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 the 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