by Lynne Graham
Pippa flushed and bent her head. ‘I know that.’
‘I’m supposed to be meeting with my notaire this afternoon to discuss the purchase of some land but I’ll cancel.’
Pippa did not trust herself to look near him. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she told him with fake casualness. ‘All I intend to do is catch up on my sleep while you’re out.’
Andreo dropped down into an athletic crouch to establish the visual connection that she was denying him. ‘I’ll ask Berthe to keep an eye on you…’
‘Don’t embarrass me like that,’ Pippa urged unevenly, bright blue eyes clinging involuntarily to his lean, powerful face.
Andreo reached for her hand. ‘OK, but you have to promise to be sensible and sit down at the very first sign of dizziness—’
‘OK…’
He bent his arrogant dark head and let his tongue delve provocatively between her lips. He set up a quivering, delicious tightness low in her pelvis. ‘You also have to promise to eat everything Berthe puts in front of you—’
‘No problem,’ she mumbled, tipping up her mouth to the sexy onslaught of his again with all the self-discipline of a rag doll.
‘And if you’re really good, you get chocolate croissants as an afternoon snack. Get loads and loads of sleep so that I can make passionate love to you when I get back,’ he husked between teasing expert kisses that left her literally begging for more, her fingers biting into his forearms. ‘But if I still think you’re tired, I won’t…’
Detaching himself from her hold, he strode across the room to pull the shutters closed on the bright morning sunlight. She stared at him and then recalled in sudden dismay that she had not taken a single photo of him since her arrival. ‘Hold on…’ she urged, panicking at the threat of having to get by in the future without any photos of him.
Andreo watched in astonishment while she scrambled out of bed and dug a camera he had never seen before out of her bag.
‘Smile…’ she instructed in a slightly wobbly voice and fiddled with the shutters to let in more light.
‘You’re supposed to be in bed,’ Andreo censured.
She caught his smouldering frown for posterity. ‘Smile…look normal,’ she pleaded.
She managed a handful of shots before she heard Berthe’s noisy little car arriving and she got back into bed to rest to please Andreo. As soon as he had gone downstairs, she got up again and furtively packed her case. Conscious that he would probably look in on her before he left to keep his business appointment, she lay down again and was asleep before she knew it.
When she woke up, the bedroom door was just closing and it was almost two in the afternoon. She had slept for almost two hours. Minutes later, she heard the Mercedes engine fire. Andreo was going out and she would not be here when he returned. Like a child she wanted to leap out of bed and watch him drive off and she found it tough to resist that temptation. She stared into space with strained eyes and reminded herself of why, regardless of her love for Andreo, she could not even consider marrying him…
As a teenager, Pippa had learned that her parents’ marriage had been a shotgun affair that would never have taken place but for her own unplanned advent into the world. Her father had been a newly qualified teacher when he’d first met the French student working as a language assistant in the same school. For Pippa’s mother it had been love at first sight and in later years she had been painfully honest with her daughter in her efforts to excuse her husband’s infidelity.
‘We only went out together a few times. By the time I realised that I was going to have a child, your father was already dating someone else. He was very popular with the girls and I was too quiet for him, but when I told him that I was pregnant he immediately said that he would marry me,’ the older woman had confided. ‘It was a huge sacrifice for him and I was grateful.’
But then her mother had had the attitudes of a different generation and had had pitifully few expectations in life. Pippa’s mother had clung to the father of her unborn baby and had meekly accepted that he should neither be kind to her nor faithful. Having married a man who did not love her and who indeed resented her, she had paid a heavy price.
That awareness strengthening Pippa’s own conviction that she had to leave Andreo before she was tempted into yielding to the strength of her own feelings for him, Pippa pulled on a pale green shift dress and teamed it with a gold linen jacket. The housekeeper, the plump and attractive Berthe, emerged from the kitchen to greet her. The ensuing exchange of pleasantries, voluble on Berthe’s side and more strained on Pippa’s, was interrupted when the older woman noticed Pippa’s suitcase and the conversation took another tack.
Learning that Pippa intended to call a taxi to ferry her into Bourdeilles, Berthe frowned in surprise and then insisted on giving her a lift into the town, explaining that she herself had some shopping to do.
The elderly little Citroën lurched and bounced down the rough lane at alarming speed. Too late did Pippa recall that Andreo had told her that his housekeeper drove as if she were a bat out of hell in a demolition derby. Reminding herself that the minor road beyond was usually very quiet, Pippa only betrayed her state of nerves with a faint gasp when her companion raked her car straight into a left turn.
The lorry thundering towards them seemed to come round the corner at them out of nowhere. A high-pitched squawk of alarm broke from Berthe as she hauled the steering wheel round in a frantic effort to get out of its path.
I should have married him… was the only thought that animated Pippa’s mind and it was a thought that pierced her with literal anguish in the instant that the little car crashed.
CHAPTER TEN
PIPPA opened shaken eyes.
The Citroën was nose down in a ditch. Berthe was sobbing in shock. But neither of them appeared to be hurt and there was no sign of the lorry, which had apparently speeded on past without deigning to notice the car that had almost come to grief below its enormous wheels.
Pippa reached across with an unsteady hand and switched off the car engine. Checking that the older woman was indeed uninjured, she persuaded her that it would be safer to get out of the car. As Pippa clambered out into the dusty ditch the sleeve of her jacket snagged on the wire attached to the fence post that had been torn down by the crash. The fabric ripped and Pippa gritted her teeth as she attempted to free herself without success. Exasperated, she shrugged out of her jacket and, leaving it where it fell, moved with some difficulty over the rough ground to the driver’s side to help Berthe.
By the time she had assisted the heavy older woman to climb out of the Citroën, a battered truck containing Berthe’s husband, Guillaume, and her strapping son had pulled up beside them. Her relatives had seen the accident from the field across the road where they had been working. Berthe lamented the reality that she had not had a chance to see the registration of the lorry.
Her husband ignored that remark and tucked his wife into his truck as tenderly as if she had been a queen. ‘You are safe,’ he pointed out, urging Pippa to join the older woman.
‘Travel back home with us and I will take you into town in my car instead,’ Berthe’s son promised Pippa.
‘Thank you but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll go anywhere today.’ Pippa’s voice emerged a little unevenly but she lifted her head high with an air of decision.
It was amazing how a near brush with mortality could focus the mind, Pippa acknowledged once she had been dropped back to the priory and had managed to convince Berthe and her menfolk that she felt perfectly fine and could safely be left there alone. In fact the sky had never seemed more blue, the sun more golden or the myriad colours of nature’s bounty more intense.
How could she have even considered running out on Andreo a second time? She was ashamed of herself and yet curiously excited too by her own daring in choosing to return and lay herself open to the type of hurt that she had always protected herself from. At the same time she was still able to cringe when she remembered Andreo telli
ng her that she was too scared to give him a chance. It was true. Right from the start, she had foreseen the end of their relationship and had sought to make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of her low expectations. At every turn she had undervalued him and what they shared.
Why had it taken her so long to appreciate that Andreo bore not the faintest resemblance to her late father in character? Judging Andreo in the bitter shadow of her parent’s infidelity, she had denied the younger man a fair hearing and she had refused to concede him the smallest trust. She had to be more honest with him and the very last thing he deserved was for her to walk out on him again while so much was still unresolved between them.
Twenty minutes later, Andreo drove back from the meeting, which he had cut short, and the first thing he saw was the Citroën upended in the ditch and a woman’s jacket lying by the side of the road. Braking to an emergency stop, for his recognition of that garment was instantaneous, he leapt out to check that the car was unoccupied. For an instant he was frozen there and then he flung himself back into the Mercedes and accelerated down the lane.
Waiting to greet him, Pippa hovered in the doorway of the airy salon. The light flooding through the tall, elegant windows behind her burnished her hair with fiery highlights and threw into prominence her taut pallor.
Andreo strode into the hall. Lean, strong face stamped with savage tension, his gaze alight with ferocious strain roved over her in wondering disbelief and shock. ‘Per meraviglia! You’re here? Safe and unhurt? When I saw your jacket beside Berthe’s car I thought you had been injured…perhaps seriously…and I assumed you had been taken to hospital, only I did not know which one…’ At that point, his dark deep drawl thickened and came to a halt.
‘We were almost run down by a l-lorry.’ Blue eyes welded to his extravagantly handsome features, Pippa was embarrassed by the nervous catch that had crept into her voice. Her heart seemed to pound so frantically inside her chest she could hardly breathe and she found herself gabbling in an almost inaudible rush, ‘My mother would have said that an angel must have been in the car with us for Berthe is all in one piece as well…’
Venting a roughened phrase in his own language to best express his disordered emotions, Andreo overcame his paralysis and strode forward to close his arms round her. ‘Porca miseria…if you only knew what I have been thinking!’
Almost immediately he drew back from her again. Pippa watched him swallow hard and stood without complaint while he ran lean hands down from her shoulders to her hips and studied her with intense concern as though he was not yet able to accept the evidence of his own eyes and credit that she too had escaped injury.
‘I got a shock too…Berthe just drove out without looking—’
‘You will never, ever get into a car with her again, amore,’ Andreo intoned harshly, long fingers closing into her shoulders and giving her the tiniest, barely definable shake in emphasis of that embargo.
‘She got a terrible fright and I’m sure she’ll be much more cautious in the future. I gather the road is usually very quiet—’
He closed one hand into her vibrant mane of curls to tip her head back and scorching golden eyes assailed hers. ‘I think if you had died, I would have wanted to die too,’ he breathed in a raw, driven undertone. ‘You are so much like a part of me now and when you are not with me, I don’t feel right. Had I lost you, I should never have felt complete again, bella mia.’
Stunned at the extraordinary emotional intensity of that passionate declaration, Pippa stared up at him with parted lips, her amazement palpable. He cared about her, he really, really cared about her. Some of the hard, hurting tension with which she had braced herself to face him began to yield inside her. ‘I suppose you’ve already guessed but I was a-about to take off on you again—’
Dark colour accentuated the sculpted perfection of his masculine cheekbones. ‘Sì…but I was asking for it. I wasn’t honest with you. I was still trying to play it cool and of course you needed my reassurance and I had too much pride to let you see how I felt about you…’
Brooding golden eyes veiling below lush black lashes, Andreo fell frustratingly silent at that point when Pippa was hanging on his every word with superhuman concentration and attention. ‘How you feel about…er…me?’ she prompted shamelessly.
‘I’m working on that,’ Andreo assured her between compressed lips, graceful brown hands curving briefly to her cheekbones while he continued to study her and then dropping from her again.
‘Oh…’ Just for an instant there she had thought he might be about to say he loved her or something crazy like that, and she was really mortified by the fantasy element able to bloom within her own imagination. For the merest instant she wanted to kick him for saying that insane thing about thinking he would have wanted to die had she died. On that score he had undoubtedly led her up the garden path but she was quite sure he had not meant to do so. He had been very much shocked by the sight of that crashed car and he felt very protective towards the baby she carried, and at least she now knew where the Latin reputation for romantic and dramatic exaggeration came from…
‘I had backed into your corner and challenged you. I suspected that you were ready to take flight again and I cut short my time with the notaire,’ Andreo volunteered, his hands dropping from her to accompany the speech.
At the stark look of reproach in his gaze, Pippa reddened with guilt. ‘My thinking was all skewed and—you know? I was trying to save face too but I wasn’t being fair to either of us in running away from things just because I couldn’t handle them—’
‘You need me to keep on proving myself to you. That’s all and for what it’s worth, I would have chased after you again, carissima,’ Andreo confided huskily. ‘And I would have done it again…and again until I won your trust.’
‘Is that what I was doing?’ That was when Pippa saw her own behaviour in a different light. On a subconscious level, she had been testing him out, hoping that he would make the effort to follow her and convince her that he was a guy she could rely on. ‘Well, it won’t be happening again. I haven’t been fair to you. Apart from that misunderstanding we had about Lili Richards, you had been very honest with me—’
‘What I had with Lili was strictly casual. I should have called Lili and told her I’d met you but ditching her by phone would have been tacky. It would also have felt like overkill when Lili and I had agreed that we were free agents before she left. I also…’ his strong jawline squared and he forged on grimly, ‘I also think that I was reluctant at that point to accept how important you had become in my life, cara.’
He was firing that fantasy element in her imagination again. ‘Important? Was I?’
Andreo frowned. ‘I haven’t been serious about a woman since Fia.’
‘My goodness…you don’t get serious much.’ Pippa heard herself make that inane comment in a distinctly squeaky voice.
‘I made such an ass of myself over her that I had no wish to allow any woman that much power over me again,’ Andreo confided with a grimace.
Pippa smoothed her hand in a soothing gesture across one broad shoulder and her fingers lingered to maintain a physical connection between them. ‘You were very young. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.’
‘I lost face in my own eyes. My family were very forgiving but I was deeply ashamed of my own lack of judgement,’ Andreo admitted curtly. ‘I fell in love with an imaginary image of Fia rather than with the woman she really was—’
‘I made the same mistake with that student Pete when I was seventeen,’ Pippa rushed to tell him. ‘I saw him as Mr Perfect but I haven’t done that with you…’
Andreo tensed and gazed down at her with rather touching wariness.
‘I mean, I know you’re not perfect! No human being is perfect,’ Pippa hurried to add, recognising too late that he really, really wanted her to think he was the most perfect guy imaginable. ‘But I swear you’re the closest thing ever—’
‘No…I’ve made too many mistakes.
If anything had happened to you or to our baby today, I would never have forgiven myself for not telling you how I feel about you,’ Andreo proclaimed.
‘I felt the same way,’ Pippa whispered tenderly.
‘I’ve been a lost cause from the first night I saw you, cara,’ Andreo interposed. ‘Why do you think I was so hot for you? I’ve never felt anything that powerful before.’
Cheeks burning, and suspecting that he was referring to lust alone, Pippa mumbled, ‘I hadn’t either—’
Andreo looked down at her with glittering golden eyes and, closing his hands round hers in a sudden movement, breathed, ‘Being with you feels wonderful but at the beginning that unnerved me—’
‘Feeling wonderful unnerved you?’
His hands tightened on hers and she flinched, soon appreciating that he was so deep in serious thought that he had not a clue that he was crushing her fingers. ‘Falling in love when you’re not expecting it can be…’ Andreo hesitated in search of the right word ‘…traumatic.’
‘Traumatic?’ Pippa parroted as he released her hands to execute a restive movement towards the window.
Andreo swung back to her again. ‘You didn’t feel the same way…of course it was traumatic!’ he pointed out. ‘You were about one degree warmer than a freezer the next day, and the minute you found out who I was you wanted nothing to do with me!’
‘But I did…I did feel the same way.’ Her thoughts had only slowly reached the awareness that he had to be talking about having fallen for her. Pippa blinked rapidly. Andreo loved her? He loved her?
‘Are you saying that you love me?’ Andreo shot at her incredulously.
‘To death…love you just so much,’ she stressed, suffering from emotional overload and very near to tears in her over-excitement.
Andreo focused on her with dazed dark golden eyes. ‘But you were leaving me again…’
Pippa nodded and compressed tremulous lips.
‘For the second time,’ Andreo emphasised.