A sound coming from the other side of the living-room door warned them then that the twins were about to come back in here. Sandro’s curse as he pushed his hand back up to his face cut through the tension like a knife.
‘I’ll h-head them off.’ Cassie jerked into movement, making for the door on knocking knees and trembling legs.
‘Give me a few minutes to…get myself together,’ he husked out. ‘Then I will take you home.’
‘We’ll catch the train—’
‘Don’t,’ he growled, ‘start that argument again. I will take you,’ he insisted. ‘Find my driver. He can usually be found out by the garages, drinking tea with Angus’s driver.’
That he had not driven himself here swung Cassie round in surprise. Sandro was still on his feet but only just, she judged anxiously as she watched the way he flexed his wide shoulders as if he was trying to shake off what was affecting him, and a sudden ribbon of understanding slithered down her front. He didn’t trust himself to drive a car right now while these blackouts kept on catching him out.
Moistening her lips, her heart thumping, she heard the husky concern shadowing her voice. ‘Sandro, you—’
The door flew open, forcing whatever she had been going to say back down her throat, and sent her attention zipping away from him to the twins. With the efficiency of a mother used to dealing with two boisterous children, she herded them back out of the room before they could lay eyes on their father, diverting them with the tempting promise that they were about to travel home in style instead of catching a busy train.
Sandro waited until the door had closed behind them before he dropped back down into the chair then reached into his pocket for his mobile phone. ‘Marco,’ he said brusquely, ‘I’m giving in. I will take that scan now….’
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE journey back home was completed in an atmosphere of strange, tense, chattering normality, made to work because Sandro had elected to take the seat beside his driver, which left space in the rear of the car for Cassie and the twins. The two children were so impressed by this luxury mode of transport that they did not notice their father’s silence or the quiet tension threading their mother’s husky voice whenever she spoke to them.
He declined her invitation to come in with them. On one level Cassie was relieved because she knew she needed time out of his dominating sphere. On another level she ached with concern for him because he still looked so strained and pale.
He smiled for the twins, though, promised to come and see them again soon. He squatted down on the dusty pavement so he could look them directly in their eyes as he made the promise then remained like that, drinking in their solemn little faces as if for the last time. Then Bella stepped in and wrapped her arms around his neck, and Sandro reached out to loop a big arm around his son to draw him into the hug too.
Why this touching little scene should fill Cassie with fresh anxiety she couldn’t work out, but when he rose to his full height and turned that same intense look on her she almost copied her daughter and threw herself at him. The way he cupped her cheek and brushed his thumb across her soft, trembling mouth stopped her. His husky, ‘I’ll call you,’ before he turned and climbed back in the car without saying anything else left her feeling wrung out and devastated because he’d used the exact same words and touch when he’d driven away from her six years ago.
She spent Sunday living with that empty feeling, while the twins plied her with non-stop questions about their father and marriage plans and Sandro’s proposed move to Italy, about which she knew nothing. Bella was excited about it. Anthony worried about leaving his school and his friends. Cassie lived in an anxious state over Sandro and that final scene on the pavement, which grew more sickeningly familiar each time she replayed it in her head.
And he didn’t call.
Monday she turned up for work and made the pretence it was like any other Monday morning with no major upheaval happening in her life—because she just didn’t know what else to do. Her shadow followed her every moment, helping to keep her concentration focused on work. But she was uptight and uncommunicative, alert for the sound of Sandro’s name being mentioned, wondering if he was in the building, wanting to find out, reassure herself that he was OK, but refusing to give herself the right to ask those questions outright.
And then there was Pandora. She did not seem to be in the building either, although that was yet another question Cassie refused to seek confirmation about.
Tuesday went the same way as Monday. By Wednesday Sandro’s contact cards had found their way out of her purse and now burned a hole in the slanted pocket of her pencil skirt. Several times she’d slid her fingers around them, desperately tempted to give him a call. Then the past would flood in, crawling around her senses with painful reminders of what had happened the last time she’d tried to reach him.
‘Are you feeling all right, Cassie?’ Ella came to stand beside her desk. ‘You look dreadfully pale.’
Her shadow honed his sharp eyes on her. Fresh tension fizzed across her skin. ‘I’m fine,’ she responded, ‘just—’
‘Feeling hunted,’ Ella put in, flicking a knife-edged glance at the shadow, who quickly lowered his gaze. ‘Come on, let’s take an early lunch,’ she insisted. ‘You look like you could do with some fresh air and a break.’
They bought sandwiches and coffee from the local sandwich bar and walked across the road to the small gated park set in the middle of the square on which the BarTec building was situated. Finding a vacant bench beneath a tree, they sat down. It was quite warm for October and the sun glinted down through the tree branches still heavy with autumn-gold leaves.
‘OK,’ Ella said, flipping the lid off her coffee, ‘let me tell you what I know, then you can fill in the empty spaces…Our sexy new boss is the twins’ father. Don’t bother to deny it because I worked that one out straight away,’ she warned when Cassie opened her mouth to speak. ‘I don’t think Pandora Batiste has worked out that part yet but she certainly feels threatened by you, which is why she spent last week on your case.’
Cassie laughed bleakly. ‘Wouldn’t you feel threatened if he was your lover?’
‘Maybe,’ Ella conceded. ‘More than maybe, if she knows that you and the twins spent Saturday with him—and don’t deny that one either because I was coming to see you when I saw you return in his car. That sweet little scene on the pavement outside your apartment made me change my mind and leave you all to it.’
‘You should have hung around longer, then,’ Cassie murmured dryly. ‘You would have been able to watch him depart.’
‘For good?’ Ella questioned sharply.
Cassie shrugged. ‘Who knows?’
‘Is that why you’ve looked so done-in and pale this week?’
This time Cassie’s shrug arrived without an added comment.
‘Idiot.’ Ella sighed. ‘Want to tell me how the two of you came together in the first place?’ she encouraged. ‘Six years ago you must have been a real babe-in-arms to a man like him.’
‘He’s only five years older than me, Ella! You can’t label him a cradle-snatcher.’
‘Just a rake on the take?’
‘No!’ She sighed out, frowning because wasn’t that exactly how she’d come to think of Sandro until he turned up again and told her about his accident and his lost memory? ‘Can we stop this now? I’m hungry; I want to eat my sandwich!’
‘I’m not stopping you eating,’ Ella denied. ‘You’re doing that to yourself because you’re in waste-away mode.’
Waste-away mode probably described her perfectly, Cassie acknowledged heavily—or lost in a limbo caused by Sandro’s continuing silence. Perhaps he was intending to just turn up at BarTec on Friday morning and haul her off to be married before he delivered her back to her desk. Or perhaps he’d done another U-turn and changed his mind about the whole crazy—
‘Perhaps you will cheer up when I tell you that Pandora Batiste hasn’t shown her face because she’s been sent back
to Florence at the boss’s command,’ Ella said coolly.
So that was why she hadn’t seen the other woman. And she didn’t feel any better about the news because…what was Florence except for another city for two lovers to meet up in?
Shifting restlessly where she sat, Cassie almost knocked over her Styrofoam coffee cup where she’d placed it beside her on the bench. Catching it before it spilt, she set it straight again then dropped her untouched sandwich beside it with a sigh.
A squirrel scurried past them with its mouth stuffed with acorns. Cassie watched it disappear into a mound of fallen leaves at the base of a tree. It was busy, focused, absolutely certain about what it was doing and why it was doing it and she envied it that because she wasn’t sure about anything.
Why hadn’t he called as he’d promised? Was he with Pandora in Florence? Would he do that to her? Her head told her no. Her head told her that he possessed a perfectly acceptable and forgivable reason for what he’d done six years ago, but her emotions still clung to the hurt he’d inflicted on them when he’d told her to get lost in that phone call she’d made to him, and a need to maintain her defences so he couldn’t hurt her like that again.
She didn’t know him, not really, and he certainly didn’t know her. They were like two strangers linked by an act of fate that had given them equal shares in two children conceived during a single night of fabulous sex. Was that enough to warrant marriage between them? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to arrange joint custody with equal shares in the twins’ upbringing? Had she even agreed that she would marry him at all?
No, she hadn’t, and Sandro had no darn right to assume that she had done, or to leave her hanging in limbo like this.
‘And here’s the really interesting bit,’ Ella continued, sipping at her Styrofoam cup. ‘Just before I hauled you out here to grill you, I received a call from Gio, instructing me to clear your diary of all your appointments and to pass them to your shadow. Apparently the boss is—’
‘Standing right in front of you,’ Sandro’s own smooth, fabulously accented voice cut in.
Both heads shot up in unison, Ella choking back the words she had been about to speak, Cassie gripped by a shockingly violent surge of relief.
He looked so tall and lean and sense-stirringly vital, the dappling sunlight seeping down through the trees just loving his healthy, warm golden tan. His dark eyes glinted as he looked down at her through the framework formed by his luxurious eyelashes, which made the look frankly as sexy as hell. But his mouth wore a grim look of disapproval that made her suddenly stingingly aware of her old grey suit she’d flung on without much thought this morning, and the way she’d carelessly scraped back her hair. She even clenched her fingers to stop them from lifting up to check how untidy her hair actually was.
Whereas Sandro’s hair was fabulously groomed to suit his elegant features; same with the dark silk suit he was wearing that looked as though this was the first time it had ever seen the light of day. His shirt was white with a fine red stripe running through it, his slender silk tie a darker red colour that drew her unwilling gaze down its length until she met with the narrow bowl of his hips. And the power hinted at in his long, darksuited legs should be censored, she decided as her mouth ran dry and she had to drag her eyes away from him, restless fingers clenching even tighter because she wanted to rip the elegant suit of clothes right off him so she could look at the man.
The physically potent and sexual man.
She wanted him. It was that quick, that hot and violent. She wanted him naked and flat on his back somewhere. She wanted to check him all over with her eyes and her hands and her mouth.
‘Where have you been?’ The question shot from her more sharply than she intended.
Sandro wondered what she would say if he told her he’d spent the last three days closeted in his apartment with his brother, enduring a living kind of hell. It did not help his stinging conscience to know that his three days of hell had finally given him back his memory. Learning the truth—knowing the full truth at last about what had really taken place six years ago—did not alter the miserable fact that this woman he was looking at here, with her pale complexion and her dark green defensive eyes and her fragile, tense posture, had paid the full price for his own bloody sins.
‘Enjoying my last few days of freedom,’ he replied to her question with a grim satire that he knew would fly right over her head.
In Florence with Pandora? Cassie wondered. ‘Well, I hope it was worth it.’
‘Very much so,’ he assured—then he struck with the lightning speed of a jungle cat, bending to take hold of her by her shoulders and draw her to her feet.
Next thing Cassie knew she was plastered against him; a second after that and she was on the receiving end of a hot, very possessive and hungry kiss. Just like that, and out here in broad daylight with Ella looking on avidly, he explored her mouth with the determined intimacy of a man staking claim on what he perceived to be already his.
And Cassie didn’t just let him, she encouraged him, arching into his long length, letting her fingers trail up his jacket to his shoulders then further until they’d buried themselves in the silky black hair at his nape.
By the time he released her mouth she was weak and dizzy, her breathing a thick, gasping sound of complaint.
‘You missed me,’ he said with fierce satisfaction, sending a surge of heat pouring into her cheeks.
‘I was worried, that’s all. You said you would call me.’
‘Well, I’m fine and I’m here.’ He claimed her mouth for a second brief burn of possession. ‘Enjoy the rest of your lunch,’ he said to Ella then, and without so much as offering the other girl a glance he banded an arm across Cassie’s back and turned them around and walked them away.
‘That was just so rude!’ Cassie gasped out in protest.
‘Your friend has witnessed enough from us to make her flavour of the month at BarTec,’ Sandro countered arrogantly.
‘Ella isn’t a gossip.’
‘Then you can make it up to her by inviting her to our wedding.’
‘I haven’t said that I will marry you!’
‘But you will.’
He fed her into his waiting car before she could answer, forcing her to slither quickly across the seat again as he followed her inside. When she turned to face him, ready with a stinging objection to his cool assurance, Sandro was ready for it.
‘You prefer to hurt and disappoint our children?’ he challenged, settling his long frame into the plush leather seat.
‘I have a right to consider my own feelings too!’
‘Then perhaps you prefer me to use more ruthless methods to convince you,’ he offered, using those ink-dark eyes to convey his meaning to her.
He was talking about sex, reminding her of the clinch they’d just shared in the park and her own lack of control. Cassie’s lips parted and trembled revealingly. Heat drenched her bones. She could fight him any which way there was to fight him—except when he touched her. She hated the fact that Sandro knew it. This physical hold he had over her laid waste to the six years she’d spent rebuilding her respect for herself.
Sandro didn’t remember her but, like any good-looking, sexually active male, he could pick out an easy target and go for it—because it was there to take. The difference with her was that he was prepared to offer marriage because of this turn of fate that linked them via the twins. Without them she would be just another notch on his bedpost, another conquest to love and leave. And no amount of justification due to his lost memory was ever going to rid her of the gut feeling that even without the car crash he would have left her anyway.
I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Please don’t call this number again.
A shiver ran down the length of her taut backbone. Cassie wrenched her eyes away from him, wishing badly she could wipe those words from her memory, then maybe she wouldn’t feel so at war with herself, as well as with him.
Had he spent the las
t few days with Pandora?
Did she really want to know?
The car moved off with the smoothness of a thoroughbred. As they drove in front of the BarTec building, she remembered what Ella had told her just before Sandro had arrived to interrupt.
‘You’ve terminated my employment, haven’t you?’ The question left her husky and taut.
‘What makes you think that?’
Turning to look at him, she saw genuine curiosity glinting in his eyes and he even portrayed that sexily. Definitely at war with herself now, Cassie relayed what Ella had said about her shadow taking over her duties.
‘So you’ve decided I did this to pile the pressure on you?’
‘Well, didn’t you?’
He frowned with impatience. ‘You cannot commute to London from Florence, cara, and a more trusting woman would have worked that out for herself. But in answer to your accusation…no, I have not terminated your employment. You are merely on a few months’ leave in which to get married and resettle in another country. When you are ready—if you decide you want to continue to work—then we will find you a position in one of my organisations that work out of Florence.’ He waved a long-fingered hand. ‘It is a decision I will leave to you.’
Not even slightly mollified by that perfectly reasonable speech, ‘Gosh, my one small concession in a battery of your pre-decided edicts. Thank you!’ she said.
‘It was not a concession,’ he denied. ‘If you knew me better you would know I don’t make them…I actually believe you have a right of choice whether or not you want to continue to work after we marry.’
‘If I marry you.’ Cassie still couldn’t seem to stop hedging on that subject. It was as if some itchy instinct was obstinately stopping her from giving in to him. ‘And you can say what you like, Sandro, but the truth is that you want me cornered, isolated and helpless so I’ll stop arguing with you.’
He heaved out a heavy sigh. ‘If I was being that ruthless then it didn’t work! Believe it or not, I thought that we had the marriage issue tied up!’
Marchese's Forgotten Bride Page 11