‘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 e
ars 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.
The phone began to ring. She stiffened up like a board. So did the other two, watching her with curious eyes.
‘Want me to answer it?’ Trina offered gently.
Oh, yes! Jemma thought frantically. Please yes! Anyone but me! I just can’t let myself be— ‘No,’ she heard herself mumble gruffly. ‘I’ll do it.’
She walked into the kitchen and stared at the wall set for all of ten seconds before slowly lifting off the receiver.
‘Jemma?’
She closed her eyes, swallowing thickly because just the sound of her name on his lips sent her mouth dry. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.
There was a short, very telling silence, and it didn’t take much to sense the anger simmering within it. ‘I want to see you,’ he said tightly.
‘Well, I don’t—’
‘Now.’ Arrogantly, he cut right through her attempted refusal. ‘I shall be around to collect you in half an hour.’
‘But it’s eleven-thirty!’ she protested. ‘I don’t—!’
‘I will sound my car horn when I arrive,’ he interrupted yet again. ‘You have three minutes from that moment to get in the car or I shall come up—do you understand me, Jemma?’ he persisted. ‘I am a man who does not play games—any kind of game.’
The line went dead. Jemma stared at it. He had just threatened her. He had actually had the gall to threaten her!
CHAPTER THREE
LEON didn’t need to sound his car horn. Jemma was already waiting outside, huddled in her pale blue wool duffel-coat and simmering with resentment when the sleek silver-grey Mercedes drew up beside her.
She had a brief glimpse of his dark, chiselled features when the lamplight caught his face as he leaned across the luxurious interior to open the door for her.
He was angry, tight with it.
Well, she thought indignantly, so am I! And refused to so much as look at him as she climbed into the car and stared coldly at the windscreen.
‘Seatbelt,’ he snapped.
She opened her mouth to tell him to get lost, then shut it again on an inward gasp as the car shot forward on an angry burst of power. Fumbling, she fastened the belt around her, having to drop her purse and the small plastic carrier bag she had brought with her on to the car floor to do it.
Pausing at the next junction, he turned his dark head to slash her with an icy look; she gave it back defiantly, but just allowing her eyes to clash with his was enough to set her trembling, and it was he who broke the hostile contact. She had not been able to, he affected her so badly.
This is crazy, she told herself as they joined the late rush of traffic crowding the London streets. How could she be so acutely aware of a man she barely knew?
Perhaps Trina was right after all, and she had been heading for this kind of emotional fall-out for years, bottling it all up, refusing to acknowledge that she had the ability to feel this way.
Trying to smother a helpless sigh, she obviously wasn’t very successful, because the black eyes raked her again. She felt their touch all the way down to her toes. Don’t, she wanted to say. Don’t look at me—don’t do this to me! But she pressed her trembling lips together and stared fixedly ahead, and after a moment he returned his attention to the road while the tension surrounding them grew so tight she could barely breathe.
He turned into a quiet, salubrious square that she recognised instantly, and a wry smile touched her mouth. Big-league wasn’t in it; this man existed on a higher plane altogether than she could ever aspire to.
Good, she thought. It only helped to shore up her resolve to get out of this situation before it became impossible. She didn’t want this—it—him. She did not need it, nor could she cope with it.
The car stopped, the engine dying. Leon unclipped both seatbelts then opened his car door. She watched balefully as he climbed out and came around to open her door. When she hesitated, he said coolly, ‘Don’t make the mistake of challenging me, Jemma. I am tired and my temper is worn thin. I could get nasty.’
Could? If he thought he was making this a pleasure then she did not want to be around when he did get ‘nasty’! Bending, she scooped up her purse and the small plastic carrier bag, then slid out of the car, scorning the outstretched hand he offered her in assistance.
He closed the car door, pressed a sensor pad on his keyring which activated the car central-locking system and the alarm at the same time, then turned without sparing her another glance to climb the steps to a black-painted front door.
&nbs
p; By the time she had joined him, he was standing inside an elegant hallway. The plain grey-carpeted floor and pale peach-painted walls blended superbly with the rich mahogany woodwork.
He glanced at a silver tray on the hall table where a stack of envelopes lay unopened. Long fingers flicked idly at them then dismissed them as unimportant. It was only then that it hit her that he must not have been here since his return to London.
So, where had he been? Working in his office? Eating dinner at some exclusive restaurant? With another woman?
Jealousy swirled up from the pit of her stomach and burned its way into her brain. Shocked and appalled by her own reaction, she stumbled as she tried to turn and walk out of the house again before he saw what was happening to her.
But Leon was too quick, and in one stride was at her side, his hand like a clamp around her arm as he turned her back again.
‘Going somewhere?’ he enquired silkily.
‘I don’t want to come in here with you,’ she objected, having now to fight her response to his heated touch as well the crazy jealousy.
For an answer, he reached over her shoulder and gave the door a shove. Jemma quivered as she heard it click shut behind her. Without a single word, he took her purse and the silly plastic carrier bag from her, unbuttoned her coat and drew it off her shoulders while she just stood there in front of him, cheeks hot, eyes lowered, trembling from head to toe at his domineering closeness.
Then he just turned and walked off down the hall, arrogantly taking her possessions with him.
It’s getting worse, she noted tremulously as she meekly followed. Ten minutes in his company last time and her senses had been so responsive to him that she could barely breathe or think. Another ten minutes and she was now so acutely conscious of him that she was actually afraid.
She paused on the threshold of a beautiful pale lemon and white sitting-room, seeing her coat casually discarded on the back of a chair. Leon was standing across the room, pouring a drink into a fine crystal glass, his dark business suit moulding his muscled body with little attempt at hiding the power beneath.
Passion Becomes You Page 3