The Mistress Purchase by Penny Jordan Page B

old-fashioned men’s cologne produced by Francine, to update it, to make out of it a scent that was intensely male…a fragrance that would for ever and always be for her the mark of the man she was so passionately drawn to. Leon’s scent…
    Dreamily she let her imagination go to work! She would name it Leon—in her own secret thoughts if notin public—and it would be topaz-dark in hue, leonine, discreet, sensual, strong, earthy and rich, yet with a touch of coolness and hauteur, a fragrant suggestion of the pale green ice that was Leon’s eyes! Leon…Leon…The bottle would be tall and round, wide enough for a man’s hand to grip comfortably and feel at ease with…
    Guiltily Sadie snatched her recklessly wayward thoughts back to reality.
    Leon was an excellent driver in whose care she felt extremely safe, and she was pleased when he praised her map-reading skills and thanked her for finding them a shorter route to the motorway.
    â€˜I dare say this wretched slug of a car will mean that it will take us longer to get there than I had expected,’ Leon warned her once they reached the right road. ‘And heaven alone knows how it will cope with climbing the mountains.’
    Sadie gave him a rueful look. Although he was complaining, he was not doing so in a bad-tempered manner, rather a wryly resigned one. It increased her growing respect for him to see that he could control his reaction to difficult situations.
    In fact, as she was quickly discovering, time spent in Leon’s company was such a blissful experience that merely sitting beside him inside a car made her feel happier than she suspected, as a sane modern woman, she had any right to be feeling.
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    As Leon had predicted, the small car laboured wretchedly up the steep mountain roads, but Sadie was too entranced by their surroundings and her companion to care. She had read in the guide book provided with the car that the porphyry rock that formed the mountains held colours which ranged from the deepest red in Cap Roux throughto blue in Agay, where the Romans had made the column shafts for their monuments in Provence, to green, yellow, purple and grey. But to actually glimpse these rich colours through the deep green screen of the forest made her catch her breath in awe, unable to resist drawing Leon’s attention to what she had seen.
    â€˜They are awesome,’ he agreed, his expression deliberately teasing as he added, ‘That is unless you have seen Ayers Rock!’
    â€˜Oh, you.’ Sadie pulled a face at him and then stopped, her eyes misting a little with emotion as she realised how easy and natural she felt with him—just as though she had known him for years…
    From somewhere deep inside her the words ‘soul mates’ rose up and would not be denied. Soul mate. Wasn’t that truly what every single human being longed for? To meet their own one and only soul mate? To be with their special-once-in-a-lifetime person who was their fate and their destiny?
    A tiny little shiver quivered through her.
    â€˜Cold?’ Leon asked, frowning and reaching out to the air-conditioning control.
    Sadie shook her head, but a small perverse part of her was pleased when he turned his head to give her a searching look, and then, and only then, seemed prepared to accept her statement. Ridiculously, she knew—given her age and the fact that she had looked after herself for so long—it gave her a tiny thrill of pleasure to know that he was so concerned for her comfort. Perhaps another woman might have accused him of being stereotypically male but Sadie admitted she was actually enjoying the sensation of being cared for.
    â€˜Does it look from the map as though it’s much further?’ Leon asked with a small frown as the car crawled up yet another steep hill.
    Obligingly, Sadie checked the map. Ironically, it gave her as much pleasure to be treated as an equal partner in their shared