Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

She caught his smouldering frown for posterity. ‘Smile…look normal,’ she pleaded.

She managed a handful of shots before she heard Berthe’s noisy little car arriving and she got back into bed to rest to please Andreo. As soon as he had gone downstairs, she got up again and furtively packed her case. Conscious that he would probably look in on her before he left to keep his business appointment, she lay down again and was asleep before she knew it.

When she woke up, the bedroom door was just closing and it was almost two in the afternoon. She had slept for almost two hours. Minutes later, she heard the Mercedes engine fire. Andreo was going out and she would not be here when he returned. Like a child she wanted to leap out of bed and watch him drive off and she found it tough to resist that temptation. She stared into space with strained eyes and reminded herself of why, regardless of her love for Andreo, she could not even consider marrying him…

As a teenager, Pippa had learned that her parents’ marriage had been a shotgun affair that would never have taken place but for her own unplanned advent into the world. Her father had been a newly qualified teacher when he’d first met the French student working as a language assistant in the same school. For Pippa’s mother it had been love at first sight and in later years she had been painfully honest with her daughter in her efforts to excuse her husband’s infidelity.

‘We only went out together a few times. By the time I realised that I was going to have a child, your father was already dating someone else. He was very popular with the girls and I was too quiet for him, but when I told him that I was pregnant he immediately said that he would marry me,’ the older woman had confided. ‘It was a huge sacrifice for him and I was grateful.’

But then her mother had had the attitudes of a different generation and had had pitifully few expectations in life. Pippa’s mother had clung to the father of her unborn baby and had meekly accepted that he should neither be kind to her nor faithful. Having married a man who did not love her and who indeed resented her, she had paid a heavy price.

That awareness strengthening Pippa’s own conviction that she had to leave Andreo before she was tempted into yielding to the strength of her own feelings for him, Pippa pulled on a pale green shift dress and teamed it with a gold linen jacket. The housekeeper, the plump and attractive Berthe, emerged from the kitchen to greet her. The ensuing exchange of pleasantries, voluble on Berthe’s side and more strained on Pippa’s, was interrupted when the older woman noticed Pippa’s suitcase and the conversation took another tack.

Learning that Pippa intended to call a taxi to ferry her into Bourdeilles, Berthe frowned in surprise and then insisted on giving her a lift into the town, explaining that she herself had some shopping to do.

The elderly little Citroën lurched and bounced down the rough lane at alarming speed. Too late did Pippa recall that Andreo had told her that his housekeeper drove as if she were a bat out of hell in a demolition derby. Reminding herself that the minor road beyond was usually very quiet, Pippa only betrayed her state of nerves with a faint gasp when her companion raked her car straight into a left turn.

The lorry thundering towards them seemed to come round the corner at them out of nowhere. A high-pitched squawk of alarm broke from Berthe as she hauled the steering wheel round in a frantic effort to get out of its path.

I should have married him… was the only thought that animated Pippa’s mind and it was a thought that pierced her with literal anguish in the instant that the little car crashed.

CHAPTER TEN

PIPPA opened shaken eyes.

The Citroën was nose down in a ditch. Berthe was sobbing in shock. But neither of them appeared to be hurt and there was no sign of the lorry, which had apparently speeded on past without deigning to notice the car that had almost come to grief below its enormous wheels.

Pippa reached across with an unsteady hand and switched off the car engine. Checking that the older woman was indeed uninjured, she persuaded her that it would be safer to get out of the car. As Pippa clambered out into the dusty ditch the sleeve of her jacket snagged on the wire attached to the fence post that had been torn down by the crash. The fabric ripped and Pippa gritted her teeth as she attempted to free herself without success. Exasperated, she shrugged out of her jacket and, leaving it where it fell, moved with some difficulty over the rough ground to the driver’s side to help Berthe.

By the time she had assisted the heavy older woman to climb out of the Citroën, a battered truck containing Berthe’s husband, Guillaume, and her strapping son had pulled up beside them. Her relatives had seen the accident from the field across the road where they had been working. Berthe lamented the reality that she had not had a chance to see the registration of the lorry.

Her husband ignored that remark and tucked his wife into his truck as tenderly as if she had been a queen. ‘You are safe,’ he pointed out, urging Pippa to join the older woman.

‘Travel back home with us and I will take you into town in my car instead,’ Berthe’s son promised Pippa.

‘Thank you but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll go anywhere today.’ Pippa’s voice emerged a little unevenly but she lifted her head high with an air of decision.

It was amazing how a near brush with mortality could focus the mind, Pippa acknowledged once she had been dropped back to the priory and had managed to convince Berthe and her menfolk that she felt perfectly fine and could safely be left there alone. In fact the sky had never seemed more blue, the sun more golden or the myriad colours of nature’s bounty more intense.

How could she have even considered running out on Andreo a second time? She was ashamed of herself and yet curiously excited too by her own daring in choosing to return and lay herself open to the type of hurt that she had always protected herself from. At the same time she was still able to cringe when she remembered Andreo telli

ng her that she was too scared to give him a chance. It was true. Right from the start, she had foreseen the end of their relationship and had sought to make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of her low expectations. At every turn she had undervalued him and what they shared.

Why had it taken her so long to appreciate that Andreo bore not the faintest resemblance to her late father in character? Judging Andreo in the bitter shadow of her parent’s infidelity, she had denied the younger man a fair hearing and she had refused to concede him the smallest trust. She had to be more honest with him and the very last thing he deserved was for her to walk out on him again while so much was still unresolved between them.

Twenty minutes later, Andreo drove back from the meeting, which he had cut short, and the first thing he saw was the Citroën upended in the ditch and a woman’s jacket lying by the side of the road. Braking to an emergency stop, for his recognition of that garment was instantaneous, he leapt out to check that the car was unoccupied. For an instant he was frozen there and then he flung himself back into the Mercedes and accelerated down the lane.

Waiting to greet him, Pippa hovered in the doorway of the airy salon. The light flooding through the tall, elegant windows behind her burnished her hair with fiery highlights and threw into prominence her taut pallor.

Andreo strode into the hall. Lean, strong face stamped with savage tension, his gaze alight with ferocious strain roved over her in wondering disbelief and shock. ‘Per meraviglia! You’re here? Safe and unhurt? When I saw your jacket beside Berthe’s car I thought you had been injured…perhaps seriously…and I assumed you had been taken to hospital, only I did not know which one…’ At that point, his dark deep drawl thickened and came to a halt.

‘We were almost run down by a l-lorry.’ Blue eyes welded to his extravagantly handsome features, Pippa was embarrassed by the nervous catch that had crept into her voice. Her heart seemed to pound so frantically inside her chest she could hardly breathe and she found herself gabbling in an almost inaudible rush, ‘My mother would have said that an angel must have been in the car with us for Berthe is all in one piece as well…’

Venting a roughened phrase in his own language to best express his disordered emotions, Andreo overcame his paralysis and strode forward to close his arms round her. ‘Porca miseria…if you only knew what I have been thinking!’

Almost immediately he drew back from her again. Pippa watched him swallow hard and stood without complaint while he ran lean hands down from her shoulders to her hips and studied her with intense concern as though he was not yet able to accept the evidence of his own eyes and credit that she too had escaped injury.

‘I got a shock too…Berthe just drove out without looking—’