Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

‘How can I answer a crazy question like that?’ Pippa almost sobbed at him in her discomfiture and distress. She had made what was for her a casual admission and had without the smallest warning found herself plunged deep into moral issues that she had never had to consider before. His contemptuous attitude both hurt and infuriated her.

Locking the door behind her, she pulled on her clothes, tears lashing her eyes.

When she emerged, Andreo had also got dressed. Drop dead gorgeous in a silver-grey shirt and black cargo trousers, he strode forward, a look of cool exasperation in his scrutiny. ‘This is insane, cara—’

‘Well, don’t look at me when you say that! I want to go home…I’ve called a taxi.’ Sidestepping him, Pippa fled out into the hall.

‘I’m not letting you go like this. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything…but how was I to know it was such a controversial subject?’ Andreo threw up lean brown hands to accentuate his astonishment. ‘Most women like babies!’

Pippa wanted to slap him. ‘I like babies too…I just don’t want one of my own!’

Andreo strode across the wide glossy hall floor and rested his hands on her rigid shoulders. She was trembling. ‘You’ll change your mind—’

‘No, I won’t!’ she told him fiercely.

She pulled away from him. Her mind had already thrown her way back to memories she rarely visited and lodged on a painful image of her mother crying and calling herself a rotten mother because she had been unable to make theirs a happy home.

Andreo settled scorching golden eyes on Pippa’s pale, frozen profile. The intercom by the front door buzzed.

‘That’ll be my taxi…’

‘Walk out now and I won’t phone you tomorrow,’ Andreo threatened without hesitation. ‘If you walk, we’re finished.’

To her everlasting shame, Pippa stopped dead in her tracks.

Andreo spoke into the intercom and said that she would be down in a few minutes.

Coming to a halt behind her, he closed both arms round her. She went stiff, resisting him with every fibre of her will-power, but the weakening started like a melting sensation deep down inside her. She wanted this guy. She wanted to be with him and she wanted his good opinion too, which was why it hurt to lose it over an issue that struck her as being as crazily remote as the risk of pregnancy. ‘I’ve already told you…it’s not that easy to fall pregnant…are you listening to me?’ she demanded sharply.

‘Sì. I’m listening.’

‘My mother was never able to conceive again after she had me and my grandmother tried for ten years before she had my mother!’ she protested feverishly.

‘That doesn’t mean that you’re likely to have similar problems.’

As the fierce tension holding her rigid began to give she curved back into his lean, powerful frame. She was of too practical a nature to sustain an argument about a situation that she could not imagine developing. Andreo slowly turned her round to face him. He splayed long fingers to her taut cheekbones. ‘You scare me…you scare yourself, amore—’

She didn’t know why but the wretched tears just broke free then and cascaded down her cheeks. With a driven groan, he hauled her close and she choked back a sob, drinking in the gloriously familiar scent of him like an addict. ‘You’re too serious,’ she told him chokily. ‘Just looking for trouble is like asking for it.’

Molten gold eyes assailed hers. ‘Come back to bed…’

‘My taxi…’

He pressed her down on the fancy wrought-iron chaise longue ornamenting the hall and called the doorman in the foyer. She sat there s

hivering, shocked at the woman she was somehow changing into against her own volition. She had said she was going home. She should have carried through on what she had said she would do. Andreo swung back to her, all male, powered by resolute determination that mocked her own. While he’d been on the phone, he had unbuttoned his shirt again. He stood there in front of her and simply shed his clothes where he stood.

‘I want to go home for the night,’ she mumbled unsteadily, sounding like a little child trying to talk herself into running away.

Slowly he raised her to her feet. She hovered, letting him peel off her garments one by one.

‘No, you don’t…you want to be with me, amore. Walking away was tearing you up,’ Andreo reminded her with lethal assurance, and then he bent and caught her up into his arms to power back towards the bedroom. ‘Week nights, you can go home, but weekends you’re mine from start to finish. Sorry, but that’s how it is.’

‘It’s a Thursday,’ she muttered weakly into the smooth brown shoulder she was already pressing her lips against.

‘Sorry, I didn’t hear that…’

‘It’s Thursday.’