‘I suppose, Cassie Janus, you are wondering if this alcoholic requires a couple of shots of hard whisky to supplement his wine-soaked blood.’
‘It isn’t a joke,’ she rebuked him sharply. ‘And stop saying my name like that.’
‘Like what?’ Opening his eyes, he looked at her pale, strained, heart-shaped face with its beautiful emerald eyes darkened by concern for him.
‘Like you’re mocking me.’
Alessandro allowed a wry smile to stretch his lips. ‘And here I sit believing I was mocking myself.’
‘And you talk in riddles.’ Sliding her hand out from beneath his and retreating into the seat, Cassie put as much distance as she could between them then sat staring out at London’s night glitter, recognising famous landmarks which put them right in the centre of one of the city’s most prosperous districts.
No cheap inner-city housing here, she thought dully. No dismal tenement blocks taken over by developers and crammed to their doors with as many apartments they could pack into them. Her own rented apartment shared the floor with two other tenants. She had two tiny bedrooms, a cramped living-dining room, a rabbit hutch for a kitchen, and the tiniest bathroom in the world. The hallway was not much bigger than the vestibule at the bottom of the restaurant steps back there where Sandro had—
Oh, don’t go there, she groaned silently, shutting off her brain with a painfully tight swallow.
‘You wear no wedding ring…’
‘What?’ Startled, she jumped, her head twisting round on her slender neck to find he was studying her hands.
‘No rings,’ he repeated.
‘No. Why should there be?’ she demanded defensively, her fingernails coiling into her palms.
‘I did not say it as a criticism, merely as an observation.’
Her guarded gaze fluttered down to where his long-fingered hands lay relaxed on his lap. ‘You wear no rings, either.’
‘I am not the proud parent of twins.’
As if he’d reached across the gap between them and grabbed her by her throat, Cassie gave a choking gasp then froze. She’d forgotten the twins! How could she have done that? How could she have let herself forget that this man—this cold, heartless man—had rejected both her and her children before they’d even been born?
‘I am presuming that you are not married,’ he prompted in the same even tone.
He’d shifted his attention to her face now, carefully shielded eyes watching her expression in a way that made Cassie wish she knew what was going on inside his head.
‘No,’ she husked out.
‘So who is taking care of them while you’re out tonight—a live-in boyfriend perhaps?’
Her heart began to beat like a hammer drill. Where the heck was he intending to go with this line of questioning? ‘No,’ she said again.
‘Then who?’ he persisted.
‘M-my neighbour.’
‘So where is their father?’
Feeling as if he was reeling her in like a fish, ‘Stop it, Sandro!’ she hissed, her control just snapping.
‘Stop what?’ he questioned with skin-shaving innocence.
‘Toying with me again!’
‘I’m not toying with you,’ he denied and even added a halfconvincing frown.
‘Then what are you doing? You know about the twins because I told you about the twins!’
He dared to look shocked. ‘I don’t recall—’
‘What—again?’ Cassie pealed out.
The car came to an elegant standstill. Twisting her gaze back to the window, she saw they’d stopped outside the entrance to a block of fancy apartments. The stark comparison to the apartments she’d just been thinking about clawed like a mockery down her spine.
Well, if he thought she was going in there with him he had another think coming, she determined. She’d taken more than enough of his madness tonight without having to deal with the pride-crushing effect of seeing how well he lived, while his children…
The chauffeur opened her door for her. Blinking up at him for a second, Cassie pushed out a stifled, ‘Thank you,’ then scrambled out of the car. The night air was chilly and she’d started shivering as she bent her head to open her tiny evening purse.
‘What are you doing?’ Sandro arrived beside her.
‘I need my mobile to ring for a taxi—’
The hand that took the purse from her was smooth and slick. ‘Not before we talk.’
As she stared up at him in gasping protest, he then took possession of her wrist with a grip like a velvet manacle and started trailing her towards the apartment-block entrance.
‘But I don’t want to go in there with you,’ she told him furiously. ‘I want my purse back and I want to go home!’
‘Stop panicking,’ he drawled. ‘It’s only ten o’clock. Your babysitter cannot be expecting you back yet.’
‘That has nothing to do with it.’ She tried a tug on her wrist. ‘I have a right to decide for myself what I—’
His soft curse cut her off mid-sentence, sending her eyes shooting up to his face in alarm because she thought he was about to suffer another of those weird dizzy fits. But his expression was angry, not creased by pain. And when she followed the direction in which he was looking, Cassie saw through the plate-glass doors into the foyer a man standing leaning against the reception desk, chatting sedately to the security guard seated on the other side.
As the doors in front of them swung open like magic she saw recognition hit the stranger’s face as he straightened up and smiled. He was young, smart and Italian if his dark good looks were anything to go by. Sandro bit out something in Italian which turned the other man’s smile into a frown. A heated discussion struck up between them, which seemed to involve Sandro asking curt questions and the younger man replying with some firm questions of his own. The whole cutandthrust argument held Cassie fascinated and the porter engrossed. He seemed to understand them but Cassie didn’t. When the stranger glanced at her and said something about her, Sandro exploded with a volley of words and a flick of his hand which she loosely translated as ‘Keep your nose out of my business and get lost’.
Next Sandro was trailing her across the foyer and into the waiting lift. As the doors slid shut, Cassie had a final view of the other man’s frowning impatience.
‘Who is he?’ she couldn’t resist asking.
‘My brother,’ he answered.
Cassie looked at him. ‘Why did you row with him?’
‘Does it matter?’ was the cool response that came back.
No, she supposed that it didn’t. If Sandro liked to throw his weight around in that kind of manner with one of his family then it was none of her business, she told herself. And anyway, the lift doors were opening again and her attention returned to the way she was now being trailed out of the lift into the kind of inner foyer that screamed money at her from each luxurious corner, and revealed only one wide, glossy white door.
Using a card swipe, Sandro tapped a pin number into the wall-mounted keypad and the door swung free of its lock. On the other side of it was a large square entrance hall that her daughter would describe as ‘really posh’.
With his long, arrogant stride he drew her across the hall’s width and only dropped her wrist once they’d entered a beautiful living room with big and chunky brown leather chairs and sofas lit by soft golden lighting.
While Cassie was taking all of this in, he tossed her purse onto a side-table then was loosening his collar and tie again as he strode across the room. What she did not expect him to do was to throw himself down on one of the sofas. The moment he did it she noticed that the pallor was back along with the pain creasing his smooth brow.
‘My apologies,’ he murmured. ‘I just need a few seconds to—shake this off.’
Silence clattered down while Cassie hovered, trying to decide what she should do next. Eyeing her discarded purse, then Sandro again, she knew exactly what she should be doing. She should be taking her chance while she had it, grabbin
g her purse and getting out of here. She didn’t want this talk he kept on threatening her with. She didn’t want to be here with him at all. He’d refused to let her talk six years ago when he’d rejected her panicked plea for him to listen to her. More important, he’d rejected the twins at the same time.
So why she was still hanging around here like a glutton waiting for more of the same punishment bothered her even as her feet took her across the floor until the front of her legs hit the arm of the sofa Sandro was stretched out upon. It was a huge thing, long and deep, but he easily measured its full length.
‘Shake what off?’ she asked him.
He didn’t answer.
Feeling that unwanted stab of concern prick her defences. ‘This is silly.’ She sighed out. ‘Sandro, you need to see a doctor….’
A half-smile twitched the corners of his mouth. ‘A glass of water would be appreciated more.’
‘Right…’ Something to do. Cassie had already turned away when his voice came again.
‘You will find some bottles in the fridge. The kitchen is—’
‘I’ll find it,’ she interrupted him. ‘I might be blonde but I’m not completely dumb. Hunting down a kitchen has got to be within my meagre mental capabilities even in this vast place.’
‘Were you always this feisty?’ he quizzed curiously.
‘You mean you can’t remember?’ Cassie fired back. ‘That’s quite a selective memory process you’ve got going there, Sandro. You remember me but you don’t remember me.’
‘I remembered you while I was kissing you,’ he returned huskily, ‘and it was the sweetest thing I’ve tasted in years.’
Cassie stopped, her narrow shoulders wrenching backwards so her hair slithered like a silk curtain between her shoulder blades. ‘Only an unprincipled rat would select that particular memory to mention,’ she iced out.
Then she walked out, taking a teeth-clenching pleasure in pulling the door shut behind her with a slam she hoped doubled the pain in his head!
She came back to find him still stretched out on the sofa where she had left him but his jacket and tie were missing, which told her he’d attempted to get up, only to end up having to lie back down again.
Feeling that same stab of concern attack her insides as she walked across to where he lay, she stood trying to fight it for a good thirty seconds, then gave in with a sigh, and sat down next to him to reach out and place her fingers against his brow.
‘You’re cold,’ she murmured worriedly.
‘Never.’ His mouth gave another one of those amused twitches. ‘I am Italian. We don’t do cold.’
‘Be serious.’ She frowned. ‘Perhaps you have a virus or—’
‘Mothering me, cara?’ he taunted softly. ‘If I remain lying here, looking pale and pathetic, will you soften your hostility towards me enough to listen to what I have to say?’
Cassie ignored the taunting tone. ‘Why do you think you’re feeling like this?’
Catching hold of her hand, Sandro lifted it away from his brow, long fingers enclosing her fingers, the dark, curling sweep of his eyelashes rising upwards to reveal the caverndarkness of his eyes, now swept by fine golden flecks she’d only ever been able to see in them when she was this close. Those golden flecks gave the darkness life, added a glittering strength and shimmering vitality that was at odds with his pallor and his physically weakened state. And they held her captive, as they’d always been able to hold her captive. He was unfairly—too dangerously—attractive. He possessed the kind of dominating height and masculine body that probably turned most women weak at the knees. Yet, for all of his other assets, those eyes had been the pinpoint centre of Cassie’s attraction for him from the first time she’d looked into them. And they still had the same power to draw her in, closing down her brain to a hazy, mesmerised state which made her feel totally exposed and hopelessly vulnerable to his magnetic pull.
‘Because…’ he said, the low, gentle husk of his voice barely registering in her stalled head, ‘six years ago I was involved in a serious car accident which put me into a coma for three weeks and wiped my memory clean of something like six weeks of my life. Until tonight, that is, when I saw you standing across a crowded room and things started to come back to me in short, sharp, lightning flashes…and I want to kiss you again so badly I ache…’
Still gazing into those gold-flecked eyes, still trapped by their beauty and their mesmerising power over her, Cassie didn’t move or speak. She didn’t even breathe or blink. Then his words finally—finally sank in and on a strangled choke she wrenched her fingers free from his and launched to her feet.
The next thing she knew she was gasping for breath and staring down at her front, now dripping with ice-cold water which had splashed all over her because she had forgotten she was still holding the glass.
‘Now look wh-what you’ve done,’ Cassie shivered out. ‘How—how dare you speak such a wicked pack of lies to me?’ She refused to so much as acknowledge that last bit he’d said.
A soft mutter and Sandro was rising up from the sofa, the speed with which he went from pale and pathetic to energypacked giant towering over her enough to spin her already dizzy head.
‘Stop accusing me of lying,’ he said, removing the now-empty glass from her nerveless fingers.
Cassie was trying to hold icy, wet, black silk away from her breasts without losing her dignity. She’d also soaked her face and the sides of her hair—water was dripping off the end of her nose and her chin. On a growl of impatience Sandro took possession of her wrist again, using it to haul her like a piece of quivering baggage back across the room and into the square hallway then across it into another room.
It was a huge white space of a bathroom with unforgiving lighting that set Cassie blinking as Sandro threw a switch. Grabbing a towel off the rail, he tossed it at her.
‘Dry your front,’ he instructed, then picked up a smaller towel and stepped up close to use it on her dripping face.
By now the water had warmed to her body heat and she was feeling calmer though no less shaken by what he’d said. ‘What is it about you that makes you say these things?’ she fired at him fiercely as she pressed the towel to her front.
‘Think about it.’ His fingers took possession of her chin to lift it upwards so he could dab the water from her cheeks. ‘What’s in it for me to make up a story as off-the-wall as this?’
He was right—what was there in it for him? ‘You mean—you really don’t remember me…at all?’
He drew the black arches of his eyebrows together. ‘The way you put it a few minutes ago probably described it best—I remember you but I don’t remember you.’ The slanted half-smile he offered was as rueful as the answer itself. ‘You are playing the starring role in some knock-out flashbacks, Cassie Janus. They hit me like a door that flings open in my head then slams shut again before I can get a proper glimpse at what is being shown to me. A couple of them have hit me like lightning bolts,’ he grimaced, ‘one of which stretched me out like a corpse at your feet.’
The mention of his corpse made Cassie shudder.
‘You need to get out of that wet dress,’ he said briskly, misreading the shudder for a shiver.
‘No, I’m all right. Just a bit w-wet,’ she dismissed impatiently.
He’d explained it all so casually but really there was nothing casual about it. He didn’t remember her but he did remember her. The whole confusing evening began to make a mad kind of sense.
‘H-how badly injured were you?’ She was frowning again, already scanning him for signs of injury, as the idea of Sandro lying in a car wreck somewhere, hurt and unconscious, was so horrible to her that she couldn’t stop herself from checking him out. The olive-toned skin stretched over his perfect bone structure with no signs of scarring or puckers or dints anywhere that she could detect. Dropping her gaze lower, she even checked out the unblemished skin at his throat then was scanning his arms and his chest as if she were equipped with X-ray vision and could see t
hrough his shirt. She did not notice how still he had gone, or that the long fingers holding up her chin had lifted away and now hovered a bare inch from her cheek, or that his eyes had narrowed.
Then she heard his low and very husky, ‘If it helps you, cara, just say the word and I will take my clothes off so you can check me out more thoroughly….’
CHAPTER FIVE
CASSIE JUST FORGOT how to breathe.
He wasn’t joking. He didn’t even sound sardonic. A fire leapt into life deep down in her abdomen as belatedly she picked up the tension possessing his very still frame.
Sexual tension.
Looking up, she saw it burning out of the centre of his eyes like a flickering amber signal, felt its fierce heat prickle the surface of her skin, turning her own eyes a darker shade of green.
She wanted to say something cutting and dismissive—needed to say it—but the words wouldn’t form in her head. He’d told her only a few minutes ago that he ached to kiss her again and she’d chosen to ignore the warning; now she felt like a rabbit trapped in the headlights of the car that was about to run her over. She parted her lips to utter a protest but made the mistake of running the tip of her tongue over the quivering, damp surface of her upper lip. As if he’d been standing there waiting for exactly that kind of sign from her, Sandro uttered a groan which seemed to scrape the very walls of his chest then moved his hovering fingers, spearing them into the silken fall of her hair to hold her head.
It was like a rabbit hit by a head-on collision. If he’d let go of her Cassie knew she would have folded down in a puddle of her own shattered emotions as he lowered his head and took driving possession of her mouth.
Nothing after that moment made a single ounce of sense to her as pure sensation took her over, springing life into every nerve-end to fling her like a fool to a place she’d believed she never wanted to visit again.
Marchese's Forgotten Bride Page 5