‘I see…’
He was looking at her in the most direct and yet somehow very tender way, Sadie recognised. A way that made her feel as though she could almost tell him just how hurt she had felt, knowing that her stepmother didn’t want her and that her father did not love her enough to insist that she was allowed to be a part of their lives.
‘I too had a very close relationship with my grandmother,’ Leon told her quietly.
For a moment they looked at one another in silence. They were, Sadie recognised, two people suddenly discovering that they had more in common than they had realised.
‘Your grandmother was Greek, wasn’t she?’ Sadie asked hesitantly, not wanting to pry and yet suddenly desperate to learn as much about him as she could, for him to be the one to tell her!
‘Yes. Like you, with your grandmother, I was very close to her. My parents both worked in the business my father was building, and my grandmother lived with us and looked after me. She died when I was fourteen.’ His frown deepened. ‘It was a very bad time for the family.’
‘You still miss her?’ Sadie guessed.
‘Yes,’ he agreed gruffly. ‘She didn’t have the easiest of lives—’ His mouth twisted a little bitterly. ‘And that is an understatement. She had an extremely hard life. Her parents emigrated to Australia to escape from poverty at home. Her mother died before they reached Sydney and her father was so grief stricken that he began to drink. My grandmother brought up her brothers and sisters virtually single-handed, and looked after her father as well, when she was little more than a child herself! She was just twelve when they arrived in Australia, and twenty-four when she married my grandfather. She was working as a ladies’ maid when he met her, and in those days anyone in service was not allowed to get married. She wouldn’t leave her job because she still had her father to support.’
‘She must have been a wonderful person,’ Sadie told him softly.
‘She was,’ he agreed.
There was a look in his eyes she couldn’t analyse, Sadie acknowledged. A look which held bitterness and anger. A look which for some reason right now he seemed to be directing right at her!
‘You’re wearing your perfume,’ he said abruptly changing the subject
Sadie nodded her head, trying not to betray the fact she was pleased he had noticed.
‘Is it very different from the original Myrrh?’
‘A little,’ she told him, the realisation that his interest had been of a business rather than a personal nature turning her pleasure to disappointment. Rather briskly, she added, ‘The original perfume, like most perfumes of its time, was much stronger than women want to wear today—and, of course, very expensive.’
‘Expensive and exclusive,’ Leon agreed curtly. ‘In fact, a luxury that most ordinary women could never hope to enjoy!’
To Sadie’s bewilderment his expression as well as his voice once again suddenly changed, becoming closed and forbidding.
‘Have you decided want you want to eat yet?’ he asked grimly.
Sadie looked at him, tempted to ask what it was she had said that had caused him to withdraw so sharply from her, but instead she simply told him very coolly and distantly that, yes, she was ready to order.
‘How old were you when you first knew that you had a “nose”?’
Their first course had just arrived, and Sadie looked across at Leon a little warily. But whatever it was that had caused that momentary harsh bleakness to harden his expression had gone, and he was once more smiling warmly at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I just sort of grew up knowing that I wanted to create perfume. My grandmother encouraged me, of course. She was born at the wrong time, I think, looking back now. She would have loved to have taken over the business, but as a girl with a brother that was just not an option.’
‘I have gathered that there was some discord between them,’ Leon acknowledged, and he looked encouragingly at her, obviously wanting to learn more.
‘My great-uncle was a gambler, and he ran down the business to finance his gambling habit. My grandmother hated what he did, and I think she ended up hating him too,’ Sadie admitted. ‘A rift developed between them which was exacerbated by the fact that my grandmother had married an Englishman and lived so far away from him. Still, she felt so passionately about the business…’
‘A passion which she obviously passed on to you,’ Leon interrupted her.
Sadie smiled.
‘My grandmother was a very passionate person.’
‘And so, I imagine, are you. Very passionate!’
Across the table their glances met and locked. Sadie discovered she was only able to breathe shallowly, her heart bouncing frantically around her chest, making her feel as though she wanted to press her hands to her body to keep it still.
The silence between them, the intimacy of their locked gazes, was the most exciting sensation she had ever experienced, she acknowledged dizzily. Her food was completely forgotten—Leon was her food, her need, her every sustenance both physical and emotional. If he were to reach out now, take hold of her hand and lead her from the table, she knew beyond any doubt that she would go with him.
‘You can’t possibly know that. I…’ Her voice was a papery dry whisper, a muted husk of sound, her eyes huge, her pupils dilated.
‘I do know it.’ Leon stopped her. His own voice was tense, low and raw with an open hunger that made Sadie shudder violently.
‘I know exactly how you will feel in my arms, Sadie, how you will taste, how passionately you will respond to me in my bed.’
What the hell was he doing? Leon wondered savagely as he heard what he was saying almost as though he was standing outside himself and listening. From the moment he had taken over the family business on his twenty-first birthday, Leon had dedicated himself totally to its success. Nothing and no one had ever threatened to come between him and that dedication—until now!
For the first time in his life Leon could feel himself being pulled in different directions emotionally. Had he gone completely mad? Totally lost the plot? Okay, so Sadie was one delectably desirable woman. But that didn’t mean…
The way she was looking at him made his body clench, and a surge of desire as fierce as the kick of a mule powered through his belly.
This wasn’t something he had written down in his mental checklist of life goals. Not now and quite definitely not ever with this particular woman!
So why wasn’t he doing something about it? Why wasn’t he getting a grip and forcing his unwanted desire for her to shrivel into nothing? Because he didn’t want to or because he couldn’t do so? Because he was already in way way over his head and not even thinking about trying to save himself?
A small shudder ripped through Sadie, openly visible to him, and his own body reacted. Responded! Hell, but no woman had affected him like this in public since he had left his teenage days behind him. It was a damn good job that the table covered the visible evidence of his arousal.
He moved a little uncomfortably in his seat, cursing softly to himself.
Sadie held her breath as she saw the way Leon’s eyes burned with sexual awareness as he monitored her reaction.
She could hardly breathe normally, never mind think of eating! Frantically she tried to come up with something banal to say, to extinguish the almost palpable aura of sexual heat surrounding them. But her brain was simply refusing