Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

‘My choosing you as my first lover meant nothing…nothing at all,’ Pippa disclaimed with lacerated pride.

Andreo learned that he could travel from rage to a torn sense of tenderness that threatened to gut him and he loathed the revelation. He knew by her unhappy eyes that she was lying to him but he could not work out why. ‘Then why look at me the way you do?’

Pippa went rigid. ‘What way?’

A very male smile slashed his lean, strong face. ‘I need to draw pictures?’

Temper leapt through her in an energising roar. ‘Perhaps you do.’

His molten golden gaze snared hers and her heart crashed against her breastbone as though someone had thrown a panic switch deep down inside her. ‘Even the way you look at me speaks to me of your hunger for me…’

‘It’s only sexual attraction, nothing I can’t bury again any time I want to!’ Pippa stabbed back in fearful retaliation.

‘So…bury me,’ Andreo invited in husky challenge, angling down his proud dark head and claiming her full parted lips, prying straight between them with the erotic immediacy of an expert.

For a split second she remained stiff as a coat-hanger and then she trembled violently, shifted forward in a clumsy movement and let her hands close in a feverish embrace over his wide shoulders to steady legs that she could no longer depend on. She moaned as he used his tongue to probe the sensitive reaches of her mouth. The ticklish throb of her tender breasts made her instinctively press into the tough, muscular wall of his hard, masculine body. Fierce sensual excitement currented through her slim body and the intimate ache between her thighs intensified.

Andreo snatched his head up and drew in a stark lungful of air, a suppressed shudder racking his lean, powerful length, a raw Italian curse almost impelled from him by the disciplinary demands of restraining the force of his hunger for her. Shimmering golden eyes locked to her hectically flushed face and swollen mouth. ‘You were saying…?’ he prompted lethally, hoping like hell that she was a good loser so that he could triumph twice over and just haul her off to the nearest bed.

‘Saying?’ The word meant nothing to her for Pippa was not thinking just then. Her pale slender fingers stretched up and speared into his luxuriant black hair to yank him back down to her again. ‘Kiss,’ she told him, all of a quiver against him, hot and restive and in need, all her powers of concentration bent on the single-minded, necessary goal of dragging him back into her arms.

Andreo murmured something husky in Italian and gazed down at her with sizzling satisfaction, glorying in his sensual power over her, neatly choosing t

o overlook that he had been cursing hers over him just seconds earlier.

‘Please…’ she framed in uneasy bewilderment, brow indenting, for she had been unlocked from the erotic lure of him long enough by that stage for rational thought to be threatening a return. As the phone began ringing she winced, for she felt as if the slightest external annoyance might tip her over the edge and make her scream or break down.

‘You’re on a sensual high…coming down hurts, amore,’ Andreo breathed as he recognised the source of the bemused tears in her eyes.

Shock shrilled through her. It had not occurred to her that the fever pitch of desire that he could rouse her to so easily had another side to the coin: the torment of unsated hunger. Suddenly limp, she rested against him, devastated by her own capacity for passion. He had been in her life barely twenty-four hours and already he had turned it and her upside down with feelings and sensations that she had never dreamt she might fall victim to. It was truly terrifying.

Andreo smoothed a hand over her downbent head in a soothing gesture. An answering machine clicked on and a man’s deep pitched voice broke the humming silence in French.

‘Pippa? It’s Christien. I need a private word with you…’

Her head came up in surprise and she pulled back from Andreo. The speaker was Tabby’s husband. As he was not in the habit of making personal calls to her, Pippa was afraid that something had happened to Tabby and concern sent her flying to the phone. ‘Christien?’

But, cool and calm as was his wont, Christien informed her that he was willing to come over to London on the day she wanted to travel and bring her back to France with him that same evening if she would accompany him on a maternity shopping trip on Tabby’s behalf. Her lively friend had her own quirky dress sense and Christien might be the living image of the Parisian’s legendary sophistication, but he had never yet managed to buy his adoring wife anything to wear that she actually liked.

‘Tabby’s pregnant again? My goodness…’ Pippa had to struggle to keep the dismayed disapproval out of her voice. After all, if her friend was soon to give birth to a third child at the tender age of twenty-three years, it was hardly Pippa’s place to comment. However, she was seriously tempted to ask Christien if an annual baby was a perquisite of Tabby having married into the top drawer of French society to which he belonged. Surely her poor besotted friend could only be expecting yet again because a mini football team of kids was what Christien’s unquenchable masculine ego demanded? Tabby might be blissfully happy with Christien but Pippa put that down to Tabby’s loving nature.

‘I’ll let her tell you all about it herself,’ Christien countered finally to bridge the awkward silence that had fallen. ‘You’re very quiet. Does a shopping trip in my sole company promise to be more than you can stand?’

Beneath Andreo’s steady appraisal, Pippa turned a guilty brick-red. Christien had seduced Tabby as a teenager and broken her heart. Their past misunderstandings had been resolved before their marriage a couple of years back but Pippa had never really warmed to her friend’s husband. That Christien himself should have guessed that fact, however, mortified her. ‘Don’t be silly. Your wife’s my friend, for goodness’ sake—’

‘Just tell yourself that you’re doing it for Tabby’s benefit.’ Christien’s cool, condescending amusement rarely failed to set Pippa’s teeth on edge. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve never considered your hostility as an issue personal to me…I know you dislike men.’

At that declaration, Pippa’s eyes almost shot out on stalks and she sped into the kitchen to gain the privacy to hiss, ‘Is that what you think? Well, let me disabuse you of the suspicion that I’m either gay or a man hater—’

‘I wasn’t aware—’ Christien sounded startled and well he might have done, for when he had brought his wife over to London in recent years Pippa had always been very quiet in his presence.

‘In fact right now I’m involved in a passionate affair with an Italian guy!’ Pippa asserted in defiant retaliation, hurt and offended by what he had said and desperate to disprove it.

At that rather shattering announcement, Christien just laughed out loud, smoothly assured her that she had misunderstood his meaning but that he was delighted to hear that her private life was flourishing. As she walked back into the hall, mentally kicking herself for rising to Christien’s provocative bait, Tabby’s husband arranged to pick her up on the relevant date. Wondering if her embarrassment over her wild outburst would have subsided even partially by then, she cast aside the cordless phone.

Out in the hall, Andreo had heard most of that exchange. Initially he had only been surprised that Pippa could speak French with the speed and verbal virtuosity of a native but his mood had soon turned dark and stormy. Who the hell was the French guy she was chattering to? Why on earth had she looked so guilty? Evidently this Christien character was married to her friend yet she had seemed most unhappy to learn that her friend was pregnant again. Weren’t women usually overjoyed by that sort of news? Why had she gone into the kitchen to continue the dialogue in urgent secretive whispers? Her discomfiture at the risk of being overheard had been pronounced.

Was she in love with her friend’s husband? It struck Andreo as a quite likely scenario. In love with a married man and fighting it or in love and flirting like mad with the misbehaving bastard but idealistically resisting temptation and refusing to let the relationship become sexual? Was that why she had thrown her virginity away on a total stranger? In a bout of rebellious frustration over the male she could not have? Dio mio, even worse, Andreo reflected with bitter anger flaming through him like a burning arrow of provocation, had he, Andreo D’Alessio, been only a sexual substitute for some other man? Might that not explain why in the aftermath Pippa should be so very determined to try to deny and indeed forget their intimacy?