by Lynne Graham
‘How old is it?’ she asked as he drove on down the lane.
‘Fourteenth century. It was a priory and it holds a special place in my heart. I bought it when I was eighteen—’
‘Eighteen?’ she gasped, sitting up out of her slump.
‘I ran away from home because my family persisted in treating me like a teenager—’
‘You were a teenager at eighteen—’
Andreo gave her a mocking glance. ‘We’ll talk about my misspent youth some other time.’
He drew up in the deep shade of a grove of stately chestnut trees. At the foot of the hill, a slow-moving river wound through a meadow. There was a stillness that she could literally hear. Drenched in late afternoon sunshine, the house drew her out of the car and the shadows. She roved ahead of him to where the ancient studded wooden door already stood wide in welcome on a hall painted a deep blue as intense as the sky.
‘Blue…’
‘My favourite colour,’ Andreo breathed huskily from behind her. ‘Just like your eyes.’
If I didn’t already love him, Pippa reflected helplessly, I would love him now for talking nonsense and owning this glorious house. ‘Is there someone else here?’
‘I asked my housekeeper to air it, stock up for my arrival and then go home again,’ Andreo confided. ‘She lives only a couple of fields away.’
‘You plan everything, don’t you?’
‘Don’t you?’
She was surprised by that comeback, even more surprised to acknowledge that he was right. She did plan virtually everything in her life. Only she hadn’t planned on him or the baby. Once more she thought of the baby as the tiny new life force it was: part of him, part of her, an individual created between them and dependent on them both. Her throat thickened. Slowly she turned to face him, blue eyes softening as she let her admiring attention rest on his breathtakingly handsome features. If their baby was a boy, he would be very handsome, and if their baby was a girl, she hoped she inherited her blue eyes and Andreo’s gorgeous black hair.
‘You’ll stay, cara?’
With difficulty she shook free of her sentimental little daydream and focused on him. He was temptation personified to her. ‘But only—’
Andreo placed a reproachful forefinger briefly against her full pink lower lip. ‘No boundaries,’ he warned her lazily. ‘I don’t like boundaries.’
‘I need them.’
‘You have to trust me.’
She felt like glass he could see through: naked and vulnerable. He had cut through her intended protests to the heart of the matter. An issue of trust. He might as well have asked her to scale Everest barefoot, she thought in dismay. She did not think that she had it in her to truly trust a male of his calibre. He was far too rich and good-looking. Not his fault, she conceded painfully. Nature had blessed him with lean, dark, devastating features and an incredibly powerful sexual aura. He had become a target for women and had learnt to appreciate the extent of his own power. But wasn’t she going to have to trust him again to tell him about the baby she carried? How could she expect more from him than she was prepared to give herself?
‘No boundaries,’ Andreo repeated softly, closing a lean strong hand over hers and leading her up the wide stone staircase to the upper floor.
In the bedroom, her attention was stolen by the massive arched window that looked right out over the river valley. The view was spectacular and the light so strong that it hurt her eyes with its brilliance. Coming to a halt behind her, Andreo ran down the zip on her dress and lingered to press his lips to the soft, sensitive spot where her neck met the slope of her shoulder.
The unbearably delicious sensation made her squirm in his hold and with a helpless gasp she let her head fall back. He skimmed the light dress down over her arms and she curved her hands down to ensure the fabric did not catch and linger at her wrists.
‘I’m shameless,’ she muttered, taken aback by her own collusion.
Andreo uttered a husky laugh. ‘I wish…’
Pippa tensed, eyes wide and vulnerable. ‘Do you?’
‘Only teasing, amore. I like you just as you are which means that you have to resist every other guy around but be a complete pushover for me,’ Andreo confided as he spun her round in his arms.
Her heart was pounding like crazy. He bent down, swept her up with an easy masculine strength that was incredibly seductive and tumbled her down onto the cool quilted spread.
Pippa surveyed him with sudden shaken intensity as if she couldn’t quite work out how she had ended up there. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this—’
‘That’s what you like about me…I send you off the rails, amore.’
‘And where do you get that idea?’
‘You don’t take risks…you’re the lady with the colour-coded wardrobe, the books in alphabetical order, the tidiest desk. But you took a risk on me.’ A vibrant smile that made her heart flip slashed his lean, powerful face.
‘I want my diary back,’ she told him unsteadily.
Andreo laughed. ‘You know I won’t read it. Last night was payback time and I enjoyed making you dance to my tune. But don’t ever walk out on me again without telling me that you’re leaving.’
Something in his intonation chilled her. He wasn’t laughing any more; he was warning her. But I’m not back with you again, her conscience urged her to tell him. Only how could she tell him what she was doing with him when she didn’t know herself? She had made a choice without even being aware of it. She was lying half naked on his bed in his house and, for the first time in countless days of suffocating unhappiness, she felt alive again.
‘Kiss me…’ she muttered unevenly.
Smouldering golden eyes raked over her slender figure, lingering on the delicate swell of her breasts above the dainty cups of her white bra and the lithe shapely length of slender thighs bisected by white high cut briefs. He pulled his designer shirt over his head and tossed it aside with unashamed eagerness. She lay there looking up at him, feeling her straining nipples pinch tight while a wanton little frisson of heat slivered up from deep within her pelvis.
‘You’re so beautiful I can’t keep my hands off you.’ Magnificent torso bronzed and bare, Andreo lifted her up to him. She was already melting like ice-cream in the hot sun from outside in. And then he claimed her mouth with shattering carnality, penetrating between her readily parted lips with the rhythmic erotic timing of an expert lover. Instantly she caught fire, breathing in gasping shallow spurts, coming back to him again and again for more of the same. Deftly, he discarded her bra. One hand at her spine, he crushed her tender rose-tipped breasts against the hard wall of his muscular chest. Rising on her knees, liquid heat thrumming through her, she pushed even closer to find his passionate mouth again for herself.
‘I want you now, amore,’ Andreo growled thickly, pressing her back onto the bed with a sudden masculine mastery that thrilled her and hooking lean, impatient fingers into her panties to peel them off.
She lay there, hot and quivering and aching for him. She was shamelessly aware of her own readiness, of the moist secret heat that had begun gathering even before his first kiss.
He unzipped his chinos, shedding them and his boxers in a careless heap. Her breath caught in her throat at the extent of his bold arousal.
‘I don’t want to wait,’ he murmured raggedly, staring down into her blushing face, drawn by the glow of desire and appreciation she could not hide.
Passion-glazed eyes locked to him, she angled back her hips and parted her thighs in a sudden provocative move that shocked him almost as much as it shocked her. With a ground-out Italian imprecation and his golden eyes ablaze he came down to her, a raw, fierce need stamped on his startlingly handsome face that made her body thrum with wanton anticipation. He sank into her, deep and strong and without ceremony. Like hitching a ride on a rocket, it was the most exciting event of her life. For the first time she sensed that he was no longer in control and that made her own hunger climb even higher.<
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‘Andreo,’ she framed, not even aware that she was sobbing out his name.
The sound of that urgent cry drove him on. He plunged into her faster and faster. Lost in the mindless pleasure of his pagan possession, she moved against him, frantic, fevered, abandoned in her encouragement and welcome. Her heart was racing so hard and fast she was convinced she was flying. Raw excitement sent her spiralling into a wild climax. An uncontrollable frenzy of pleasure gripped her in wave after wave of ecstasy and she writhed under him. With an uninhibited shout of satisfaction, he shuddered over her in a white-hot release that surpassed anything he had ever felt and subsided.
Pippa floated back to planet earth to find that she had both arms possessively wound round Andreo in a way that would never qualify as cool. He rolled over, kissed her breathless and kept her clamped to him with a strong arm.
‘Sleep, amore,’ he urged.
She studied him. His black lashes accentuated the tough angles of his hard, smooth cheekbones, wide strong mouth and stubborn jawline. He had a classic masculine profile and he was totally, absolutely gorgeous. She pushed her face into a muscular brown shoulder and breathed in the aroma of his skin with an addict’s intensity.
‘You can have your diary back,’ he muttered with a husky sound of amusement. ‘You just settled your debt for all time. That was amazing…’
She stayed close, for every tiny moment with him felt unbearably precious and she was convinced that telling him that she was pregnant would destroy what they had. Reality would dispel the magic. Instantly she would become the reverse of sexy and fanciable, she thought with pained regret. Instead she would become a problem: a woman with the right to decide whether or not he became a father. It was a choice he got no say in and a situation he could surely only resent. After all, he had not been careless; he had taken all possible precautions to try and ensure that she did not conceive. But fate had decided otherwise.
In truth she was in no hurry to admit that she was carrying his child, for she already knew that she would not seek a termination. She herself had been conceived outside marriage and her mother had acknowledged her right to life, so how could she do less for her own baby?
She loved Andreo and that too had to influence her feelings towards his child. Indeed she had begun to love him within minutes of meeting him. But he was not in love with her and theirs was a casual affair. A fling, frothy and fun, nothing serious, she told herself sternly, suppressing her pain at the threat of the inevitable parting ahead. How long would they have together in France? She feared that the idyll would end the instant she confessed to being pregnant.
‘So amazing,’ Andreo continued thoughtfully, ‘That it is time to come clean—’
She tensed. ‘About what?’
‘Last night you said that you made plans to come to France after we met and never wavered from that goal,’ he reminded her. ‘That must have been a lie.’
Of course it had been a lie. But in the space of a heartbeat she could picture how trapped he might feel if she were to reveal that she loved him and follow that up with an announcement that she was pregnant. He would feel trapped and she would feel humiliated. Why should she sacrifice her pride to that extent? A baby that was the result of an accident in birth control during a casual affair would be rather less disturbing for him than one conceived with a woman who burdened his conscience with the additional news of her undying devotion.
‘You only said it because you weren’t ready to admit that all that fierce and very flattering jealousy of yours over Lili was quite unnecessary,’ Andreo breathed with lethal conviction. ‘I am a straightforward guy in relationships—’
‘Perhaps you are, but I was only being honest,’ Pippa swore in an uneasy undertone against his shoulder. ‘We had a fantastic time in London but these things don’t last…’
Long fingers speared into her riotous curls and lifted her head. Burnished golden eyes struck hers in a sparking collision course that made the breath catch in her throat. ‘And how would a woman who has never known any other lover know that for a fact?’ he intoned very soft and low and his accent thick on every syllable.
Her gaze veiled to hide her pain and her colour receded. ‘I just knew—’
Andreo tumbled her off him and moved with disconcerting speed and dexterity to pin her under him instead. ‘So I give you great sex and nothing else?’
Her face flamed and shamed embarrassment at the depths that pretence had reduced her to made her steal an unwise upward glance. She was ensnared by hot golden eyes as aggressive as an invasion force. ‘Well…er—’
Andreo flashed her a scorching smile that was extremely unsettling. ‘To think I wasted all that effort on soppy flowers and sentimental cards—’
‘No, I really liked—’
‘No need to pretend, cara.’ Lithe as a jungle cat, Andreo shifted and settled between her thighs with an erotic expertise that made her heart jump inside her.
He kissed her with passionate force. She quivered, fought to concentrate, knowing she should argue in her own defence. He kissed her again and her thoughts blurred while she burned and she ached all over again for a satisfaction he had given her only minutes earlier. She blushed fierily for her own weakness. ‘Andreo—?’
‘Want me?’ he prompted thickly, an irresistible gleam of sexy challenge in his molten gaze.
And she did, oh, how she wanted him: more than pride or common sense or reason. On every level all that was feminine in her responded to his raw masculinity and she could not fight her own nature. And on that liberating reflection, she surrendered to his passion.
Five glorious days later Pippa woke up to find herself alone, but there was nothing new in that for Andreo always got up first.
Her tummy felt queasy and, with a rueful grimace over the awareness that only Andreo’s preference for rising with the dawn had protected her from having her secret exposed, she rolled off the bed and headed into the bathroom. But, as had happened the morning before, that initial nausea slowly receded again. Perhaps the worst of her sickness was already over, she thought cheerfully and, pulling on a light cotton wrap, she went downstairs in search of Andreo. Both he and the Mercedes were nowhere to be found, however, and a note left on the hall table informed her that he had gone out to buy chocolate croissants for her.
An ear to ear smile curved her lips. He was spoiling her again and she had already discovered that she absolutely adored every moment of being spoilt. She had never been a self-indulgent woman or a woman who had ever imagined that any male might put himself out on her behalf. Indeed her father’s unfortunate example had persuaded her that all men were instinctively selfish. So for that reason the sheer amount of effort that Andreo was prepared to expend on any gesture likely to please her continually shook her.
‘I like surprising you…I enjoy seeing you smile, amore,’ he had confided with the charismatic grin that made her heart spin inside her.
Eyes dreamy and soft over that memory, Pippa went for a shower and tried to work out without success how five whole days had passed at such speed. Why was it that happy times seemed to shoot past faster than the speed of light and unhappier times dragged? Brow furrowing on that conundrum, she was on far too much of an emotional high to linger on it.
While she was in the act of shampooing her hair, her attention fell on the sunken bath that was set in a glorious multi-coloured mosaic surround and her skin warmed and her smile grew abstracted: when they shared the bath they fooled around like kids. He had taught her how to relax and overcome her innate fear of making a fool of herself. He had made her laugh and, over and over again, he had given her the kind of joy she had never dreamt she might experience in a hundred years.
She loved the long evenings the most. When the shadows had begun to lengthen and the heat of the day had ebbed, they would dine at the stone table overlooking the river and sit talking far into the night. Even the food they were eating was wonderful. Berthe, Andreo’s friendly housekeeper, who worked as an
occasional chef in her son-in-law’s restaurant, performed gastronomic miracles in the kitchen.
Pippa was combing her hair when she thought that she heard the Mercedes return. However, when she ran to the window she could only see Berthe’s husband, Guillaume, who farmed Andreo’s land, driving a tractor into a field next to the lane. The phone by the bed rang and she answered it.
‘It’s Tabby,’ her friend said cheerfully. ‘I’ve been trying to raise you on your mobile—’
‘It’s dead,’ Pippa admitted apologetically. ‘I forgot to charge it—’
‘Luckily, Christien asked Andreo for his number,’ Tabby explained. ‘I was really surprised when you didn’t phone me—’
‘I know,’ Pippa groaned, full of squirming guilt. ‘I know I should have phoned you—’
Tabby was not slow to take advantage of her friend’s discomfiture. ‘So stop holding out on me and tell me what’s happening between you two.’
When a noisy click sounded on the line, Pippa assumed they had a bad connection and raised her voice to be heard over the interference. ‘There’s really nothing to tell—’
‘Does that mean that you still haven’t told him about the baby?’ Tabby exclaimed in a tone of disbelief.
‘Tabby…’ Pippa felt stabbed in the back by that incredulity. After all, what harm was she doing in remaining silent a little longer?
‘I wouldn’t have asked if I hadn’t found you in residence at the end of Andreo’s phone line,’ Tabby sighed, sounding even more anxious. ‘I’m sorry…forget I even mentioned the baby. I really didn’t mean to put pressure on you. It’s just…I’ve been so worried.’
But Pippa’s attention had been stolen from their conversation for she had heard a step on the stone stairs. She spun round just as Andreo appeared in the arched doorway. Sheathed in faded denim jeans and a black designer shirt, he looked darkly handsome and dangerous. When she clashed with the furious challenge in his hard appraisal, she frowned in bewilderment and then gulped at the sight of the cordless phone grasped in his hand. From that phone Tabby’s voice could still be clearly heard setting up an echo in concert with the phone that Pippa held herself. Her blood ran cold: Andreo must have lifted the phone downstairs and overheard their dialogue.