‘I’m shameless,’ she muttered, taken aback by her own collusion.
Andreo uttered a husky laugh. ‘I wish…’
Pippa tensed, eyes wide and vulnerable. ‘Do you?’
‘Only teasing, amore. I like you just as you are which means that you have to resist every other guy around but be a complete pushover for me,’ Andreo confided as he spun her round in his arms.
Her heart was pounding like crazy. He bent down, swept her up with an easy masculine strength that was incredibly seductive and tumbled her down onto the cool quilted spread.
Pippa surveyed him with sudden shaken intensity as if she couldn’t quite work out how she had ended up there. ‘I shouldn’t be doing this—’
‘That’s what you like about me…I send you off the rails, amore.’
‘And where do you get that idea?’
‘You don’t take risks…you’re the lady with the colour-coded wardrobe, the books in alphabetical order, the tidiest desk. But you took a risk on me.’ A vibrant smile that made her heart flip slashed his lean, powerful face.
‘I want my diary back,’ she told him unsteadily.
Andreo laughed. ‘You know I won’t read it. Last night was payback time and I enjoyed making you dance to my tune. But don’t ever walk out on me again without telling me that you’re leaving.’
Something in his intonation chilled her. He wasn’t laughing any more; he was warning her. But I’m not back with you again, her conscience urged her to tell him. Only how could she tell him what she was doing with him when she didn’t know herself? She had made a choice without even being aware of it. She was lying half naked on his bed in his house and, for the first time in countless days of suffocating unhappiness, she felt alive again.
‘Kiss me…’ she muttered unevenly.
Smouldering golden eyes raked over her slender figure, lingering on the delicate swell of her breasts above the dainty cups of her white bra and the lithe shapely length of slender thighs bisected by white high cut briefs. He pulled his designer shirt over his head and tossed it aside with unashamed eagerness. She lay there looking up at him, feeling her straining nipples pinch tight while a wanton little frisson of heat slivered up from deep within her pelvis.
‘You’re so beautiful I can’t keep my hands off you.’ Magnificent torso bronzed and bare, Andreo lifted her up to him. She was already melting like ice-cream in the hot sun from outside in. And then he claimed her mouth with shattering carnality, penetrating between her readily parted lips with the rhythmic erotic timing of an expert lover. Instantly she caught fire, breathing in gasping shallow spurts, coming back to him again and again for more of the same. Deftly, he discarded her bra. One hand at her spine, he crushed her tender rose-tipped breasts against the hard wall of his muscular chest. Rising on her knees, liquid heat thrumming through her, she pushed even closer to find his passionate mouth again for herself.
‘I want you now, amore,’ Andreo growled thickly, pressing her back onto the bed with a sudden masculine mastery that thrilled her and hooking lean, impatient fingers into her panties to peel them off.
She lay there, hot and quivering and aching for him. She was shamelessly aware of her own readiness, of the moist secret heat that had begun gathering even before his first kiss.
He unzipped his chinos, shedding them and his boxers in a careless heap. Her breath caught in her throat at the extent of his bold arousal.
‘I don’t want to wait,’ he murmured raggedly, staring down into her blushing face, drawn by the glow of desire and appreciation she could not hide.
Passion-glazed eyes locked to him, she angled back her hips and parted her thighs in a sudden provocative move that shocked him almost as much as it shocked her. With a ground-out Italian imprecation and his golden eyes ablaze he came down to her, a raw, fierce need stamped on his startlingly handsome face that made her body thrum with wanton anticipation. He sank into her, deep and strong and without ceremony. Like hitching a ride on a rocket, it was the most exciting event of her life. For the first time she sensed that he was no longer in control and that made her own hunger climb even higher.
‘Andreo,’ she framed, not even aware that she was sobbing out his name.
The sound of that urgent cry drove him on. He plunged into her faster and faster. Lost in the mindless pleasure of his pagan possession, she moved against him, frantic, fevered, abandoned in her encouragement and welcome. Her heart was racing so hard and fast she was convinced she was flying. Raw excitement sent her spiralling into a wild climax. An uncontrollable frenzy of pleasure gripped her in wave after wave of ecstasy and she writhed under him. With an uninhibited shout of satisfaction, he shuddered over her in a white-hot release that surpassed anything he had ever felt and subsided.
Pippa floated back to planet earth to find that she had both arms possessively wound round Andreo in a way that would never qualify as cool. He rolled over, kissed her breathless and kept her clamped to him with a strong arm.
‘Sleep, amore,’ he urged.
She studied him. His black lashes accentuated the tough angles of his hard, smooth cheekbones, wide strong mouth and stubborn jawline. He had a classic masculine profile and he was totally, absolutely gorgeous. She pushed her face into a muscular brown shoulder and breathed in the aroma of his skin with an addict’s intensity.
‘You can have your diary back,’ he muttered with a husky sound of amusement. ‘You just settled your debt for all time. That was amazing…’
She stayed close, for every tiny moment with him felt unbearably precious and she was convinced that telling him that she was pregnant would destroy what they had. Reality would dispel the magic. Instantly she would become the reverse of sexy and fanciable, she thought with pained regret. Instead she would become a problem: a woman with the right to decide whether or not he became a father. It was a choice he got no say in and a situation he could surely only resent. After all, he had not been careless; he had taken all possible precautions to try and ensure that she did not conceive. But fate had decided otherwise.
In truth she was in no hurry to admit that she was carrying his child, for she already knew that she would not seek a termination. She herself had been conceived outside marriage and her mother had acknowledged her right to life, so how could she do less for her own baby?
She loved Andreo and that too had to influence her feelings towards his child. Indeed she had begun to love him within minutes of meeting him. But he was not in love with her and theirs was a casual affair. A fling, frothy and fun, nothing serious, she told herself sternly, suppressing her pain at the threat of the inevitable parting ahead. How long would they have together in France? She feared that the idyll would end the instant she confessed to being pregnant.