‘Your...er...mistress is waiting for you.’ Leila’s voice felt scratchy.
He still had his hand wrapped around hers and now let her go. Leila tucked it well out of reach.
He morphed before her eyes into someone much cooler, indecipherable. Perversely, it didn’t comfort her.
‘I’ll take it.’
Leila blinked at him.
‘The perfume,’ he expanded, and for a moment a glint of what they’d just shared made his eyes flash.
Leila jerked into action. ‘Of course. It’ll only take me a moment to package it up.’
She moved to get a bag and paper and quickly and inexpertly packaged up the perfume, losing all of her customary cool. When she had it ready she handed it over and avoided his eye. A wad of cash landed on the counter but Leila wasn’t about to check it.
And then, without another word, he turned around and strode out again, catching his...whatever she was...by the arm and hustling her back into the car.
His scent lingered on the air behind him, and in a very delayed reaction Leila assimilated the various components with an expertise that was like a sixth sense—along with the realisation that his scent had impacted on her as soon as he’d walked in, on a level that wasn’t rational. Someplace else. Somewhere she wasn’t used to scents impacting.
It was a visceral reaction. Primal. His scent was clean, with a hint of something very male that most certainly hadn’t come out of a bottle. The kind of evocative scent that would make someone a fortune if they could bottle it: the pure essence of a virile male in his prime. Earthy. Musky.
A pulse between Leila’s legs throbbed and she pressed her thighs together, horrified.
What was wrong with her? The man was a king, for God’s sake, and he had a mistress that he was unashamed about. She should be thinking good riddance, but what she was thinking was much more confused.
It made alarm bells ring. It reminded her of another man who had come into the shop and who had very skilfully set about wooing her—only to turn into a nasty stranger when he’d realised that Leila had no intention of giving him what he wanted...which had been very far removed from what Leila had wanted.
She looked stupidly at the money on the counter for a moment, before realising that he’d vastly overpaid her for the perfume, but all she could think about was that last enigmatic look he’d shot her, just before he’d ducked into the car—a look that had seemed to say he’d be back. And soon.
And in light of their conversation, and the way he’d made her feel, Leila knew she shouldn’t be remotely intrigued. But she was. And not even the ghost of memories past could stop it.
* * *
A little later, after Leila had locked up and gone upstairs to the small flat she’d shared with her mother all her life, she found herself gravitating to the window, which looked out over the Place Vendôme. The opera glasses that her mother had used for years to check out the comings and goings at the Ritz were sitting nearby, and for a second Leila felt an intense pang of grief for her mother.
Leila pushed aside the past and picked up the glasses and looked through them, seeing the usual flurry of activity when someone arrived at the hotel in a flash car. She tilted the glasses upwards to where the rooms were—and her whole body froze when she caught a glimpse of a familiar masculine figure against a brightly lit opulent room.
She trained the glasses on the sight, hating herself for it but unable to look away. It was him. Alix Saint Croix. The overcoat was gone. And the jacket. He had his back to her and was dressed in a waistcoat and shirt and trousers. Hands in his pockets were drawing the material of his trousers over his very taut and muscular backside.
Instantly Leila felt damp heat coil down below and squeezed her legs together.
He was looking at something in front of him, and Leila tensed even more when the woman he’d been with came into her line of vision. She’d taken off the jacket and the flimsy dress was now all she wore. Her body was as sleek and toned as a throughbred horse. Leila vaguely recognised her as a world-famous lingerie model.
She could see that she held something in her hand, and when it glinted she realised it was the bottle of perfume. The woman sprayed it on her wrist and lifted it to smell, a sexy smile curling her wide mouth upwards.
She sprayed more over herself and Leila winced slightly. The trick with perfume was always less is more. And then she threw the bottle aside, presumably to a nearby chair or couch, and proceeded to pull down the skinny straps of her dress. Then she peeled the top half of her dress down, exposing small but perfect breasts.
Leila gasped at the woman’s confidence. She’d never have the nerve to strip in that way in front of a man.
And then Alix Saint Croix moved. He turned away from the woman and walked to the window. For a second he loomed large in Leila’s glasses, filling them with that hard-boned face. He looked intent. And then he pulled a drape across, obscuring the view, almost as if he’d known Leila was watching from across the square like a Peeping Tom.
Disgusted with herself, Leila threw the glasses down and got up to pace in her small apartment. She berated herself. How could a man like that even capture her attention? He was exactly what her mother had warned her about: rich and arrogant. Not even prepared to see women as anything other than mistresses, undoubtedly interchanged with alarming frequency once the novelty with each one had worn off.
Leila had already refused to take her mother’s warnings to heart once, and had suffered a painful blow to her confidence and pride because of it.
Full of pent-up energy, she dragged on a jacket and went outside for a brisk walk around the nearby Tuileries gardens, telling herself over and over again first of all that nothing had happened with Alix Saint Croix in her shop that day, secondly that she’d never see him again, and thirdly that she didn’t care.
* * *
The following evening dusk was falling as Leila went to lock the front door of her shop. It had been a long day, with only a trickle of customers and two measly sales. Thanks to the recession, niche businesses everywhere had taken a nosedive, and since the factory that manufactured the House of Leila scents had closed down she hadn’t had the funds to seek out a new factory.
She’d been reduced to selling off the stock she had left in the hope that enough sales would give her the funds to start making perfumes again.
She was just about to turn the lock when she looked up through the glass to see a familiar tall dark figure, flanked by a couple of other men, approaching her door. The almost violent effect on her body of seeing him in the flesh again mocked her for fooling herself that she’d managed not to think about him all day.
The exiled King with the tragic past.
Leila had looked him up on the Internet last night in a moment of weakness and had read about how his parents and younger brother had been slaughtered during a military coup. The fact that he’d escaped to live in exile had become something of a legend.
Her immediate instinct was to lock the door and pull the blind down—fast. But he was right outside now and looking at her. The faintest glimmer of a smile touched his mouth. She could see a day’s worth of stubble shadowing his jaw.
Obeying professional reflexes rather than her instincts, Leila opened the door and stepped back. He came in and once again it was as if her brain was slowing to a halt. It was consumed with taking note of his sheer masculine beauty.
Determined not to let him rattle her again, Leila assumed a polite, professional mask. ‘How did your mistress like the perfume?’
A lurid image of the woman putting on that striptease threatened to undo Leila’s composure but