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
