'Are you hurt?' he asked in a dark, deep accented drawl that would have made her toes curl had she been able to feel them. Slowly, carefully, she shook her head to express her continuing health. The fact that he was flattening her into a wet ditch was meaningless when she met those gorgeous eyes. She spread her visual net to appreciate the lush spiky black lashes that provided a fitting exotic frame for his deep-set gaze. He had a lean, hard-boned face that was angular and uncompromisingly male, yet possessed of such breathtaking intrinsic beauty that she could do nothing but stare.

Andreas looked down into the bluest eyes he had ever met. He was convinced they could not be naturally that bright turquoise colour and was equally suspicious of the spill of shiny pale blonde hair tumbling round her heart-shaped face like tangled silk. 'What the hell were you doing in the middle of the road?'

'Would you mind letting me up?' Hope mumbled apologetically.

With a stifled curse as he registered in rare embarrassment that he was still lying on top of the woman responsible for the death of his car, Andreas wrenched himself back from her. A faint tinge of colour demarcating his superb cheekbones as he questioned his own uncharacteristic loss of concentration, he sprang upright and reached down a lean, long-fingered hand to assist her. An unsought thought emerged out of nowhere: she had skin as smooth, soft and tempting as whipped cream.

'I wasn't in the middle of the road…I was scared you would drive on without seeing me,' Hope explained, wincing at the freezing chill of her clothing as she let him pull her upright. He was impossibly tall, so tall, she had to throw her head back on her to look up at him.