The Mistress Purchase
PENNY JORDAN
Penny Jordan needs no introduction as arguably the most recognisable name writing for Mills & Boon. We have celebrated her wonderful writing with a special collection, many of which for the first time in eBook format and all available right now.Sold - to the Greek tycoon! Leon Stapinopolous has never known defeat in the boardroom - or the bedroom!The acquisition of one of France's oldest perfume houses is to be another profitable notch in his business profile, with Leon insisting that stunning perfume designer Sadie Roberts is included in the purchase price! Sadie is adamant he'll never own her.But Leon thrills her senses more than the headiest fragrance, with his blend of charm and passion…
Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.
Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon's most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women's fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Mistress Purchase
Penny Jordan
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
PROLOGUE
‘EXCUSE me!’ Sadie Roberts grimaced as her plea was ignored and she had to try to wriggle her way past the small group of men, all hanging fawningly on the every word of the man who was addressing them. And what a man, Sadie acknowledged with a small, irritated female surge of hostile and unwanted but still undeniably fierce awareness of him. If maleness was an essence, then this man possessed a potency that made Sadie’s sensitive female receptors twitch warily.
He stood a good four inches above the older man who stood faithfully by his side, and whilst his voice was cool and low pitched it had a timbre that made Sadie shiver sensually, as though a soft, scented velvet glove had been slowly stroked over her bare skin.
Trapped where she was by the sudden surge of people trying to move down the narrow tented corridor that led from one part of the trade fair to another, Sadie wobbled perilously on her unfamiliar high heels—the shoes, like the heavy make-up, were her cousin Raoul’s idea—and found herself being inexorably pushed closer to the arrogant stranger. So close, in fact, that she could have put out her hand and touched him. Not that she had any intention or desire to do such a thing. Had she? Wasn’t she secretly thinking…wanting…? Frantically Sadie made a grab for her reckless thoughts.
He, the man she was tensing her body into denying its reaction to, had lifted his hand to look at his watch, its fingers lean, tanned, the nails neatly cut and clean, but still very masculine. It was a hand that belonged to a man who was fully capable of dealing competently with any number of manual tasks, whilst the suit he was wearing clearly identified that he was equally capable of writing a cheque to pay someone else to do them!
Oh, yes, he would be very good at writing cheques, Sadie decided. He had that kind of arrogance. A wealthy man’s arrogance. It was there in the cool look of hauteur he was slanting over her; a slow, thorough visual inspection that was a disturbing combination of sensuality and slicing assessment.
Another rough push as someone else fought their way through the tightly packed crowd almost sent Sadie straight into him, so that their bodies might have meshed in a shared physical exchange that would sting her blood and stop her breath.
What was the matter with her? Why should she feel so alarmed, so unnerved, so…affected by the knowledge that beneath the cool silk mohair of the immaculate suit he was wearing surely lay a body that was all raw masculinity, solid hard muscle and sinew, all…?
Immediately Sadie froze, pushing away her unwanted and disruptive thoughts.
Irritated with herself and her uncontrollable reaction to him, she seized the opportunity provided by the thinning of the crowd and made herself walk away.
Hot-faced, she hurried back down the corridor in search of her cousin Raoul.
‘Come here, Sadie, and let the guys get a whiff of our scent.’
Stony-faced, Sadie turned to face her cousin and co-director.
She was still furious with Raoul for the trick he had pulled on her this morning, in persuading her to wear the perfume house’s current scent. This was a scent created in Raoul’s father’s time—when he had briefly managed the small family-owned business. And even she was more annoyed with herself, for being gullible enough to fall for it. She should have listened to her own instincts and refused to go along with Raoul’s plans the moment she had smelled the appalling concoction which was now offending her own olfactory senses! Instead, she had given in to a bout of sentiment and told herself that she wanted to do everything she possibly could to mend the breach in their family!
She had assumed that she was simply going to accompany Raoul to the trade fair. But Raoul had other ideas! The clothes, the make-up and the ‘big’ hairstyle he had bullied her into were bad enough, and just not ‘her’ at all, but she had bitten on her lip and given in—in the interests of cousinly harmony. But, oh, how she wished now she had not done so!
For the last few interminable hours she had been subject to a barrage of leering looks, suggestive remarks and totally unwanted physical intimacies from the would-be male buyers Raoul had persisted in inviting to sample the perfume she was wearing on her skin!
She loathed the scent. It was everything that Sadie detested most about modern synthetic-based perfumes, completely lacking in character and subtlety, with no staying power, and thin and cold where a perfume should be rich and warm, lingering on the senses like good chocolate or a lover’s caress. And, even worse, this perfume had a brashness about it, a sexuality—there was really no other word—that Sadie personally found so loathsome that she now actually had a nauseating headache from wearing it!
‘That’s it. I’ve had enough. I’m going back to the hotel right now!’ Sadie told her cousin grimly, as she evaded the unwelcome attentions of the red-faced overweight buyer who had been trying to nuzzle the side of her throat.
‘What’s wrong?’ Raoul demanded, grinning slyly at her.
‘What’s wrong?’ Sadie took a deep breath.
Eighteen months ago, on the death of her much loved maternal grandmother, Sadie had inherited a thirty per cent shareholding in the small prestigious French perfume house of Francine, which had been in her grandmother’s family for several generations, along with the secret recipe for what had been the house’s most famous scent.
Her awareness of the rift that had existed between her grandmother and her brother, Sadie’s great-uncle and Raoul’s grandfather, which had caused her grandmother to distance herself from the business and take no part in it, had initially coloured Sadie’s reaction to her inheritance. But Raoul, who owned the remaining shares in the business, had invited her to heal the rift which had developed between the two branches of the family during her grandmother’s time and not only take her place on the board but also put her skills as a perfumier to good use and work in the business.
But then she’d had no idea just how far from her own idealistic imaginings and dreams Raoul’s plans for the business were!
Raoul, with his shrewd business acumen and lack of sentimentality, seemed determined to use every means he could to promote the perfume house, no matter how un-savoury or out of keeping with the house’s history and traditions!
‘What’s wrong?’ Sadie repeated furiously, her wide-set topaz eyes appearing pure gold with emotion. ‘Do you really need to ask me that, Raoul? Can’t you see how this…this publicity gimmick of yours is cheapening not just me but our perfumes as well? Do you really think that what I have just had to endure will encourage women to buy our scent? That by being pawed over by…by—’
‘By the world’s most influential megastores’ perfume buyers?’ Raoul cut in, the humour gone from his voice and his face set.
‘I don’t care what you say, Raoul,’ Sadie told him. ‘I’m going back to the hotel!’
Without giving him the opportunity to reopen the argument, she spun round on her heel and headed for the exit.
Initially she had been excited at the prospect of this trade fair, especially when Raoul had informed her that it was to be held in Cannes, which was so close to Grasse, where their great-great-grandfather had first begun his perfume business. But now she couldn’t wait to get away and return home to her cottage in Pembrokeshire, overlooking the sea—and to her own burgeoning business, involving perfumes she made to order for a small group of discerning clients who came to her by word of mouth.
No, the world of big business most definitely wasn’t for her—and as for the way that Raoul had set her up! Angrily Sadie hurried along the poorly lit tented walkway, too engrossed in her own thoughts to pay any attention to the small group of besuited businessmen hovering by the exit until one of them stepped in front of her, giving her a look of insolent sexual inspection before addressing his colleagues.
‘Come over here and check out Raoul’s latest offering, guys,’ he invited.
Sadie froze, anger, contempt and disgust all burning into one hot golden fireball in her eyes as she flashed a look of fierce hostility at him. The height she had inherited from her father’s family enabled her to meet the man’s piggy-eyed leer, but a small quiver of female vulnerability still shuddered protestingly through her body.
The other men were surrounding her like a pack of jackals—not capable of hunting down their own prey, she decided, but all too eager to drag down and feed off someone else’s. They were like vultures…
One of the men made a sexually abusive comment about her in French, causing Sadie to lock gazes with him in silent contempt. Thanks to her maternal grandmother, her own French was fluent and comprehensive, but there was no way she was going to lower herself to making any kind of response to what she had just overheard.
Instead she stepped sideways and, keeping her head held high, walked past the group of men, mentally promising herself that she would make sure Raoul knew exactly what she thought of him and his promotional ideas when he later returned to their hotel!
She was almost past the men when one of them suddenly reached out and grabbed hold of her arm.
Sadie was wearing a sleeveless black dress, and the sensation of the man’s unwanted touch on her bare skin made her shudder and immediately pull herself free. Not only angry now, but also beginning to feel queasily apprehensive, Sadie kept on walking, her gaze resolutely fixed on the exit.
Which was no doubt why she didn’t see the other man who suddenly loomed up at the side of her, having either bypassed or emerged from the leering crowd she had just escaped from.
She might not be able to see him, but she was immediately conscious of him, Sadie acknowledged as the felt the restrictive shadow his presence cast over her. And instinctively she knew! A sharp frisson of awareness shuddered through her, causing her to turn slightly towards him, even though she didn’t want to. Her recognition of him was immediate—and shocking. His height and the breadth of his shoulders made her catch her breath, and she could sense too the alien and intensely male quality about him that had stopped her in her tracks earlier that day. Now it caused her to sway a little on her high heels as her body registered things about him that broke through her normal reserve.
She turned back sharply, determined to continue her journey. To her shock he lightly tapped her on the shoulder. Immediately Sadie swung round on her heels to confront him, her tawny gaze suddenly hazing as she realised just how far she had to look up before she could look into his eyes.
Just how tall was he? Six-two…six-three…four? He looked as though he might be Greek, Sadie recognised; he had olive skin colouring and the right kind of arrogantly and openly aristocratic good looks—the sculpted cheekbones; the hawk nose, the clean jawline and the thick jet-black hair. But his eyes weren’t a warm, rich brown, they were an icy pale green, and he had a lean fitness about him that was possessed by very few Greek men in their early thirties, which Sadie estimated he must be.
Sadie saw him look at her and then frown slightly, leaning closer to her and very deliberately sniffing the air. The disparaging look he gave her made her whole body burn.
‘That’s an unusual perfume you’re wearing. Is it up for sale as well?’ he demanded, in a voice that was pure soft sensuality with an accent that was equally pure Australian.
Sadie had had enough. In fact she’d had more than enough. Jerking back from him, she hissed bitingly, ‘How dare you imply that I am for sale? What is it about men like you?’
‘Men like me?’ His pale green eyes narrowed icily. ‘Well, let’s put it this way—when it comes to women like you, then men like me tend to be a bit on the fussy side. I like my women like my perfume. Exclusive!’
He broke off suddenly, turning away from Sadie as the older man at his side touched his arm, and murmured something to him whilst looking at Sadie with distaste.
CHAPTER ONE
“HUBBLE bubble toil and trouble.”
Sadie grinned as she met the teasing look her best friend Mary gave her as she stepped into the workroom where Sadie distilled the ingredients of her perfumes.
‘Mmm…What a wonderful smell!’ Mary exclaimed enthusiastically.
Sadie’s smile widened. ‘It’s a special personal order I’m doing.’
‘For someone famous? Who?’ Mary pounced.
Sadie shook her head and laughed.
‘You know I can’t tell you that. It’s a matter of client confidentiality.’
‘Mmm…well, since the press got wind of the fact that a certain very, very famous singer has asked you to design a special signature scent for her, I can only assume…’
‘Don’t ask me any more questions about it,’ Sadie begged fervently. Her smile changing to a look of concern. No doubt other people in her position would have welcomed the publicity she had received when it had become public knowledge that she had been asked to design the singer’s perfume, but Sadie valued her privacy and her anonymity. And besides…
‘I take it that you’re still going to France?’ Mary asked her.
Sadie’s frown deepened.
‘I don’t have any real choice,’ she admitted tersely, ‘Raoul is making it impossible for me not to go. He’s determined to sell the business to this Greek billionaire who wants to add it to his luxury goods consortium…’
‘Leoneadis Stapinopolous, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ Sadie agreed even more shortly. ‘Or the Greek Destroyer, as I call him!’
‘Destroyer?’ Mary shook her head. ‘You really don’t like him, do you?’
‘I certainly don’t like what he’s planning to do to Francine!’ Sadie told her fiercely.
‘Well, by all accounts he’s a very shrewd operator,’ Mary allowed. ‘The consortium he heads is worth billions, and since he took on that new designer to redesign the women’s wear side of his acquisitions…well, there isn’t a woman going who doesn’t secretly yearn for a little something with their label on it.’
‘No?’ Sadie gave her a grim look. ‘Well, I certainly don’t.’ When she saw her friend’s face, she protested, ‘Mary, he doesn’t just want to buy the perfume house, he wants to buy the rights to the perfume my grandmother left to me as well…. Raoul is trying to pressurise me into selling it, but there is no way I am going to. That perfume was designed by my great-grandfather for my great-grandmother. He only allowed a handful of clients to have the perfume. My grandmother left the secret of its make-up to me because she knew that I would protect it! The whole reason she quarrelled with her brother was because he wanted to do exactly what Raoul wants to do now.’
‘So don’t go to France, then!’ Mary told her forthrightly.
‘I have to. I own thirty per cent of the business, and there’s no way I’m going to let Raoul sell it to this…this…Greek…’
‘Sex god?’ Mary supplied helpfully, with a gleam in her eyes.
‘Sex god?’ Sadie queried disapprovingly.
‘Haven’t you seen his photo in the financial press?’
When Sadie shook her head Mary grinned.
‘Wow, is he something else! His great-grandparents were Greek, and they settled in Australia as a young couple.’
‘You seem to know a lot about him,’ Sadie challenged her.
‘Like I just said, he’s a very sexy man—and I’m a sexy-man-hungry woman!’ Mary grinned. ‘Speaking of which, you are crazy, you know, hiding yourself away down here in Pembroke when you could be living the high life in Paris and Cannes—not to mention flying here, there and everywhere mixing powerfully potent perfumes for your celeb clients. How does Raoul feel about your business, by the way?’ she asked.
‘Francine no longer makes one-off perfumes to order,’ Sadie responded, ‘so there is no conflict of interest there. But…’
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 wanted 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.’
His hold on her upper arm slackened the imprisoning bracelet of hard male flesh, his hand sliding smoothly down to her wrist and then holding it whilst the soft pad of his thumb pressed deliberately against her frantically jumping pulse. The shuttered lids lifted. Shockingly, the ice had melted and turned into a shimmering blinding heat that sent her heartbeat into overdrive.
‘What is it?’
What was it? Didn’t he know? Couldn’t he tell?
‘It’s obviously a very highly marketable scent, and…’
Scent; he was talking about her perfume! Her perfume, Sadie reminded herself savagely as she pulled herself free and stepped back from him.
‘Pity you didn’t choose to wear it at the trade fair. What you did wear—’
‘Was Raoul’s father’s creation and had nothing to do with me,’ Sadie snapped sharply, quickly defending her own professional status. ‘I didn’t even want to wear it!’
‘I should hope not,’ Leon agreed suavely. ‘Not with your reputation.’ He gave her a silkily intimidating look. ‘One of the reasons we are prepared to pay so generously for Francine is, as I am sure you must know, so that we can secure the combination of its old recipes and your perfumery skills. We want to bring to the market a new perfume under the Francine name which…’
The briskness of his manner snapped Sadie back to reality. This man was her enemy—bent on destroying everything she held dear professionally—and she had better keep that thought right to the forefront of her mind! Accusingly she looked at Raoul.
‘Raoul, I think—’ she began.
Raoul stopped her, smiling fawningly at the other man. ‘Leon, Sadie is as excited about your plans for Francine as I am myself—’
‘No, I am not,’ Sadie interrupted him sharply. ‘You know my views on this subject, Raoul,’ she reminded her cousin. ‘And you assured me that we would have time to talk in private today, before we met with…with anyone else!’
What was the matter with her? Why was she finding it so hard to so much as say his name without betraying the effect he was having on her?
‘Raoul may know your opinions,’ Leon cut in smoothly, ‘but since I do not, perhaps you would be good enough to run them past me.’
‘Sadie—’ Raoul began warningly, but Sadie had no intention of listening to him, and refused to be intimidated by the challenge she could see gleaming dangerously in Leon’s eyes.
Leon was no longer the man whose presence had swamped her female defences, the man who had somehow reached out to her and touched her senses and her emotions at their most primeval level. Instead he was the man who was threatening everything that mattered most to her. And there was no way that Sadie would break the mental promise she had made to her grandmother that she would cherish and protect the inheritance she had passed on to her in every way that she could.
Turning to confront Leon, Sadie began as calmly as she could. ‘I may only be a minority shareholder in the business, but I do own one-third of the shares.’
‘And I own two-thirds, ‘Raoul reminded her angrily. ‘If I want to sell the business to Leon, then as the majority shareholder—’
‘The business maybe, Raoul.’ Sadie stopped him, her face beginning to turn pink with the force of her emotions. ‘But—’
‘I am not really interested in which one of you has the majority shareholding in the business,’ Leon cut in grimly. ‘What I and my shareholders are interested in is the reintroduction of Francine’s most famous scent and the addition of an equally successful new creation! Using modern production methods—’
‘I will never create a perfume made in such a way!’ Sadie told him passionately. ‘To me, synthetic scents are an abhorrence. They are a mockery of everything a true scent should be. A great fragrance can only be made from natural ingredients. It does not just reflect its origins, it also reflects and highlights the…certain essential properties of its wearer…’
‘Certain properties?’ The dark eyebrows rose mockingly. ‘You mean it reflects and highlights a woman’s sensuality?’
To her disgust, Sadie realised that she was actually blushing!
‘Sadie, you are totally out of step with what’s happening today in the perfume business,’ Raoul objected angrily.
‘No, Raoul,’ Sadie argued back, glad to have an excuse to turn away from Leon and focus on her cousin instead. ‘You are the one who is out of step. The mass perfume market may still be governed by chemically produced products, but at the top end of the market there is an increasing demand for traditionally produced perfumes. If either of you two had done your homework you would both know this,’ Sadie told them fiercely. ‘And the fact that you do not know it, the fact that you have not done your homework, makes me have very serious doubts about the ultimate success of any new product you might launch.’
Whilst Raoul was beginning to bluster an angry protest, it was Leon’s reaction that interested her more, Sadie acknowledged. His mouth had tightened into a hard line and he was frowning at her.
‘Mass-market perfume is big business,’ he told her harshly. ‘The production of a perfume which can only be afforded by a few élite buyers does not interest me.’
‘Well, it should,’ Sadie countered. ‘Because it is the scent worn by the élite buyers that the mass-market buyers most want to wear themselves. And why shouldn’t they aspire to do so? Why should they be fobbed off with a synthetic substitute that is never going to come anywhere near equating to the real thing?’
‘Perhaps because the synthetic substitute is affordable and the real thing is not,’ Leon told her pungently.
‘You say that, but it could be!’ Sadie claimed immediately. ‘It is perfectly feasible for high-quality natural perfumes to be made at a reasonable cost. But of course the profit margin on them would be much smaller, and that is the real reason why big business like you refuse to produce them. Because profit is all that matters to you. You and men like you are as…as soulless as…as…synthetic perfume!’ Sadie told him passionately.
‘Is that a fact?’
The silky tone of Leon’s voice made Sadie quiver inwardly with wariness, but she refused to heed her body’s own protective warning, eyeing Leon defiantly.
‘Well, you, of course, would be in a perfect position to judge me, wouldn’t you? Having met me how often? Twice?’
‘Three times,’ Sadie corrected him, and then felt her body burn with self-conscious heat as he looked thoughtfully at her.
‘Three times?’
‘How many times I’ve seen you is an irrelevance.’ Sadie overrode him.
‘The world’s opinion of the status of the corporation you run and its aims and beliefs are written about publicly and frequently in the financial press, and—’
‘The financial press?’ Leon stopped her. ‘They report company and corporation policy. They do not make it,’ he told her acidly.
‘I don’t care what you say,’ Sadie protested emotionally. ‘Raoul already knows my views on his plans to sell Francine to you—against my wishes. In fact I came here hoping that I might be able to dissuade him, but I can see that there is no hope of that! I cannot stop him from selling to you, since he is the majority shareholder, but there is no way that I would ever—ever…prostitute my…my gift of a good “nose” for perfume by selling that to you!’
Abruptly Sadie realised how silent both men had become. Raoul was looking angry and embarrassed, whilst Leon…
The chill was back in his green eyes, but strangely now there was a glow beneath it, a glitter like the beginning of the Northern lights on ice, all white fire shimmer and danger, a warning of a strength and a power that secretly she already felt vulnerably in awe of.
Which was all the more reason why she should not give in to him, Sadie told herself militantly.
‘Stirring words. Pity they don’t seem to have been matched by your actions!’
Leon’s cool words were every bit as chillingly dangerous as the look he had given her. Outraged, Sadie turned to look to Raoul for support, but her cousin was out of earshot on the other side of the room, searching through some papers on his desk.
Leaning closer to her, Leon continued with steely venom, ‘When I saw you at the trade fair it was quite obvious that you were—’
‘That was Raoul’s idea,’ Sadie protested defensively.
‘Raoul’s idea, Francine’s perfume—and your body. As a matter of interest, what kind of response, other than the obvious, did that cheap sideshow you were putting on generate? I am, of course, asking about the amount of sales it generated, and not the number of offers you received for your body!’
Sadie glared at him.
‘How dare you say that? I had no idea that men would assume I was also available.’ Her mouth compressed with anger whilst her face burned hotly with sharply remembered shame.
‘No idea?’ The contempt in his eyes left her sensitivities burned raw. ‘Oh, come on. You can’t expect me to believe that! You paraded yourself openly and deliberately, wearing—’
Sadie had had enough.
‘I was perfectly respectably dressed, and if I’d had any idea that what I had assumed to be a collection of professional businessmen would behave like…like a pack of…of…animals, I would never, ever have allowed Raoul to persuade me into helping him.’
How could her cousin even think of selling Francine to this man? To this…this monster?
With a change of tack so swift and unexpected that it caught her totally off guard, Leon demanded, ‘That scent you’re wearing today—what is it?’
Immediately Sadie tilted her chin and eyed him defiantly.
‘It’s a perfume of my own.’
‘I like it,’ Leon told her crisply. ‘Indeed, I should have thought that it would be a highly marketable addition to the Francine name. In fact, I am surprised that you are not already marketing it!’
Anger flashed in Sadie’s eyes, turning them as brilliant a gold as the sun streaming in through the dusty windows.
‘This scent was created by me for my own personal use.’
‘It’s an original formula of your own devising?’
Sadie frowned. Why was he asking her so many questions? He was beginning to seriously annoy her!
‘Not exactly,’ she admitted haughtily. ‘It’s actually based on a one-time famous Francine perfume called Myrrh.’
Sadie stopped speaking as the dark eyebrows snapped together and she was treated to a frowning look.
‘Myrrh…I see!’
In the warning-packed silence that followed Sadie could feel her nerve-ends tightening.
‘Aren’t I right in thinking that that was Francine’s most exclusive and successful scent?’ Leon asked smoothly.
Now it was Sadie’s turn to frown.
‘Yes, it was,’ she acknowledged. ‘You have done your research well,’ she admitted, unable to resist adding a little acidly, ‘Or rather someone has.’
No doubt a man like him paid other people to provide him with whatever information he needed! He could certainly afford to do so, after all!
‘You say that the scent you are wearing is based on Francine’s Myrrh? I am surprised that you allowed Sadie to tamper with something so valuable and irreplaceable, Raoul,’ he announced to Raoul, looking over Sadie’s head towards her cousin.
Infuriated as much by his manner as his words, it gave Sadie a great deal of satisfaction to tell him coldly, ‘Actually, Raoul has no power to “allow” anyone to do a thing with the original Myrrh formula, since her father left it to my grandmother and she left it to me! A fact which I’m sure Raoul intended to share with you in the near future.’
Sadie saw immediately that Leon had not been told that she owned the Myrrh formula. He looked at her, his mouth thinning, before turning and demanding, ‘So you own one-third of Francine and the Myrrh formula?’
‘Yes,’ Sadie confirmed emphatically, with a great deal of satisfaction.
‘This is a matter I shall need to discuss with my lawyers. The Myrrh name, in my opinion, belongs to Francine, and—’
‘And the Myrrh scent belongs to me,’ Sadie informed him angrily. ‘If you think that you are going to browbeat and bully me with threats of lawyers, then let me tell you that you cannot. I’m going, Raoul,’ she told her cousin shortly. ‘I’ve wasted enough time here!’
‘Sadie—’ Raoul began to protest, but Sadie ignored him, crossing the room and pulling open the heavy door.
Her visit, Sadie acknowledged bitterly as she got back to her car, had been a complete waste—not just of her time, but more importantly of her hope and her desire to somehow persuade Raoul not to sell the business.
She attempted to soothe her spirits and her senses by walking through the old town, along the narrow streets that wound between wonderful old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings, pausing to glance in shop windows before stepping out of the sunlight into the shadows until she had finally made her leisurely way to the principal square at the top of the old town.
The Place aux Aires housed a daily market of fresh flowers and regional foods. However, it was so late in the day that the flowers and food had all been sold by now, and the stallholders were packing up for the day. She decided to find a café in the arcade that lined one long side of the square and drink a cup of coffee whilst she admired the pretty three-tiered fountain which graced the square.
Down below where she had parked she could see the empty shell of one of the town’s old distilleries, neglected and unused now, in these modern times—thanks to men like Leon! Before getting into her car something made her stop and look up towards the window to Raoul’s office.
Her whole body stiffened as she saw Leon standing there, looking down at her.
Angrily she held his gaze, determined not to be the first one to look away, her concentration only broken when another driver, anxious for her to vacate her parking spot, beeped his horn to attract her attention.
In the dusty silence of the room the two men looked at one another.
‘Look, Leon,’ Raoul began breezily, ‘I know what you must be thinking, but I promise you that everything will be fine. I’ll talk to her. She’ll come round. You’ll see. Of course it would help if you were a bit more, well…friendly towards her! The woman hasn’t been born who doesn’t respond to a bit of coaxing and flattery,’ Raoul told him.
Silently Leon studied him before saying gently, ‘Friendly? Well, I assume that you know your cousin far better than I do, Raoul. Although I wouldn’t have thought…’
‘Oh, Sadie is okay.’ Raoul gave a small shrug. ‘Of course, she’s had her own way all her life—been spoiled and indulged. Her grandmother saw to that! She married into a wealthy English family.’
He gave another dismissive shrug, neglecting to add that that wealth had been lost long before Sadie’s birth!
‘There’s nothing to worry about, Leon,’ Raoul continued confidently. ‘Sadie’s a bit naïve. She gets all fired up and on her high horse, all moralistic at times, that’s all. I put it down to the fact that she was virtually brought up by her grandmother! Sadie’s a bit old-fashioned, if you know what I mean, but I can soon talk her round! She’s just not had much to do with men, of course—thanks to her grandmother.’
‘Oh, yes, that would explain it,’ Leon murmured suavely, but Raoul was oblivious to his sarcasm.
‘Leave everything to me, Leon!’ he continued arrogantly.
Leon frowned. It was becoming increasingly obvious to him that Sadie was in a very vulnerable position where Raoul and the business were concerned. Had she been a member of his family…But of course she was not, and there was no way he could afford to let his Greek ancestry urge him into the self-elected role of protective paterfamilias towards her! Indeed, there was no reason why he should concern himself about her in any way—not after the open hostility she had shown him!
His frown deepened. Hostility wasn’t something Leon was used to women exhibiting towards him. Quite the opposite. There had never been a woman he had needed to pursue, and he certainly wasn’t going to start chasing one who had made it plain that she didn’t want him! Of course he wasn’t! No, all he felt was pique and chagrin; these were emotions so unimportant that he wasn’t even going to bother acknowledging them, never mind responding to them!
What was important—almost vital—was securing the acquisition of Francine. Leon had understood from Raoul when they had first discussed the matter that in acquiring Francine he would also be acquiring its existing scent formulae, including that for Myrrh, and the perfume-creating skills of Sadie herself. Now it seemed that Raoul had not been entirely honest with him.
‘Everything will be fine, Leon. I promise you,’ Raoul repeated insistently. ‘All we need to do is convince Sadie that you’ll let her use her precious natural ingredients and she’ll be eating out of your hand and begging you to let her concoct a new perfume for you.’
‘I’m afraid that isn’t an option, Raoul. The cost alone of simply acquiring natural raw products would give my board a collective heart attack! It just isn’t commercially viable to produce a mass-market scent by traditional methods.’
‘Well, maybe not. But you don’t have to tell her that, do you?’ Raoul challenged him.
‘Are you suggesting that I should deliberately lie to her?’
‘You want the Myrrh formula and you want her to work for you, don’t you?’ Raoul asked him shrewdly.
Leon looked away from him briefly before demanding curtly, ‘Raoul, why wasn’t I informed about your cousin’s views—and, more specifically, that she owned the formula for Myrrh?’
Raoul gave a dismissive shrug
‘I didn’t think it was that important. You only asked me for a list of the perfumes my father had sold off. Anyway, like you, I am sure you could prove that legally the formula really belongs to the business. After all, a man with your resources can afford the very best of lawyers—lawyers who can prove anything. Sadie hasn’t the money to take you on in court, but of course it will save you a lot of fuss if she gives in and hands it over to you—and I promise you that if you play it my way she will!’
‘You seem remarkably unconcerned about your cousin, if I may say so,’ Leon commented dryly.
Carelessly, and without any trace of embarrassment, Raoul told him, ‘Certainly I am not as concerned for her as I am for myself. Why should I be? We’ve only been in contact for the last few months. I need to sell Francine, Leon. If not to you then to someone else. And there is no way I am going to let Sadie or anyone else interfere with that.’
‘I think I’d prefer to speak with your cousin myself,’ Leon announced coolly, adding warningly, ‘It’s true that I want Sadie’s expertise, and that I want the Myrrh formula, but there’s no way I would agree to her being deceived about my future plans for the business. I’m afraid that in my book honesty can never be sacrificed for expediency!’
Initially, when he had seen Sadie at the trade fair, Leon had assumed that she was made much in the same mould as her cousin. But now he wasn’t nearly so sure.
But he could not afford the luxury of sympathy, Leon warned himself, and unless he had misjudged her Sadie would certainly not welcome receiving it from him.
Raoul gave a careless shrug.
‘Fine—if that’s what you want to do. After all, you’re going to be the boss!’
Going to be, but was not as yet, Raoul reminded himself angrily after Leon had gone.
There was no way he was going to allow Sadie to mess up this deal for him, and no way he was going to risk leaving it to Leon to persuade his cousin to change her mind. Not when Raoul knew that he could do so much more easily and quickly.
In the privacy of his elegant hotel suite, Leon completed the telephone conversation he had been having with his chief executive in Sydney and then went to stand in front of the large window that opened out onto his private balcony.
Sadie’s ownership of the Myrrh formula was a complication he had not anticipated, as was Sadie herself. But he had no intention of using Raoul’s suggested underhand tactics to rectify it! Underhandedness and deceit were weapons of engagement that were never employed in the Stapinopolous business empire—even though once they had been used against it to devastating and almost totally destructive effect.
Leon’s expression hardened. Those dark years when his family had almost lost the business were behind them now, but they had left their mark on him. However, right now it wasn’t the past he was thinking about so much as…
A little grimly Leon acknowledged that he wasn’t sure which had distracted him the most—the tantalising length of Sadie’s slim legs encased in the jeans she had been wearing, or the intensity with which her eyes had reflected her every emotion.
She was, he decided grimly, impossibly stubborn, fiercely passionate and hopelessly idealistic. She was a go-it-aloner, a renegade from the conventional business and profit-focused world of modern perfumes. She was, in short, trouble every which way there was. A zealot, a would-be prophet, intent on stirring up all kinds of disorder and destined to cause chaos!
She would make his board of directors shake in their corporate shoes and question his financial judgement for even thinking about wanting to get involved in a business in which she played even the smallest part.
Did she really believe that it was feasible to produce what amounted to a handmade scent in the quantities needed to satisfy a mass-market appetite at an affordable price, using old-fashioned methods and natural raw materials?
He was already facing opposition from some members of his board over his plans to acquire Francine—but it was an opposition he fully intended to quash! An opposition he had to quash if he was not to find himself in danger of being voted off his own board!
‘Why Francine?’ one of his co-directors had demanded belligerently. ‘Hell, Leon, there are dozens of other perfume houses in far better financial condition, with more assets, and—’
‘It is precisely because Francine is Francine that I want it,’ Leon had countered coolly. ‘The name has a certain resonance. An allure. And because of its current run-down state we can acquire it at a reasonable cost and build up a completely new profile for it. The new Francine perfume, when it comes on the market, is going to be the perfume to wear.’
‘The new Francine perfume?’ one of the others had questioned. ‘Hell, Leon, if there’s to be a new perfume why buy the damned outfit at all? Why not just get some chemist to come up with a new perfume for us and get some actress or model to front it for us? That’s what everyone else is doing.’
‘Which is exactly why it is not going to be what we shall do,’ Leon had responded briskly.
He was taking a very big gamble. He knew that. For every classic fragrance there were a hundred perfumes that had been forgotten, buried in obscurity. Leon wasn’t a fool. He knew that he had his detractors and his enemies in the shark-infested waters of the business world in which he lived; he knew too that there were also those who were simply plain jealous of his success. And all of them, whatever their motivation, would enjoy seeing him fail and fall.
Launching a new perfume was always a risk, even for a well-established perfume house with a stable of existing popular products. All Francine had was a name and a couple of old-fashioned formulae.
A couple, but not Myrrh, it now seemed.
Broodingly, Leon turned his back on the view. On the bedside table amongst his personal possessions was a small framed photograph. Going over to it, he picked it up and studied the delicately pretty feminine features of its subject, a sombre expression darkening his eyes.
The Sadies of this world didn’t really know what life was all about. Handed a silver spoon at birth, they could take what they wanted from life as a right.
Was she really oblivious to the fact that only a small handful of women could afford the luxury of the kind of scents she blended? Or did she simply not care?
Well, he cared. He cared one hell of a lot—as she was about to discover!
As she drove past the flower fields belonging to Pierre, Sadie exhaled a deep breath of pleasure and satisfaction. Pleasure because both the sight and the scent of growing flowers always lifted her spirits, and satisfaction because she had the power to prevent the Greek Destroyer from wrecking the precious heritage her grandmother had passed on to her.
Pierre and his brother grew both jasmine and roses. A swift, delicate-fingered person could pick half a kilo of the jasmine blossoms in an hour, and the picked blossoms sold at a hefty price—as Sadie had good cause to know. The delicacy of the jasmine flower meant that it required year-round care by humans rather than machines. And in the rose fields stood the precious, wonderful Rose de Mai, from which the rose absolute which Sadie used in her perfumes was made.
Pierre and his wife Jeannette came hurrying out to the car to welcome Sadie, embracing her affectionately.
‘So Francine is to be sold and soon you will be creating a fine new perfume for the new owners? That is excellent news. A talent such as yours should be recognised and allowed to truly shine. I am already looking forward to saying that I know the creator of the next classic scent,’ Pierre announced teasingly, once Sadie was seated at the scrubbed kitchen table, drinking the coffee Jeannette had made for her.
Sadie frowned as she listened to him. She had expected Pierre to share her own feelings towards the sale of the business, instead of which he was making it plain that he thought it was an excellent opportunity for her.
‘It is true that Leon…he…the would-be owner does wish me to create a new perfume—but, Pierre, he is only interested in mass-market perfumes made out of chemical ingredients,’ Sadie objected.
Pierre shrugged. ‘He is a businessman, as we all must be these days, and perhaps not totally au fait with the complexities of our business. He does not have your knowledge perhaps, petite. Therefore it is up to you, in the name and memory of your grandmère, to help him,’ Pierre pronounced sagely.
‘Help him!’ Sadie’s voice was a squeak of female outrage. ‘I would rather—’ she began, and then stopped as Pierre overrode her.
‘But you must do so,’ he said calmly. ‘For if people like yourself do not give their knowledge and their expertise to those who are coming new into the business then how are we to go on? This is a wonderful opportunity for you Sadie!’ Pierre repeated emphatically.
‘It is?’ Sadie stared at him whilst Pierre nodded his head in vigorous confirmation.
‘Indeed it is, and your grandmother would be the first to say so if she were here. Ah, I can remember hearing her tell her father that she longed for the House of Francine to produce a new perfume—a fragrance which would rival that of the most famous perfumery.’
‘You heard her say that?’ Sadie swallowed the emotional lump which was suddenly blocking her throat. She had loved her grandmother so much, and she knew how much Francine had meant to her.
‘You are indeed fortunate to have been given such an opportunity,’ Pierre was telling her.
‘I am?’ Sadie struggled to marshal all the objections she had had no difficulty in hurling at Leon’s head. ‘But I prefer to work on a one-to-one basis with my clients,’ she managed to point out.
‘Pff…’ Pierre gave a Gallic thrust of his shoulders. ‘Filmstars and the like—they come and go and are as changeable and fickle as a mistral wind! They would quite happily take your perfume and claim it as their own creation if it suited them, and just as easily turn to someone else.’
A little reluctantly Sadie was forced to acknowledge that what he was saying had a grain of truth to it. Right now her own perfumes were very popular, but that could all change overnight. And if it did…
She frowned. What was she trying to tell herself? Surely she wasn’t actually going to give in—to sell out—let Leon walk all over her?
But what if Pierre was right? What if she could create a wonderful new perfume—so wonderful and so popular that the whole world would want to wear it?
Sadie began to feel slightly dizzy, almost drugged with her own surging excitement, with the thought of fulfilling her grandmother’s unexpectedly revealed dream.
But Sadie was no fool. She knew perfectly well that it was impossible to mass-produce a perfume created only out of natural ingredients, which meant…
‘I can’t do it, Pierre,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘You know how I feel about synthetic scents.’
Pierre nodded. ‘Indeed, we all feel the same, but these are modern times and it is impossible to mass-produce a scent from natural materials alone. There has to be a compromise…But think of what a triumph it would be were you to create one based on a perfect combination of old and new, natural and synthetic.’
‘No one has ever managed to do that,’ Sadie objected.
‘Until now,’ Pierre told her slyly.
Giddily Sadie tried to clear her head.
‘Do you really think that I can do it?’ she asked Pierre shakily.
‘Of a certainty! If not you, then who else? You have the history and the knowledge, the experience, the tenderness, the understanding…You have a gift and, like a truly exceptional perfume, it is only waiting to be released in order to charm everyone who experiences it!’
Sadie stared at him in bemusement. She felt as though she was riding a rollercoaster of emotions and thoughts. Could she do it? Could she create a perfume to rival that of the very greatest of houses?
She could almost see it in her mind’s eye. She would call her perfume Francine…. It would have a similar base to Myrrh, but be a little lighter, delicate enough to make everyone who smelled it move closer to its wearer in order to breathe it again. It would be sensual and yet joyously teasing, flirtatious but still serious—a woman’s perfume, passionate, charming, enticing…It would be a scent her grandmother would have been proud for her to create!
To her surprise, Sadie discovered that she was on her feet and halfway towards the kitchen door.
‘I must go, Pierre,’ she told him dizzily.
She would need to make sure that Leon knew she was not to be messed with, of course. And she’d make it clear that she must be given carte blanche where the creation of her scent was concerned. There was no way that Leon was going to overrule her or dictate to her, and she fully intended to make that plain to him. The scent would be her creation and would bear the Francine name. It would, Sadie decided, her heart singing, restore to the house of Francine its old status and glory. It would be her abiding gift of love to her grandmother!
CHAPTER THREE
SADIE picked up the telephone message Raoul had left, asking her to come back to Grasse so that they could talk, as she got into her car.
Still under the heady influence of listening to Pierre, she sent Raoul a text message informing him that she was on her way.
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