Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

‘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.’