Читать книгу The Italian Boss's Mistress - Линн Грэхем, LYNNE GRAHAM - Страница 8

ANDREO dealt Pippa a level challenging appraisal. ‘That’s entirely your decision.’

Colour swept Pippa’s face and she could have bitten her tongue out in embarrassment. Of course that was her decision! It was a good half-century since women had been raised to think that what a man expected a woman should invariably try to deliver. She walked over to the tall windows that overlooked the spectacular city skyline but she could only think of how foolish she must have sounded to him. Like a nervous virgin who had never been alone with a man in a hotel suite before? All the heat drained from below her fair skin to leave her pale.

Unfortunately, Hilary had only managed to make her over on the outside with a smooth sophisticated façade and inside she was still the same old Pippa Stevenson, she acknowledged. Pippa, who had attended an all girls’ school and whose evenings and weekends had been filled with extra classes and academic study, rather than social events and flirting. Boys had always seemed as remote and strange to her as alien entities and she had never learned what to say or how to behave around them. At the age of seventeen she had been humiliated by the young man she’d been infatuated with and, from that day on, hurt pride had become her strongest source of protection.

Time might have moved on but once bitten twice shy had proved to be her motto. Since then she might as well have been living on a single sex planet, she conceded ruefully, for she had never again risked pain or rejection. For almost six years she had been her father’s carer and while it was true that the older man had demanded that she devote all her free time to his needs and his interests, it was equally true that she had not offered much of a protest. It had been easier to be a dutiful daughter and accept without question that she was the ‘big strapping lass’ her parent had often called her and highly unlikely to appeal to any man. From the age of twelve, when she had first shot up in height to tower over all her classmates like a lanky beanpole, Pippa had loathed her extra inches and had pointlessly longed to be small and dainty like her pretty mother.

But now, for the first time, she shook free of that memory without regret and reminded herself that Andreo appeared to admire her just as she was. She stole a covert glance at him and collided with smouldering dark golden eyes and her mouth ran dry. He was breathtakingly handsome.

Andreo watched her, for she was so still that she might have been a living breathing statue. Her feathery lashes lowered above the pale perfect line of her cheekbones and she looked incredibly vulnerable. It was obvious that she was having second thoughts. Was there another guy in her life? Someone to whom she felt she owed loyalty? Whatever, he chose patience over the risk of losing her altogether. ‘Perhaps I should just take you home,’ he murmured evenly.

Pippa went rigid, for that unexpected offer only heightened her tension. Go home? It would be the sensible thing to do. Yet her whole being rebelled against the concept. Sensible Pippa. When had she ever been anything else? And where had it got her? She had become a workaholic with no social life and no man had looked twice at her either. When had she ever felt for any male what she was feeling now?

‘Is there anyone else?’ Andreo breathed, his tension palpable.

‘No…’ She drew in a slow steadying breath. ‘You?’

‘No.’ The blonde who had last shared Andreo’s bed was modelling in Mexico and he saw no reason to confess that the lady had become yesterday’s news at the exact same instant that he’d seen her successor before him.

The atmosphere buzzed.

‘I don’t believe that I’ve ever wanted any woman as much as I want you, bella mia,’ Andreo confided with raw honesty.

‘I want to stay…’ Pippa whispered in a rush and, shaken though she was by the force of her own craving for him, she was equally entrapped by the simple acknowledgement that she still had a whole new dimension of life to explore. Her body seemed to be developing responses all of its own. The fabric of her dress felt abrasive against the taut peaks of her breasts and there was a swollen heaviness low in her pelvis that made it a challenge for her to remain still.

‘You won’t regret it.’ His slashing smile of satisfaction was sufficient reward for her agreement. Her heart hammered so hard inside her ribcage that she felt dizzy. He was so beautiful and when he looked at her she felt beautiful too. She crossed the room on lower limbs that felt as unreliable in the support stakes as bendy twigs. She was trembling but she reached for his silk tie like a woman who meant business, a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.

Averse to her clumsy approach, his wretched tie refused to cooperate and went into a tight, immoveable knot. Just when she was on the brink of screaming for a pair of scissors, lean brown fingers intervened and jerked loose the knot with apparent ease. He cast the tie aside and drew her raised hands into his own to fold her back into his arms. She was as boneless as a rag doll until he crushed her into the hard, muscular wall of his chest, one masculine hand knotting into her bright hair to angle her head back. Then she shivered, stretched up to him, helpless in the thrall of her own wild anticipation.

His expert mouth swooped down to taste hers again and a soft moan of encouragement broke low in her throat. He traced her lips, penetrated them and a series of little gasps were torn from her as she clung to him to stay upright. He bent down and swept her up into his arms.

‘Aren’t I too heavy?’ she mumbled through swollen, stinging lips and a sense of wonderment as dangerous as a hypnotic spell. He was, she was convinced, ‘the one’, the one special guy who she had always hoped and prayed might be waiting out there for her. The guy she was going to fall madly in love with. The guy who was hopefully going to fall madly in love with her. Well, maybe not madly, she adjusted hurriedly, fearful of hoping for too much and ending up with precisely nothing as a punishment for daring to be so ambitious. Even if he fell just a little bit in love with her, she would be content, she swore to herself.

‘Light as a doll, cara mia…I’m just an unrepentant show-off,’ Andreo teased as he strode into the elegant contemporary bedroom next door and set her down again onto her own feet.

One of her shoes had fallen off and she kicked off the other, but he had already stepped back from her to un-button his shirt. Eyes wide, she became his audience. Her toes curled in the luxury carpet while she watched as the shirt fell open to display a sleek bronze wedge of masculine torso, his powerful pectoral muscles delineated by a triangle of rough dark curls. Her tummy flipped and she felt alarmingly short of breath and very hot. Knees wobbling, she backed up until her legs hit the edge of the bed and she sank down on the luxurious mattress.

‘What…?’ A wicked smile slanted over his wide, sensual mouth and golden eyes gleamed from below dense black lashes. ‘Did you want to take off the shirt for me?’

‘No…er…I’m not into shirts,’ Pippa framed, dry-mouthed and serious, for she had decided there was nothing less cool than struggling with male apparel.

‘You can always practise on my tie, cara,’ Andreo teased with intense amusement for he had found her lack of dexterity and the inexperience implied by that trait endearing.

‘Is that a fact?’ Pippa strove to match his mood with a quip while acknowledging that his sheer masculine presence both thrilled and intimidated her.

‘Any time…’ Andreo husked, strolling forward with all the formidable and yet daunting grace of a prowling tiger to lean down and close his large hands over her smaller ones and raise her upright.

That close to him her nostrils flared on the clean, husky male scent of his lithe, lean physique. She quivered, a curl of heat igniting low in her stomach. Shorn of her shoes as she now was, he struck her as awesomely tall and broad.

‘Santo Cielo…you’ve shrunk a little,’ Andreo mocked. ‘But promise me that you will always wear those heels around me. Seeing you top all the guys around me gives me a high—’

‘It…does?’

‘Sì. You looked as disdainful as a queen too.’ He shed his shirt and reached behind her with complete calm to unzip her dress for her.

‘Couldn’t we put the lights out?’ Pippa mumbled in as humorous a tone as she could manage, the cooler air brushing her spine merely reminding her that when the dress went she had only one more layer left to hide behind.

Andreo actually laughed out loud. ‘You’ve got to be kidding, bella mia!’

Perspiration beaded her short upper lip. ‘I guess I was…’

He skimmed the straps down from her taut shoulders and let her slinky little blue dress fall to the carpet. He spread long fingers to frame her cheekbones. ‘You are stunning…’

But Pippa had already closed her eyes sooner than risk seeing his disappointment when he saw how thin and flatchested she was when stripped back to her bra and briefs. Nerves strung high, she shivered and he gathered her up into his arms and came down onto the bed with her cradled across his hard thighs. He tasted her mouth long and slow and the forbidden heat in her tummy flickered up again in spite of her tension.

‘Sexy…’ Andreo growled, appreciating the satin-smooth softness of her delicate white skin.

Nobody had ever called her that before and the temptation was too great: her lashes lifted on bemused eyes as blue as sapphires. ‘Sexy?’

‘Very…’ He found everything about her sexy: her hair, her eyes, her height, her incandescent smile, the air of fragility that she exuded that gave him a curious urge to open doors for her, the sort of courteous but unfashionable stuff he normally only did in the radius of his female relatives.

Mesmerised by the intensity of his dark golden appraisal, she missed out on the deft movement with which he unclipped her bra. ‘Honestly…?’

As her firm little breasts were bared his breathing fractured. Air chilled the tightly beaded tips and she looked down at her own bare flesh in dismay before bringing her hands up to cover herself from his intent appraisal. ‘Lights…’ she said in a wobbly voice.

‘I love your body…’ Andreo told her.

Feverish colour flooded her cheeks as she scrambled off him and dived with more haste than elegance below the fancy quilted spread and tugged it back up to her chin.

Andreo elevated a level dark brow and surveyed her with a frown. Her cinnamon hair was fanned out like polished silk round her face, which was hot pink to her hairline. Her eyes were evasive.

‘I think I need a drink,’ she gasped, amazed that after all the alcohol she had imbibed she still felt almost as sober as the proverbial judge.

Andreo sprang upright and strolled over to the mini bar to withdraw a chilled mineral water. Opening it, he emptied it into a crystal tumbler and wandered back to extend it to her.

Clutching the spread to her, Pippa accepted the glass. She did not have the nerve to tell him that she had expected to receive an alcoholic beverage. ‘You must be thinking I’m a little strange,’ she muttered in a rush.

‘Why would I think that?’ Drinking water from the bottle he had helped himself to, Andreo rested his lean hips on the edge of the cabinet opposite while he contemplated her tense and embarrassed face.

No way was she having another intoxicating drink. He liked his partners to know what day it was. But there was another guy in her life, he was sure of it. That was why she was so jumpy. His competitive spirit soared into the ascendant. He would talk his way into that bed with her tonight. He might only get this one chance to pull her and once the deed was done, it would squash the competition. And if she didn’t squash the competition after the event, he most assuredly would take care of that necessity for her. He didn’t share and she was his. Dio mio, never before had he kissed a woman in a public bar or been so challenged to restrain his overwhelming hunger to possess her. Together they were hotter than a volcano and if she didn’t yet appreciate that fact, he would soon teach her to do so.

The silence stretched and with the galling cool of an expert interrogator he made no attempt to break it.

Pippa sat up in a driven motion and hugged the spread beneath her arms. ‘There’s something I ought to mention…’

Andreo tensed. He really did not want to hear about the other man. Everything she told him would linger in his memory and annoy him. He didn’t know how he knew that. He didn’t even know why he was thinking that, for he had never been one of those weird possessive types. But he did know that he did not want to hear the low-down on her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. ‘I don’t believe in exchanging stories about other lovers.’

‘Neither do I…and I’m not even sure I should make such an issue of this…but—’ Pippa sucked in a jerky breath and shot him an anxious glance ‘—it seems only fair to warn you that I haven’t done this much.’

Andreo was touched. He didn’t want to hurt her pride so there was no easy way of telling her that she had made her relative lack of experience pretty obvious. He was fine with that. But then he was a very open-minded guy, he reflected.

‘In fact…’ Pippa hesitated, worrying at her full lower lip with her teeth, her quiet voice dropping lower and lower in level until he was leaning forward without realising it to catch her words. ‘…to be really, really frank, I haven’t done this at all…’

His winged black brows pleated. ‘Say that again…’

‘Ever,’ Pippa concluded.

‘You’re telling me that you’ve never spent the night with a guy you’ve just met before?’

‘Yes, but not just that,’ Pippa interposed a shade irritably for he was being exceedingly slow on the uptake when she wanted him to get the message faster than the speed of light. ‘Apart from the fact that I’m not promiscuous—’