by Lynne Graham
Pippa snatched in a steadying breath but she was relieved that he had sufficient sensitivity to appreciate how difficult she would find such a situation. ‘It’s all right. I’ll be fine,’ she said woodenly.
Andreo shed his jacket and tie, unbuttoned his shirt. He had been so angry when he’d arrived, and he still was, but all of a sudden he just wanted to laugh out loud. He very much doubted that their hosts had gone to bed at eleven at night. It was inconceivable to Andreo that he would allow other people’s opinions to influence his behaviour, for he was fearless when it came to pursuing any course in which he knew himself to be in the right. It was evident that Pippa was much more vulnerable and he studied her with keen interest. Covered from head to toe in a shapeless garment that would have looked at home in a coffin, she was scrambling into the bed in extreme haste.
While he stripped with the most shocking lack of self-consciousness and not a decent ounce of the extreme awkwardness that Pippa felt he ought to have been suffering in her presence, she turned her back on him to glare at the wall. But the image of his lithe bronzed masculinity travelled with her as powerfully as if he still stood in front of her. She was furious with herself for being severely tempted to sneakily spy on him while he undressed. After all she had said and done, what sort of sense would that make?
But then was there any sense at all to what was happening between them now? Suppose he was telling her the truth about Lili Richards? Why, after all, would he follow her all the way to France if she had only been the two-week equivalent of a one-night stand? Maybe he had been planning to visit the country anyway: he did own a house in France, she reminded herself.
She lay in bed, tossing and turning, listening with one ear to the distant sound of the shower running in the connecting bathroom. It shook her that she couldn’t get her thoughts into any kind of reasonable order. She was in total turmoil. In search of an explanation, she looked back to the outset of their affair…
She had spent ten consecutive days with Andreo D’Alessio. Only work hours had intervened and they had soon alleviated that problem by stealing at least two hours together around midday. In retrospect she was shocked at the feckless attitudes she had fallen into. Andreo had wanted her and that had been that: she couldn’t have cared less about Venstar. For the entirety of those ten days she had lived entirely for Andreo. They had not spent a single night apart. The one evening on which she had suggested that she ought to go home, Andreo had wasted no time in dissuading her from the notion.
Never before had she been so indescribably happy. That reality spoke for itself, her more sober self interposed at that point. Happiness of that magnitude was not meant to last and once she had tasted the best she should have known that it could only get worse from there on in. How much worse? Andreo was an unrepentant womaniser…and there was a possibility that she might be expecting his baby!
No, no, no! Pippa shrieked inside her mind, fighting to throw that scary thought back out again. The chances of her being pregnant were very small, she told herself doggedly. If her cycle did not return to normal soon, she would consider approaching a doctor. A little voice she did not want to listen to reminded her that her own mother might only have conceived once but that conception had actually taken place when her parents had only been together for two short weeks!
Andreo sauntered out of the bathroom. All that stood between him and total nudity was a pair of seriously trendy Armani boxers. Pippa stared. She preferred distracting herself to suffering what she regarded as almost hysterical fears relating to pregnancy, or almost as bad, succumbing to a need to mentally dissect every blasted minute she had ever spent in his company. Her mesmerised attention roamed over the hard contours of his strong, muscular shoulders, broad, powerful chest, the flat slab of his stomach and long, strong thighs. Lean muscle rippled in the smooth bronze expanse of his back and narrow hips as he closed his case and straightened, a magnificent male animal in his athletic and sexual prime. The tip of her tongue slunk out to moisten her dry lower lip. She was conscious of the heated, heavy rise of excitement low in her pelvis, the aching pulse of moist responsive heat.
‘No…’ Andreo said softly.
Her reactions slowed by her distance from rational thought, Pippa blinked and focused on him. ‘Sorry?’
‘I’m off limits. You would have to get down on your knees and beg before I would forgive you for your behaviour—’
‘Off limits?’ Pippa was unable to credit her own hearing. ‘Get down on my knees and beg? What for?’
‘Sex…sex with me, amore.’ Andreo tossed back the sheet and came down beside her, black hair tousled, stunning dark golden eyes burnished to sizzling gold. ‘Don’t think I don’t know when you want me—’
Pippa turned the same colour as a ripe beetroot, yanked up a pillow and tried to thump him with it. ‘That’s utter nonsense!’
‘And how violent you can be when you don’t get it.’ Removing the pillow from her fevered grasp, Andreo tossed it behind his head and stretched with the flexing, fluid grace of a prowling tiger. Angling a knowing appraisal at her, he smiled with unholy complacency.
In one furious jerk, Pippa sat up. ‘You know nothing about me—’
‘I know you kept every single flower and card I ever sent you, even the dying blooms,’ Andreo commented smooth as silk.
‘So what?’ she raked at him. ‘I hate waste!’
‘Tabby said you had been inconsolable since your arrival but trying hard to cover it up,’ Andreo added.
Ready to claw like a wildcat, Pippa launched herself at him and hissed scornfully, ‘There’s no way Tabby would say something like that to you…she’s my friend!’
Andreo took advantage of her proximity to close strong hands round her forearms and tip her down on top of him.
Sudden silence fell. Her hands had come down on his chest to steady herself, slender fingers spreading on warm, hair-roughened muscles. Her breath caught in her throat. When her startled blue eyes collided with his burning gold scrutiny, the atmosphere was electric and the fight and the anger went out of her as surely as if he had pulled a switch.
Andreo meshed a lean-fingered hand in the tumble of her cinnamon-coloured curls and stole one devastating, passionate kiss. Breathing shallowly, he freed her reddened mouth again and lifted her back onto her own side of the bed.
Excitement had seethed up in a tempestuous greedy burst inside Pippa. Her body was clamouring for the satisfaction that he had taught her to want. She rolled over, and like an iron filing drawn by a magnet, reached for him again. But Andreo dealt her a smouldering look and set her back from him in unashamed rejection. ‘I’m still too angry with you…’
‘Angry?’ she repeated, aghast and in shock from what had just happened.
Andreo settled grim dark golden eyes on her. ‘If I ever want someone else, I will tell you up front. That’s how I am. I don’t lie or sneak around. I don’t need to. To date there may have been a fair number of women in my life but none could ever accuse me of dishonesty or infidelity, cara.’
‘Lili Richards touched you…that was infidelity!’ Pippa slammed back in a ferocious surge of disagreement. ‘One finger on any part of you qualifies as infidelity!’
Andreo screened his amused gaze. ‘Is that a fact? I don’t like being pawed in public. I think it’s tasteless. Presumably you didn’t see me push her away and ask her to cool it—’
‘No, I didn’t. And before you come over all smug and think that you broke my heart and that that’s why I left London, think again!’ Pippa hauled up the sheet and turned her slim, elegant back on him. ‘Our relationship had run its course and it was time for it to end. I decided to go to France right at the start of our affair and I never once swerved from that decision!’
During the blistering silence that fell in answer to that declaration, hot stinging tears inched out from below Pippa’s lowered eyelids and slid down her cheeks onto the pillow. She knew she would not be able to sleep by his side.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HAVING lain awake for half the night, Pippa drifted off around seven and woke with a start an hour later. Her nostrils flared on the rich, aromatic smell of fresh coffee and her stomach instantly rebelled. Eyes flying wide in dismay, she threw herself off the bed, hurtled past Andreo where he stood with a laden breakfast tray and raced at all possible speed into the bathroom. She was sick but, mercifully, it was over quickly and she felt fine in the aftermath.
‘Are you OK?’ Andreo enquired from the doorway.
Her embarrassment intense, Pippa stalked across the bathroom and slammed shut the door in his face, snapping, ‘Can’t I even be ill in peace?’
After a lengthy shower, an even slower drying-off of her curls into fluffy childish bangs that infuriated her, she emerged and found the bedroom empty, which, oddly enough, annoyed her even more than a barrage of questions would have done. When she went downstairs, Tabby took her into the dining room for breakfast.
‘Andreo said you weren’t well. He’s worried about you…he’s a real hunk too, isn’t he?’ Tabby lowered her voice to add with an irreverent grin. ‘Christien gets on with him like a house on fire.’
‘I could have forecast that without a crystal ball,’ Pippa confided. ‘Where are they?’
‘Well, they made a great play about going off to talk business…but I bet you anything that they’ll end up either down in the wine cellar or having a spin in Christien’s latest new car,’ Tabby declared with her warm, contagious laugh.
‘What’s the fastest way of finding out if you’re pregnant?’ Pippa asked her friend in a rush.
Tabby blinked and breathed in deep and let the silence linger before saying, ‘I could take you to see my doctor. He’ll do a test.’
Tabby made the necessary phone call while Pippa sipped at a cup of tea but only shredded a piece of toast for she was too nervous to feel hungry. As they walked out to Tabby’s car her friend gave her a rueful appraisal. ‘Thanks for trusting me.’
‘Terror loves company,’ Pippa quipped half under her breath.
An hour later, she knew for sure: she was going to have a baby. No longer could she hide her head in the sand and hope that only nerves were upsetting her system. But she was shattered by that confirmation.
‘What are you planning to do?’ Tabby asked her friend worriedly during the drive back to the château.
‘I don’t know,’ Pippa confided unevenly, and it was the truth.
She had had such an unhappy childhood and she had only to picture some poor child suffering in a similar way for her heart to sink. Of course, she knew that she would never punish a child for poor academic performance. She would not comment on her child’s lack of good looks either. Nor would she ever tell her son or her daughter as her mother had once told her that she was only staying in a bad, destructive relationship for their sake.
‘Talk it over with Andreo…he is…I mean…the baby is his?’ Tabby gave her friend an apologetic look.
Pippa nodded in rueful confirmation.
‘He’s fabulous with kids,’ Tabby informed her eagerly. ‘Jake and Jolie climbed all over him this morning and he was very good-natured about it. You’ve just been taken by surprise, Pippa. You’ll get used to the idea.’
‘I’m sure I will…’ The very concept of accepting that new life was growing inside her shook Pippa deeply. It seemed so extraordinary, almost a miracle, something worthy of celebration rather than fear and anxiety.
‘I adore babies,’ Tabby admitted, bringing her car to a halt outside her huge imposing home and switching off the engine. ‘Christien thought we should wait until Jolie was older but I didn’t want to. I prefer not to have big age gaps between our children.’
Christien and Andreo strode out through the front entrance to greet them.
One glimpse of Andreo’s riveting dark features and Pippa’s heart skipped a beat. Casually clad in an aqua short-sleeved shirt and beige chinos, he looked heart-stoppingly handsome She thought of how she had planned to tell him that she was already booked on a train to the Dordogne and abandoned the idea. Now that she knew about the baby, Andreo would have to be told as well. And perhaps, she thought unhappily, it was time she stopped trying to tell herself that she would be able to walk away from him without pain, for that was an outright lie.
‘You didn’t say you were going out, ma belle,’ Christien said to his wife, lean strong face reproving.
‘You didn’t say you were taking Andreo out for a spin round the estate in the McLaren…or did I miss that announcement?’ his wife fielded cheekily.
Andreo decided to take advantage of their audience and Pippa’s unusually timid aspect, for her bright blue eyes had yet to meet his. ‘Your luggage is already on board the helicopter.’
Involuntarily, Pippa experienced a moment of amusement. He had not been able to kidnap her but he had kidnapped her luggage and her diary. Little more than ten minutes later, their farewells exchanged, they were walking towards the helipad.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Great…this morning was just one of those things,’ she dismissed hurriedly. ‘Where’s this property of yours in the Dordogne?’
‘Near Bourdeilles. The countryside around there reminded me of Tuscany,’ he volunteered. ‘Unspoilt farmland and woods. You’ll like my house. It’s very relaxing.’
‘I’m sure it is, but I’ll be taking a room in Brantome…my mother is buried near there,’ she responded brittly. ‘This is my first trip back to France since I was seventeen and something of a pilgrimage. There was a car crash that summer and my mother and several of my parents’ friends died. If I stayed with you, you wouldn’t find me good company.’
Andreo had read about the accident in the investigation report. Having spoken to his pilot, he watched her struggle to do up her seat belt and intervened to do it for her. Her pale, delicate profile was taut, the tension in her slender body as pronounced as that etched in the unusual clumsiness of her hands.
They landed at a private airfield and continued their journey in the Mercedes four-wheel drive that awaited them. The landscape was becoming familiar to her and she was silent. Haunted by painful memories of that fatal summer, she finally closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
‘We’re here…’
When Andreo wakened Pippa, she could not recall ever having slept more heavily. She clambered out of the car in as much of a daze as a sleepwalker. Having simply assumed that Andreo was planning to drop her off in the centre of Brantome, she was disconcerted to find herself standing instead outside a small rural church.
‘I remembered the details from the investigation report.’ Andreo reached into the car boot and lifted out a beautiful bouquet of fresh flowers. ‘I stopped off in a village on the way for these but I should have woken you up so that you could choose—’
‘No, they’re lovely.’ Her voice wobbled, for she was touched by his kindness and suddenly very grateful indeed not to be alone.
Andreo curved a strong arm to her spine because even in the warmth of the sunshine she was trembling. It did not take them long to find what they sought in the beautifully kept graveyard. She knelt down and gently laid the flowers on the springy turf and struggled to maintain control over her unsettled emotions.
‘That summer we were staying in a village only a stone’s throw from here. It was a disastrous, horrible holiday,’ she confided, the words tumbling from her in an enervated torrent. ‘Tabby was all tied up with Christien and her ghastly stepmother, Lisa, was flirting like mad with my dad. He loved all the attention. I had a fight with Mum on the day of the accident. I told her we should go home and leave Dad free to flirt with Lisa and Mum was mad with me…and I said I was ashamed of her because she let Dad treat her like dirt!’ A sob was wrenched from Pippa. ‘We made up but I should never have spoken to her like that.’
Andreo rested level dark golden eyes on her distraught face. ‘She was your mother. She would have understood, cara mia.’
But Pip
pa could not stop the tears falling, for she had never come to terms with the terrible costs of that crash or the frightening emotional turmoil into which she had been cast in its aftermath. How could she ever have forgiven herself for wishing even momentarily that it had been her mother and not her father who had survived? For hating her father for insisting that she could not be spared from his bedside to travel to her own mother’s funeral? Andreo just held her close and let her cry.
‘OK…’ Recognising when the storm was over, Andreo assisted her back into the Mercedes.
Pippa felt drained and yet curiously at peace as well. For the first time she noticed that it was a seriously beautiful day, and while Andreo was driving through the town she told him about her infatuation with Pete and subsequent disillusionment. ‘Men always did go for Tabby in a big way,’ she completed with an accepting shrug of her shoulders.
‘She lacks your elegance,’ Andreo drawled. ‘He had no taste.’
The Mercedes purred through sleepy Gascon villages lined with ancient stone houses. She had forgotten how lovely the lush green landscape was in early summer. The little town of Bordeilles was on the River Dronne and she could remember visiting the tall dignified château that towered over the other buildings.
‘Aren’t you going the wrong way?’ she murmured.
‘I’m taking you home with me, amore.’
‘I should argue but I can’t be bothered.’ But she knew even as she said it that she was talking nonsense, making excuses sooner than admit that wild horses could not have torn her from his side. She just needed to be with him and she refused to question why that was. A couple of kilometres beyond the town he swung off the road and into a dusty laneway where he paused and lowered the window.
‘That’s it over there…’
She looked across a field of yellow black-eyed sunflowers to see the building with the tower that sat on the far side of it. Fashioned of the local honey-coloured stone and roofed with warm reddish-brown tiles, the house looked as if it had stood in that precise spot for ever.