he was struggling to answer. Suppressing a groan of disbelief, Andreo flipped over a flyer lying on the bar counter and jotted down the problem on the blank side of the sheet.
‘My little brother…he’s in boarding school and sometimes he needs a hand with his work,’ he explained taut-mouthed to Pippa.
Blinking, only slowly emerging from the daze induced by her own screaming hormones and her wild response to Andreo, Pippa hovered by his side. She was shattered by the acknowledgement that she had been on the very brink of going off with Andreo. A guy she had only just met, a guy she knew nothing about! She was incredulous at her own reckless behaviour and appalled. Anyone might have been forgiven for thinking that she had lost her wits the same moment she’d first laid eyes on Andreo!
‘Marco…’ Andreo could feel Pippa’s sudden withdrawal as much as if she had slammed a door shut in his face. He had to fight to keep the exasperated edge from his intonation as his impatient little brother asked him how long it would take for him to solve the problem for him.
In the act of emerging from shock to plunge into embarrassment instead as she wondered how the heck she was to retain Andreo’s interest while also telling him that she had changed her mind about going any place with him, Pippa noticed that Andreo was in the act of striving to differentiate trigonometric functions on the flyer.
‘That line’s in error,’ she muttered with a slight frown as she drew closer to him.
Andreo froze in astonishment. ‘Is that a fact?’ he challenged.
Pippa filched the pen from between his fingers and at lightning speed ran through the question to emerge with the answer while at the same time succinctly explaining where he had gone wrong in his calculations.
Andreo breathed in very deep and slow. He was better than ninety-nine out of a hundred people at maths and he had just met the hundredth in the unexpected guise of a very lovely and tactless redhead. Was he a chauvinist bastard?
‘Andreo…’ Marco breathed in wonderment, having overheard the entire dialogue and haltered by no such reservations. ‘Whoever she is she’s a real whiz at this stuff. Not one of your usual airheads, is she? Make sure you get her phone number for me!’
As Andreo finished the call it occurred to Pippa that she had not been very diplomatic. Tabby, who seemed to have been born knowing how the male mind worked, had once told her that men had very tender egos and that, if you really, really liked a guy, you should always leave him space to save face. Aware that she had steamrollered over him, she almost winced.
Over the top of her head, Andreo saw two members of his personal staff lurking by the door of the conference hall, visibly anxious to rope him back into the festivities but understandably reluctant to interrupt him and his companion. He pressed her round the corner of the bar where they were no longer within view.
‘We should separate and return to the hall for ten or fifteen minutes…practise discretion,’ Andreo ground out half under his breath, while gazing stormily down into her beautiful face, his reluctance to part from her palpable, ‘but I don’t want to let you out of my sight for a second in case I lose you, cara .’
Unaccustomed to being treated like a femme fatale whom no mere male could resist, Pippa just giggled, convinced that he was teasing her. Hands snapping to her elbows, Andreo backed her into the phone cubicle behind her and hauled her close.
‘What are you doing?’ she gasped in stark disconcertion.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Andreo enquired in a husky, ragged undertone, languorous golden eyes hot with invitation on hers.
Held in intimate contact with every lean, hard angle of his big, powerful frame, Pippa discovered in shock that she just wanted to be even closer to him, indeed so close that she might qualify as an extra layer of his skin. This time around she understood why her breasts felt heavy and almost swollen. She recognised her own desire for him and her face burned with mortification but nothing could kill the raw, wicked longing quivering through her in a thousand tiny stinging needles as her body came alive in ways entirely new to her.
‘Philly…?’
Tempted beyond all bearing by promptings that she had never been forced to deal with before, Pippa let her arms slide up to link round his strong brown neck and eased closer into the hard, unyielding strength of him. With a stifled Italian curse, Andreo succumbed to that frank invitation with all the volatile passion that lay at the heart of his nature.
Pippa might have been new to passion but no victim could have been more eager to seek her fate. He took her softly parted lips under his and thrust them apart with the forceful onslaught of his. The sweet, unbearably rousing invasion of his tongue into the moist interior of her mouth made her heart give a heavy thud and tightened her every muscle. All of a sudden her entire body was alive and throbbing with near-painful excitement and greedy for more of what she had never had.
With a reflexive shudder at the amount of strength it demanded from him and rigid with fierce desire, Andreo yanked himself back from her. Heavily lidded golden eyes swept her bemused face and lingered on the soft, swollen red of her ripe mouth. ‘Ten minutes…and you stay within view the whole time,’ he warned thickly. ‘Then we leave together.’
Blinking like a woman emerging from a dark spell of enchantment, Pippa let herself be walked back across the foyer and finally into the busy hall. The clumps of chattering people seemed to evaporate from their path at magical speed and Andreo only came to a halt when they reached a vacant corner table. There he snapped his fingers to hail a passing waiter and order her a drink. Momentarily, his imperious show of command took her aback.
‘Now don’t move from here until I come back, cara mia, ’ Andreo instructed in a low-pitched drawl. ‘It would be so easy for us to lose each other in this crush.’
‘Are you worth waiting for?’ Pippa heard herself enquire in a teasing undertone for she could only be amused at being spoken to as though she were a feckless child likely to wander off and get lost without his guidance.
‘Don’t laugh. This is not funny.’ Andreo was angry that she could seem unconcerned at the same risk and equally infuriated by his own lack of cool. He wanted her. But the level of that wanting was already more than he felt comfortable with. As his mobile phone broke into Marco’s colourful signature tune again, he worked out how best to pin her down in the short term.
‘Do you think you could help my little brother with his homework again?’ he asked. ‘He speaks excellent English.’
Touched by that request, Pippa grinned and extended her hand for his phone. Sipping at her drink, she talked Marco through what remained of his assignment while she watched Andreo on the other side of the room watch her in turn. Every time she saw that proud dark head angle in her direction, scorching dark golden eyes burning up the distance between them, her mouth ran dry and her heart raced. Venstar bigwigs surrounded him and the portly little man she had earlier identified as D’Alessio, but in that almost anonymous sea of people she was conscious of only one very individual male: Andreo.
Everything she was feeling was so outrageously new to her. Nothing had ever seemed so wonderful and miraculous as the simple fact that Andreo appeared to be as impressed by her as she was by him. No matter how hard she tried to reclaim her usual sterling common sense, it was overwhelmed by the outrageously girlish giddy excitement leaping and dancing through her bloodstream.
She had not known a guy could kiss like that. She had not known that a guy could actually make her feel like that. Oh, yes,
