Passion Becomes You

‘Now that,’ he murmured, ‘would be a great pity.’

She glanced up, drawn by the husky message in his voice. Their eyes clashed, and she stopped breathing, drowning instead in the dark, deep promise burning in his eyes.

No, she told herself from some hazy distance in the back of her foggy mind. Don’t let this happen. Think of Cassie weeping in the next room. Think of Josh, just another version from the same mould as this man. Ruthless, selfish women-eaters.

He reached across the desk and touched a thumb to her mouth, drawing it downwards to part her lips a little. The softly padded flesh beneath his touch grew hot as blood began pumping into it, swelling it, assailing her with the most erotically sensual experience of her life.

‘No strings,’ he murmured so softly that she barely caught the words above the sudden roaring inside her head. ‘No commitments other than that while we are together we neither of us turn to anyone else. When it is over, we part honestly, as friends. I will be your only lover. And I will give myself exclusively to you.’

The hand moved, sliding beneath her hair to curve her nape, then he was leaning towards her, drawing her towards him across the width of the desk, and he replaced the caressing finger with his mouth. It was cool and firm, her own hot and excruciatingly sensitised flesh contracting in reaction so that she jumped, startled as if stung.

‘Think about it,’ he murmured as he drew away again. ‘And I will call you soon. Now.’ While she blinked, still lost in the sensual daze he had so easily wrapped around her, Leon Stephanades straightened up and became the cool businessman. ‘I will take Cassandra home. Tell Tanner I will be out of the country for a about a week. If he wishes to deal with me then he had better be available when I get back.’ He turned to go back to Josh’s office, then spun back again, his expression darkening when he saw how thoroughly he had incapacitated her, but that was all; he gave no other indication that he had just made the most audacious proposition Jemma had ever heard. ‘You can also tell him that, no matter what his decision will be about Cassandra’s condition, as her good friend, I expect her to be treated with respect. She is only human, after all, and humans are by nature fallible.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘FALLIBLE?’ Josh snarled, prowling around his office like an angry bull. ‘The bitch isn’t fallible. She’s like an armoured tank, equipped with the most modern killing devices known to man!’

He had been in the office ten minutes—arriving just ten minutes after Leon had taken a wilting Cassie away.

‘She said to tell you she’d be in touch.’ Jemma relayed that message too. But she did not inject the same amount of tight defiance into it that Cassie had done. She hadn’t dared. As it was, he hit the roof.

‘I don’t wish to set eyes on the conniving bitch again!’ he bit out, then swung on Jemma, his grey eyes as hard and as sharp as glass. ‘Did she tell you she did it deliberately?’

Jemma nodded. ‘Leon Stephanades got it out of her.’

‘And how fortunate for her that he was around!’ The jeer was bitter and cutting. ‘For all I know, they probably planned it between them!’

‘What, that man aiding and abetting in stitching up another of his kind?’ She only heard her own contempt once the words had left her tongue. ‘He would rather cut his own throat first!’

‘And what do you know about him?’ Josh challenged deridingly. ‘As far as I am aware, you only met him for the first time today.’

And what a meeting, Jemma thought with a small shiver. ‘It doesn’t take much to recognise the type, Josh,’ she murmured drily. ‘I recognised it in you on first sighting, too.’

His eyes sharpened, something in her tone diverting his attention from his own problems for a moment. ‘Proposition you, did he?’ he mocked. She blushed—enough of an answer in itself. ‘Well, I hope you had the good sense to give him the same put-down you gave me,’ he said grimly. ‘Because that guy is big-league. He plays to different rules from the rest of us.’

‘As far as I can see,’ she retaliated, simply because she felt uncomfortable in knowing that, far from putting Leon Stephanades down, she had virtually thrown herself at him, ‘you’re both tarred with the same brush!’

‘Only he’s a darn sight more powerful than me,’ Josh pointed out.

‘How powerful?’ Jemma asked curiously, beginning to tingle again, just talking about him.

‘Among the top twenty richest families in the world—that powerful,’ Josh answered, then ran his fingers through his straight blond hair in frustration. ‘And God help any woman who tried to pull Cassie’s dirty trick on him!’ he grunted, slumping down in a chair.

‘Josh...’ Jemma put out a hand to touch his arm in appeal. ‘Cassie loves you! I know she does! What she’s done is stupid and wrong,’ she acknowledged. ‘But I am sure she did it out of love! Doesn’t that count for anything?’

He shook his head. ‘Does love deceive, Jemma?’ he challenged. ‘Does it betray trust, connive to trap? Is it selfish and greedy and bloody ruthless?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, hurting for him because she could see the real hurt his anger was trying to hide. ‘Because I’ve never been in love to know.’

‘I feel betrayed,’ he confessed. ‘Bloody betrayed!’

They sat in dull silence for a while after that, Jemma completely sympathising with Josh even though she could partly understand Cassie’s motives. The woman had not tried to hide her ultimate goal, after all. Marriage and children. The full works. But the really sad fact among all of it was that Jemma had a sneaking suspicion that Cassie would have got it all from Josh if she’d only been a bit more patient. He’d been crumbling, she was sure of it. But now...?

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked him huskily.

He sighed and got up. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered flatly. ‘All I do know is that she’s had it as far as I—me personally—am concerned. She’s pregnant; there isn’t a damned thing I can do about that now. If she wants to keep it, then I’ll support her and it. If she wants an abortion, then I’ll pay for it. But if she wants me, she can go to hell before she’ll get me again.’

Fagged to death by the time she let herself into her flat that night, Jemma just dropped her bag and sank into the nearest chair. They had managed to get some work done during the afternoon, but not much, and what there was had been achieved in a grim mutual silence that had eventually left its mark on her throbbing head.

Trina walked into the room, chewing on a banana. ‘Bad day?’ she enquired when she saw Jemma’s drained face.

‘Hmm,’ was all she could manage.

‘Want cheering up?’ Trina, the sexiest Mrs Mop in the domestic cleaning game, tended to finish work several hours before Jemma, simply because most people liked their homes cleaned and vacated before three o’clock in the afternoon. She ran her own business from the flat with the help of a veritable army of part-timers who worked in teams, and not one of them wore a turban on her head or dared have a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. They wore uniforms which rivalled the smartest airline ones, and they travelled around in neat little vans with neat little smiles and a brisk friendly manner. They were all paid well, but then Trina’s charges were high. You get what you pay for, was her motto, and London, especially up-market London, had accepted and acknowledged that long ago. Trina had a waiting-list of potential clients almost as long as her list of real ones. She’d wanted to expand at one time, but the current recession had put paid to that idea—that and her super-sharp accountant-cum-boyfriend Frew. Trina was a tall, slim, easygoing redhead, with green eyes, a sharp tongue and a nasty sense of humour.

Jemma opened her eyes long enough to scrutinise Trina’s deadpan face, then closed them again and shook her head. ‘Not tonight, thank you,’ she refused the offer. ‘I don’t think I’m up to one of your nice surprises.’

‘Shame,’ Trina pouted. ‘Because this one is rather a cut above the ordinary. Still...’ Jemma sensed her friend’s shrug as she turned to leave the sitting-room-cum-office again ‘...I suppose it will keep.’

Jemma sighed, remained exactly where she was and how she was for the space of thirty delicious seconds, then sighed again and hauled herself out of the chair. ‘All right!’ she called after Trina. ‘You win! I can’t stand not knowing. What’s the nice—? My God!’ she choked. ‘Where did those come from?’

She had walked out of the sitting-room and down the hall to the kitchen while she was talking; now she just stood, rooted to the spot in the kitchen doorway, staring at the largest basket of out-of-season fruit and flowers she had ever seen.

‘Looking at them,’ Trina said sardonically, ‘from all over the world, I’d say.’

It filled their small kitchen table. The basket, an exquisitely woven affair of rich golden cane with a tall rounded handle, simply spilled over with flowers. Pretty, star-shaped lilies, sensually scented pure white jasmine, blood-red hibiscus heads that were almost too heavy for their stems. Pink, purple and the palest lilac sprays of bougainvillaea clustered everywhere, and at the base were oranges with the dark green leaves still attached to their short stems. Peaches as big as grapefruits. Grapes, green and black, in huge, succulent bunches. And figs, fresh, plump, juicy figs that made the mouth water just to look at them.

There was a card. Trina plucked it from the centre and mockingly passed it over to Jemma. ‘For you, ma’am,’ she drawled, watching her face as she took the card then dragged her rounded eyes down to focus on it. ‘Methinks you have a passionate admirer. The writing on the envelope is sexy, too,’ she pointed out. ‘All sharp strokes and dramatic curves. I wonder who it can be?’

Jemma wasn’t listening. She was trembling instead, staring at the envelope and frightened to open it. She knew who it was from; there was a little voice inside her head repeating his name over and over again. How he had found out her address she had no idea, but that cynical part in her she hadn’t known existed until today was telling her that for a man like him it wouldn’t be that hard.

What had Josh said about him? From one of the richest families in the world, was what he had said. Powerful. A man not to mess around with.

And Cassie? What had she said about him? Sexy. Loyal. Invincible. Even his own father could not dictate to him.

And what have you learned about him yourself, Jemma? she asked herself shakily. Beautiful, she replied. Dangerous. Fair-minded but cocksure and arrogant with it. Determined, if this basket was a sign of determination to get his own way. Honest, if his proposition was serious. Deadly, if her own tangled feelings were anything to go by. He had succeeded in tying her in sensual knots within seconds of setting eyes on him.

She sucked in a shaky breath, her fingers trembling as she slowly broke the seal on the envelope and took out the gold-embossed card inside.

The words blurred then slowly cleared before her wary eyes.

Today was no way to meet someone who is destined to become the most important person in my life. It was a day of bad smells and acid tastes. So I send you these. Fruits to sweeten your mouth and the flowers of my homeland to freshen the air around you. Keep the flowers warm and moist or they will wither and die before I can see you again. Eat the fruit, enjoy the sensual tastes of my native land and think of me.

Leon.

The air left her lungs on a tremulous sigh as she looked back at the basket filling the table, only to find its beauty superimposed by his darkly attractive and smoulderingly sensual face.

God in heaven. She pulled out a chair and sat down, the hand holding the card going up to cover her eyes.

‘Bad news, then—not good?’ Trina prompted, curious at Jemma’s reaction.

She held out the card for her friend to take. ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,’ she murmured, and left Trina to make of that what she may.

‘Who is this Leon?’ she asked after smothering several muffled chokes as she read the blatantly evocative words. ‘I’ve never heard you mention a Leon before.’

‘That’s because I hadn’t met him before today,’ Jemma explained, and sat back in the chair, grateful to find his face had disappeared from the basket. ‘He is one Leon Stephanades. A—business colleague of Josh’s.’

‘Wow,’ Trina gasped, and sank down in the other chair.

‘You’ve already heard of him, I see,’ Jemma mocked.

Trina nodded. ‘But Jemma,’ she exclaimed, searching her friend’s face worriedly, ‘he’s way out of our league, love!’

‘I know it.’ A funny expression crossed Jemma’s face; she didn’t even recognise it herself, except that it felt as if it came somewhere close to desolation. ‘But try telling my senses that, will you?’ She grimaced self-deridingly. ‘I made an utter fool of myself today, Tri,’ she confessed. ‘He walked into Josh’s office and I felt the earth move beneath me! I couldn’t stop staring at him!’ Her expression was pained. ‘I couldn’t think! I couldn’t breathe! I couldn’t even focus! There were birds flying around in my head and puffy white clouds floating across my vision! He smiled and my heart did somersaults! And—God,’ she choked, covering her face with her hands, ‘he would have had to be blind not to know what was happening to me!’

‘Well,’ Trina murmured slowly, looking down at the card still in her hand, ‘he must have experienced something similar to respond with this.’

‘Did he?’ Her expression was cynical to say the least. ‘What he saw, Tri, was a peach ripe for the plucking!’ She picked a peach from the basket and brandished it bitterly in front of her. ‘And does a man like that turn an easy meal down? Does he hell!’ she answered herself scathingly. ‘And he’s all man, Tri,’ she added helplessly. ‘Big, tough and lean. So damned attractive he knocks your eyes out, and so disgustingly sure of himself that he quite coolly propositioned me!’ The contempt was back, but aimed at Leon instead of herself this time.

‘How?’ Trina’s eyes were round like saucers and eager with interest.

‘How does a man like that proposition a potential lover?’ Jemma snapped. ‘He laid down the ground rules. If you want to play in my league then this is how it’s done—and so on. I wanted to slap his arrogant face, but all I did do was let him kiss me!’ Self-disgust rattled in her throat. ‘By the time he let me up for air again, I was so dizzy I couldn’t think, never mind hit out!’

‘So?’ Trina prompted. ‘How did it get to the point that he sends you something like this?’ she wanted to know. ‘And I don’t mean the basket—I mean this card. It reads like a fait accompli to me—except the talk about smells and acid, of course,’ she frowned, not able to work that bit out. ‘He expects to see you, Jemma, when he gets back from wherever he’s gone off to. A man doesn’t make that assumption unless you’ve let him.’

‘This one does,’ she grunted. ‘Especially when the girl in question gave him no encouragement to think otherwise.’

‘You mean—you just let him get away with kissing you and propositioning you like that?’

‘I would have let him take me on the office floor if he’d wanted to,’ Jemma said drily. ‘That was the level I’d sunk to!’

‘My God!’ Trina sat back and stared. ‘I can’t believe it! Wait till I tell Frew! He’ll go bananas! He claims the man hasn’t been born who can get through your thick shell!’

‘Well, thanks very much, Frew!’ Jemma cried. ‘And what gives him the right to think he knows anything at all about me?’

‘Come off it, Jemma!’ Trina scoffed. ‘You and me both know you’re as picky as a worm in a barrel of apples! How many twenty-four-year-old virgins do you think Frew knows?’

‘That’s a horrible thing to say!’ Jemma flared, jumping to her feet and dropping the lovely peach on to the table. The soft velvet skin split open, allowing the sweet, sensual scent of its juicy fruit to seep out. It assailed her nostrils, whetted her tastebuds, and she had to close her eyes because she was suddenly thrown into a storm of sensation that was all directed by one cleverly manipulative man.

‘Your parents are entirely to blame for that!’ Trina went on, unaware of the torment going on inside Jemma. ‘If it wasn’t your father having some torrid affair with another woman it was your mother paying him back by putting it about with some other man! What an example they set you! And now look at you!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re standing there, trembling with indignation over Frew’s impression of you when you know damned well it’s only the truth! You’re afraid of starting your sexual ball rolling, Jemma,’ she stated bluntly, ‘just in case you discover that you’ve got more of your parents in you than you can deal with!’

‘Do you want me to bed the very next man who walks in that door just to prove you wrong?’ she flared, her eyes snapping open to glare at her so-called best friend.

Trina’s mouth twitched. ‘Not if it’s my Frew, you’d better not,’ she warned. ‘Or it will be your first and last experience.’

‘Oh, go to hell, Tri,’ Jemma sighed, deflated by her flatmate’s unfailing sense of humour.

‘Don’t you see what’s happened to you today, Jemma?’ Trina appealed on a more serious note. ‘You’ve been so determined to keep your emotions under a tight lid that when a man like Leon Stephanades came along your senses boiled up and the lid flew off so they all came shooting out like steam under pressure! That’s why you made such a damned fool of yourself with him!’

‘Thanks for the analysis,’ Jemma grunted, and sat down again. ‘You’ve made me feel so much better!’

‘I was not attempting to make you feel better,’ Trina sighed. ‘Only understand why you responded to him as you did! The man is a god among men. You’ve ambled along quite nicely while only confronted with mere mortals, but when it came to a godlike being you blew your emotional top!’

‘Josh would not take kindly to being classed as mere mortal,’ Jemma pointed out.

‘Josh Tanner,’ Trina stated deridingly, ‘does not even get a look-in compared to your Leon.’

‘Tell that to Cassie,’ Jemma grimaced. And she told Trina the rest of what had happened today.

‘Oh, my,’ her friend drawled when she finished. ‘Now I see what your Leon means when he writes about nasty tastes and smells. The whole thing stinks and tastes bad.’

‘He is not my Leon!’ Jemma angrily pointed out.

‘No?’ Trina quizzed. ‘Then what are you going to do about him?’

‘Nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘Just ignore him until he goes away.’

But that was not as easy as it sounded. Mainly because Leon Stephanades refused to be ignored. Over the coming week, Jemma was barraged with reminders of his existence and his intentions.

First there was a long velvet case hand-delivered to her flat with the logo of a very exclusive jeweller embossed on its lid. It contained a fine gold bracelet, linked at its clasp by a single turquoise. ‘The colour of your eyes, don’t you agree?’ the accompanying note said. Jemma closed the lid and put it away, determined to give it back to him at the first opportunity she got. The next day came the matching earrings. On Thursday the matching necklace. ‘Wear them for me on our first night together,’ the accompanying note said.

Her mouth tightened, the idea that he thought he could buy her like this filling her with an icy anger, and she discarded the necklace into her dressing-table drawer with the same contempt with which she had discarded the bracelet and earrings. On Friday there was nothing. No special delivery to come home to, no note, nothing. Trina studied her face sagely, and Jemma lifted her chin in a defiant refusal to utter a single word.

That night she accepted a date with a man who had just moved into the flat below. He was an architect, just finding his feet in the big London company he had recently joined. He was good-looking, pleasant and companionable, and by the time the evening was drawing to a close Jemma was beginning to feel at peace with herself for the first time in a week.

If it hadn’t been bad enough having Leon obsess her every waking thought, then trying to work with Josh in the mood he was in had been just as bad. Not that she blamed him for it—he had every right to behave like a bear with a sore head. But Cassie’s constant phone calls, pleading to speak with him, had taken their toll on Jemma’s nerves. And when his persistent refusal to speak to her had only had Cassie pouring out her heart on Jemma’s ears instead, the tension inside her had begun to hit an all-time high.

So she was quite happy to give herself up to the light, congenial company of Tom MacDonald. As his name suggested, he was a Scot, and eager to make new friends. They talked about anything and everything over a quiet dinner in a small Italian restaurant a short walk away from their flats. He told her about his life in a small Scottish village just outside Edinburgh where his rector father and forbearing mother had reared a family of six boisterous children in the big, rambling vicarage home, and where he had sometimes been willing to sell his soul for a bit of privacy. And she told him about her life as an only child who’d spent her childhood worrying which of her parents was going to walk out next—or, worse, whether they both would at the same time. It surprised her that she told him all of this since the only other person she had ever discussed her lonely uncertain childhood with had been Trina—or maybe, she decided later, it was because of what Trina had said to her the other night that had made her open up to Tom. Whatever. By the time they walked back home, she was feeling comfortable enough to make another date with him for the next night.

They parted at his flat door since it was on a lower landing than her own, and she let him kiss her, half relieved, half disappointed that fireworks had not gone off in her head as they had done when Leon had kissed her.

Trina was still up when she got in, reclining across Frew, who was stretched out on the sofa watching the end of a cops and robbers film.

‘Guess who’s been calling you all night?’ Trina taunted lazily.

Jemma went cold inside. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said, hoping to God that she was right, and she didn’t know.

‘Mr Macho Stephanades himself, no less.’ Frew dashed Jemma’s hopes in one sardonically uttered sentence. ‘I answered the last time,’ he told her drily. ‘And received the kind of reply that had me running to the mirror to see if my throat had been cut.’

‘Ha-ha, very funny,’ Jemma jeered and turned a cool face on Trina. ‘I hope you told him to get lost,’ she said.

‘Me?’ her flatmate squeaked. ‘Why should I tell him to get lost? He’s not my problem! Although...’ she added with a teasing glance at Frew ‘...hearing that gorgeous sexy voice purring down the line at me had me thinking it would be quite something to have him as a problem.’

‘He’d eat you for breakfast and not even notice,’ Frew scoffed, refusing to rise to the bait.

‘If he could eat me, what do you think he could do to Jemma?’

‘Excuse me if I leave you to discuss me while I go to bed,’ Jemma put in sarcastically. ‘But please do continue none the less.’

‘He’s back in London!’ Trina called as Jemma turned to leave the room. Her spine began to tingle, as though just knowing he was in the same city was enough to make her flesh respond to him. ‘And he was not happy when I told him you were out on a date!’

‘When I answered the phone on his last call,’ Frew tagged on, ‘he mistook me for your date and actually threatened to come around here and eject me!’

‘I do hope you put him right,’ Jemma drawled, turning to send Frew a deriding look. ‘Only I would hate him to have the wrong impression about my taste!’

‘Whoa there, tiger!’ Trina warned. ‘That’s the love of my life you’re insulting!’

‘Well, tell the love of your damned life to keep his nose out of my business!’ Jemma snapped, wondering helplessly where all that lovely relaxed contentment she had rediscovered tonight had gone.