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

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‘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…