by Lynne Graham
How naive could a woman be? Andreo D’Alessio was a rat! A sleek smooth rat. He was also very, very rich and he had a very bad reputation with women. How likely was it that such a male had even vaguely decent intentions towards the stupid, trusting virgin who had flung herself into his bed the very first time they’d met? Pippa paled. She was ashamed of her own desperate desire to believe that she could trust him. Hadn’t she learned anything at all since she was seventeen?
That last summer in France she had fallen in love for the first time. A student staying in the neighbouring village, Pete, had been four years older, blond, good-looking, a motorbike fanatic. For a whole month, she and Hilary and occasionally even Jen had hung out with Pete and his mates. Tabby had met the boys too, but once her friend had met Christien, who was now her husband, Tabby had spent all her time with him.
Pippa had fallen like a ton of bricks for Pete. He had held hands with her, kissed her, acted as though he was interested in her and her life. Perhaps she ought to have questioned why he’d been so keen to encourage her to talk about how worried she’d been about Tabby, who had embarked on a wild affair with Christien. Tabby with her caramel-blonde hair and voluptuous figure had always attracted the guys and she had come out with them all again only because Christien had been away on business.
That day, Pete had taken Tabby on the back of his bike instead of Pippa. Although he had pretty much ignored Pippa, she had honestly thought he was just being friendly. So when he had kissed Tabby right in front of her, she had been shattered, but pride had made her hide her pain. Tabby had had no idea that Pippa had regarded Pete as her boyfriend and she had said afterwards, ‘I was annoyed when Pete came on to me but he told me he’d been waiting his chance with me all summer and I felt really sorry for the poor bloke…because, let’s face it, the only bloke in the world for me is Christien.’
The hardest thing that Pippa had ever done was pretend indifference to the humiliation that Pete had inflicted on her. Pete had just used her to pump her for information about Tabby and as an excuse to call at the farmhouse where they’d all been staying in the undoubted hope of running into her friend again. What little faith Pippa had had in her own judgement of the opposite sex had taken a hammering, for Pete had made it painfully obvious that he’d felt absolutely nothing for her.
Surfacing from those wounding recollections, Pippa looked up with a dazed aspect to her bespectacled blue eyes when she saw the post boy poised in front of her desk holding a gigantic basket of flowers.
‘Wow…’ Jonelle gushed with inquisitive eyes. ‘Is it your birthday or something?’
Gulping, Pippa scrambled upright. She detached the envelope from the basket handle and tore into it with hands that she could not keep steady.
‘Text me your address…finish early?’
There was no signature and it was not his handwriting but she knew the glorious arrangement was from him because she did not know another living soul in the country who could have afforded to spend that much on flowers. Her knees felt wobbly and she dropped back into her seat. She decided that it would be more dignified to ignore both the gesture and the message, but she was horribly conscious of just how badly she wanted to dig out her mobile phone and text him. She had never had a guy to do that with.
‘Call for you, Pippa…’ Jonelle announced, having answered the extension on what was now Cheryl’s desk.
Pippa took the call.
‘Do we have to sneak around?’ Andreo complained huskily. ‘My English grandmother used to say, “Tell the truth and shame the devil”.’
‘It’s a pity her outlook didn’t rub off on you!’ Pippa whispered in a controlled hiss while she slid her forefinger into the long ringlet that had broken loose from her pony-tail and wound bright strands of hair round and round in a frantic, enervated spiral.
‘I had to throw all my staff out of the boardroom to call you—’
‘Did I ask you to?’ But an appreciative grin tugged at Pippa’s mouth.
‘I need to use my phone!’ Without any further warning, Cheryl simply snatched the receiver from Pippa’s hold and stabbed a punitive finger down on the cut-off button.
In astonishment, Pippa wheeled round. ‘There was no reason to do that—’
‘Wasn’t there?’ Cheryl gave her an enraged scrutiny. ‘Thanks to you I’ve just gone through the worst ordeal of my life!’
‘Sorry?’ Pippa was now noticing how hot, bothered and tearful the pretty brunette looked.
‘I gave my presentation and that sarcastic bastard, D’Alessio, blew me away with the most awful questions. I couldn’t answer them and he treated me like I was stupid…it’s your fault that I wasn’t well enough prepared!’ Cheryl was sobbing in noisy earnest long before she reached the end of that impassioned outburst.
In the ghastly silence that stretched through the section, Ricky Brownlow hastened up, his discomfiture in the radius of Cheryl’s distress palpable. ‘Miss Long’s upset and she doesn’t know what she’s saying. Pippa…er…I’m sorry about this. I’m sure Cheryl will want to apologise to you later when she’s feeling more herself.’
As the blond man urged the crying brunette into his office, Cheryl was heard to loudly deny any desire to apologise to Pippa for anything.
‘Since when did Ricky get so chummy with Cheryl?’ someone asked.
‘Seems she found out the hard way that she couldn’t do Pippa’s job. Serves her right too.’ Jonelle sniffed. ‘I’m more amazed she had the nerve to even apply for it!’
Pippa’s mobile phone buzzed. Instead of answering it, she switched it off. It would be Andreo and she did not trust herself to check that it was and still ignore his call. Stuffing her phone back into her bag, she went back to work. As she was leaving an hour later Cheryl sidled up to her, her eyes and her nose still pink, her resentment barely concealed as she forced out grudging words of apology for her verbal attack.
Pippa was as gracious as she felt she could be but the brunette’s behaviour had merely underlined her own conviction that her own days of working at Venstar were strictly numbered. When she got home to the terraced house that she had once shared with her late father, she phoned out for a pizza. She loosed her wayward hair, finger-combed her curls and shed her suit in favour of a T-shirt and shorts. Making herself comfortable, she rang Tabby at her Breton home and asked if she could come and stay with her friend and her husband for a while.
‘I can’t believe you’re finally taking a holiday and coming over to see us!’ After the ghastly day at work that Pippa had endured, Tabby’s bubbling delight warmed her.
Following that call, Pippa studied her familiar surroundings and finally conceded that she was bored and dissatisfied with her dull existence. She decided that that was most probably why she had gone off the rails with Andreo D’Alessio and ditched her principles. Alcohol had played its unfortunate part too, she told herself grimly. It was not that he was so impossibly attractive, but more that he had caught her in a weak moment.
Just for once she had longed to do something different, something adventurous, something that wasn’t sensible. Everything else in her life was certainly sensible. Right down to her very wardrobe and rarely varied routine. Her grandparents and her parents had been comfortably off and, thanks to their canny financial planning, she owned her home outright, enjoyed a healthy savings account and could afford to take her time about job hunting. In twelve days’ time, she would be in Brittany. While she was over there, shouldn’t she explore the possibility of living and working in France for a while?
No sooner had that idea occurred to Pippa than her thoughts leapt ahead of her. She was free to do as she liked and rather than burn all her boats at once and risk selling her terraced home, she could let it out to tenants instead. Her late mother had been French and Pippa had grown up bilingual. All things considered, launching a fresh phase of her life across the English Channel would not be quite as risky for her as it would be for others, she decided.
Her front
doorbell buzzed. Her mouth watering at the prospect of a slice of pizza, she answered it and then fell back a step in surprise and confusion.
Andreo took advantage of her disarray to push the door back and stride into the hall. Tall, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped, his proud dark head at an angle, he rested brilliant golden eyes with speaking satisfaction on the basket of flowers that she had carted back from the office and then he switched his bright gaze to her.
‘You aren’t dressed yet, cara,’ he commented in his lazy drawl.
‘I’m not ddressed because I’m not going anywhere.’ At the nervous stammer of her own voice, flames of pink burnished Pippa’s delicate cheekbones. ‘And I’ve already told you that…why are you so persistent?’
CHAPTER FIVE
ANDREO almost laughed out loud. In asking him that question, could Pippa be serious?
Sexual desire was like a juggernaut inside him, driving him back to her with relentless force and determination. Lean dark face taut, he raked his incisive gaze slowly and carefully over her. He had to admit that she was a far cry from the sultry beauties he usually took to his bed, women who devoted much of their day to the maintenance of a groomed and flawless appearance. Her cinnamon mop of explosive curls was tousled and curiously appealing to him. She wore not a scrap of make-up and she was barefoot. Not even her nails were painted. Her T-shirt and shorts were not of the designer variety either.
But her candid eyes were bright as sapphires against her flushed skin and her soft pink mouth was vulnerable and full. Well washed and faded, the T-shirt moulded her supple curves and delineated pouting breasts rounded as apples and crowned with stiff little nipples.
His all-male body responding with fierce enthusiasm to that provocative evidence that his preoccupation in her was wonderfully matched by hers in him, Andreo murmured thickly, ‘I want you too, bella mia.’
The whole time that Andreo had been engaged in looking her over with the arrogant assurance of a male well aware of his own breathtaking magnetic attraction, Pippa had found herself welded to the spot with her heartbeat accelerating, her mouth bone-dry and her breath coming in jagged little bursts.
Clad in designer casuals of faultless sophistication, he looked incredibly handsome: cropped black hair glinting below the downlighters, level brows accentuating the masculine perfection of his hard cheekbones and the blue-black shading of his bronzed skin where it roughened in true masculine style round his aggressive jawline. She could literally feel his stunning eyes on her and the intensity of his appraisal fired a charge of helpless quivering excitement inside her. Her spine was in a rigid curve, slim shoulders thrown back, an attitude she only then appreciated pushed her braless breasts into prominence. The tingling of her sensitive flesh made her gaze lower and a hot wave of scarlet washed her cheeks when she realised why he was staring at her: the shameless distension of her nipples was obvious even through the cotton of her top.
‘I don’t want you…’ she gasped in belated denial, lifting one hand in a blind betraying gesture to steady herself against the wall behind her.
Andreo was incensed with her. ‘All I want right now is food—’
‘Liar!’ Pippa proclaimed.
Andreo sent her a smouldering appraisal, dense black lashes low over burning gold. ‘It is polite to make a civilised pretence of patience, cara mia.’
Civilised? Since when had he been civilised? Even the alcohol in her bloodstream the night before had not dimmed her awareness of his powerful personality and emphatic individuality. Staring back at him, for all her spoken defiance entrapped by the sheer impact of his exotic dark good looks and sexual vibrancy that close, Pippa shivered. ‘Don’t pretend with me.’
He quirked a sardonic brow. ‘You need me to tell you that, since early this morning, I’ve been on fire with a very powerful urge to carry you back to bed and sate my every fantasy?’
‘I’m not the kind of woman whom men have fantasies about,’ Pippa told him with a stony disdain edged with a raw, angry regret that she fought to keep to herself. For at that very moment she longed to be the sort of female who did inspire men with such fervour and admiration.
‘I only know what you do for me and what we found last night was—’
‘Just sex.’ Pippa thrust up her chin as she forced herself to make that blunt interruption, determined as she was to ensure that he received no opportunity to turn her foolish head again with false flattery. ‘That’s all it was.’
Andreo was outraged. Times without number he had slept with women and thought in exactly those terms, but no woman had ever treated him to a similar description. He felt insulted beyond relief and furious with her. ‘Dio mio. Why so coarse?’ he demanded with seething bite. ‘Together we discovered something exceptional. You were a virgin—’
Pippa paled with anger at that embarrassing reminder of the lack of experience that had evidently encouraged his reluctance to accept that she could know what she was talking about when she rejected him. ‘Do you have to drag that up?’
‘It is relevant. You chose me as your first lover,’ Andreo reminded her, infuriated by her efforts to brush him off as though he had been some tasteless and misjudged one-night stand.
Her oval face flushed a hot and mortified pink.
Andreo was quick to press his advantage. ‘I was concerned then that you would have regrets but don’t let that come between us now, amore.’
‘My choosing you as my first lover meant nothing…nothing at all,’ Pippa disclaimed with lacerated pride.
Andreo learned that he could travel from rage to a torn sense of tenderness that threatened to gut him and he loathed the revelation. He knew by her unhappy eyes that she was lying to him but he could not work out why. ‘Then why look at me the way you do?’
Pippa went rigid. ‘What way?’
A very male smile slashed his lean, strong face. ‘I need to draw pictures?’
Temper leapt through her in an energising roar. ‘Perhaps you do.’
His molten golden gaze snared hers and her heart crashed against her breastbone as though someone had thrown a panic switch deep down inside her. ‘Even the way you look at me speaks to me of your hunger for me…’
‘It’s only sexual attraction, nothing I can’t bury again any time I want to!’ Pippa stabbed back in fearful retaliation.
‘So…bury me,’ Andreo invited in husky challenge, angling down his proud dark head and claiming her full parted lips, prying straight between them with the erotic immediacy of an expert.
For a split second she remained stiff as a coat-hanger and then she trembled violently, shifted forward in a clumsy movement and let her hands close in a feverish embrace over his wide shoulders to steady legs that she could no longer depend on. She moaned as he used his tongue to probe the sensitive reaches of her mouth. The ticklish throb of her tender breasts made her instinctively press into the tough, muscular wall of his hard, masculine body. Fierce sensual excitement currented through her slim body and the intimate ache between her thighs intensified.
Andreo snatched his head up and drew in a stark lungful of air, a suppressed shudder racking his lean, powerful length, a raw Italian curse almost impelled from him by the disciplinary demands of restraining the force of his hunger for her. Shimmering golden eyes locked to her hectically flushed face and swollen mouth. ‘You were saying…?’ he prompted lethally, hoping like hell that she was a good loser so that he could triumph twice over and just haul her off to the nearest bed.
‘Saying?’ The word meant nothing to her for Pippa was not thinking just then. Her pale slender fingers stretched up and speared into his luxuriant black hair to yank him back down to her again. ‘Kiss,’ she told him, all of a quiver against him, hot and restive and in need, all her powers of concentration bent on the single-minded, necessary goal of dragging him back into her arms.
Andreo murmured something husky in Italian and gazed down at her with sizzling satisfaction, glorying in his sensual power over her, neatly choosing t
o overlook that he had been cursing hers over him just seconds earlier.
‘Please…’ she framed in uneasy bewilderment, brow indenting, for she had been unlocked from the erotic lure of him long enough by that stage for rational thought to be threatening a return. As the phone began ringing she winced, for she felt as if the slightest external annoyance might tip her over the edge and make her scream or break down.
‘You’re on a sensual high…coming down hurts, amore,’ Andreo breathed as he recognised the source of the bemused tears in her eyes.
Shock shrilled through her. It had not occurred to her that the fever pitch of desire that he could rouse her to so easily had another side to the coin: the torment of unsated hunger. Suddenly limp, she rested against him, devastated by her own capacity for passion. He had been in her life barely twenty-four hours and already he had turned it and her upside down with feelings and sensations that she had never dreamt she might fall victim to. It was truly terrifying.
Andreo smoothed a hand over her downbent head in a soothing gesture. An answering machine clicked on and a man’s deep pitched voice broke the humming silence in French.
‘Pippa? It’s Christien. I need a private word with you…’
Her head came up in surprise and she pulled back from Andreo. The speaker was Tabby’s husband. As he was not in the habit of making personal calls to her, Pippa was afraid that something had happened to Tabby and concern sent her flying to the phone. ‘Christien?’
But, cool and calm as was his wont, Christien informed her that he was willing to come over to London on the day she wanted to travel and bring her back to France with him that same evening if she would accompany him on a maternity shopping trip on Tabby’s behalf. Her lively friend had her own quirky dress sense and Christien might be the living image of the Parisian’s legendary sophistication, but he had never yet managed to buy his adoring wife anything to wear that she actually liked.