Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

&n

bsp; ‘That’s what I reckoned too,’ Andreo confided, deadpan.

‘Will you just give it back to me?’ she prompted very softly and gently.

‘No. Right now, it’s a negotiating tool and a guarantee that you think and listen and eventually account for your behaviour,’ Andreo delineated without hesitation.

Her teeth gritted and her fingernails flexed and bit into her palms.

‘But in the short term, I’m willing to grant you a little breathing space. After all, it’s late, we’re in someone else’s home and you’re obviously ready for bed. We can talk tomorrow—’

‘I’m leaving in the morning for the Dordogne—’

‘I know. Tabby did mention how close I’d come to missing you,’ Andreo interposed evenly. ‘Isn’t it fortunate that I have a home in the same region? You’ll be able to travel down with me.’

At the mere idea that she might be willing to travel anywhere with him, Pippa breathed in so deep and long that she was almost convinced she would burst.

‘Is it OK if I have a shower?’ Andreo enquired, setting his case down on the luggage rack by the wall.

‘You can’t sleep here!’ Pippa exclaimed, blue eyes huge.

‘No problem. Perhaps you’d do the honours with our hostess and request a separate room for me.’

Pippa paled and tried to steel herself to the prospect of rising to that challenge. Tabby would be embarrassed by her assumption that her guests would happily share the same bedroom. Pippa would be embarrassed asking for an arrangement that was the equivalent of a public announcement about the hostile state of her current relationship with Andreo. Colour warming her cheeks, she dropped her head.

‘You might as well sleep here tonight. It’s a big bed and it’s late and Tabby and Christien have probably already gone to bed,’ she muttered grudgingly.

As he watched her visibly squirm at the idea of approaching her friend unholy amusement at her discomfiture made Andreo say with exaggerated courtesy, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s obvious that you’re uncomfortable with the idea.’

Pippa snatched in a steadying breath but she was relieved that he had sufficient sensitivity to appreciate how difficult she would find such a situation. ‘It’s all right. I’ll be fine,’ she said woodenly.

Andreo shed his jacket and tie, unbuttoned his shirt. He had been so angry when he’d arrived, and he still was, but all of a sudden he just wanted to laugh out loud. He very much doubted that their hosts had gone to bed at eleven at night. It was inconceivable to Andreo that he would allow other people’s opinions to influence his behaviour, for he was fearless when it came to pursuing any course in which he knew himself to be in the right. It was evident that Pippa was much more vulnerable and he studied her with keen interest. Covered from head to toe in a shapeless garment that would have looked at home in a coffin, she was scrambling into the bed in extreme haste.

While he stripped with the most shocking lack of self-consciousness and not a decent ounce of the extreme awkwardness that Pippa felt he ought to have been suffering in her presence, she turned her back on him to glare at the wall. But the image of his lithe bronzed masculinity travelled with her as powerfully as if he still stood in front of her. She was furious with herself for being severely tempted to sneakily spy on him while he undressed. After all she had said and done, what sort of sense would that make?

But then was there any sense at all to what was happening between them now? Suppose he was telling her the truth about Lili Richards? Why, after all, would he follow her all the way to France if she had only been the two-week equivalent of a one-night stand? Maybe he had been planning to visit the country anyway: he did own a house in France, she reminded herself.

She lay in bed, tossing and turning, listening with one ear to the distant sound of the shower running in the connecting bathroom. It shook her that she couldn’t get her thoughts into any kind of reasonable order. She was in total turmoil. In search of an explanation, she looked back to the outset of their affair…

She had spent ten consecutive days with Andreo D’Alessio. Only work hours had intervened and they had soon alleviated that problem by stealing at least two hours together around midday. In retrospect she was shocked at the feckless attitudes she had fallen into. Andreo had wanted her and that had been that: she couldn’t have cared less about Venstar. For the entirety of those ten days she had lived entirely for Andreo. They had not spent a single night apart. The one evening on which she had suggested that she ought to go home, Andreo had wasted no time in dissuading her from the notion.

Never before had she been so indescribably happy. That reality spoke for itself, her more sober self interposed at that point. Happiness of that magnitude was not meant to last and once she had tasted the best she should have known that it could only get worse from there on in. How much worse? Andreo was an unrepentant womaniser…and there was a possibility that she might be expecting his baby!

No, no, no! Pippa shrieked inside her mind, fighting to throw that scary thought back out again. The chances of her being pregnant were very small, she told herself doggedly. If her cycle did not return to normal soon, she would consider approaching a doctor. A little voice she did not want to listen to reminded her that her own mother might only have conceived once but that conception had actually taken place when her parents had only been together for two short weeks!

Andreo sauntered out of the bathroom. All that stood between him and total nudity was a pair of seriously trendy Armani boxers. Pippa stared. She preferred distracting herself to suffering what she regarded as almost hysterical fears relating to pregnancy, or almost as bad, succumbing to a need to mentally dissect every blasted minute she had ever spent in his company. Her mesmerised attention roamed over the hard contours of his strong, muscular shoulders, broad, powerful chest, the flat slab of his stomach and long, strong thighs. Lean muscle rippled in the smooth bronze expanse of his back and narrow hips as he closed his case and straightened, a magnificent male animal in his athletic and sexual prime. The tip of her tongue slunk out to moisten her dry lower lip. She was conscious of the heated, heavy rise of excitement low in her pelvis, the aching pulse of moist responsive heat.

‘No…’ Andreo said softly.

Her reactions slowed by her distance from rational thought, Pippa blinked and focused on him. ‘Sorry?’

‘I’m off limits. You would have to get down on your knees and beg before I would forgive you for your behaviour—’

‘Off limits?’ Pippa was unable to credit her own hearing. ‘Get down on my knees and beg? What for?’

‘Sex…sex with me, amore.’ Andreo tossed back the sheet and came down beside her, black hair tousled, stunning dark golden eyes burnished to sizzling gold. ‘Don’t think I don’t know when you want me—’

Pippa turned the same colour as a ripe beetroot, yanked up a pillow and tried to thump him with it. ‘That’s utter nonsense!’