by Lynne Graham
‘Philly…’ In one strikingly graceful movement, Andreo rose to his full height and extended his hand.
The name he employed broke her spell. ‘It’s Pippa, actually, Pippa Stevenson,’ she told him in a high, unnatural voice. ‘Andreo…how could you have lied to me the way you did?’
Andreo let his hand fall back to his side, keen eyes narrowing, for he did not like her tone. ‘I didn’t tell you a single lie,’ he countered.
‘But you knew that I hadn’t the smallest suspicion that you were Andreo D’Alessio. If you weren’t prepared to tell me the truth, you should’ve left me alone.’
‘But you didn’t want to be left alone, cara mia,’ Andreo traded smooth as polished jet, wondering why she was making such a fuss over news that would delight any normal woman. So, instead of being a nine-to-five worker, he owned the business. So, instead of being reasonably successful, he was a mega achiever. So, instead of earning a good salary, he was filthy rich and in possession of a private jet and an array of luxury homes. What was there to complain about? And where the hell did she think she was coming from when she accused him of lying? He had been careful not to tell her a single untruth.
Tension was pounding out an enervated beat at Pippa’s temples but she lifted her head high and she breathed in deep. ‘You are my employer and I had a right to know that.’
‘Dio mio…what a fuss you are making about nothing!’ Andreo censured, a satiric dark brow elevated in a manner that would have warned the wary that his patience was running out.
‘Nothing?’ Pippa gasped, jolted into agonised reaction by his bold refusal to acknowledge the damage he had done.
‘Between us and after last night, it should mean nothing, carissima.’ Andreo rephrased as he strode forward to reach for her clenched hands.
Pippa sidestepped him and spread her arms wide in angry condemnation. ‘You’re even worse than I thought you would be—’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Andreo demanded.
Pippa kept her eyes wide and fixed in focus because tears were damming up again behind them. Tears of rage and disappointment. He was not the guy she had thought he was. ‘I would never have spent the night with you if I had known I worked for you. Do you make a habit of sleeping with your employees?’
‘Per meraviglia…’ A faint but perceptible rise of blood illuminated his high cheekbones and his tall, powerful length went rigid. Blazing golden eyes seared her in punishment for her daring to ask such a question. ‘Never before have I become intimate with a member of my staff!’
‘I wish I could say I believed you but it’s difficult,’ Pippa admitted curtly. ‘Particularly when it’s obvious to me that you haven’t the faintest idea of the boundaries that a decent employer should respect!’
‘Your anger I will take, but your insolence I refuse to accept,’ Andreo murmured in icy warning.
Pippa trembled and her hands knotted into tighter fists. ‘You’re not even ashamed of yourself, are you?’
Andreo surveyed her steadily. ‘Do I have regrets about spending the night with you? No. I had too good a time. I don’t consider our relationship a mistake. As far as I’m concerned the fact that I employ you is virtually irrelevant as an issue. I own many different businesses and employ many thousands of workers and my time here at Venstar will be brief. You will neither gain nor lose by my interest.’
‘Oh? And how do you make that out?’ Distress made Pippa’s voice rise half an octave. ‘If a colleague was to recognise me as the redhead with you at last night’s party, I could never hold my head up again! My only consolation is that I wasn’t recognised and that nobody knows what a fool I made of myself!’
Andreo closed lean brown hands over hers in a deliberate move that prevented her from walking away again. He could not imagine how her co-workers could possibly have failed to identify her and he could only believe that she was kidding herself on that score. Enough was enough, he decided in growing frustration. It was time she calmed down and stopped attacking him. ‘You didn’t make a fool of yourself. That isn’t how it was between us. Why are you talking like this? Two people met and succumbed to the same potent attraction—’
‘It’s not that simple—’
Andreo stared at her with level intensity. ‘It is if you want it to be, cara.’
Painfully aware of the rich, dark pull of his sensual attraction, which was all the more devastating when backed by his powerful personality, Pippa wrenched her hands free of his with positive violence. ‘I don’t want it to be. You pretended to be someone you weren’t. The guy I thought you were doesn’t exist. I wouldn’t have been attracted to a sexist playboy like you in a million years!’
As she attempted to move away Andreo blocked her path and scorching golden eyes assailed hers in a look as aggressive as an assault. ‘I think you had better explain that condemnation in language I can be sure I understand.’
Her throat convulsed but she stared back at him in agonised defiance, the sense of loss tearing at her only increasing her bitterness and armouring her with more obstinate determination. ‘You cost me my promotion even before you arrived in this building. I heard one of the men who met you in Naples telling a director how unimpressed you were by my picture in the company newsletter and how you preferred sexy, fanciable women in executive posts…’
‘That is a complete fallacy.’ Pippa Stevenson? Her name had set off a faint familiar bell in Andreo’s memory. The company newsletter. He remembered that publication and leafed through the documents on his desk in search of the copy that he had retained.
‘I applied for the management position in my section,’ Pippa continued unsteadily. ‘A job which I had already been doing for some months and which I had every reason to hope would become mine on a permanent basis. Instead the promotion went to another woman, who is not only junior to me in status and unqualified but, also, very much prettier—’
‘Dio mio…this photo does nothing for you! In this guise even I would be challenged to recognise you,’ Andreo confessed with a frown of exasperation. ‘But I made only one reference to your appearance that day in Naples. I did not make a single politically incorrect or provocative comment about pretty or sexy women in management, I assure you. I only said that you looked slovenly—’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Pippa exclaimed in a stricken tone of wonderment.
‘And, unfortunately, you do look rather untidy in this picture,’ Andreo breathed, standing his ground, shooting from the hip in self-defence.
Slovenly? She could not believe he had employed that word as a description of her appearance. Moving forward to snatch the newsletter from him, she gasped, ‘What’s wrong with me?’
‘I shouldn’t need to tell you. Look at your hair…it’s all over the place.’ Andreo found himself studying her while she pored over the newsletter picture and noticed that once again her hair presented, at first glance at least, a rather mussed appearance. Tiny cinnamon curls clustered at her hairline and a rebellious wave was threatening to ruin the once-smooth fall of the silky strands on top of her head. Far from being straight, he registered, her hair seemed to be exuberantly curly.
‘Slovenly…’ Pippa repeated sickly.
Andreo found that that hurt intonation hit him like a four-car pile-up but he was bone-deep stubborn and as angry with her as any male wholly unaccustomed to female censure could be. ‘There’s a button missing from your jacket and the trousers look like you slept in them. You don’t look very smart. That’s all I said.’
Painful colour had drenched her cheeks. She bit down hard on the soft underside of her lower lip and tasted blood. That photo had been taken barely a week after her father’s death and she had rushed into the room, all breathless and apologetic and the last to join the line-up. It was an old trouser suit and she could see that it was not flattering. But that word, ‘slovenly’, mortified her and she was appalled that he could be so cruelly inconsiderate of her feelings.
‘That is the sole remark th
at I made,’ Andreo asserted, deciding just then that he would never, ever again comment on an employee’s personal appearance without very serious forethought.
Whatever, he had cost her the job of Finance Manager even though he was refusing to acknowledge it, Pippa reflected unhappily. He had to know just how eager the Venstar executives were to please him. His criticism would have been sufficient to put a large question mark over the advisability of raising her to managerial status.
‘I want to repeat that I passed no inappropriate comments relating to my supposed physical preferences in female employees,’ Andreo completed with sardonic clarity.
Pippa remained mutinously silent. He might have what it took to pull women in a very big way, but he was also very much one of the guys: earthly male, athletic, dazzlingly confident, popular with his own sex. A male-dominated culture operated at executive level within Venstar. If Andreo had chosen to make Jack-the-lad jokes about women at that session in Naples, she was well aware that he could not have chosen a more receptive audience.
‘I assume that you accept that,’ Andreo prompted with speaking emphasis.
A laugh that was no laugh at all fell from her lips. ‘I don’t know if I do. Your behaviour last night made it clear that you don’t consider yourself bound by the standards that the average employer would automatically respect.’
Andreo threw up his arrogant dark head. ‘I don’t accept that contention.’
‘Why should you when you’re so convinced that no rules whatsoever should apply to you?’ Pippa shot at him with a fierce, tremulous edge of accusation to her voice. ‘You seem to believe that you have a God-given right to do exactly as you please regardless of how it might affect others. What about my rights? You’re my boss and, had I known that, what happened between us would never have happened. I wouldn’t have dreamt of making an exhibition of myself with you in front of the people I have to work with either!’
‘Dio mio, what is done is done…’ Andreo entrapped and held the distressed blue of her gaze with smouldering golden eyes.
‘It should never have happened,’ Pippa mumbled chokily, striving with all her might to disconnect from the heated charge of his magnetic appraisal. ‘And slovenly means grubby…and I have never been less than clean in my whole life—’
‘I never said that you were…just a little untidy. I was not aware that the word had any other connotation.’ Andreo could not credit the effort he was making to placate her. He was annoyed with her. He had every reason to be annoyed with her but he still found himself closing his arms round the general space she occupied as slowly and sneakily as if he were about to try and hug dynamite.
‘I am not untidy…what are you doing?’ It shook Pippa that even in the wake of all her proud words of rejection little miniature fireworks of wild anticipation started fizzing low in her tummy the minute he put his arms round her.
‘Tell me you don’t want this,’ Andreo growled sexily.
Her body was all hot and quivery and eager and shamed colour warmed her cheeks at that awareness. Her breasts felt heavy and tender, the straining peaks tautening into hard little points of betrayal below her jacket. ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she pleaded.
With a husky laugh, Andreo bent his handsome dark head and teased her soft lips open with shattering carnal expertise. ‘We need to talk. We could have lunch instead of dinner, cara—’
‘No…’
‘Dinner is such a long way away…why should we be that patient?’ Andreo’s breath fanned her cheek as he came back for a more intimate sortie, letting his tongue delve an erotic path between her lips and making her vent an involuntary moan.
‘Back off…my career and my reputation are important to me and this is a mug’s game,’ Pippa muttered shakily, desperate for another kiss but fighting the lure of him with all her might, knowing all too well just how much she was likely to hate herself if she let him come between her and her wits a second time.
She could smell the evocative male scent of his skin, awesomely familiar to her, shockingly exciting. She felt dizzy and emotional and she wanted to throw herself the last six inches that separated them. She could feel him willing her to do it too. He had an attitude problem. She knew that now. A big backlog of her misguided predecessors had flattered his ego and taught him that he could talk and laugh and seduce his way out of awkward moments. He was manipulative, utterly without conscience, ruthless enough to go to any length to win. He was not Mr Wonderful, Mr Perfect, that one very special guy she had believed he was.
But even though she knew all that, resisting Andreo was tearing her apart at the seams. He had taught her to want him and she had been bitten deep by her own yearning. She felt achingly vulnerable and furious with herself for not having sufficient will-power to put him in his place.
‘Amore…let’s not make heavy weather of this,’ Andreo drawled, his glorious Italian accent skimming down her sensitive backbone and just tying her up in pathetic shivering knots of responsiveness. ‘In your heart, you know very well that you’re going to forgive me for all my supposed sins.’
Fury with him and her own weakness made the tears she had held back for well over an hour surge free in a dismaying flood. Without thinking, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and dislodged one of her contact lenses. ‘Oh, no!’ she groaned and dropped down onto her knees. ‘Don’t move…I’ve lost a lens!’
Andreo dropped down into an athletic crouch and picked up the tiny lens from the polished wood floor. ‘I have it,’ he murmured, removing a sheet of paper from the desk and folding the lens into the pocket he had fashioned for it. ‘So you wear contacts…’
Pippa wondered if he had ever made a pass at a woman who wore spectacles before and then sucked in a stark breath of despair, wishing that she had the power to regain control of her own brain. ‘I’m not about to forgive you,’ she stated between gritted teeth. ‘I don’t want to see you again. I just want to forget that last night happened—’
‘Go ahead…we can have a hell of a time rediscovering the joys and reliving the highlights tonight, bella mia.’
‘Why won’t you listen to what I’m saying?’ Pippa demanded in fierce frustration, still down on her knees as she tucked the folded paper into her jacket.
‘Whether you knew it or not, you signed up for more than one night when you shared my bed.’ Andreo rested brilliant dark golden eyes on her in challenge. ‘I still want you. You still want me. While I can’t understand how your colleagues could have failed to recognise you at the hotel last night, I’m willing to be discreet if that’s what you prefer—’
‘Stop trying to tempt me,’ Pippa cut in a fierce accusing tone even while she leant almost imperceptibly closer to him. ‘I wouldn’t waste ten minutes of my time on a guy who gives women sex toys for his amusement!’
His black brows drew together, lashes dropping low over his amazing eyes. He gave her a slashing grin that made her want to hit him and pin him horizontal to the floor at one and the same time. ‘Sex…toys?’
‘The diamond-studded handcuffs…I read about them in a newspaper,’ she informed him thinly.
‘Shame on you, cara mia. You’ve been reading real trash,’ Andreo murmured in unembarrassed silken reproof. ‘And I hate to be the one to disappoint you but you’re about as ready for sex toys as I am for celibacy!’
Vaulting upright, he stretched down a hand to help her up too. But in almost the same moment Pippa heard the door open and a male voice address Andreo in his own language. She almost died on the spot and shot right under his desk to curl up into a remarkably small ball.
Sal Rissone made a praiseworthy effort not to let his attention touch on the woman hiding under Andreo’s trendy glass desk.
‘Just pretend that she’s as invisible as she thinks she is,’ Andreo told him in Italian.
‘Am I allowed to ask what she’s doing there?’ his childhood friend enquired, deadpan.
‘Protecting herself from the embarrassment of being seen in
my office. She…she gets hyper about crazy things,’ Andreo murmured almost defensively, shrugging a broad shoulder. ‘She’s a sensitive woman.’
Sixth sense warned Sal not to crack the rather coarse joke brimming on his lips. Self-evidently, Andreo had decided that hyper was cute and sensitive and worthy of respect. Andreo, who thought women were interchangeable commodities pretty much put on earth for his sole enjoyment, was making excuses for one so off-the-wall she was hiding under his desk. Andreo, who had such very pronounced ideas of what he liked and what he disliked. Sal could not wait to call his wife and share the news that Andreo was acting as strangely today as he had the night before.
Seconds after the door closed on Sal’s departure, Pippa shot out from her hiding place. Standing up, she smoothed herself down with shaking hands while refusing to award Andreo a single glance and walked straight back out of his office again. After all, what more was there to say? She had made her feelings clear. Furthermore, she was all too painfully conscious that she had a very low resistance threshold to those sleek, dark, gorgeous good looks of his.
Mid-afternoon, instead of working, she found herself staring into space, utterly, frighteningly shorn of her usual great concentration. She tried to boot Andreo back out of her thoughts but he hung in there as if he were tattooed on her brain cells. She was furious with herself. He had no shame. He would not agree that he had been an irresponsible, selfish toad in refusing to admit that he was her boss. So now she knew what the surprise he had been planning to break to her over dinner would have been…
Yes, now she knew and she also had the unarguable proof of how basically unimportant he had deemed the whole issue to be. Brow furrowing, she reconsidered that angle as she recalled his insistence that the attraction between them should take priority over all else. Hadn’t he also sworn that she was the only employee he had ever been involved with? Taken together with his behaviour, didn’t those facts suggest that Andreo might be genuinely interested in her? For goodness’ sake, was she already falling back into that demeaning trap of dreaming that her wildest fantasies could come true?