Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

‘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!’