Passion Becomes You Read online

  She didn’t hear Josh’s answer to that, because Cassie had leapt at her desk, eyes flashing green fire—and something else that Jemma could not interpret but hinted oddly at terror. ‘Is that Josh? Give me that!’ she demanded, trying to snatch the phone from Jemma. ‘I have a few things I want to—’

  ‘I don’t want to speak to her!’ Josh grated into Jemma’s ear.

  ‘Give, Jemma!’ Cassie insisted, her eyes fire-bright with anger. ‘It’s time that rat learned a few home truths!’

  ‘Get her out of my office—now!’ Josh barked.

  ‘I can’t!’ she answered both of them, jumping to her feet in an effort to stop Cassie from wrenching the phone from her, and Josh hurled out a string of abuse aimed entirely at Cassie while Leon Stephanades viewed the whole scene with a look of lazy amusement sparking his eyes.

  Jemma hated him at that moment. The whole thing was utterly ridiculous. She felt stupid being a part of it, and he thought it was funny!

  He glanced up at her then, caught the look burning in her eyes, and suddenly the amusement left him to allow something so elemental to take its place that she gasped as everything inside her went haywire in answer to it, heart, lungs, pulses, even her skin—as if every minute hair follicle she possessed had been delivered an electric shock which set her whole body tingling.

  Josh was growling, Cassie was shouting, but suddenly they might as well not have been there for all Jemma knew. She was lost in a seething hot raid on her senses, and what really threw her into hectic confusion was the fact that he was feeling the exact same way—and doing nothing whatsoever to hide it!

  Then it all came crashing in. With the help of a sudden pained cry from Cassie, Jemma refocused her attention on the other woman just in time to hear her choke, ‘Whatever I am, you bastard, I am still pregnant with your child!’ Then she crumpled on to the floor.

  In a state of stunned shock, Jemma watched the lightning-quick reactions of Leon Stephanades as he caught Cassie’s weight before she hit the floor, listened to Josh cursing and swearing on the other end of the line, his voice so thick that it was obvious he was feeling the pressure of his emotions as much as Cassie was.

  ‘The bitch trapped me, Jemma,’ he was saying hoarsely. ‘She deliberately laid a trap for me.’

  Jemma did not know what to say. In the end, she just murmured, ‘I’ll call you back, Josh. I’ll call you back,’ and slowly replaced the receiver.

  By the time she had collected a cool cloth and a glass of water, Cassie was beginning to show signs of life. Leon Stephanades had carried her into Josh’s office and placed her on the leather sofa in there and was now squatting beside her, gently chafing at one of her hands.

  Jemma knelt down beside him and offered him the cloth. He took it without speaking, his expression grim to say the least as he applied the cloth to Cassie’s brow.

  It was him Cassie saw when she eventually opened her eyes. ‘Oh, God, Leon,’ she whispered tragically. ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘Nothing, until you feel well enough,’ he answered calmingly. ‘Then I will take you home.’

  Tears blurred the wretched green of her eyes. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ she claimed fretfully.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ he said. That was all, but even as Jemma stiffened in violent protest at what his tone was implying Cassie’s eyes were going dark with guilt, and on a pained choke she hid her face in her hands and began to sob wretchedly.

  Shocked, Jemma sat back on her heels, the fact that any woman would set out deliberately to trap a man that way just too awful for her to take in.

  Leon Stephanades turned his head to look at her, then grimaced. ‘Don’t look so appalled, Miss Davis,’ he drawled. ‘Your sex use this ploy all the time. To them, it is the next best thing to a genuine proposal—especially when it is a man like your Mr Tanner who is involved. Or me,’ he then tagged on cynically.

  Feeling sick, Jemma got up and walked back into her own office. She felt ashamed of her sex, if what Leon Stephanades had said was true. Ashamed for Cassie whom she had liked and even admired for what she’d seen as her candid honesty about her intentions.

  And Josh? She sat down behind her desk and wondered what she felt for Josh.

  She felt sorry for him, she realised. For the first time in two years of witnessing the way he used women for his own purposes, she actually felt sorry for him.

  Because, no matter how much he deserved his come-uppance in one way or another, he did not deserve this.

  The phone rang. And for the next few minutes she had to turn her attention strictly to business as a spate of calls followed one on top of the other.

  She was just replacing the receiver for the final time when Leon Stephanades came through to her office. ‘She is calmer now,’ he said. ‘When she has tidied herself, I will take her home.’

  Jemma nodded dumbly, refusing to look at him, shock and distaste at what Cassie had done still evident on her face. He studied her for a moment, then closed the connecting door between the two offices and walked over to her desk.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I just find it hard to believe she actually did it deliberately,’ she confessed.

  ‘Women are devious creatures, Miss Davis,’ he said heavily. ‘They will go to any lengths to achieve their own ends.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She smiled tightly. ‘Generalisations like that keep the world turning, I suppose.’

  ‘They do in my sphere,’ he said cynically.

  His sphere—who the hell did he think he was? Were all women supposed to be as unscrupulous as Cassie? ‘Well,’ she said, coming stiffly to her feet and making a play of gathering her telephone notes together, ‘I shall try to remember that when I decide to go hunting, and make a wide berth of your—sphere.’

  ‘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.’

  CHAPTE
R 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.