Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

Reassured, Pippa stretched up her arms and linked them round him to draw him down to her, all the while maintaining her loving connection with his appreciative gaze. ‘I love you every bit as much…’

Four weeks later, Pippa married her Italian boss.

The run-up to the wedding was an incredibly busy time for her. She spent almost two weeks flitting about Italy getting to know Andreo’s family: his fashionable and friendly mother, Giulietta, his six-foot-two-inch teenage brother, Marco, and his three older sisters and their respective husbands and children. The D’Alessio clan made an enormous fuss of Pippa and she went from feeling rather intimidated by the sheer number of Andreo’s gregarious relatives to feeling warmed by their affectionate acceptance of her as Andreo’s chosen bride.

Giulietta D’Alessio persuaded Pippa to allow her to organise the wedding and having little taste for that kind of thing, Pippa was delighted to hand over the responsibility for what was already promising to be a major social event.

Andreo and Pippa were married in Rome. Tabby and Hilary had gone shopping with Pippa to help her choose her wedding outfit. She selected a sleeveless bodice made of duchess satin and a long swirling skirt of Thai silk and a detachable embroidered train. Wearing it on the day with the superb diamond tiara that was a gift from her bridegroom and a short delicate veil, she was much admired as a stunningly elegant bride.

Tabby acted as matron of honour and Hilary was to be a bridesmaid but had to surrender the honour to Andreo’s eldest niece a week before the ceremony when her little sister, Emma, was rushed into hospital for emergency surgery. Andreo’s boyhood friend, Sal Rissone, was best man. In his speech the best man confessed that he had first suspected that Andreo was in love the minute he’d begun clock-watching at the office and seeking privacy to make his phone calls.

‘You look so beautiful you take my breath away, bella mia,’ Andreo told his bride when they finally got a moment alone together on the dance floor at their reception.

Pippa’s heart had not stopped racing since she’d seen Andreo waiting for her at the altar. As befitted the occasion, his lean, dark, devastating features were serious but his proud, possessive gaze had remained welded to her with intoxicating intensity. Over the past frantic month, Andreo’s need to catch up with work and clear the space in his busy schedule for a honeymoon had ensured that they had had little time together. When he drew her close, she shivered at the contact with his lean, powerful body, ultra sensitive to his raw, virile masculinity and the wicked promise of the sensual smile curving his beautiful mouth.

‘I want to be alone with you so badly I ache,’ Andreo admitted with such feeling force that she blushed to the roots of her hair and struggled to damp down her own wanton response to his unashamed hunger for her.

Only a minute later, Marco cut in on Andreo to dance with her. His youthful features held all the promise of the same good looks that distinguished her bridegroom. Having cheerfully ignored his older brother’s protests, he sighed with mock reproach, ‘It’s not cool to cling to each other the way you two do.’

Pippa laughed. ‘We don’t,’ she said and angled her head round to try and spot where Andreo had gone.

‘Don’t worry…he hasn’t gone far.’ It was Marco’s turn to laugh for his older brother was poised on the edge of the floor, his attention exclusively pinned to his beautiful bride. ‘I can see I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of teasing you.’

For their honeymoon, Andreo took Pippa to his birthplace on the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples. There she was carried over the threshold of the magnificent villa that Andreo regarded as his home. He and his siblings had been born on Ischia but his widowed mother had moved her family to Rome after her husband’s death.

After breakfast the next morning, Pippa walked out of their bedroom onto the sun-drenched marble terrace. She was enchanted by the glorious views. The chalk white houses were set against a landscape of old stone walls, silvery olive groves and lush green vineyards and backed by the deep sparkling blue of the sea.

‘So this is where we’re going to live,’ she murmured, resting back against Andreo with the perfect trust of a woman who knew she was loved. ‘Have you always spent most of your time here?’

Andreo closed gentle arms round her and spread lean fingers in a tender speaking gesture across the fain

t protuberance of her tummy. ‘No, but now that I’m to become a father I shall need to cut down on my trips abroad, cara. Off the tourist track, the pace of life is slower here. It’s a wonderful place to raise a child.’

Contentment filled Pippa to overflowing. Turning within his embrace, she gazed up into his darkly handsome features with her heart in her eyes, but there was still one tiny nagging concern to be faced. Breathing in deep, she worried at her lower lip before saying shyly, ‘I’m probably being very silly, but are you going to end up getting bored with me?’

‘Dio mio! What are you talking about?’ Andreo demanded in frowning disconcertion. ‘I could never become bored with you or what we have together. It is more than I ever hoped to have with any woman—’

‘Even though I’ll never be in the diamond-studded handcuffs line?’ Pippa prompted in an effort to be more specific about what he might or might not miss in the future.

Andreo tensed and wondered which he was going to put first: his rampant reputation as a living legend in the bedroom or his bride’s peace of mind? The only diamond-studded handcuffs he had ever purchased had been of the miniaturised variety, quite literally a gold charm for a bracelet, the most casual of gifts. A kiss-and-tell story sold by the same lady who had briefly shared his bed had first employed the outrageous lie presumably to make her revelations seem more newsworthy.

‘All that’s behind me…’ But as he looked down into Pippa’s anxious blue eyes Andreo’s conscience stirred and he released his breath in a sudden hiss. He confessed the truth about the diamond-studded handcuffs.

Pippa looked up at him for a long, timeless moment and then she just crumpled into helpless giggles. Every time she tried to stop laughing, she would recall the rueful look on his face as he chose to make that lowering admission and it would set her off into whoops again.

‘But now that I’ve found the woman of my dreams, I can at last live out my every sexual fantasy,’ Andreo drawled in a super-fast recovery, bending down and scooping her up to carry her back into the bedroom.

Hot-cheeked, eyes startled, Pippa gazed up at him. ‘Are you serious?’

He came down on the bed with her and covered her soft pink mouth with the passionate demand of his. Erotic heat sizzled along her every nerve ending and she quivered.

‘How serious would you like me to be, amore?’ Andreo teased and then he told her all over again how much he loved her and she smiled, buoyant with joy and trust.

Seven months later, Pippa gave birth to their first child. She enjoyed an easy pregnancy and delivery. They called their infant daughter Lucia. She was an exceptionally pretty baby with her father’s eyes and her mother’s cinnamon curls and both her parents were besotted with her.

They took Lucia to France with them when they attended the christening of Tabby and Christien’s second son, Fabien. The two couples had become fast friends and distance did not get in the way of their socialising. Andreo even asked Tabby to paint a miniature portrait of Lucia to mark the occasion of the first anniversary of his marriage.

The week in which their wedding anniversary fell, Andreo and Pippa left their beloved daughter in the care of her grandmother, Giulietta, and went to stay at the idyllic priory in the Dordogne, which held a special place in both their hearts.