Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

‘I asked you to marry me,’ Andreo ground out with chilling hauteur.

‘Gosh, did you?’ Pippa sniped back in response, fighting off the dizziness assailing her with all her might. ‘How did I miss that? I heard you tell me with great condescension that you would marry me and that I needed you. Well, listen well, I don’t need anybody but myself!’

With feverish haste, she headed back upstairs but on the first step a hand came down over hers where it rested on the balustrade and effectively arrested her progress. ‘This is incredibly childish,’ Andreo asserted.

‘You said it…’ Pippa was desperate to make her escape before she broke down and cried her eyes out.

‘I will not chase round France after you,’ Andreo breathed in a warning growl.

‘I don’t want you to chase after me.’ Her skin felt horribly clammy and her tummy was rolling with nausea. With a supreme effort, she dragged her hand free of his restraint and blindly mounted another step.

‘I think that you do but this time it’s not going to happen. You’ve done everything you can to undermine our relationship and if the proposal didn’t come up to scratch, you’ve only got yourself to thank for it,’ Andreo delivered with harsh emphasis. ‘You tell me you don’t need anyone. At least admit the truth…you’re too much of a coward to give me or what we have a chance!’

For a bare instant, Pippa considered that frightening condemnation but her mind was in a state of flux and by that point she was so giddy that she was swaying where she stood. Still struggling to triumph over her light head, she was sucked down a long, suffocating tunnel into the darkness of unconsciousness.

When she surfaced from her faint she was lying down and no sooner had she attempted to lift her head than the nausea returned with cruel strength. Handling that bout of sickness with infuriating efficiency, Andreo carried her back to the bed and told her not to move while he was downstairs.

He reappeared a few minutes later.

Enraged by her own demeaning bodily weakness, Pippa bit out grittily, ‘I’m still leaving.’

‘If the doctor agrees…’ Andreo murmured in the mildest of tones.

‘What doctor?’

‘The one I’ve called out. You were very sick.’

‘That was just that stupid morning sickness on my stupid empty stomach!’ she hissed at him. ‘And until you started arguing with me, I was getting over that!’

Andreo continued to survey her with immense calm and cool.

‘Stop looking at me like that!’ Pippa launched at him wildly. ‘Like I’m a kid having a shocking temper tantrum!’

His glorious golden eyes took immediate cover below the dense flourish of his lush black lashes. He said nothing, nothing at all, and while the silence stretched Pippa squirmed on a torture rack of her own making. He had been exceedingly kind and he had not bolted from a situation that the average male avoided like the plague. He might be drop dead gorgeous but he was also amazingly practical. He very probably could handle the less rewarding aspects of baby care, she reflected guiltily. Feeling far too emotional and utterly raging at the maddening tears that came to her eyes all too readily, she flipped over on her side and hid under her bright tumbled hair.

‘I don’t want you to be upset like this,’ Andreo murmured levelly from the foot of the bed, resisting a very powerful urge to offer more physical comfort.

‘I’m not upset,’ she mumbled.

‘I was lying when I said I wouldn’t chase round France after you, carissima,’ Andreo imparted silkily.

‘Oh…?’ Low though she felt it would be to reach for a proffered olive branch, she discovered that she was eager to mend the breach between them.

‘I won’t let you go free to get lost again,’ he spelt out with the lethally quiet diction of a very confident personality. ‘You seem to think that there’s something wrong with needing me…but all of us need someone and you don’t appear to have anyone else.’

At that unexpected speech, Pippa tried and failed to swallow the thickness in her throat. She felt as though she had hit her lowest ebb: he had taken pity on her. What he was doing for her now, he would have done for any woman carrying his child. Essentially he was an honourable guy. Exactly the sort who could be depended on to accept responsibility for an accidental pregnancy. Hence the marriage proposal. She had been right not to listen and to throw that offer back in his face, she told herself wretchedly.

The middle-aged doctor advised her that pregnant ladies required more rest and that keeping the late hours that were presumably responsible for her shadowed eyes was not to be recommended either. It was all common sense stuff. When he had gone, Andreo brought her a delicious lunch on a tray. Her own keen appetite amazed her: she cleared the plate.

‘I didn’t hear Berthe’s car. She really is a fantastic cook.’

‘She hasn’t arrived yet. I made it…’

Surprise made Pippa exclaim, ‘You…did?’

‘Why not? I once lived here alone for six months. Either I learned to look after myself or I went hungry,’ Andreo said dryly.

She was feeling incredibly tired and she rested her head down on the pillow. Studying his darkly handsome classic profile, she felt the magnetic pull of his charismatic attraction with every sense she possessed and she could have wept over her own susceptibility. ‘Was that when you were eighteen? What were you doing here then?’