Книга - Power: Marchese’s Forgotten Bride / Ruthlessly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded

Power: Marchese's Forgotten Bride / Ruthlessly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded
Michelle Reid

ABBY GREEN


Michelle Reid & Abby Green Sensational storytellersA stranger’s expecting his twinsWhen Alessandro Marchese strides into the offices of his latest acquisition, the tingling of Cassie’s skin tells her that her new boss is the man who left her pregnant with twins! But it seems he’s completely forgotten her – until now!Expecting the dark-hearted Italian’s heirMulti-millionaire Vincenzo Valentini sought out Cara Brosnan to make her pay for his sister’s downfall. He seduced innocent Cara and cruelly discarded her. To make matters worse, she’s just discovered she’s expecting and the ruthless Italian is claiming her again – this time as his bride!










There’s something very sexy about…

POWER



“Michelle Reid pens a spicy, volatile tale

with sizzling chemistry and extraordinary

characters.”

—RT Book Reviews

“This tear-jerker has layers of conflict but

will more than satisfy you in the end.”

—RT Book Reviews on Abby Green’s Ruthlessly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded

Two ravishing reads from terrific authors

Michelle Reid and Abby Green!


Power

Marchese’s Forgotten Bride

Michelle Reid

Ruthlessly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded

Abby Green






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


Marchese’s Forgotten Bride

Michelle Reid




About the Author


MICHELLE REID grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, the youngest in a family of five lively children. But now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire, with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet, and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning, and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without, and produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.


Dear Reader,

I was really pleased to learn that one of my books is being paired with a book by Abby Green in this new collection. As one of a string of fine newer authors to come into our Modern™ series in recent years, Abby is a big favourite of mine. Her vibrant, visual style of writing and passionate story telling appeals to the romance reader in me and I love her intense heroes and strong heroines who are not afraid to stand up for what they believe in.

So if you have not tried one of her books before, then it is my great pleasure to introduce you to Abby Green—I hope you enjoy both of our novels!

Warmest regards,

Michelle Reid




CHAPTER ONE


THE restaurant bar had become so crowded that Cassie discovered it was a struggle to lift her glass to her lips. Not that she minded standing there, soaking up the bright, noisy atmosphere, she told herself, eyes busily taking in the sight of her fellow workmates all dressed up in their best party glamour for this evening’s introductory treat laid on by their new boss.

It had been so long since she’d been to anything like this and it felt so good to be here. She’d even indulged in a frighteningly expensive new dress for herself, made of a smooth black-on-charcoal embossed silk, which skimmed her slender figure and felt fabulously stylish and chic. With her hair professionally cut and styled for the first time in years, now her pale golden locks felt wonderful as they brushed against her naked shoulders whenever she moved her head.

‘Your eyes are sparkling like big shiny emeralds,’ Ella remarked dryly beside her. ‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’

A brilliant smile enhanced the shape of Cassie’s roseglossed mouth. ‘I’d forgotten what it’s like to actually enjoy being a part of such a noisy, mad crush!’

‘Well, here’s to a lot more of the same now the twins are a bit older.’ Ella somehow managed to lift her glass high enough to chink it against Cassie’s. ‘No more skimping and saving and emulating an overworked drudge now you don’t need to pay those crazy pre-school nursery fees.’

‘From single working mum to wild party girl in one leap.’ Cassie laughed. ‘Do you want me to do a bit of husband hunting at the same time?’

‘God, no.’ Ella shuddered and Cassie watched a cloud settle across her friend’s pretty face.

Ella was fresh out of a long-term relationship with a guy who’d dumped her six weeks away from their wedding day with the classic—I’m just not ready to be tied down—excuse. Cassie knew exactly what that felt like—the dumping part anyway. Only in her case she’d been left pregnant with twins.

‘He’s history, Ella,’ she reminded her firmly, ‘forget about him.’

With a blink of her long black eyelashes Ella nodded, setting her bobbed dark hair swinging around her face. ‘Yes, I’ve moved on, haven’t I?’

Haven’t we both? Cassie thought. ‘With bells on,’ she agreed and gave their glasses a second chink. ‘Think huge great bodybuilder with the temperament of a pussycat instead of razor-sharp share-dealer with the genetic make-up of a slithery snake.’

Ella burst out laughing at the comparison between her current lover and the one that had got away. The sound of her laughter caught the attention of several people crushed in around them and with a shift of bodies their conversation changed to include those around them. The next few minutes went by with the easy camaraderie that came from people who worked in close proximity five days a week, and the party atmosphere moved up a gear with the help of the free-flowing wine. The crush tightened then eased and tightened again as people began to circulate.

‘When are they going to start herding us upstairs to eat?’ Ella sighed a while later. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I think we must be waiting for the new boss to arrive,’ Cassie said, squeezing a sip of wine from her glass.

‘Well, if it gets any more crowded in here we’ll be like sardines in a can,’ her friend complained, ‘although I wouldn’t mind playing sardines with the guy that’s just walked in here with our MD and a clutch of scary bigwig types…’

Turning her head to look in the direction that Ella was looking, Cassie just wasn’t prepared for what came next. Shock struck her blindside. For the next few horrible seconds she felt as if she were falling off the edge of a cliff! Her legs went hollow beneath her then started to fill up again from her toes with a tingling wild rush of hot static as instant recognition screamed through her head. She had not laid eyes on him in six long years, yet each lean, hard, vital inch of him battered her senses with a familiarity that dragged her heart to a shuddering stop.

And who could miss him? she thought helplessly as her heart lurched into action again with a blunt, hammering beat. He was so tall he stood a good head and shoulders above the others clustered around him, even with his dark head tilted down a little so he could hear what their short and portly MD was saying over the noisy buzz of conversation filling up the bar. Yet Cassie knew the top of that head; she knew it so intimately it could have been only an hour ago that she’d run her fingers through the thick layers of vibrant black silk. Her fingers even twitched tautly around her wineglass in stinging recognition, almost sending the glass and its contents crashing to the white marble floor beneath her strappy black mules.

‘Methinks we are getting our first eyeful of our new boss,’ Ella murmured beside her, ‘and just feel the change to the buzz in here…’

It took Cassie several seconds to absorb that piece of information because she was too busy trying to deal with the buzz going on inside herself.

‘No,’ she managed with a shivery cold whisper, ‘that isn’t him.’

‘Are you sure…?’ Ella took a moment to reassess the man in question, while all Cassie could do was to stand there, locked in her own private form of hell. Then, ‘No, it’s got to be him, Cassie,’ her friend determined. ‘That totally gorgeous piece of manhood just can’t go by any other name than the oh-so-sexy-sounding Alessandro Marchese.’

The name rolled off Ella’s tongue like a sensual fantasy. Cassie suffered a stinging, sharp jolt to her chest. Alessandro Marchese? Was Ella looking at a different man?

‘You mark my words, we are looking at a few billion dollars of hot Italian breeding standing over there, cara,’ Ella mocked dryly, ‘and, if I’m not mistaken, the lady in red clinging to his arm can match him gene for superior gene…’

The lady in red…

Wrenching her gaze sideways, Cassie confirmed that indeed she and Ella were looking at the same man as she stared at the fabulously beautiful, glossy black-haired creature wearing an exquisitely cut blood-red dress who was clinging to his arm while she listened to what the two men were saying. They looked at ease with each other—intimate—like two lovers who’d been lovers for a very long time.

And Ella was right, they did suit each other—in the same way that the name Alessandro Marchese suited him far better than the plain Sandro Rossi Cassie had known him by did!

As she dragged her eyes back to him, a burning, sick bitterness dried up her throat when she discovered that he’d lifted his head up and she was now getting a full-on view of his face—a face that had lost none of its raw masculine impact in the six years since she’d last looked at it, she acknowledged painfully. Those long, lazy eyelids, the straight, fleshless nose, the slender and firm yet shatteringly sensual mouth… Like someone harbouring a death wish, Cassie drank in the smooth stretch of gold skin across his stunning high cheekbones and the way his lavishly long and thick black eyelashes almost brushed against those stunning cheekbones as he turned a wry, sexy smile on the woman in the red dress.

If she’d had the strength in her legs she would be walking over there to slap that smile off his lying face! Alessandro Marchese… Who was he trying to kid? Was he a crook or something that he had to use an assumed name these days? Or was she the one who’d been lied to? The one who’d been sucked in by his fabulous dark looks and his gorgeously intense sincerity, the one who’d been so skilfully romanced and thoroughly seduced then left like an unwanted breakfast when he’d swanned off back to his native Italy to get on with his real life?

The sting of betrayal stalked down her backbone like taunting fingers as she studied the way he was standing there exuding the supremely relaxed self-assurance which came automatically to smooth-tongued, sexually confident brutes. Cassie hated him yet she could not stop herself from feasting on him, couldn’t stop her eyes from sliding down the column of his strong, bronzed throat to the width of his broad shoulders set inside a superbly crafted dark lounge suit, and across the white shirt that did absolutely nothing to subdue the hard-muscled power in his long, lean physique.

And she remembered it all, every intimate detail, from the hair-roughened power of his rich golden torso, with its satin-tight abdomen that felt like warm, living satin to touch, and the sleek, corded sinew which angled so dramatically down the narrow bowl of his hips to the—

She had to get out of here—

The need struck with a startling punch of delayed reaction that sent her slender body jerking up straight. As if he picked up the violence in her reaction, he lifted those heavy eyelids and looked directly into her face, forcing her into a head-on collision with a pair of piercingly deep-set blacker-than-black eyes that she’d wished, hoped, prayed she would never have to look into again!

Time suddenly ground to a shimmering standstill. The bright, noisy chatter filling the bar just stopped as if someone had thrown up a glass wall, shutting the two of them off from everyone else as six long years of grimly burying his memory shattered in the wild rush of images that began to rampage around her head.

Sandro laughing… Sandro smiling that dryly amused smile when she’d shyly tried to flirt with him… Sandro holding her… kissing her… Sandro oh, so gentle then turning hot and fierce and devouringly intense as they made love.

A shaft of pure sexual fire stroked right down her middle, catching Cassie out so badly she sucked in her breath. The breath forced her lips apart and made his fabulous eyelashes flicker as he honed his attention on to her mouth, and her whole body stung and tightened in direct response to that luminous dark glance. She didn’t want to feel like this. She wanted to be left cold by the sight of him and she was appalled that that was not how it was!

Like a man slowly tracking old pleasures, he lifted his gaze to take in the waterfall shine of her pale gold hair brushing against her trembling white shoulders, then dropped to where the strapless structure of her dress hugged the creamy thrust of her breasts. The message powering out of his eyes was so hot and so elementally sexual Cassie felt a terrible flush of agonised awareness prickle her fair skin. She wanted to cry out in shrill, pained, angry protest but she couldn’t. She had never felt so agonisingly exposed to her own wretched weakness in her entire life.

It did not occur to her that it had taken him this long to recognise her, until he finally lifted his eyes back to her eyes and she watched his lazy, searching expression alter to a look of shock. For the next few taut seconds she actually thought he was going to keel over, the way his eyes widened then turned as black as Hades and his face drained of its beautiful bronzed tan. She stopped breathing—she stopped doing anything—breathing, hearing, thinking…

Then he stiffened his long body up and abruptly turned his back on her, blanking her out with a cruel, ruthless economy that was like having a door slammed in her face.

Again.

Left totally, utterly stunned and shaken by the sheer brutality of his rejection, Cassie thought that she was the one going to faint. Someone accidentally knocked her arm, almost spilling her drink, but she barely noticed. Someone else spoke to her but she couldn’t work out a single word that they said. She knew she’d gone pale because she felt pale; a clammy kind of chill had settled over her flesh. And worse—much worse—was the way an already badly wounded part of her was cracking open like a fissure forming a fresh wound over a jagged old one in recognition that he could still do that to her after all of these years and here of all places, in full view of all her work colleagues.

Somehow—she didn’t really know how—she managed to turn away from him. She managed to draw in a few shallow breaths. She was feeling so badly shaken up inside it took all her control not to start moving like a battering ram in her desperation to get out of the now suffocating crush.

‘Do you think they’ll let us go and eat now?’ she heard Ella murmur wistfully.

And it came as a further shock to realise that the whole shattering incident must have only lasted a few seconds. ‘Yes,’ she breathed like a metal-encased robot set on automation.

Who was she…?

The question lit up Alessandro’s brain like a bolt of lightning and sent a too-familiar pain whipping across the front of his head, forcing him to lift a hand up to rub at his brow.

And he felt weird, as if something was scooping him out from the inside.

Could instant sexual attraction be so strong it could threaten to take the legs from beneath you? he wondered. It was years—he couldn’t remember the last time the sight of a beautiful woman had felled him so completely as the blonde had just done. And he was angry with himself for letting it happen here of all places, with a woman who’d just become one of the newest members of his international workforce. It was unprofessional—and damned inconvenient when he—

‘Headache, Alessandro?’ Always aware of any change in his mood, Pandora spoke, her voice reaching him softly laced with concern.

‘No.’ Dropping the hand from his face, he found himself turning to narrow another look at the blonde.

Even her rear view sent that same instant shaft of fire burning through him, almost knocking him sideways with its power. And her hair—her hair… there was something about the colour of her hair and the way it caressed her slender white shoulders—

‘You’ve gone a worrying shade of pale, cara,’ Pandora persisted. ‘Are you sure you—?’

‘Jet lag,’ he dismissed with irritation, most of his attention still fixed on the blonde. ‘We have just arrived here straight off a fifteen-hour flight. Don’t fuss, Pandora. You know it annoys the hell out of me.’

Who was she…? And why was he getting this gut-shaking feeling that he had seen her somewhere before…?

‘And you worked instead of resting…’ His companion ignored his warning. ‘One day, Alessandro, you will—’

Beside him, Jason Farrow suddenly clapped his hands together, drowning out the rest of what Pandora was saying and making Alessandro fight the need to wince as the unwelcome sound crashed through his aching head.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I please have your attention?’ the current MD of BarTec prompted, causing silence to fold around the room as everyone looked expectantly in their direction.

Grimly trying to shake off the strange sensations running through him, Alessandro took in the full impact of a hundred pairs of eyes honed exclusively on him.

He knew her. The more he thought about it the more sure he became that he’d met her somewhere before. Her pale golden hair, her luminous green eyes, her full, soft, sexy pink mouth… He tried not to frown as he tracked through his memory banks looking for clues as to how or where he knew her, with that weird, hollowing-out feeling increasing as he did.

Her gently moulded cheekbones and small, straight nose, her cute, slightly pointed chin…

He disentangled himself from Pandora’s clinging hand, shocked suddenly by how appalled he felt to have her show such intimacy with him.

‘Can I ask you all to offer a warm welcome to the new owner of BarTec, Alessandro Marchese…?’

Having been forced to turn around again, Cassie saw that Sandro—or whatever it was he called himself these days—was still frowning as if something had thoroughly ruined his day. Well, join the club, she thought as a flow of acid contempt for him thankfully cleared out her battered feelings of hurt and dismay. Who the heck did he think he was that he felt he had the right to blank her as if she were nobody?

She listened to the second wave of applause ripple through the bar area, though she didn’t bother to join in. She would rather cut off her hands than applaud this man. She hated him. Now that she was looking at him without the first incapacitating rush of shock cluttering up her emotions, she was remembering just how much she hated and despised Sandro Rossi—or, in this case, Alessandro Marchese.

‘Grazie molto per la vostra accoglienza calorosa…’ the man himself responded in a rich, deep, sensually delivered Italian which caused a collective gasp of delicious appreciation from the females present in the bar, while his beautiful companion touched his arm and murmured something to him that turned his frown to a grimace, then a short second later into a smile that clutched Cassie’s stomach muscles in a vice-like grip and just captivated everyone else.

‘My apologies,’ he murmured, ‘allow me to repeat that in English… Thank you very much for your warm welcome…’

‘Oh, my,’ Ella breathed beside Cassie. ‘Now, that was very, very sexy indeed. Do you think he deliberately set out to disarm us all with the piece of theatre?’

Probably, Cassie thought cynically, fighting to keep her bitter feelings from showing on her face. In truth she was surprised the sharp-eyed Ella hadn’t noticed what had been passing between her best friend and their new boss—surprised that the whole darn room hadn’t noticed!

Sandro was now busy charming everyone as he mapped out his plans for the company, and he did it by conveying an air of smoothly polished self-assurance aimed to allay everyone’s fears about their future at BarTec. Lowering her eyes, Cassie listened without really hearing, unwillingly tuned in to the flowing resonance of his voice but without catching more than the odd word because her mind was elsewhere, rolling back the years to a time when she’d first heard that voice.

It hadn’t changed—he hadn’t changed. Whatever he preferred to call himself these days, he was still the man who’d used those sexy dark base tones and his easy-going charm to make her fall in love with him before casting her aside once he’d enjoyed the pleasures of her body, leaving her desolate, pregnant and alone.

A second crash of applause woke her up with a shudder. Sandro had finished speaking and was now smiling down at the woman in the red dress. Cassie wanted to leave. It was horrible just how badly she wanted to just walk through that door and go. But Sandro was still blocking the exit along with his cluster of smartly dressed minions, who all looked as slick and as sharp as he did.

Could she squeeze past them without him noticing? Would he care that she was leaving if she did? The sizzle of temptation fizzed through her body alongside the angry bitterness already swimming through it.

‘At last we get to be fed.’ Ella’s dry comment forced her to take note of the way everyone was beginning to make a move towards the stairs which led to the restaurant above, and grim common sense arrived as Cassie felt herself swept up in the general exodus.

She knew she could not afford the luxury of just walking out of here. She needed her job at BarTec. She did not need the rash of questions bound to fly at her if she did decide to go.

Tagging along beside Ella, she listened to her friend chattering away ten to the dozen about their gorgeously interesting new boss to those crowded around them while Cassie just felt completely shut off.

I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Please don’t ring this number again…

Those cold words of rejection echoed around her head. From fierce, dark, passionate lover to contemptuous stranger in the blink of an eyelash. To hell with the fact that he’d been her first lover, or that he’d left her pregnant and terrified and bewildered. Sandro had taught her the hardest way possible that men like him had no conscience whatsoever when it came to pursuing a woman they desired until they’d caught her, and no honour at all when it came to dumping them after their desire had been slaked.




CHAPTER TWO


CASSIE and Ella found themselves placed at the same table in the farthest corner of the restaurant along with the rest of their colleagues from the accounts department. The only stranger at the table was a very good-looking, smartly presented man who introduced himself as, ‘Gio Rozario, one of Alessandro’s team.’

The meal progressed through its different courses with everyone firing eager questions at him, which he fielded with friendly ease and a return volley of questions of his own. He seemed genuinely interested in all of them. He charmed them all the way his employer had done downstairs in the bar.

Barely touching her food, Cassie watched and listened and contributed very little. She’d already noted that each table had at least one team member sitting at it, and it didn’t take many brain cells to work out that the seating had been intentionally arranged this way so the spies in their midst could gather in information and impressions about BarTec employees, which they were bound to feed back to their boss.

In other words, the Marchese mob was deep into work mode while the rest of them were off-duty and off-guard. Clever, she thought grudgingly. The wine was still flowing freely and she would be prepared to bet that by the time this evening was over few of them would walk out of here with many secrets intact.

Without her wanting them to do it, her eyes drifted across the room to the huge circular table set in the middle of the restaurant where her one major secret sat dining with the members of the board. He looked relaxed, like his team, in control of the conversation happening around him—a smooth and sophisticated corporate giant with the body of an athlete and the profile of a heartbreaker.

And he had the same vibrant dark hair and eyes as Anthony…

Oh, God—not bothering to fight the need to escape any longer, Cassie got to her feet. ‘Excuse me,’ she mumbled, ‘I need to visit the ladies’ room,’ then she picked her up her evening purse and walked blindly towards the stairs.

Under cover of his half-lowered eyelids, Alessandro watched the slender blonde traverse the room towards the stairwell. She must be going to use the wash room which was situated downstairs in the bar area, he judged, tension singing along the corded sinew of his groin as he followed the sensual grace with which she moved.

This first full view he’d had of her without the crush blotting most of her out sent his gaze flowing down the delicate curves of her slim figure displayed inside the little grey and black dress she was wearing that did a lot to enhance the creamy smoothness of her skin. Fine-boned, he observed, slightly built with a nicely curving, neat behind and fabulous long legs with neat ankles elevated by the heels of her shiny black mules.

She started walking down the staircase, her silky, pale hair swinging forward as she bent her head to watch her footing on the shiny white marble steps, an elegant white hand reaching out to grasp the banister rail. Something stung across his front, like sensual fingernails scoring the hairs covering his chest, and once more the bolt of lightning shot through his head.

He frowned, having to fight the need to lift his hand up and rub at his aching brow again. At the bend in the staircase he saw her stop to fumble in her evening bag and watched her lift a mobile phone to her ear.

Who was it she wanted to talk to? A lover? A husband?

Lips flattening back against his teeth, he wished he knew why the prospect of either was having a gut-grinding effect on him.

‘Cassie Janus,’ Jason Farrow inserted smoothly beside him.

Forced to look in the other man’s direction, Alessandro schooled his expression to reveal absolutely nothing but a mild question as to what it was the other man was talking about.

‘I noticed your interest earlier,’ the current MD confided as if it should earn him brownie points.

Sandro said nothing, though he was absolutely sure Jason Farrow had not said all that he wanted to say. And anyway, he was waiting to find out if the name Cassie Janus made some kind of connection in him.

It didn’t.

‘She heads our accounts team,’ the older man supplied helpfully. ‘Has a mind like a calculator, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her, heh?’

Alessandro had been predisposed to dislike Jason Farrow before he’d even met him but that sexist remark tied it up for him. If Farrow had dared to add a conspiratorial wink Alessandro suspected he would have stood up and hit him.

A company the size of BarTec was small fry by comparison to the big fish he usually liked to bury his teeth into. However, the company had developed some ground-breaking technology in microelectronics he would much rather have safely caught under the Marchese umbrella than let his competitors get hold of it. So when Angus Barton decided to sell BarTec due to ill health, he’d jumped at the chance to buy him out. Angus was a close friend of his late father’s. Even if he had not been interested in anything BarTec had to offer he would have lifted the load of responsibility from Angus’s weary shoulders based on that long friendship alone. It was Angus who’d confessed he’d made some rash decisions during the months before he decided it was time to sell. Elevating Jason Farrow to the position of managing director had been one of those decisions. ‘He’s a self-opinionated bully. He certainly bullied me, anyway.’ The sad grimace his father’s old friend had offered up had not been a comfortable thing to behold because it had shown a man who knew he was losing the will to fight his many battles.

This evening had been arranged as a way of easing the troubled minds of those employees important to him, as to what he meant to do with the company, and to weed out those who were not going to make it beyond the scrutiny of his team. Jason Farrow was fast becoming the name at the top of that throw-away list. He looked what he was, a well-shod, well-fed, self-promoting dinosaur who dared to see power in voicing such observations to him. When he got to know him better, he would learn the hard way that it wasn’t the case.

As it was… ‘You have a problem with women in the working environment?’ Alessandro prompted casually.

‘God, no, they lighten my day!’ Farrow declared with a nerve-needling grin. ‘Though I still have to be convinced that women are capable of giving one hundred per cent to their careers, female hormones being what they are,’ he confided. ‘Cassie’s situation makes her one of the luckier ones working at BarTec—she was Angus’s little pet. Angus employed her when really she wasn’t up to taking on the commitment required of her. Still—’ Farrow shrugged, unaware that Sandro’s eyes had lowered and narrowed as he bit back the desire to question Farrow further as to what stopped Cassie Janus from giving her full commitment to her job. ‘That’s what you get when you let personal feelings get in the way of good business sense,’ BarTec’s managing director continued in a slightly peevish tone. ‘I had a much better candidate lined up for Cassie’s job but Angus knew her late father, so…’

Behind his lowered eyelids Alessandro’s brain shut out the rest of what Farrow was saying when his instincts suddenly sharpened on what he saw as a link between himself and the woman who’d managed to knock his senses for six.

Angus… Had he met her during one of his weekend stays with Angus Barton?

‘You of all people must agree that there is no place in business for sentimentality,’ he tuned back in to catch. ‘She’s easy on the eyes, as you’ve already noticed, but a pretty face and figure can be a distraction best kept out of the office, in my opinion.’

Alessandro had heard enough. ‘Pandora…’ he drawled to catch the attention of the member of his team sharing this table with him.

Pandora Batiste turned her glossy dark head and smiled the kind of naturally sensual smile that had the power to blow most men’s libido to bits.

‘Tell Mr Farrow what you do to earn the outrageous annual salary I pay to you,’ Alessandro urged casually.

Pandora laughed. ‘Outrageous indeed. I earn every euro and you know it, Alessandro,’ she scolded him, then turned her drop-dead smile on Jason Farrow. ‘As from Monday morning you and I will be working closely together to make my transition into Angus Barton’s venerable shoes as painless for everyone as we can possibly make it, Mr Farrow,’ she enlightened. ‘I hope I can rely on your loyalty and support…’

The message was as clear as the ruddy hue that flooded into Jason Farrow’s face. He was about to find out the tough way that there was indeed no room for sentimentality or distraction in business with the beautiful Pandora around to pull rank on him.

Alessandro picked up his barely touched glass of wine and rose to his feet. ‘If you will excuse me, it’s time for me to circulate,’ he murmured smoothly and strode off, grimly satisfied Farrow had received a mental kick in the teeth in return for his sexist remarks and for bullying Angus.

Angus… His frown came back as he crossed the stairwell, aware that his feet wanted to take him down those stairs to confront Cassie Janus about his suspicion that they’d met before but even more aware that with Farrow’s eyes burning a hole in his back he could not afford to be seen to be singling her out.

She was a distraction, he acknowledged, if only to himself. And why did Farrow believe he had a right to question her commitment to the company? Was this a case of another rash decision Angus had made as his illness began to take hold?

Cassie was standing in the now-empty bar area with her eyes closed as she listened to the soothing voice Jenny, her next-door neighbour, was using to reassure her that the twins were OK. ‘All tucked up in bed and fast asleep,’ Jenny told her. ‘They’ve been absolute angels. You should let me do this for you more often, Cassie. It’s a real treat for me to play granny when my own grandchildren are so far away. And I have to admit,’ she added with a chuckle, ‘it’s lovely to be able to watch anything I like on television other than Larry’s endless football.’

The angels had been angels because Cassie had witnessed the deal being struck between them and Jenny when they thought she wasn’t paying attention. Having eagerly presented Jenny with a box of chocolates, the twins had then gone into a dance of miming appeals which translated as ‘Just one chocolate each without Mummy knowing and we’ll go to bed when you say’. Jenny had played along with them, of course, and of course Cassie had let them get away with it. She now had this cosy image of her next-door neighbour stretched out in the stuffed old armchair in front of the TV set with her shoes off and her feet resting on top of the old coffee table while the box of half-ravaged chocolates rested conveniently on her lap.

‘So what did you decide to watch?’ she asked, feeling a smile relax some of the tension from her mouth at last.

Jenny named a romantic movie from the stack she’d brought with her. ‘You don’t rush back home, now,’ she ordered. ‘I’m nicely set up here for at least a week! Oh, and Bella said, if you rang, to remind you to take a photo of your new boss on your phone so she can see what he looks like!’

Well, that was a promise she was going to break, Cassie thought bleakly as she put her phone away. Nothing on this earth was going to make her risk her sharp-eyed daughter noting the similarities between her twin brother, Anthony, and Alessandro Marchese.

She even shivered at the prospect as she made herself go back up to the restaurant. The first thing she saw as she turned the bend in the stairs was Sandro standing by one of the tables across the room. Her gaze swept down the length of his back and his long, powerful legs trapped inside the elegant cut of his suit, then stayed lowered, her lips pressing together as she walked back to her own table and slipped into her seat as a burst of laughter erupted across the room.

‘That guy knows how to make a good first impression,’ she heard Ella say.

‘Alessandro believes a relaxed and friendly working environment aides good will and increased productivity,’ Gio Rozario responded loyally. ‘You will like him, I promise you.’

I just bet, thought Cassie, unable to stop herself from watching Sandro move on to the next table and realising belatedly what he was doing. He was visiting each table in turn and she’d badly timed the moment she’d used the loo excuse because it was clear that he was moving around in this direction.

Now she was trapped, and knowing it heightened her tension to a point that she became acutely aware of his every move, every smooth syllable in his deeply modulated and beautifully accented voice. Each table he approached his designated spy came respectfully to his or her feet, then followed through by introducing each individual at the table complete with a pocket résumé, which fed Sandro fodder to weave into his disarming charm aimed to put everyone at ease with him.

Cassie was impressed by his tactics, though she didn’t want to be. She was annoyed with herself for the way her senses were sending tingling shock waves to every nerve-ending the closer to their table he came.

‘Does he hire himself out?’ Ella murmured curiously. ‘I could do with someone like him around the next time I visit my family.’

Gio—they’d already been told to use his first name—laughed. ‘Ask him,’ he invited. ‘Alessandro is pretty good with families, coming from a large one himself. Good at smooth set-downs too.’

He’s pretty good with families…? Cassie felt a bubble of hysteria rise to her throat. For a horrible moment she thought it was going to break free. Then her slender spine stiffened as she picked up Sandro’s presence arriving at the table directly behind her. She could even smell his subtly unique scent and feel the heat from his body, he was standing so close to the back of her chair.

Why Sandro? she asked herself tautly while everyone else was busy talking, joining in the light banter Gio Rozario and Ella were generating between the two of them. Why did he have to be the new owner of BarTec?

A flood of laughter suddenly erupted from the other table, encouraged to do so by a final comment made by the big man himself, then Cassie felt him turn to face them. Like a puppet pulled by his master’s strings, Gio rose to his feet.

Snatching her hands down onto her lap, she balled them together in a tense-fingered clench as she listened to Gio begin the round of smoothly toned introductions and just prayed the screaming tension she was feeling was not showing in her posture or her face. He was standing so close to her one of his long, powerful thighs was in danger of brushing her naked shoulder so the skin there itched and tingled with tension and burned as it absorbed his body heat.

Gio’s short potted history of each one of them was handed to his employer with a light touch which gave Sandro clues as to what to say to put each person at ease. He was fabulous at it, a true social connoisseur with that beautifully relaxed tone of voice and an accent that could probably turn the hardest female to melting mush. Half a dozen times Cassie tensed up inside when he reached out with an arm across her shoulder to shake the hand held out opposite her. Each time her awareness of him intensified to a place somewhere between a wildly hot resentment and sizzling self-defence.

Had he done it deliberately? Had he chosen to stand directly behind her chair so he could put off until the very last moment the point when he had to look her full in the face and acknowledge her?

‘Ella Cole…’ She picked up Gio’s voice as if from a foggy distance. ‘Ella is, she assures me, the lynchpin which keeps the accounts department running smoothly.’

‘A secretarial tyrant in other words,’ Ella happily described herself. ‘Scary but nice,’ she added as Cassie watched with the unblinking eyes of a bat as that long-fingered hand attached to a luxuriously dark silk-suited arm swept across her front to take Ella’s hand.

It would be her turn next. She was the only one left. She was about to be forced into touching the hand that knew her body more intimately than any other man’s hand, and she didn’t know if she could bear it, didn’t know if she could bring herself to touch him, be polite to him, pretend that all of this hurt and bitterness and anger crawling around inside her wasn’t there.

‘And Cassandra Janus.’ Cassie tuned in to the sound of her own name being spoken, and felt a sickening tension grab her stomach as Sandro took a step to one side of her chair so that he could face her side-on.

This was it, she warned herself. Any second now he was going to offer her that hand and she was going to have to accept it—look up into his handsome, lying face and—

‘Cassie is the bright new star in the accounts team…’ Gio explained as the hand oh, so predictably appeared in front of her.

Cold now, so cold her fingers would not allow her to straighten them out of the tense clench she held them in, Cassie flicked her eyes up to his face. It was like being hit full on by six long years of agony. This close up he was even more shockingly spectacular to look at than she’d allowed herself to remember.

‘Cassandra Janus…’he repeated slowly, turning Janus into the evocatively sexy Janoos the way he had used to do all those years ago, which dried Cassie’s throat until she felt parched. And his eyes, those deep-set, heavy-lidded, rich dark brown eyes, were daring to look at her with such cool, polite interest as he added, ‘I feel I should know the name from somewhere… Have we met before by any chance?’

Had they met before…? Was he joking? Or was this his ruthless way of warning her to take care what she said? Dear God, Cassie thought as hysteria almost erupted from her in a shriek of high-pitched laughter.

Having to draw on every ounce of composure she had stored in her, ‘No,’ she managed as calmly as she could do, ‘we haven’t met before, Mr Marchese.’

Deliberately ignoring the way she’d all but bitten his name out, ‘Alessandro, please,’ he invited.

Cassie throbbed where she sat. He would have to nail her to a wall and threaten to throw knives at her before she’d call him by that name, she vowed fiercely. What did he want from her—blood?

And that hand still waited for her to place her own in it. Feeling light-headed with tension now, she managed somehow to uncurl her cold fingers and lift her hand to place it in his. An instant rush of electric recognition shot up her arm to gather like a hovering bullet just behind her ribs, close to her madly hammering heart.

As if he felt it too, his strong fingers closed over hers more tightly than they should.

‘Angus headhunted Cassie from Jay Digital a year ago,’ his spy continued with his pocket résumé with no clue as to what was passing between his boss and Cassie, ‘which was probably the best move Angus ever made. I have been reliably informed that what Cassie does not know about financial performance and risk management could be written on the back of a postage stamp.’

‘Interesting…’ Sandro murmured, making Cassie cringe inside her own skin because he already knew she’d been studying for a MBA part-time when they’d met.

Yet she vaguely suspected that he’d barely heard a word that Gio was saying. His eyes still burned into her eyes, her hand still lay captive in his. And the electric tension they were generating between them just kept on building and building, dragging a frail, shaken breath from Cassie’s lips. His ridiculously long eyelashes flickered as he lowered his gaze to her parted mouth and she shivered.

She watched a frown begin to crease his smooth features.

‘Cassie is also one of those highly admirable people that successfully juggles the demands of her career with the demands of being mother to five-year-old twins,’ Gio Rozario continued like a well-programmed robot.

Hearing the twins mentioned snapped Cassie back to reality. Unable to stop the bitter flash that spun out of her eyes into his, she snatched her hand back then dropped it onto her lap, where she returned it to a tense-fisted clench.

What happened next was pure drama. No one expected it. Certainly not Cassie, who was in the process of dragging her gaze away from his.

She heard a groan, felt Sandro grab the back of her chair with his hand and flicked a glance up to his face in time to catch the shaft of pain that creased it, followed by his swiftly draining pallor, just before she felt her chair start to shift.

After that she had no time to register anything because her chair was being pulled right out from beneath her and somehow she was on her feet, trembling and shaking and staring as six feet four inches of powerfully built male dropped like a stone, taking her chair with him, to end up stretched out between two tables near her feet!

One of those dreadful pin-drop silences hung for a second. The whole thing was so out of the ordinary and bizarre, the entire room just froze in a breathless wait for him to curse or something then climb back to his feet.

But he didn’t move, and in the next few skin-flaying seconds it took Cassie to register that he looked horribly lifeless, the rest of the room was erupting in a cacophony of sound that shattered the silence.

Gasps, cries, chairs screeching on the white marble flooring—she was vaguely aware of being pressed to one side as Gio rushed past her, followed closely by a flash of red. Shocked murmurs of, ‘Did he slip?’ ‘Is he drunk?’ ‘Why isn’t he moving?’ ricocheted off Cassie’s buzzing eardrums and she blinked, her shocked eyes swimming into focus on the crouching huddle that was Gio and the woman in red kneeling beside Sandro, urgently yanking at his tie and the collar of his shirt.

He looked grey—he looked dead.

Cassie heaved in a deep, thick, gasping breath of air and out of nowhere, just nowhere, she whispered, ‘Sandro,’ and was falling to her knees, all but knocking Gio sideways in her urgency to get to him.

‘Sandro!’ She cried out his name again, and sent a second shock wave rampaging around the stunned assembly.




CHAPTER THREE


‘EXPLAIN to us what happened back there, Cassie.’

For such an outwardly genial character Gio Rozario had suddenly developed a core of steel. He was leaning against the edge of the desk in the restaurant owner’s tiny back office, into which he’d hustled her, having been forced to bodily remove her from Sandro’s prostrate form.

Standing beside Gio was the woman in the red dress who’d joined them a few seconds later. For such a beautiful creature, Pandora Batiste—as she’d introduced herself—had a way of turning her liquid brown eyes into glass, Cassie noticed as she gave a helpless shake of her head.

‘I can’t explain it,’ she answered, still so badly shaken by what had happened that she couldn’t keep her shivering limbs still where she sat.

‘You dived on him,’ Gio described.

Her mouth trembled, cold and shivery like the rest of her because she still—still couldn’t shrug off those horrifying seconds when she’d thought that Sandro had dropped down dead at her feet.

Because she’d wished for it—oh, so many times over the last six years when things had been tough for her—she’d wished with all of her aching heart to see Sandro dead at her feet.

‘So did you,’ she fed back, staring down at her right palm, which still pulsed with the reassuring beat of Sandro’s heart from when she’d laid it against his chest.

‘I know him, you do not,’ Gio argued. ‘Or we assumed you did not,’ he then amended after a pause. ‘He spoke to you…’

Cassie closed her eyes and saw the deep, dark chasms of Sandro’s eyes when he’d opened them and looked into her face. ‘Cassie—Madre di Dio…’ he’d mouthed weakly, then he’d closed his eyes again and Gio had pulled her away from him.

‘Please,’ she said anxiously, ‘will one of you go and find out how he is?’

‘You called him Sandro,’ Pandora Batiste took over, ignoring Cassie’s plea. ‘Nobody calls him Sandro. He despises it. He has been known to blow into a spectacular rage if he’s ever referred to by that name. So why did you—a supposed stranger to him—feel free to use it?’

A wry kind of smile tilted Cassie’s tense, pale lips. It was news to her that Sandro held such an aversion to the name, since it was he who’d given it to her in the first place. Call me Sandro. Will you allow me to buy you lunch? A coffee, then? OK, may I just sit here and worship in silence…?

‘You know each other,’ the glassy eyed beauty insisted. ‘I witnessed your initial shock when you first caught sight of him in the bar. I felt Alessandro’s shock when he saw you.’

With an effort Cassie lifted up her face to look at them both standing there, leaning against the desk with their arms folded and their eyes fixed on her while she sat shivering on her chair.

It annoyed her. Their whole superior and dominating attitude infuriated her. ‘You have no right to interrogate me like this,’ she protested.

‘We are not interrogating you,’ Gio denied the charge, ‘we are simply concerned about what took place and—’

‘Curious,’ Cassie amended curtly, feeling a return of some much-needed mental strength, ‘but I will not have this conversation with you,’ she informed the two of them. ‘And I would be more impressed by your so-called concern for Sandro if you were out there with him instead of in here with me.’

‘Alessandro is being taken care of—’ It was Pandora Batiste who stressed the name.

‘How can you know that?’ Cassie looked at her. ‘I would have thought your time could be better spent finding out why he passed out like he did!’

‘That’s what we’re doing—’

‘No, you’re not. You’re trying to bully information out of me that you have no right to demand. Is he drunk?’ she asked sharply then. ‘Has Sandro turned into a drunk, as well as a—?’

‘As well as a what?’ a different voice prompted from behind her.

Shooting to her feet, Cassie spun around to find the man himself standing in the office doorway. Her throat dried up. He looked dreadful, still as pale as death even if he was standing on his own two feet. And his eyes were too dark—as black as deep caverns hollowed into his skull.

‘Are you all right?’ She couldn’t stop the strained question from leaving her aching throat.

He didn’t answer. Flattening out his mouth, he just moved his eyes away from her to look at his two assistants and dismissed them with the barest shift of his dark head.

‘Damage control,’ he instructed as they both shot away from the desk in unison. ‘Jet lag, migraine—I don’t care what excuse you use so long as you make it convincing,’ he added as they walked towards him, ‘then find me a route out of here that does not require an audience.’

The door closed behind their retreating figures, leaving Cassie blinking at the mute obedience Sandro had commanded from them. If Pandora Batiste was his lover then she had to be a pretty darn subservient lover to take that kind of attitude on her beautiful chin.

As he returned his gaze to Cassie, she felt her own small chin shoot upwards in a defiant gesture brought on by what she had just witnessed. She was regretting now that she’d asked him how he was feeling, because he was clearly very all right, going by that tough performance. And if he was standing there like that and looking at her like that because he intended to bully her around in the same way, then he had another think coming.

Tension sparked in the atmosphere, generated mostly by her defiant stance. And still he said nothing, just slowly drifted his eyes over her as if he was carefully dissecting her inch by nerve-stripping inch.

How old was he now? she questioned as she suffered his scrutiny without allowing herself to flinch. Thirty-two—thirty-three? If he’d told her the truth about his age six years ago, that was. He’d given her a different name, so why not a different age? Anyway he looked years older right now as he stood there, leaning heavily against the door and with his face still drawn by the ravages of whatever it was that had sent him crashing to the ground in the first place.

Nor did he look so sensationally elegant, she noticed, her eyelashes flickering as she glanced down to where his shirt hung open at its snowy white collar and the knot of his tie rested low on his chest.

‘You have not answered my question.’

Cassie lifted her cool gaze back to his. ‘I have absolutely nothing to say to you,’ she informed him.

‘You had plenty to say to my two assistants.’

‘You think so?’ Her arms snapped up to wrap around her narrow ribcage in a piece of body language that had to be screaming self-protection at him. ‘Then why don’t you go and ask them for your answers so you won’t need to hold any kind of conversation with me?’

There was a short silence while his eyes narrowed. Her insides started to sting as if she were being attacked by a swarm of bees. ‘You are very hostile,’ he murmured eventually.

‘Yes, aren’t I?’ Cassie agreed. ‘And you don’t think I should be?’

To her surprise he offered up a gut-stingingly attractive half-twist of a smile. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not sure.’

Baffled by that answer, Cassie pressed her lips together and waited to find out where he intended to go with this weird conversation. She had been expecting anger, she’d been expecting threats. He couldn’t want the ugly truth about the real him to come out because it would tarnish his super-charming image. Closeting himself away in this room with her was, in her view, only helping to increase the fever of speculation that must already be rife out there.

‘Look,’ she said when she couldn’t stand the silence between them any longer, ‘neither of us wants this confrontation, Sandro. So why don’t you move away from the door and I’ll just leave?’

‘Sandro,’ he echoed and uttered an odd laugh, then he lifted his hand to rub at his forehead when it suddenly creased with pain again, triggering a twinge of concern inside Cassie she did not want to feel.

‘I think you need to sit down,’ she advised stiffly.

‘Mmm,’ he responded but made no move to leave the door.

Watching him rub at his brow for a few seconds longer, she let out a sigh and gave in to the growing pulse of concern that was nagging at her. Picking up the chair she had been sitting in earlier, she carried it across the room to set it down against the wall next to the door.

‘Here,’ she said abruptly. ‘Sit down before you fall down again.’

When he swayed a little she was compelled to reach out and grasp his arm. Firm, warm skin and solid muscle flexed against her palm and her fingers as he allowed her to guide him into the chair, folding his long body down onto it before leaning forward to rest his forearms on his knees.

‘My apologies,’ he said as Cassie snatched her hand away, his voice sounding thick and slurred.

Cassie said nothing, hating what was running through her now because it was all too complicatedly wrapped up in her son and the way Anthony could look when he was feeling poorly but trying his hardest to deny there was anything wrong with him until she gave him no choice but to accept it.

‘I am not drunk,’ this father of her children insisted from under cover of his massaging fingers.

So he’d heard her say that? ‘Fine,’ she responded. ‘Whatever…’ she added with a heck of a lot more indifference because she didn’t like the way she was beginning to feel.

‘I do not drink alcohol,’ he persisted, probably driven to do so by her tone. ‘If you had been observing me during the evening you might have noticed that I still had the same glass of wine I began the evening with… until it smashed to the ground when I did, of course,’ he added with a dryness which seemed to give him back some energy, and he straightened in the chair.

He still looked like death. Cassie suppressed the need to shudder. ‘Then you’re sick,’ she said, ‘and if you’re sick you need to see a doctor.’

‘Sí,’ he acknowledged. ‘I will do so after we talk…’

That threat alone was enough to slam all her defences right back into place again. She tensed up, her body going rigid inside the little black dress. ‘I don’t think so,’ she refused.

‘You know me, yes?’ he persisted. ‘But for some reason you prefer to deny it.’

‘What is this?’ Cassie flashed out on a flare of anger. ‘Some kind of weird game you’re trying to play with me, or has your English deteriorated along with your ability to stand up on your own?’

He stood up, long, powerful legs thrusting up off the chair without a hint of a stagger, and, letting out a sharp gasp, Cassie was suddenly regretting the taunt when she found herself standing toe to toe with the lean, hard, very vital version of Sandro towering over her, as intimidating as hell.

‘This is no game, I promise you,’ he stated grimly. ‘You speak to me as if I am your enemy. What is it you are trying to hide?’

‘I’m trying to hide something?’ Cassie’s green eyes opened wide. ‘Let’s get this straight, Sandro. You blanked me! You turned your back on me! When you had no choice but to face me at the table you greeted me like I was some absolute stranger then still had the damn barefaced cheek to ask me if we’d met before!’

‘So you do know me!’ Something bright burned out of the centre of his eyes and he stepped even closer, almost blocking out the light in the tiny back room.

Cassie started trembling, her senses clamouring like maniacs because he was too close now and they certainly knew him. They could feel him, smell him, even taste him. Six years without her so much as setting eyes on him meant absolutely nothing to them, she was discovering, especially when she had never let another man get this close to her since him!

‘Back off,’ she urged, turning her hands into ready clenched fists tucked tightly in against her ribs.

He didn’t seem to hear her, and his colour was coming back, pouring rich olive tones into his skin, the power emanating from him now showing no hint of the weakness he had been displaying a minute before. ‘You know me,’ he repeated as if it was some kind of major breakthrough. ‘What I need to know is how you know me!’

‘I don’t know you, Mr Alessandro Marchese,’ Cassie flared up in hot opposition to his intimidating stance. ‘Briefly, however, I used to know a real rat of a man called Sandro Rossi!’

There—it was out. He’d made her say it.

‘Happy now?’ Her green eyes blistered him a hostile glance. ‘Though, why you needed me to admit to something we both clearly would prefer to forget is a complete mystery to me. Now back off,’ she repeated icily, ‘before I start yelling for help at the top of my voice!’

He went one step further and turned his back on her, reeling on the heels of his shoes. ‘Dio mio,’ he breathed. ‘Somehow I knew it.’

‘Knew what?’ Cassie all but shrilled at him.

‘That we had met before.’

‘And this,’ she muttered, ‘is the craziest conversation I’ve ever been involved in!’

‘You don’t understand…’ As he spun around again, severe shock lashed his skin to the fabulous bone structure, making Cassie’s stomach churn into trembling knots. ‘You see, I don’t remember you…’

Standing trapped by her own open-mouthed disbelief, ‘How dare you say that?’ she breathed.

He frowned. ‘You are confused. I understand that.’ Lifting a hand out towards her, when her green eyes sparked and her creamy shoulders racked backwards in violent protest, he sighed and dropped the hand again. ‘This is the reason I said that we need to talk.’

Talk…? Pushing out a deeply scornful laugh, she said, ‘When you can toss out lies as glibly as you do, Sandro, trust me, talking with you is a complete waste of time!’

‘I do not tell lies!’ he denied, stiffening up in furious objection to the charge.

‘Then what about the one when you promised to come back for me then didn’t bother?’ Cassie challenged, firing up with hurt along with the question that had been burning holes in her heart for six long years. ‘Or the one on the telephone when you denied we’d even met?—“I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Please don’t ring this number again!”’ she quoted word for crucifying, thick and hurtful word.

‘I said that…?’ He’d gone totally white again.

‘Give me a break.’ Dragging her eyes away from him because she did not want to see or accept that the way he kept changing colour like that had to mean he was being hit hard by something pretty shattering tonight. ‘Once upon a long time ago I might have been an easy target where you were concerned—but not any more!’

‘I do not believe I said something as cruel as that to you,’ he breathed in thick denial, his long brown fingers clenching at his sides. ‘It is not in my nature to speak to anyone like that!’

‘Well, you said it to me.’ Cassie had to tug her lips together when they tried to wobble uncontrollably because nothing had ever wounded her as much as those cruel words of rejection had done. ‘Am I allowed to leave here now or have you got anything else you want to talk about?’

‘No one has attempted to stop you from leaving,’ he husked out.

Caught by the raw strain she’d heard in his voice, Cassie made the stupid mistake of glancing at him again and saw that the hand was back up at his brow. Something creased up her insides to see such a big, powerful man standing there like that, but she refused to give the feeling room to grow.

‘Thank you,’ she said with icy curtness, and with a twist of her body she made herself turn to face the door.

Two seconds later she was on the other side of it with her eyes closed and her heart pounding as if she’d just run a mile. She had a feeling he’d swayed again but she had not hung around long enough to find out.

I don’t remember you, her brain threw up at her in a seething flash of derision. If he didn’t remember her then why had they had that confrontation at all?

The sudden sound of movement sent her eyes shooting open. The first thing she became aware of as her gaze became focused was that the whole restaurant seemed to have emptied while she’d been shut inside that tiny back room. The next thing to hit her was the low, buzzing sound of conversation floating up the stairwell and she realised that everyone must have moved back down to the bar.

Hovering at the top of the stairs, she swallowed tensely, trying to pull her ragged senses together before she had to go down there and face up to the full battery of BarTec curiosity she was certain would be waiting for her.

And she was trembling all over with reaction now. In the last couple of hours she felt as if she’d been fed through the emotional wringer a hundred times! First the shock of seeing Sandro standing in the restaurant bar entrance, then the stomach-curdling humiliation when he’d blanked her out.

I don’t remember you…

He’d remembered her OK when he’d plied that heated scan down her body! And he’d remembered her when the delayed look of shock hit his face!

And—no, she couldn’t go down there and face everyone. What was she supposed to say? Oh, we knew each other once. The memory of it drove him to drink wine until he was dropdown drunk.

I am not drunk…

Just another lie he’d fed to her. For what other excuse was there when a strong, healthy man just collapsed like that?

‘There is another exit,’ his deep accented voice quietly murmured.

Cassie swung around on her slender heels, so startled her heart burst back into an overloaded beat. Sandro had come out of the office without her hearing him and was now in the process of closing the door. Her defences shot back up, her insides catching her with a tight, dizzying squeeze because he looked so different—again—as if he’d pulled up his own defences and now the cool, smooth corporate giant was back on show. He’d even done up his shirt collar and straightened his tie, she saw, her mouth going dry when her head decided to throw up an image of her teasing fingers doing that for him on the morning he’d left for Florence, all those years before.

‘H-how do you know?’ She had a fight to push the question beyond the fresh lump of hurt blocking her throat.

‘I spoke to Gio.’ He started walking towards her and as she tensed automatically Cassie thought she saw an angry glint move across his eyes but he strode right past her, though his voice fed out the same moderate coolness when he said, ‘Follow me if you prefer to leave quietly. It’s this way…’

Continuing to hover for a few more moments, Cassie wavered between her two choices that really were not choices at all. She either bit the bullet and ran the gauntlet waiting for her down there in the bar or she bit the bullet and let Sandro lead her out of here by a back door.

‘Are you coming or not?’

He’d come to a stop in front of an emergency-exit door at the back of the room she had not noticed before. With a reluctance that had to show in her body language, she set her feet walking towards him, heavily aware she could not face those people downstairs. Although, she asked herself bleakly, how was she going to be able to face them in two days’ time when she went into work on Monday morning?

With a touch from his long fingers Sandro pushed down the heavy bar to spring the lock on the door. Beyond it was a narrow set of stairs lit by emergency lighting that barely scraped the stair walls.

‘Watch your step in those shoes; these treads are steep and narrow,’ he instructed.

Lips pinned fiercely together, Cassie watched him go first, the width of his shoulders stretching almost wall to wall. Following him, she curled her fingers like talons around the sloping banister rail because they tingled so badly with a need to reach out and clutch at his shoulders for extra support on the rickety stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs was a tiny vestibule. As he reached it he turned and stretched out a hand towards her.

‘Don’t be squeamish,’ he clipped out when she froze two steps up from him. ‘My fingernails are not tipped with poison and the bottom step is loose and uneven. If this exit meets health and safety requirements I am in the wrong business,’ he drawled as, once again, Cassie bit the bullet and settled her hand in his.

His strong, warm fingers closed over her cool, slender fingers. That same rush of electric recognition shot up her arm as it had done when she’d been forced to take his hand before. Concentrating all of her attention on the uneven steps, she arrived in the vestibule so close to him that her breasts brushed against his jacket lapel. Appalled by the pinch her nipples gave in response to the abrasive brush, with only the silk of her dress to act as a buffer, she very nearly did what she’d been trying not to do and fell off her spindly heels in her jerky effort to put space between them.

His other hand arrived low on her back to steady her. Instead of opening up a gap between them there was suddenly no gap at all. Unable as she was to stop it, a muffled breath left her throat and she looked up and was hit head-on by the glow of raw desire leaping out from his dark, dark eyes. His whole hard body pulsed with it. It was that instant, that hot, so stifling it held her breathless and horrified because the same dismaying heat was pooling low down inside herself, toying with intimate tissue that tugged and pulled.

Her throat hurt. She tried to swallow. The sense of being drenched in fine sexual static made her lips part to whisper something she couldn’t even understand herself.

He understood it, though, because he muttered roughly, ‘No wonder I’m struggling.’

About to demand what he meant, Cassie wasn’t given the chance. Next second his dark head was lowering and she was receiving the full, burning impact of his passionate mouth on hers.




CHAPTER FOUR


HEAT poured into her bloodstream. He kissed her as if he’d been waiting to do it for years. He savoured it, explored the moist hollows of her mouth, guided her like some helpless puppet through the fiery pit of reacquaintance with the forgotten side of her own sensuality only this man had ever tapped.

His hand was restless on the small of her back, long fingers burning her through the fine layer of silk, stroking and kneading as they drew her further into the hardening bowl of his hips. The heat coming from him was heavy with the scent of his subtle aroma, the mobile seduction of his lips and the skilled intrusion of his tongue sinking her so deeply into a heady place of pleasurable memories Cassie found herself responding as a rolling mist of desire closed her in.

She felt small and weak and delicate as she leant against him, could feel his heart pounding against the clenched fist she’d pressed to his chest when this had first begun. And she could feel her own heart racing against the tightening crush of her breast. Her legs had gone hollow again, that tingling sensation a wash of desire this time, attacking every nerve–end from her toes to her hips. When he breathed something against her mouth and moved against her the flash of sexual agitation she experienced flung herself back from him on a shocked, shaken gasp.

Eyes as black as ink bored into her for a second then flowed down over her heaving, slender, panting, trembling frame. His frown was back, the greying pallor, joined by a fierce, dark, pulsating frustration that scared Cassie even as her own shattered senses clamoured in direct response.

As he reached out towards her, ‘No!’ she cried out because she thought he was going to drag her back to him.

What he did was tighten the grim line of his mouth and gently hitch her dress up from its structured front. Her helpless whimper was of mortified agony when she realised why he’d done it. After that the silence between them sizzled. She’d never felt so helpless or so exposed or so cheap in her entire life. One kiss and she’d fallen to pieces. One kiss from a man she supposedly hated and she’d turned into—

‘Oh,’ she choked and shot into movement, spinning round and reaching out to grab hold of the heavy bar which held the exit door shut.

She was panicking—Cassie knew she was panicking and he was saying nothing. She could feel him standing there behind her like some—some—grim, silent reaper, probably disgusted with himself for kissing her at all!

Then his arms were coming round her; she felt the smooth, warm slide of his silk sleeves against her arms as with a gentle firmness he prised her fingers from the bar. Trapped like that, trembling and shivering at the same time, and acutely aware of every lean, hard inch of him, she watched through bright, burning eyes as he dealt with the heavy lock on the door.

Almost falling outside into the cool night air in an effort to put space between them, Cassie found herself in an alleyway that must run alongside the restaurant. It was quiet and dark, the shadowy bulks she could see across from her looking too much like lurking bodies to her fevered mind, though she knew they had to be rubbish bins. Still, she spun away from them to face what she thought—hoped—was the main street. She had to get away—she knew she had to get away before she did something really humiliating and fell into a fit of wildly sobbing tears.

Sandro. She’d just let Sandro kiss her stupid. How dared he—how could she have let him get away with it? She hated him, every single thing about him.

The door closed with a thud behind her and she jumped like a startled rabbit then went onto the balls of her feet. A strong hand clamped around her wrist to stop her running. The grimly silent way that he kept her still while he stepped close enough to strap his other arm across her back broke her control with a shrill, ‘Let me go!’

‘No,’ he rasped. ‘Look at the ground,’ he instructed. ‘This alley is cobbled. In those shoes you will not make it two steps without falling over or twisting an ankle or worse. And anyway, you are going nowhere, Cassandra Janus, until we’ve had our talk.’

Talk? He still wanted to talk?

‘I h-hate you,’ Cassie hissed out feverishly. ‘That’s talking.’

Keeping her clamped to his side, he set them moving and said nothing. She barely reached his shoulder and he was almost carrying her in his grim effort to keep her flimsy weight off her even flimsier shoes.

Electric storms came in different forms, she decided wildly as the electric storm Sandro was now generating sparked with a ferocious determination that held all the way to the lamp-lit main street and straight into the back of a waiting limousine conveniently parked at the kerb.

Shuffling inelegantly across the plush leather seat because he was not bothering to go around and climb in on the other side of the car, she felt his athletic bulk arrive beside her, folding down onto the seat, while Cassie was anxiously tugging her ruched skirt back into place over her exposed thighs. She dared a glance at him then wished she hadn’t because he looked so stern, so grim and remote. It was only when he said something in curt Italian which set the car moving that her head twisted the other way and she realised they had a chauffeur to drive them. Even as she registered this unexpected mode of transport for a man who had used to drive himself everywhere in a racy soft-top, a black grated partition was sliding up in front of them and blocking the front compartment out.

Or them in.

‘He—the driver—n-needs to know my address,’ she pushed out in an attempt to snatch some control back here.

‘If he were driving us there I would agree, but he’s not.’

Stirred by his cool sarcasm, ‘I suppose you think it’s very macho to play the arrogant heavy!’ Cassie flung out. ‘But I can still see the fall-down drunk who embarrassed himself in front of his new workforce!’

His face swung around to slice a look at her. ‘You never used to be this acid-tongued,’ he hit back. ‘Six years without me around to keep you in line has turned you into a harridan, cara!’

‘I thought you didn’t remember knowing me before,’ Cassie returned sharply.

It shook him. She saw it happen. She watched his face drain of its wonderful colour and the pain come back to crease his brow. Shifting forward in the seat with an alarmed jerk, she went to bang on the partition because she thought he was going to pass out.

‘Be calm,’ he murmured, sensing rather than seeing what she was about to do because his eyes were shut. ‘I have it controlled this time…’

This time what, though? Cassie wondered tensely as she remained perched on the edge of the seat, ready to call for help if she needed it, while Sandro continued to sit there with his dark head resting back against the leather seat and his long, powerful body looking worryingly sapped of strength.

And it was only then that she allowed it to truly sink in that something much more serious than too much wine was making Sandro behave like this. He looked really ill.

‘Are y-you all right?’ she asked when she couldn’t stand his stillness any longer.

‘Sí…’ It was low and husky and it ran down through her like a hotline wired to her hips and thighs.

Cassie drew in some air, let it out again then, moistening her lips, which still felt hot and swollen after that terrible kiss, she gave in to the need nagging at her and reached out with a tentative hand and gently placed it on his knee.

‘Sandro, please,’ she begged huskily. ‘You’re frightening me.’

I’m frightening myself, Alessandro thought in an attempt to dry-humour himself out of this thick cloud which kept on blanketing him after each lightning strike. He managed to lift a limp hand and dropped it down on top of her hand as she would have withdrawn it from his knee. Small and fragile though her fingers felt to him, they seemed to possess a power of their own because he felt his energy begin to seep back through him.

‘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 half-convincing 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 cut-and-thrust 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, grabbing 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 cavern-darkness 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 energy-packed 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 through 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.

Why with him—why this man? she tried asking herself as her fingers released their grip on the towel so they could leap up to clutch at his shirtfront, her fingernails digging into warm, solid muscle as she gave herself up to his hot, deep, hungry kiss.

One single night spent in his arms six long years ago and her body remembered him with this strength and intensity. He felt so big and strong and so desperately familiar to her—as if she’d never been parted from him at all! Her heart was pounding madly, her head was spinning, her senses surging wildly out of control. It was she who gave in to the overwhelming force of it by abandoning herself to the hardening length of his long body and straining against him.

Sandro was trying to fight it. He should not be doing this, he tried telling himself. It was neither fair nor right. And he still felt really rough, though he had been trying to hide it. He felt as if his nice, tidy world was being ransacked by this beautiful creature called Cassie Janus, and he didn’t need the added invasion of this ravaging race of sexual desire to cause him yet more havoc right now.

He even tried to draw back from it, tried to push her out to a safer distance. But this had been an evening of uncontrolled experiences, he admitted as her fingers stroked along the width of his shoulders then buried themselves in his nape so she could cling more tightly to him. With a throaty growl which did not sound very lover-like he closed his arms more firmly around her and lifted her right off her feet so he could delve deeper into the kiss.

He felt the hard tips of her breasts pierce his chest through his shirt and make an instant hot-wire connection with the burn taking place between his hips. Like that, he turned and carried her out of the bathroom. Like that, he found his way by sheer instinct into his bedroom and rolled them both down on the bed. He’d never experienced anything this powerful with any woman. He’d never wanted one as much as this. As she arched beneath his resting weight he shifted sideways and felt the urgent tremor in his fingers as he reached behind her to deal with the zip on her dress.

The structured bodice slithered down her writhing body, exposing the creamy white thrust of her breasts. Cooler air hit her heated skin and at last Cassie made a wild snatch for sanity, wrenching her pink, bruised, kiss-swollen mouth free so she could push out a trembling protest—

‘Sandro, no, we can’t do this!’

She didn’t think he heard her. There was something almost bemused about the intense blackness in his eyes as he honed in on her exposed breasts. She squirmed beneath him as he folded his long fingers around one smooth, full mound then lowered his mouth to capture its taut, screamingly sensitive peak. Even as she cried out he was driving her so wild with pleasure she could only manage a grateful little whimper when eventually he reclaimed her mouth. Within seconds she was lost in it, drugged by her own uncontrollable desire for more of him—and more.

His shirt fell apart with the aid of her own urgent fingers, her hands feverish and greedy as they made contact with hair-roughened pectoral muscles moulding his powerful frame, and he shuddered, murmuring something hot into her mouth. The strength of her own hunger shocked her even as she sank into it like some sex-mad slave. She stopped trying to fight what she was feeling, she stopped trying to ignore the wild sensations he was creating as he stroked her skin. Desperate to touch him wherever she could do, she just couldn’t keep still, slender limbs tense and restless as they moved against him. She was vaguely stunned to realise that all their clothes had disappeared. When he ran a seeking caress down the taut flatness of her stomach and stroked those long fingers into the hot, moist crevice between her thighs she just lost it altogether, gasping and trembling and urging him on with anxious strokes of her own restless fingers and helpless little words of need he answered in rich, dark Italian breathed like fire onto her receptive skin.

And she knew—still knew she should be stopping this, if only she had the strength of will. But she didn’t have that strength and his sinfully pleasurable caresses were drawing her senses together in a twisting, squirming coil that forced her to whisper, ‘Oh, God, Sandro, please…’

He arrived above her like a dark knight powered by a desire that slammed her hectic breath back down into her lungs. His eyes were burning flames of passion, the flesh covering his face tightly drawn. And his breathing was fast, his heartbeat uneven, the groan he uttered just before he recaptured her mouth more a warning that his control had fled. He drove into her with a single, long, deep stroke that dragged a quivering cry from her and a shuddering groan from him.

‘Per Dio,’ he groaned as her tender muscles stretched then tightened in a sensual ripple along his full length.

Stars began exploding in her head as he started moving. Her fingernails latched on to the solid muscles in his arms as if she had to hold on for dear life. And she could feel each powerful inch of him inside her, his heat, his girth, even his pleasure as it transported each sensation he experienced with each new thrust and she was lost—abandoned to the wildly building fever of it. Her head was thrown back, her hair streaming down onto the pillow, her lips parted to let escape her soft, tense, helpless gasps. It was reckless, mindless, so beyond restraint that when her climax came it drew her taut as a bow beneath him, forcing a muttered oath from his lips when he had to support her slender frame in his arms so she could continue to take her pleasure and his thrusting weight.

Afterwards she lay in a daze of total mind-hazed shock. She didn’t want to think, she didn’t want to come down from where she still floated on a fluffy cloud of after-quivers because she knew that shame and soul-crushing dismay were waiting for her when she did finally drop back down to earth.

Sandro lay heavy on her with his arms still wrapped around her slender body and that feeling of being scraped out from the inside he’d felt earlier this evening, robbing him of the strength to move. They should not have done it and strange, swirling images were floating around his aching head. He’d never been so out of control before, did not know how it had happened or even why it had happened. It was as if someone else had been living inside his body, driving him on.

And those flashes were getting worse now, flinging open doors in his head and slamming them shut with a violence that set his teeth on edge. On an inner groan, he slid his arms from beneath her. ‘Dio,’ he breathed on a thick, husky laugh aimed to lighten the charged atmosphere, ‘did we ever get out of bed once we made it there?’

With Cassie still lying limp-limbed and trembling beneath him, his badly aimed joke brought her alive on a quivering flood of skin-flaying offence that had her pushing him off her before she reared up and swung on him wildly, landing the flat of her hand hard against the side of his face.

Gasping and shaking and dimly horrified by her own outburst of physical violence, ‘Are you referring to the single night we spent there before you upped and left me?’ she sliced into him chokingly. ‘You really like to live up to the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, macho-rat remit, don’t you, Sandro? Two weeks wooing me and one night screwing me. Mission accomplished, so forget that one, leave her pregnant and move on to the next!’

Having collapsed on his back beside her, Sandro took the full blast of her shaking anger the same way he’d taken her slap to his face—with total stillness, nothing showing on his face now except her finger marks standing out on his cheek. And his lack of reaction only made Cassie want to hit him again; she wanted to pummel his chest with her fists!

Instead she scrambled off the bed with a snaking move of trembling limbs and looked wildly around for something with which to cover herself up. She saw Sandro’s shirt lying draped half on and half off the side of the bed and shuddered, spinning away from it. She would rather be flayed alive than wear that next to her now-cringing flesh. How dared he make a joke of what they’d just done here? How had it happened? How had she let him reduce her to this? Grabbing a pillow up off the bed, she hugged it to her front, a well of hot tears building in her throat. Oh, God, she hated herself—she hated him! And her legs could barely hold her upright, her insides still singing like sinful traitors triumphing over what Sandro had done for them.

On a stinging shot of shamed energy she began urgently gathering up her clothes, refusing to look at him, refusing to notice how he was still lying there, saying nothing, or how the hand was back up at his face, long fingertips pressing into his creased brow.

Clutching the pillow to her front along with her skimpy jumble of clothes now, she turned and headed for the door. She had to get away. She just had to—

‘I cannot believe I did that to you.’

The husky sound of his denial froze Cassie taut and quivering in the doorway. ‘Can’t or don’t want to believe it?’ she shook back.

Without thinking, she spun to look at him in time to watch him roll off the bed to land beside it on his feet. Each beautifully toned inch of him was captured by the light from the single lamp burning golden by the bed, sweat-glossed sleek, powerful muscles that expanded and contracted in a lithe display of masculine potency that turned her ravished muscles to hateful, trembling mush.

Why did he have to be the only man who could do this to her? ‘If you ask me, Sandro, your biggest problem is that you don’t seem to want to know yourself—which in my view makes a complete mockery of your so-called lost memory!’

He flinched, one of his hands sweeping out in a sharp, slicing gesture meant to cut her bitter words to shreds. Shaken by the violence of the action, Cassie just stared as he jerked into movement, striding across the room to disappear through a door, closing it behind him with a quiet thud that left her standing there with her heart writhing around in her chest in self-disgust at what she’d let him do to her—again.

A sob of revulsion broke free from her throat and she dropped the pillow and spun around to leave the bedroom at a wild run, making for the bright white bathroom where her foolish downfall had begun. The harsh lights hurt her burning eyes as she dragged on her flimsy briefs and fumbled feverishly with the zip on her dress. She hadn’t found her stockings but she didn’t care, she told herself as she wriggled her bare toes into her shoes.

All she wanted to do was to just get the heck out of here without having to face him. As she turned towards the door she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and a stinging flood of tears lashed her aching throat. She looked like a plump-lipped, hot-cheeked lush! Her hair was all over the place, its waterfall layers all tangled and mussed, and her eyes were so dark she looked as if she’d been indulging in some kind of drug!

Which she had in a way, she thought helplessly as she wrenched her gaze away from her gut-crawling image. She’d indulged in the drug of irresponsible sex, and coming down from it was the worst feeling she’d ever experienced! Snatching the bathroom door open, she sped across the hallway and into the living room with the intention of retrieving her purse from where Sandro had tossed it and getting the heck out of here!

Only to find herself jerking to a sinking, shuddering standstill when she saw Sandro there in the room.

He was standing beside a cabinet which stood open to reveal a selection of bottles and glasses. He’d pulled his trousers and his shirt back on but half the buttons were left unfastened and his feet were bare, the smooth style of his hair roughed up. He looked pale with strain but hard and grim and he held a glass slotted in his fingers that definitely did not have water in it.

‘Whisky,’ he said, catching the fluttering direction her gaze had taken. ‘I decided I might be better off becoming a drunk before you lay any more shocks on me.’

‘There are no more shocks.’ Cassie struggled to get even those few words past the thick blockage in her throat.

‘You think not?’ He scraped a set of fingers through his hair, oddly managing to smooth it without, Cassie was sure, that being his intention. ‘Try climbing inside my head, cara,’ he invited grimly. ‘It is a minefield of shocks and questions.’

He took a gulp at his drink.

It was yet another change in his personality Cassie found she had to struggle with. She’d seen the ultra-sophisticated businessman and the smooth expert charmer. She’d seen shock completely debilitate him and felt the explosive thrust of his anger scare her almost out of her wits. He’d been weak, he’d been strong, he’d been frighteningly vulnerable and ruthlessly passionate when he’d taken her to his bed. Right now he just looked unbearably cynical and chillingly remote, as if he’d slammed his defences into place.

And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, she decided as she hovered tensely on the threshold of the room, desperately wanting to snatch up her purse and just go, yet held glued to the spot by a bubbling growth of concern because she could see the strain of what was happening to him was really making itself felt now and he looked so dreadfully pale.

‘Sandro, please, don’t drink that,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘I don’t think—’

‘Tell me the date you claim we were together,’ he cut in right over her.

‘We were together!’ Cassie instantly flared up.

‘All right,’ with another one of those angry slashes with his hand, ‘tell me when we were together, then!’

Needing to take in a breath of shaky air, Cassie named the date.

Sandro made a jerky movement that was almost a flinch. ‘For how long?’

‘I’ve told you this too—’

‘Then repeat it. How long?’ he bit out rawly.

Pressing her lips together, she had to push herself beyond the shame barrier before she could answer, ‘Two w-weeks.’

‘Two weeks,’ he echoed in a thick, cursing voice. Then he really scared her by dropping like lead into the nearest chair and made that gesture with his fingers, pushing them up against his brow. ‘Are you claiming that we managed to conceive twins in only two weeks?’

‘N-no.’ Having to bite back the desire to object to the way he had put that, Cassie gave in to her own trembling legs and walked over to a chair to sit down. ‘It took you two weeks to get me to go to bed with you and only one n-night to conceive the twins. The next morning you said you had to fly back to Florence. You promised you would be gone for only a few days but you never came back.’

‘I couldn’t come back.’ Lowering his hand from his brow, he continued the story from his point of view. ‘The accident happened and I lost six seemingly vital weeks of my life.’

‘Will you stop this, Sandro?’ A sudden flush of hot anger launched Cassie back to her feet. ‘Your lost weeks have nothing to do with this!’

His head shot up. ‘How the hell do you come to that crazy conclusion?’

‘But I told you this too,’ she cried out. ‘I called you on your mobile. You barely gave me the opportunity to speak before you hit me with, “I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Please don’t ring this number again…”’ As he jerked to his feet Cassie shuddered because those harsh words were etched in fire on her brain. ‘It was quite a brush-off,’ she continued with a thin laugh that didn’t even touch base with humour. ‘If I had been in a better frame of mind I m-might have appreciated just how callous you could be. But at the time I was more concerned about myself and the—the twins I’d just found out I was carrying. When I tried to tell you about them you put the phone down on me!’

‘But I do not remember this telephone call!’ he thrust out angrily.

Eyes like green fire leapt into contact with his eyes. ‘That conversation took place eight weeks after you left me, Sandro. Are you now saying that your memory loss scans eight weeks instead of six?’

In the thickening silence that gathered after that piece of blazing sarcasm, Cassie wondered why she was bothering to repeat any of this when once again he gave no reaction, not even a wince.

‘Even if you did not remember m-me,’ she went on unevenly, ‘a less callous man would have hesitated long enough to ask himself if there was a chance I could belong to his lost weeks.’ And she’d been so scared, almost weeping, begging him to listen to her. ‘But you weren’t interested enough to want to bother to do even that, were you?’

Still he said nothing. And he was emulating a slab of rock now—because he could no longer defend himself against what she’d said?

Probably, Cassie decided as the feelings of bitterness flooded back into play and she turned to walk over to the side-table and picked up her purse. ‘Just do me a favour, and stay right away from me,’ she husked out shakily. ‘If you decide you want contact with my children then you will have to go through my solicitor because I don’t want you anywhere near them.’

And this time she was leaving, Cassie told herself. This time she was not going to look back.

As she walked to the door the sound of something falling shattered that vow almost as soon as she’d fixed it inside her head. She swung around, her blood already running cold because she knew what she was going to see even before her eyes locked on to Sandro lying stretched out on the living-room floor.

Like an action reply of the last time he’d done this, she was on her knees beside him before she’d realised she’d moved.

‘Sandro…’ she breathed, reaching out to touch her trembling fingers to his cheek. His skin felt horribly cold and clammy and the grey cast to his face sent alarm bells jangling up through her insides.

Getting to her feet again, she raced out of the room and down the hall to the kitchen. A minute later she was back on her knees beside him again with a damp cloth and a glass of water that was pretty useless, she thought wildly when he was still showing no sign of coming round.

‘Come on, Sandro…’ she urged tensely, pressing the dampened cloth to his brow then his mouth then his brow again—touching him because she needed to touch him but without a single clue as to what she should be doing to help him.

Another minute went by and he still wasn’t moving. And like a safety switch built inside her, the more practical side of her nature swung into play. He needed a doctor—maybe even an ambulance. Glancing around for her purse, she saw it lying halfway across the room where she must have dropped it as she’d run. She was about to scramble up and get it, when another phone started ringing and her eyes spun dizzily to look at Sandro’s suit jacket still lying across the back of a chair where he’d draped it.

Without thinking about it she stretched out to drag the jacket towards her then reached into the pocket and pulled out the phone.

‘Alessandro, it’s Gio. I’ve just had a call from—’

‘Oh, thank God,’ Cassie breathed with shaking relief. ‘Gio, it’s Cassie. Sandro has collapsed again. He needs a doctor or an—’

‘Leave it to me.’ To his credit, Gio didn’t waste time demanding explanations, he just said, ‘I’ll have someone there in a few minutes.’

The next five minutes dragged by in a frightened haze while Cassie sat beside Sandro, hugging her knees to her chin with one tense arm while the other hand rested against his chest so she could feel the comforting beat of his heart. He still hadn’t come around by the time the door bell rang, forcing her back to her feet to go and answer it.

Gio stood on the doorstep along with the man she’d seen in the foyer when they’d first arrived here this evening.

Gio said, ‘This is Marco, Alessandro’s—’

‘Brother. Yes, I know.’ Cassie glanced at the other man with a strained smile quivering on her lips, which he did not return.

‘Where is he?’ he demanded brusquely.

A bit shaken by his attitude, ‘In—in the living room,’ she responded, and he brushed past her into the apartment.

‘Marco is also a physician,’ Gio explained dryly as he too stepped past her.

And the brother’s brusque manner began to make sense. The argument between the two brothers down in the foyer must have been about Sandro’s blackout at the restaurant. Someone must have called Marco to meet his brother here but Sandro had sent him away.

Following the two men into the living room, Cassie lowered herself into a chair to watch helplessly as both men went down on their knees beside Sandro. Her heart was pumping very slowly now and she had a vague suspicion that she might be going into shock because she couldn’t seem to feel anything else at all.

Even when Sandro showed signs of coming round she still didn’t feel anything. Eventually he sat up, holding his head in his hands. His brother was murmuring something to him and Sandro was answering in low, thick Italian. All three men seemed to understand what had happened, which left only Cassie without a clue. A severe shock could make a woman faint, she knew that. It could make a man black out. But she knew that what she had witnessed with Sandro was much more than that.

Then she heard Marco murmur in English, ‘We need to get you to bed, Alessandro.’

And she came alive like a phoenix rising up from the ashes of numbed senses. Without saying a word she just leapt up and ran out of the living room and into Sandro’s bedroom, then began rushing around it, madly trying to tidy the evidence of their recent activities in there before the others came in and saw it and guessed what had been going on.

She found her stockings and Sandro’s socks then remembered with a sharp jolt that he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Gio and his brother had to be curious as to why he wasn’t, which meant…

Oh, shut up! she slammed at the riddling squirm of her own guilty conscience and was just straightening the rumpled blue coverlet when a sound by the door made her look up then go perfectly still.

Sandro was leaning heavily against the doorframe. ‘I see we are both on the same wavelength, which makes a change…’ he drawled, glancing around the hastily tidied bedroom.

‘You look dreadful,’ Cassie breathed, slowly straightening up.

‘I feel it.’ He grimaced. ‘I’m sorry. Did I scare you again?’

Her throat felt so thick she couldn’t get any words out, so she swallowed tensely and nodded. Then because he looked as if he was going to keel over again she went and slid her arm around his waist.

‘Y-you need to be in bed.’

One of his arms arrived heavy across her shoulders. ‘So I do,’ he agreed.

‘Let me call your brother and Gio to come and help you—’

‘You can’t. I sent them packing.’

‘But—why?’ Cassie gasped out.

‘Their presence here embarrassed you.’

‘What has that got to do with anything?’ She flashed a sharp green look at him. ‘Your health is more important than my embarrassment. Not five minutes ago you were lying unconscious—again!’

‘Now I’m not,’ he responded with cool logic, ‘though I cannot guarantee to remain upright for much longer, so if you think you could…’

‘Oh.’ Cassie tightened her grip on his waist. ‘Let’s get you to bed, then.’

‘Best invitation I’ve had all day—’

‘Don’t you dare make a joke of it!’ she choked out. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like to watch you drop like that? I thought you were dead! I thought you’d suffered a m-massive heart attack or s-something and I…’

‘OK—OK,’ Sandro cut in soothingly. ‘Don’t start weeping on me, brave Cassie. Just help me across the room so I can fall on that bed.’

Pinning her trembling lips together, she did as he bade her. Brave Cassie indeed. She hadn’t felt brave while she’d sat beside him. She’d felt helpless and useless and scared.

As they reached the bed Sandro swung his arm off her shoulders and sat down heavily, then just keeled over like a drunk.

Still without allowing herself to say another word, Cassie busied herself doing the mothering thing and placed a knee on the bed so she could reach across to the other side of him and catch up the cover so she could flip it over his length.

‘I’m not cold,’ he told her, his ink-dark eyes fixed on her pale profile.

‘You feel it,’ she insisted.

‘I thought you did not want to come near me again.’

It was a taunt, a soft and husky-voiced kind of taunt that made the muscles around Cassie’s heart flutter in response. She opened her mouth to insist that she didn’t want to be near him, then on a heavy sigh she changed her mind and sank down beside him on the bed, slumping her shoulders in a weary gesture of defeat.

‘Tell me what’s wrong with you,’ she requested.

He was silent for so long that she thought he must have gone to sleep but when she turned her head to look at him he was still watching her through those unfairly captivating, fathom-dark eyes and a lump formed in her throat because—oh, dear God—she knew deep down inside her that she was still in love with him.

‘They knew what was going on—Gio and your brother the doctor,’ she prompted. ‘I saw it in their faces the moment I opened the door to them. For ninety-nine per cent of the time you’re so strong and vital I would challenge a tank to try and knock you over…’ without knowing she was doing it, she reached out to rest her hand against his chest above his beating heart ‘… but I’ve seen you drop twice now, and you usually rub your brow and frown just before it happens as if—as if—’

‘I’m in pain, which I am,’ Sandro finished for her. ‘The car accident left a—pressure on my brain which makes itself felt now and then.’

‘So it isn’t just m-me that causes it?’

She sounded so vulnerable when she said that, Sandro released a small sigh and his hand arrived to cover hers. ‘It can be bad sometimes…’ He hedged the question.

‘Bad enough to make you pass out—a lot?’

‘No,’ he denied. ‘Occasionally—rarely. I get these flashes of memory which hit me out of nowhere. They’re sometimes followed by…’

‘A complete shut-down.’

‘Sí.’

‘Can anything be done to ease the—pressure?’

‘Can we talk about the twins instead?’

The twins…! Once again, Cassie was hit by a jolt of reality. ‘Oh, heck,’ she gasped, jumping to her feet. She’d done it again and forgotten all about the twins! Flicking a glance at her watch, ‘It’s late. I’ve got to go…’

‘To relieve the babysitter?’ He sounded grim again.

‘Yes.’ Looking around her, trying to remember where she’d stashed her stockings in her rush to hide the evidence of what they’d been doing in here, she explained, ‘Jenny is very good but I promised her I would be back home by midnight—’

‘Like Cinderella.’

‘No…’ impatience added bite to her answer ‘… like a single mother who cherishes a reliable babysitter so does not take advantage of her time!’

Sandro frowned at his watch then, noted what Cassie already knew—that she had only fifteen minutes left to her midnight deadline—and with a lithe stretching movement he discarded the cover and rose up off the bed.

‘I will take you—’

‘No!’ Cassie cried out. ‘You should have stayed where you were! I can call a cab—’

He turned on her, scowling now as if she’d offended his masculinity. ‘Either I take you home or you will use my driver!’ he slammed out with a force that made Cassie blanch.

‘All right!’ she shot back in quivering reaction. ‘I’ll let your driver take me! I don’t know why you needed to shout.’

‘Grazie,’ he teethed out, and reached over to pick up a phone by the bed.

Cassie bit into her bottom lip to stop herself from saying anything else. Having stabbed in the required number, he pushed the phone to his ear and showed her the length of his back.

To Cassie it was another one of his cold dismissals. In response to it she spun on her heel and walked out of the bedroom. Every time they held a conversation, they went from calm into a raging storm without any pause in the middle. Now her insides were fizzing with—she no longer recognised what it was that was going on inside her or what was making her wait around in the hallway until he joined her there.

When he appeared, striding towards her with his expression still drawn and now irritable too, she could not stop herself from asking, ‘Will you be all right here on your own?’

‘Don’t make me out to be so pathetic,’ he bit out. ‘And stop looking at me through those anxious emerald eyes because it turns me on like a flaming gas jet! Just do something sensible and go, Cassie.’

He pulled the door open then just stood there, expecting her to get out—wanting her to get out even though he claimed she turned him on.

Well, there was no sign in him of gas jets right now, she recognised, just a hard, grim, remote man.

So she left, her lips pressed together to stop them from quivering, and her eyelashes trembling against her cheeks. He stood at the door and watched her until the lift doors closed between them. Then, like a fool, she parted her lips and let them quiver, let her eyes open wide and fill with wretched, unwanted, weak tears.




CHAPTER SIX


CASSIE let herself into her tiny apartment virtually on the stroke of midnight. Everything was quiet and soothingly normal, only the muted sound of the television seeping out from the living room to tell her that anyone else was here.

Taking in a deep breath, she opened the door to find Jenny sitting in the armchair watching TV just as she’d imagined her, with her feet up on the coffee table and the almost empty box of chocolates lying on her lap.

‘Oh, hello.’ Jenny smiled at her, straightening her round, comfortable shape up in the chair. ‘You’ve timed it nicely because my film has just finished. Did you have a nice time?’

I wish, Cassie thought heavily. ‘Yes,’ she heard herself answer with a calm that didn’t sound as unnatural as she feared it would. ‘Have the twins behaved themselves?’

‘Perfect angels. Not a single peep out of them.’ The older woman came to her feet and plied her with interested questions about her evening while she gathered together her bits and pieces and hunted down her discarded shoes.

‘W-would you like a cup of tea before you go?’ Cassie found her good manners from somewhere.

‘No, thank you, love. I’d just had one before you arrived home.’

A few minutes later and Cassie was closing the front door on Jenny’s disappearing figure then turning to lean back against it with a sigh. She’d never felt so battered and wrung out in her entire life.

Then she was pulling herself together and peeling herself away from the door to go and check on the twins. She found two peacefully sleeping faces highlighted by the tiny night lamp set on the table between their beds. Anthony was lying sprawled on his back with his duvet half kicked off him, his thick, dark hair ruffled in a way that made Cassie’s heart squeeze because it looked so like Sandro’s had looked before his fingers had unwittingly smoothed his hair back into place. Bella lay curled neatly on her side as she usually slept, her pale blonde hair streaming out behind her in a silken gold swathe.

They both looked so young, so sweet but so very vulnerable. How were they going to feel about a father they hardly knew anything about if Sandro decided he wanted a role in their lives?

It didn’t bear thinking about. Cassie was too scared to think about it. And, selfishly, her fears were mostly for herself. The twins had always been just hers to love and to be loved by. There hadn’t been a single second since their birth that she hadn’t loved and cherished them with all of her heart. In everything she’d done since she’d known she was pregnant and alone, she’d always placed their well-being first—in her choice of employment, in her choice of nursery accommodation, paying over the odds to secure the best care available for them and negotiating a flexible timetable with her employers so she could work the best hours to suit the twins’ needs. When Angus offered her this chance to come up to London to work for him, it had been the much larger wage packet and his kind offer to let her rent this flat from his property portfolio on reduced terms that had clinched the deal for her.

Still, it had been tough sometimes to reach the end of the financial month still solvent but she’d done it. Cassie was proud of that achievement—fiercely proud. However, she would be willing to bet that Sandro wouldn’t view their tiny flat and their threadbare second-hand furniture as anything to be proud of.

Closing the twins’ bedroom door as quietly as she had opened it, she stepped into her bedroom next to theirs. Both bedrooms were short on space but the twins had the larger room simply because it was practical while the two of them shared.

What happened, though, when it was no longer practical for them to share? she wondered suddenly. What happened if, now he’d sold BarTec, Angus decided it was time to sell his property portfolio too and she found her reduced rent bumped up to the same as that of the other tenants, as it was bound to be?

She thought of Angus again on a sudden wave of guilt because she was thinking selfishly once more instead of feeling concern for her father’s old friend and his failing health. She made herself a promise to visit him next weekend—it couldn’t be this weekend because the twins had a birthday party to attend. Angus loved it when she took the twins on a visit. He might be a die-hard bachelor and seriously ill but he maintained that an afternoon spent with her and the children was a better pick-me-up than any doctor could prescribe for him.

And her dress needed dry-cleaning, she saw as she slipped it onto a hanger. The water spill had dried and left the embossed silk looking like crushed tissue paper. Teach her not to indulge in an expensive dress with a dry-clean-only label, she told herself—and knew she was thinking about mundane things to stop her head from thinking about what she’d just done with Sandro.

She almost jumped out of her skin when the phone beside her bed started to ring. Diving at it to pick it up before the shrill ring disturbed the twins, she flicked out a sharp, ‘Yes?’

‘All right…’ the sound of Ella’s voice hitting her eardrums had her sinking wearily down on the bed ‘… start talking. What’s the history between you and our sexy new boss?’

‘There isn’t any history,’ she lied, wishing with every aching pulse she had in her that it was the truth.

‘Pull the other one, Cassie. That guy almost ate you up and you almost spat him out in disgust. And all of that came before you laid him out cold on the floor!’

‘I did not lay him out,’ she denied.

‘No, you just jumped on him afterwards, called him Sandro and almost wept all over his shirt. The next thing we know you’re being hustled away into a back room and we’re being spun a line about jet lag and migraine headaches and get a glimpse of neither one of you again. You know the guy, Cassie,’ Ella insisted. ‘Everyone at BarTec knows you know the guy. Even the MD confirmed that our new boss couldn’t keep his eyes off you all evening. And the beautiful Miss Batiste was not happy about it if the way her lovely dark eyes had turned cat-like was a judge.’

‘She can keep him. I don’t want him,’ Cassie burst out unthinkingly then could have bitten off her unruly tongue.

‘Oh, wow,’ drawled Ella, ‘that sounded to me like a bitter woman talking.’

‘Look,’ she said, straightening her wilting shoulders and hunting around for an explanation that would shut Ella’s curiosity up, ‘I don’t know him exactly but I—I used to know an… acquaintance of his…’ which wasn’t an outright lie, she reflected grimly ‘… and that’s it. No mystery.’

There followed a long silence that made Cassie’s tense fingers pluck at the quilt covering her bed. Then Ella spoke again. ‘He knows the twins’ father.’

Cassie closed her eyes on a silent groan. ‘Will you please put your imagination to bed?’ she pleaded. ‘And while you’re at it put yourself to bed at the same time, because that’s where I’m going!’

‘Yeah, right,’ mocked Ella. ‘To dream of no-good Italian love-rats that get a girl pregnant then dump her, and their handsome acquaintances that drop down dead in shock when the twins are mentioned.’

‘Weird dreams for you to have, sweetie,’ Cassie mocked right back. ‘I wonder what the bodybuilder would think if he knew…?’

‘Clever,’ Ella acknowledged. ‘Now tell me where you disappeared to with him.’

As she discovered she was staring at the black dress on its hanger, Cassie’s next excuse lit like a lightbulb in her head. ‘I managed to drench my dress in the—commotion,’ she said, telling yet another lie that wasn’t quite a lie. ‘His driver brought me home.’

And right there on the back of that second twist on the truth, she realised she’d found a couple of reasonable excuses which would allow her to show her face at work on Monday morning. Sandro was a distant acquaintance. He’d sent her home in his car.

‘Listen, Ella,’ Cassie murmured seriously, ‘I want you to keep your suspicions to yourself about my connection to Mr M-Marchese—’ she hated saying that name ‘—being more than a distant acquaintance to me. I can’t afford to put my position at BarTec at risk because rumours go rife that make it too uncomfortable for us to work together there.’

‘Calm down,’ sighed Ella, ‘I’m your friend, not your enemy. You should know I wouldn’t dream of saying any of this to anyone else but you!’

‘Thanks,’ Cassie mumbled. ‘Sorry,’ she added.

‘So I should think. You know,’ her friend added slowly, ‘Jason Farrow also shot his big mouth off about your father and Alessandro Marchese’s father both being friends with Angus.’

‘Really?’ Cassie was so surprised by that piece of information she couldn’t stop letting Ella know it.

‘If you need a good excuse to let loose on BarTec’s curious minions, I would use that connection if I were you. Especially since the MD has already started that ball rolling for you.’

‘Bless you, Ella,’ Cassie whispered, feeling stupidly weepy now.

‘Don’t mention it,’ Ella replied. ‘Maybe one day you’ll trust me enough to give me the real story, hmm?’

Maybe, Cassie thought, knowing that Ella already had a pretty good handle on it anyway.

The weekend passed by on a whirl of busy normality with no sight or sound of Sandro—if she didn’t count the number of times he visited her dreams, waking her up with the hot drive of his body joined intimately with hers. Dreams like that were so very shocking she’d huddled beneath her duvet, horrified by the vividness of her imagination and ashamed by it. She hated him, she tried telling herself. She didn’t understand what had made her do what she’d done with him. It whittled away at the self-belief she’d spent all these years earning back since the last time he’d done his best to wreck it.

The shy and introverted twenty-two-year-old working hard to prove her junior position at Jay Digital, as well as recover from her father’s recent illness and death, just hadn’t acquired the necessary weapons needed to deal with someone as handsome and charming and sexy as Sandro Rossi when he strode into her life. He’d wooed her like some old-fashioned suitor. He’d been so intense when he told her he’d fallen in love with her. He’d vowed to make her happy for the rest of her life. He’d said and done all the right things in the right order to make her fall in love with him. When she finally caved in and let him make love to her, discovering she was a virgin had stunned him, and he’d promised to marry her the way an honourable suitor would have.

Then he’d gone home to Florence to tell his family about her and it hadn’t occurred to her once to wonder why, if he was serious about loving and marrying her, he hadn’t taken her with him, as well. She’d just waited and waited like a fool for him to come back again. Long, empty days that had stretched into long, dragging weeks, and her only way to contact him had been via his mobile phone. She’d rung, she’d texted and eventually—after having her every message ignored—she’d finally received the painful hint that he didn’t want anything more to do with her. So that last call she’d made to him eight long weeks later had really been a frightened cry for help.

And if she ever had to remind herself why she needed to hate Sandro then she’d just done it, Cassie told herself. Because even knowing now about his car accident and memory loss, she still would never forgive him for the brutal way he had cut her out of his life during that call.

Walking into work on Monday morning to find the way already smoothed for her by Ella’s chatty mouth kept the cloud of normality hovering just above her head and she slipped comfortably into work mode. In fact, she went to great pains to present herself as the calm-mannered professional everyone at BarTec was used to seeing her as. She answered any questions tossed her way about Friday night—and there were plenty of them—with a cool humour that played the whole thing down until she let herself believe her curiosity value had died a quick death. She even managed to concentrate on some complicated financial projections and picked the phone up when it rang on her desk without thinking twice about who might be on the other end of the line.

So when Sandro’s deep voice arrived in her ear she just froze in dismay. ‘I am using Angus’s old office,’ he informed her coolly. ‘I want to see you, Cassie. Now.’

‘For goodness’ sake,’ she whispered fiercely into the mouthpiece, while slanting a hunted glance around the room to check if anyone was looking at her, ‘I’m not coming anywhere near you in this building—or ever again, come to that!’

Ignoring that last part, ‘Then I will come to your office,’ he said.

‘No!’ She stood up so fast that she caught Ella’s attention, the other girl’s eyes opening wide in surprise at the abruptness with which she uttered that single negative. Fighting to get her voice under control, ‘I’ll be there straight away,’ Cassie responded with only the barest bite of ice.

Refusing to look at anyone directly, including Ella, she walked out of the office. Angus’s old inner sanctum was situated behind the pair of double doors she could see directly in front her at the far end of the corridor, which meant she had to walk between two rows of glass-panelled offices beyond which anyone who was interested could witness the path she took. And that wasn’t the end of her cheek-stinging journey because on the other side of the pair of doors was a large outer office where Angus’s secretary had used to sit in peaceful isolation.

Now the poor woman was being forced to share her space with half a dozen of Sandro’s team, each one of whom stopped what they were doing to stare at Cassie as she stepped through the door. It was like having to walk a line of a thousand curious eyes. She didn’t have a clue as to what these particular people believed had taken place on Friday evening but the hum of their total silence buzzed like a wasp trapped against her eardrum.

Pinning a distant smile to her tense lips, she just kept on going, refusing to glance to her left or her right. She didn’t even pause between her short knock and turning the handle to open the door which led the way to Sandro himself. However, trying to appear professional at all costs meant she was trembling inside by the time she’d closed the door behind her again, and anger was fizzing away in her blood.

At least he was alone, she saw, her sparking green gaze tracking across the room to where he stood behind Angus’s old desk with his attention seemingly fixed on the view beyond the window. He was wearing another dark business suit that looked as if it had been tailored exclusively for him and the October sunlight was shining on the silk gloss of his hair.

An unwanted wash of physical awareness dragged on the tense muscles surrounding her abdomen, followed instantly by a sinking wash of shame. She’d been suffering from the same two sensations all weekend each time she caught herself thinking about him—the sexual drag, the sinking shame, usually joined by a thick lump of tears to block her throat. Only this time the constriction was due to tension not tears as she stood waiting for him to turn and acknowledge her presence.

But he didn’t turn. As the silence stretched between them Cassie began to wonder if he’d heard her come in the room.

Tugging some air into her lungs, ‘I’m here on your time, Sandro,’ she announced herself coolly.

‘Alessandro,’ he corrected without turning, ‘when we are here anyway.’

Never. Her chin shot up in direct defiance of that comment. She was never going to refer to him by that name. She’d met him as Sandro. He had left her as Sandro. As far as she was concerned he’d come back into her life as Sandro, and until he came up with a good excuse as to why he’d lied to her about his name he was staying Sandro.

‘I was in the middle of something important,’ she informed him stiffly, ‘and summoning me here like this is going to set the tongues wagging again. So if you would just tell me what you want, I would rather get out of here again as quickly as I can.’

‘Feeling the strain?’

‘Are you?’ she threw right back at him.

He turned at that, the glimmer of a smile playing with the hard compression of his mouth. ‘If that was your sweet way of asking me how I am feeling today, then the answer is lousy.’

‘Oh,’ Cassie said, disconcerted by that honest answer.

He looked it too, now he was letting her see his face. Oh, his undeniable good looks were all there in his clean, smooth, vibrant features, but his colour wasn’t good and there was tension around his eyes which matched the tension she could see in his mouth.

‘Come and sit down.’ With a wave of a hand he invited her forward, and, because she was beginning to feel like an idiot hovering by the door, Cassie complied.

He watched her all the way, much as his team had watched her cross the outer office, but Sandro did it with his eyes half-hidden by the low droop of his eyelids that made her acutely aware of her grey tailored suit that had seen better days, and the prim way she’d stuck her hair in a knot at the back of her head.

Her eyes therefore sparked him a glance of cold challenge as she reached the chair set in front of the desk and sat down on it.

‘You’re angry with me,’ he murmured.

‘If you’ve brought me here to talk about… personal matters then you should not have done,’ Cassie replied. ‘I’ve spent the whole morning being as careful as I could be squashing curiosity about us. One phone call from you and I might as well have walked in here this morning and blasted out the whole truth.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No.’

‘In fact, you’ve played it very cool, from what I’ve been told. Apparently Angus plays a very big role in our… acquaintance.’

‘Blame Jason Farrow for that,’ she said. ‘He’s the one who put it about that both our fathers were friends with Angus.’

‘He also told everyone I couldn’t take my eyes off you all evening. He’s been very busy.’

‘He likes to believe he’s more important than he is.’

‘You don’t like him.’

Lifting her cool gaze to meet his, she replied, ‘Does it matter if I do or I don’t?’

Sandro offered a shrug. ‘Not really.’

‘Then why are we having this conversation about him?’

‘In an attempt to smooth your ruffled feathers before we move on to discuss you and me and the twins…?’

Cassie dropped her gaze as her icy composure cracked right down the middle because she just had not expected him to say that about the twins.

‘There’s nothing to discuss.’ Staring down at her fingers where they lay on her lap, she watched them pleat together in a white-knuckled clench. ‘They’re my children. My responsibility.’

‘You told me they were my children too,’ Sandro reminded her.

‘We both said a lot of things on Friday night that didn’t add up to much worth remembering.’

She sensed the stinging whip of his irritation at her blocking tactics. With a shift of his stance that made her tense spine start to tingle, Cassie listened to his footsteps bring him around the desk until his black shoes appeared in front of her lowered gaze. There was a whisper of expensive clothing as he settled his thighs on the edge of the desk. Prickly heat feathered out from the sudden increased pace of her heartbeat when she breathed in his subtle, now dizzyingly familiar scent.

‘Born on the fifteenth of January,’ he dropped onto her very gently, adding the year and even the time of the twins’ birth, ‘a boy and a girl, each weighing five and a half pounds.’

Her startled green gaze shot upwards to clash head-on with steady dark brown. ‘How did you find all of that out?’ she demanded in gasping, shocked bewilderment.

And he might admit to feeling lousy but this close up he just looked gorgeous and sexy and disgustingly healthy.

‘I spoke to Angus.’

Angus? ‘Why would you want to drag him into this?’

‘To find out anything I could about you and the twins without formally applying for information from the personnel department here?’ he offered up in a smooth, mocking tone steeped in his own absolute justification.

Her cheeks stung hot with anger. ‘You had no right to go anywhere to dig into my business.’

‘Are you telling me now that the twins are not mine?’

Biting back the desire to lie, Cassie lowered her eyes and said nothing.

‘Wise of you, cara,’ Sandro drawled. ‘For I might be suffering from memory loss but my intelligence is still intact. I can do simple arithmetic. I can even count backwards on my fingers nine months.’

‘The twins were premature—’

‘By two weeks,’ he confirmed the shocking depth of his new knowledge. ‘I managed to incorporate it into my calculations. Not bad for a guy who spent his weekend reeling from one knock-out memory flash to another—all of which still placed you in the starring role.’

‘So what do you want—my sympathy?’ Cassie shot at him, lancing up off the chair and onto her feet.

It was a stupid mistake to make because she found herself standing almost toe to toe with him again, and because his hips rested against the desk, their eyes were level—dark and deep and swirling with the turbulent reflection of his present feelings.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I just want to hear you confirm the truth to me.’

Cassie went to turn away from him but he turned her back again, his hand arriving on her arm to achieve that aim. She tried a tug to free it, but he held on and the moment his fingers made contact with the skin at her wrist things started to happen inside her she did not want to feel.

‘I h-hate you, Sandro,’ she breathed tensely.

‘I can see that you do,’ he responded dryly, ‘which is why you are trembling and your body heat is altering, and your soft lips are pulsing as they fill with warm, sensual blood. Friday night I wanted to rip your dress off and toss you down on the nearest flat surface long before I actually got around to doing it. I was so hot for you my head burned. I ploughed this really strange course between crazed confusion and sexual madness and the two only merged together when I held you naked beneath me in my bed with your hungry mouth fixed on mine.’

Cassie tossed her head back. ‘Are you so proud of the way you behaved that you’re this happy to describe it?’

She watched, astonished, as two streaks of colour shot high across his cheeks. ‘I lost control,’ he confessed. ‘I apologise if I was too—passionate.’

Too passionate? In her estimation they’d both been too passionate. Hot, wild, out of their…

‘I should have apologised to you directly afterwards, but you’d knocked me for six again and I never got around to it.’

‘I don’t want your apology.’ Feeling as if she was being eaten alive by her own culpability that night, Cassie gave another tug at her captured arm and this time managed to pull free and step right out of reach. ‘And I’ve already told you I don’t want to have this kind of conversation with you here.’

‘Have dinner with me tonight, then,’ he invited. ‘We can talk on neutral ground.’

‘No.’ With an abrupt twist she headed for the door.

His sigh of irritation trembled down her backbone. ‘Saturday, then,’ he offered. ‘I have to go away tomorrow and cannot get back to London until the weekend. Cassie, don’t walk out of that door before we reach a compromise here!’ he warned. ‘I want to meet my children, and I prefer to do it with your permission and blessing but I will meet them without both if you force me to!’

Cassie whipped around. ‘Are you threatening me?’ she choked out, taut and trembling with a frantic mix of anger and alarm.

A scowl wrecked the shape of his attractive mouth. ‘No—’ springing up from the desk like some lithe hunting animal annoyed by the self-built cage of his own response ‘—not unless I have to,’ he temporised.

In other words he was threatening her! Cassie wrapped her arms around her middle, crushing the fabric of her grey suit jacket against her ribs. She wanted to call his bluff and tell him to get lost but she knew she couldn’t. She just didn’t possess that much power over the truth. And the truth was—love it or hate it—Sandro was the father of her children. If he wanted to meet them, what right did she have to throw obstacles in his way? She couldn’t do that to the twins or to him. Her own feelings couldn’t come into it. They—the three of them—had a given right to know each other even if it meant she had to put her own grievances with Sandro aside in order to make it happen.

But what was it going to mean to her to have Sandro stroll in and out of her life at his leisure? To see him interact with the two people she loved beyond anything else in the world?

Watching her stand there fighting a battle with herself scraped at the inner walls of Sandro’s chest. He knew this was tough on her. He knew she would rather slap his face again and tell him to go to hell. He’d left her. He’d walked away to leave her to cope on her own. He’d rejected her in the most brutal way a man could do it. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Please don’t ring this number again…





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