The Mistress Purchase Read online

  She couldn’t help thinking how much this would have upset her grandmother. She had often told Sadie whilst she was growing up how much she missed her childhood home. Sadie had been too young then to suggest that her grandmother lower her pride and make contact with her brother, with a view to visiting Grasse and the house.

  ‘You should see it, Sadie,’ she had told her vehemently. ‘It is as much a part of your heritage as your “nose”.’ When your grandfather saved me from the Germans and brought me to England I had no idea that I would never return to Grasse. My father would have been so angry and hurt if he had known what my brother did.’

  Sadie had tried to find words to comfort her, but she had seen how much her grandmother had missed her home.

  ‘Yes, that is part of the deal,’ Leon agreed, picking up the coffee pot and refilling her empty cup for her.

  ‘What will you do with it? Will you keep it or sell it?’ Sadie asked him, wondering what it was about seeing such a strong sexy man performing this small domestic chore that made her insides melt.

  ‘I don’t know yet, and anyway the decision won’t be entirely mine to make. Why?’ Leon questioned, giving her a keen look.

  ‘No reason,’ Sadie answered him hesitantly. Despite the physical intimacy they had shared she didn’t feel mentally close enough to him to talk more about her grandmother.

  Her reticence owed more to her own loyalty to her grandmother than a reluctance to confide in Leon. She was well aware that an outsider who had not known her grandmother might question her stubbornness in refusing to have anything to do with her estranged brother. And, for reasons she was not prepared to delve deeply into, it was becoming increasingly important to Sadie that Leon felt warmly and sympathetically towards the grandmother she had loved so much. After all, how could she give her love completely to a man who did not understand and accept Grandmère’s little foibles?

  Leon was still looking at her, with one dark eyebrow raised and an expression in his eyes that told her he knew she was being evasive.

  Ruefully, she gave a small shrug.

  ‘It’s just that—well, there is so much family history attached to the house. I just think it would be very sad if it were to be sold off, or converted into offices or apartments like so many of the older buildings have been. If you were going to…to dispose of it…’

  ‘You’d want first chance to buy it?’ Leon guessed, wondering why, if she did want the property, she had not asked for it to be included in the package he was having put together for her in part exchange for the very generous lump sum she would be receiving for her share of the business.

  Immediately Sadie shook her head.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she admitted, wrinkling her nose a little as she added, ‘But there’s no way I could afford it. Even in its run-down state it would still be expensive, and I just don’t have that kind of money. Not even if I sold my home in England.’

  Leon frowned as he listened to her. Raoul had implied to him that Sadie came from a wealthy background—‘pampered and spoiled’ had been just two of the words he had used to describe her. Even if Raoul had been lying, the sum he had agreed to pay him for the business and the property was, in his opinion, on the dangerous side of generous—and he knew that his board would agree with him.

  Sadie would by virtue of her one-third holding in Francine receive one-third of that money. When he included in that sum the extra amount he had now offered, via Raoul, to pay in respect of Sadie giving up her own business to join the company, he was looking at a very large amount indeed—and Sadie’s share was well in excess of what he knew to be the value of the Grasse property.

  It was on the tip of his tongue to challenge her statement, and a small frown wrinkled his forehead as he contemplated what might lie behind Sadie’s seemingly artless comment.

  Could she actually be angling for him to offer to hand over the Grasse property to her? Somehow he hadn’t thought of her as a person who was either manipulative or grasping—unlike her cousin. But he was enough of a businessman to respect the fact that she was in a position where, if she chose to do so, she could set an extremely high value on her expertise.

  Unusually for Raoul, he had been unexpectedly and unhelpfully vague about what he thought Sadie’s financial requirements might be for joining Francine, and so Leon had sought the advice of a local firm of headhunters, asking them what the going rate for a person of Sadie’s skills would be. Once they had told him he had decided that in view of the fact she was giving up her stance on natural raw materials, and agreeing to create a new perfume, he had added a large extra amount onto the sum he had informed his legal team he would be paying her as a salary.

  If she was after the Grasse house as an additional ‘sweetener’, though, she was going to be disappointed!

  Aware of his unexpected and certainly unwanted withdrawal from her, but totally unaware of what Leon was thinking, Sadie questioned lightly, ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, nothing at all,’ Leon assured her smoothly. ‘If you’re ready, we ought to make a start. The mas is a good three hours’ drive away.’

  Relieved to see the sombre look replaced by a much warmer one, Sadie nodded her head.

  The tables on the open air terrace of the restaurant where they had eaten their breakfast were filling up with other guests now, and Sadie was glad that they’d eaten early enough to have virtually had the place to themselves.

  This hotel would make a wonderful venue for honeymoons, she acknowledged as she stood up and Leon came to pull her chair back for her. What with its spa facilities and suites with their own private hot tubs. If she and Leon were sharing such a suite…

  As he saw her eyes darken and her face flush, Leon wondered what it was that had brought that soft look to Sadie’s eyes and caused her sudden intake of breath.

  Standing close to her now, breathing in the warm scent of her, he wondered if he was being entirely wise in choosing to spend a whole day with her—especially after last night! And it wasn’t the fiercely passionate kiss they had exchanged before going their separate ways he was thinking about, but the hours afterwards, when he had lain awake in bed, aching for her so much that he’d had to grit his teeth against the sheer intensity of it, and will the hard, angry throb of his erection to subside.

  When Leon picked up the keys for the hire car he had ordered from the foyer, the receptionist announced, ‘The hire car firm has asked me to apologise to you because unfortunately they have not been able to supply you with the car you requested. They have instead delivered a smaller one. Apparently there was a mix-up at the main office, and with Cannes being so busy with a big trade fair…’

  Sadie could see that Leon was frowning a little, and so she offered calmingly, ‘As there are only the two of us the size of the car doesn’t really matter, does it?’

  Leon took the keys from the receptionist and turned to smile warmly at her.

  ‘Does having such a good nature come naturally to you, or do you have to work at it?’ he teased her gently as he took her arm and guided her out into the warm morning sunshine.

  Sadie cast him a wry look.

  ‘You didn’t give me the impression that you thought I had a good nature when we first met,’ she reminded him dryly.

  ‘Ah.’ Leon gave her a droll look. ‘But that was before.’

  ‘Before what?’ Sadie couldn’t resist asking as he led her towards the small compact hire car parked just outside the main entrance.

  Bending his head towards her, Leon replied wickedly, ‘Before I kissed you.’ He was playing with fire and he knew it, but suddenly he felt happier than he had felt in a long long time.

  Speechlessly Sadie got into the passenger seat. Leon was quite definitely flirting with her, and somehow she didn’t think that he was the type of man to flirt with every woman he met. No, when Leon flirted, it was because…

  Because what? Because he wanted to idle away a few spare days enjoying a brief sexual liaison? Sadie shivered, as though t
he words ‘brief’ and ‘liaison’ were lumps of ice someone had dropped down her back.

  It really was a compact car, she acknowledged ruefully a few minutes later, as she saw the way that Leon was practically folded over the steering wheel.

  ‘In Australia we wouldn’t give something of this size to our kids in case we were convicted of child abuse,’ he told her in disgust as he inserted the key into the ignition.

  Sadie laughed.

  ‘I thought it was only Texas where everything was bigger than anywhere else,’ she teased him, but her laughter turned into a small anxious frown as the car refused to start.

  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.