produce is pre-sold under contract to certain long-standing customers,’ they had told Sadie—from which she had understood that those customers would be the most famous and respected of the established perfume houses. ‘But there is a little to spare and we shall make that available to you,’ they had added magnanimously

  Raoul, typically, had laughed at Sadie for what he called her sentimentality.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he had said to her, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Paying heaven alone knows what for their stuff, when it can be manufactured in a lab at a fraction of the cost.’

  ‘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.’