Had he spent the last few days with Pandora?
Did she really want to know?
The car moved off with the smoothness of a thoroughbred. As they drove in front of the BarTec building, she remembered what Ella had told her just before Sandro had arrived to interrupt.
‘You’ve terminated my employment, haven’t you?’ The question left her husky and taut.
‘What makes you think that?’
Turning to look at him, she saw genuine curiosity glinting in his eyes and he even portrayed that sexily. Definitely at war with herself now, Cassie relayed what Ella had said about her shadow taking over her duties.
‘So you’ve decided I did this to pile the pressure on you?’
‘Well, didn’t you?’
He frowned with impatience. ‘You cannot commute to London from Florence,
cara
, and a more trusting woman would have worked that out for herself. But in answer to your accusation…no, I have not terminated your employment. You are merely on a few months’ leave in which to get married and resettle in another country. When you are ready—
if
you decide you want to continue to work—then we will find you a position in one of my organisations that work out of Florence.’ He waved a long-fingered hand. ‘It is a decision I will leave to you.’
Not even slightly mollified by that perfectly reasonable speech, ‘Gosh, my one small concession in a battery of your pre-decided edicts. Thank you!’ she said.
‘It was not a concession,’ he denied. ‘If you knew me better you would know I don’t make them…I actually believe you have a right of choice whether or not you want to continue to work after we marry.’
‘If
I marry you.’ Cassie still couldn’t seem to stop hedging on that subject. It was as if some itchy instinct was obstinately stopping her from giving in to him. ‘And you can say what you like, Sandro, but the truth is that you want me cornered, isolated and helpless so I’ll stop arguing with you.’
He heaved out a heavy sigh. ‘If I was being that ruthless then it didn’t work! Believe it or not, I thought that we had the marriage issue tied up!’
‘If you believed that then why didn’t you call me to warn me that my shadow was there to learn my job?’
‘Because…’ He stopped, his lips coming together with a grim, hard snap. He frowned and looked away from her, only to immediately look back again, frustration playing games with the set of his face. ‘I was busy, OK?’ he said finally. ‘I had…things to do that put me out of range of a satellite link. And will you please desist from perching on the edge of the seat emulating a stern school headmistress?’ he bit out suddenly, waving a long-fingered hand at her tense attitude. Then he really shocked her with a sudden, totally unexpected eruption of anger. ‘And fasten your damn seatbelt!’
She was startled enough to jerk in surprise, the lightningquick way he snaked across the gap between them and physically pressed her back into the seat stunning Cassie into uttering a sharp cry.
‘You fool,’ he muttered, dragging the seatbelt around her and pushing it firmly into its lock. ‘Trust me,
cara
, you do not want to know what it feels like to hit something at speed without this in place!’
Flung by the taut words and his roughened manner into visualising what it was he was talking about, ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I just didn’t think.’
‘Been there, done that.’ His mouth wore a ring of tension around it. As he went to move away from her, Cassie reached up to touch his cheek. He looked at her, glinting eyes still frowning and fierce.
‘Sorry,’ she repeated.
His answering sigh turned into a grimace. ‘I overreacted, didn’t I?’
‘No,’ she denied. ‘I deserved to be physically manhandled and shocked out of my skin.’ Her fingertips stroked the tension etched into his lean cheekbone. ‘We haven’t really discussed what happened to you in the accident but—’
‘We are not going to discuss it.’
As abruptly as he’d moved across the seat he shifted back again, the subject cut off as severely as he severed Cassie’s breath in her throat. Her eyelashes flickered as she studied his lean profile. He looked stern suddenly.
‘Sandro—’
‘I was going to take you to lunch, but I’ve changed my mind,’ he cut right over her. ‘We will go shopping instead.’
‘Shopping for what?’ she demanded blankly.
‘Wedding rings. Betrothal rings. A bridal gown that will knock my eyes out,’ he enlightened casually. ‘Perhaps a treat or two for the twins.’
Being met by a wall of silence in response to that, Sandro was forced to turn his head. His beautiful bride was sitting there in her neat grey business suit with her long legs crossed decorously in front of her and her face showing him a stubborn profile that completely wiped out the few moments of softness which had preceded it.
The air left his lungs on an impatient hiss. Every time he showed her vulnerability she showed him softness. Every time he tried to move things forward for them she showed him stubborn ice.
‘Stop fighting me,’ he advised. ‘I understand why you feel the need to do it but I won’t let it change the final outcome. We get married in two days. Accept it, Cassie.’
She turned to look at him, green eyes Arctic-cool, her soft mouth small. ‘Most decent men would have the grace to
ask
me to marry them.’
Wry acknowledgement stretched his mouth to a grin—then suddenly he wasn’t grinning as a vivid flashback completely caught him out. Sandro thought he’d done with them during his three days of hell, but this flashback was different from the rest he’d experienced and sent a blanket of heat flooding through his body as he captured an image of her lying naked on a narrow bed with her long, slender body backed by a pale pink coverlet and her hair fanned out around her face. Those cool green eyes were shy and dark and luminous, that stubborn mouth softly parted, red and ripe.
Marry me, Cassie…
‘Dio,’
he breathed at the husky, dark echo of his own deep voice, and slammed his eyes shut as her soft response ignited a blazing fire in his loins with a force that actually made him shake.
‘Tomorrow,’
she’d whispered.
‘Sandro…?’ The sound of her voice saying his name cut into the flow of this new memory. He felt her hand curve around his arm.
‘Sandro,’ she repeated anxiously, ‘don’t.’
Like a man flung from one place to another he came back to a sense of the present with his full attention focusing on her trembling fingers clutching his arm through his suit jacket. She thought he was about to black out again but nothing could be further from the truth. What he’d just experienced had arrived with crystal clarity backed up by a three-day war he’d been waging with his past.
The one that got away, he thought ruefully as he fought to control the heat of his raging hormones. Lifting his gaze to her face, he found he was drowning in dark green anxiety. He loved it. He loved the way her teeth were worrying her full, soft lower lip.
‘I’m OK,’ he said, but she wasn’t having it.
‘No, you’re not.’ Straining the seatbelt to reach out with her other hand, she laid it against the rapid beat of his heart. ‘What triggered it this time?’
From aggravatingly stubborn to gloriously concerned, Sandro observed, relaxing like a stroked cat into the seat, ruthlessly ready to pump this moment for all that it was worth.
‘You did—who else?’ he responded truthfully, then confided, ‘I saw you lying gloriously naked on a very girly pink bed.’
Hot colour poured into her cheeks and he had to fight the urge to laugh. She understood what it was he was referring to. She knew exactly what he’d seen.
‘It was very—intense.’ Reaching up, he lifted her hand away from his chest and raised it to his lips. ‘Sexy,’ he added, laying kisses along the tops of her fingers, ‘disgracefully passionate.’
‘I…You…’ Her slender body tensed like a bow string.
Sandro let his eyes take on a darkling glint. ‘I was telling you I loved you—’
‘You don’t have to describe it,’ Cassie cut in. ‘I’m not the one with the patchy memory!’
‘And you whispered back to me,
“I love you too, Sandro…”
’
Cassie hid her eyes beneath her trembling eyelashes and tried to pull away from him but Sandro tightened his grip.
‘Did you mean it,
mi amore
?’ he persisted softly. ‘Did
I
mean it?’
At the time…? ‘Yes,’ she breathed.
‘Then we can mean it again. All it needs is a leap of faith.’
He was talking marriage again. He hadn’t really stopped talking marriage! Only now he was calling it a leap of faith. Unclipping her fingers from his hard-muscled bicep, she tried once again to retreat.
‘I asked you to marry me—’
She swung on him hotly. ‘Will you stop telling me what I already know?’
She’d been there, after all! She didn’t have a single problem recalling every detail of their first time together in her tiny apartment in her even tinier bedroom with its narrow, girly pink bed!
‘So I’m asking you again—will you marry me?’
He was remorseless, that was what he was—
pig
remorseless! Shame he couldn’t remember the way he’d kissed her goodbye the morning after and walked away!
‘If I am willing to take the leap then why can’t you take it with me…?’
Cassie opened her eyes to stare at him. There was no hint of strain blanching out his lean golden features, no sign at all of that terrible weakness that usually befell him after a memory flash like this. He was simply Sandro, lean, dark, beautiful Sandro, with the disgustingly long, curling black eyelashes framing dark, dark sexy brown eyes and the warm, smooth, achingly sensual mouth she just wanted to…
‘OK!’ she snapped out in resentful surrender. ‘I’ll marry you! But don’t think for one second that your lousy lost memory means I forgive you for what you did to me because it doesn’t!’ She rose up on the back of that surrender. ‘And nor will I forgive you for the unscrupulous way you dragged the twins into this!’
His response was immediate and downright arrogant. With a fast, graceful movement of his long body he had her imprisoned in her own corner of the seat. Her quivering gasp of surprise found a vent in a stinging, ‘You’ve unfastened your seatbelt!’
‘The car is stopped; now I can do what I want with you.’
And he did. It was no use pretending she didn’t let him when she didn’t put up even a token fight to the hot, consuming demand of his kiss. She came out of it breathless and disheveled, her jacket spread open, her blouse buttons undone and the twin peaks of her breasts stinging against the flimsy lace bra cups because they wanted his caressing fingers back on them. Her hair flowed around her shoulders now, though she couldn’t recall him setting it free, and her mouth tingled hot and bruised and swollen.
‘There…’ with husky satisfaction he ran the tip of his tongue along her pulsing upper lip ‘…leap of faith, sealed with a kiss. Now let’s go shopping….’
C
LIMBING
out of the car to find the driver had parked in the middle of Bond Street put a deeper blush into Cassie’s already hot cheeks. For a moment she froze, agonisingly aware that she’d barely been given time to do up enough blouse buttons before Sandro had caught hold of her hand and pulled her out onto the street.
And they’d stopped outside one of the most famous jewellers in London. Staring at its elegant glass frontage, she saw none of the glistening riches set out on display because she was staring at her own reflection in shocked dismay.
She looked like a lush again, a tousle-haired, deepcleavaged blonde lush with a thoroughly kissed mouth and dazed, dark, river-green eyes. It took only a glance at Sandro’s expression to know that he was very happy with what he saw as he looked back at her. And he looked no different from the way he had when he’d first appeared in front of her in the park. His clothes were still immaculate, his hair smooth and neat. Yet she knew, because she’d watched him do it, that he’d had to adjust certain parts of his anatomy before he’d opened the car door.
And recalling why he’d had to do that did not ease the heat from her cheeks as he walked her across the pavement, or what was still taking place between her trembling thighs.
‘I really do hate you,’ she whispered as they waited for a liveried security person to swing the jeweller’s shop door open for them.
‘I know…’ he bent his dark head to touch his warm lips to her ear ‘…fabulous hatred,
amante mia
. I can’t wait to enjoy it some more.’
With that rich promise ringing in her head, he walked them into the shop, her hand secured inside his. The way he received instant gushing attention kept her quiet and meek because—well, there was only room for one ego in the shop and to watch Sandro turn his arrogant Italian ego full on was something she discovered she would not have liked to miss.
They were escorted to a private room from where he plied her with diamonds and rubies and sapphires. He waved away the emeralds with long-fingered contempt because, ‘They cannot compete with your beautiful eyes,
bella mia
,’ he told her. When she lifted those beautiful emerald eyes to stare at him as if he’d turned into some weird caricature of himself, his lazy grin told her he knew exactly how he was behaving and was enjoying doing it.
He was different all round, Cassie realised, light-hearted, more expressive, expansive in his language and his warm, sensual drawl. He draped her in diamonds, necklaces, bracelets, and made her cheeks burn like fire when he used the tips of his long fingers to delicately position a huge white diamond droplet between the thrusting warmth of her breasts.
‘Will you stop it?’ she hissed at him when the assistant moved off to collect another tray of mind-boggling trinkets. ‘I’m not going to let you buy me any of them. And I feel like a bimbo!’
‘I’m buying you this one,’ he said, leaning against the table while she stood in front of him. ‘I’m going to eat it on our wedding night as a sexy side dish while I am eating you.’
‘You’re mad,’ she breathed helplessly.
‘Crazy,’ he agreed. He didn’t need to extend that to ‘crazy for you’ because it was written in his eyes as he caught up the diamond droplet and lifted it to his lips before settling it between her breasts again.
Cassie knew she had started to fall fathoms deep in love with him again when it occurred to her that this madly extravagant display he was putting on was not about playing games or about his ego or even the shockingly sexual atmosphere he was generating deliberately.
He was, quite simply, being the other Sandro she’d met years ago. The relaxed, light-hearted, teasing, charming, gorgeously expressive Sandro she’d spent two amazing weeks falling deeper in love with every day. This was Sandro being happy. It hit her really hard just how
un
happy he had been since they’d met up again—and the reason for the change…?
She’d stopped fighting him. She’d given him what he wanted and agreed to marry him. She didn’t think this was even about the twins. He might not remember her but, as he kept on saying to her, he
knew
her. He’d slipped back into wanting her from almost the first moment their eyes had met again, and now he was courting her—because this crazy romantic side to his nature came so beautifully naturally to him.
That had to mean something, didn’t it? It had to mean that his instincts were not playing him false and if—
when
—his memory did return it was not going to reveal some terrible, dark reason as to why he’d shut her out in the first place.
They chose a diamond cluster ring that sparkled on her finger. And matching wedding rings studded with tiny bright diamonds set into rich yellow gold.
From there he changed his mind again and decided to take her to lunch at a busy pub, where they had to stand up at a bar table to eat and the lunch crowd pressed in all around them but they didn’t notice because they were talking—really talking the way they had used to do, about everything and anything.
Engrossed.
Touching, always touching each other without really being aware of doing it, his fingers toying with her fingers, stroking her cheek, the tumbling waterfall of her hair. Her fingers feeding him crisp slices of green apple from her dessert dish he bit into with his even white teeth, always making sure he grazed her tingling fingertips at the same time. Other women stared covetously at him and enviously at her. And the sexual magnetism purred around the two of them like the idling engine of a dangerously powerful car.
It was as if he was recreating their first afternoon together without being aware of it. And Cassie sank beneath his magical spell. As they walked back down Bond Street with his arm resting about her shoulders she expected them to start shopping as he’d said they would, but he shrugged that idea away with, ‘We’ll do it tomorrow.’
Tomorrow suddenly felt bright and exciting because it had to mean he intended to spend it with her.
Cracks only began to appear in the veneer of their reincarnation when he came back with her to her apartment and saw how they lived for the first time.
He didn’t say a single word as he looked at the stuffed old armchair and twin-seater sofa made to match by the couple of throws draped over them. Then he took in the ancient TV set with its tiny square screen. When he finally dealt his gaze on the wooden dining furniture bought flat-packed on her shoestring budget and put together by her own hands, it was as if a suit of glass armour shot down over him. He might as well have bitten out, My children live in a place like this…?
‘Don’t be such a snob, Sandro,’ Cassie retaliated stiffly. ‘We have been very happy here.’
Walking out of the room, she crossed the tiny hallway to gain access to her bedroom. Flushed and cross and her dignity ruffled, she opened her wardrobe door and slipped her jacket onto a hanger.
A sound behind her made her turn as she closed the wardrobe door. He was standing in the doorway, giving her tiny bedroom with its single bed and single wardrobe and single chest of drawers that same glassy look.
‘If you’re looking for pink, try the other bedroom,’ she said in an attempt to lighten the loaded atmosphere.
He didn’t even crack half a smile. What he did do was to take the single step to reach her wardrobe and draw the door open then stood staring at what was hanging inside it—the little black dress she’d worn to his introduction dinner, freshly dry-cleaned now and covered in polythene, another suit like the one she’d been wearing today and a small selection of businesslike tops and shirts.
Grim mouth flattening, he slammed the door shut then spun on his heel and walked out. When she’d fought her angry flush enough to follow him she found him standing in the twins’ room as if he’d been turned to stone. One side of the room was as pink and feminine as a fairy tale, the other side shot with moons and rockets and flying space troopers.
‘What did you expect?’ she flung out, hurt by his oh-soexpressive stance. ‘A damn huge, great, fancy palace?’
The fact that she swore at him swung Sandro around. Cassie was stunned that the pallor was back on his face—only this time it was the harsh pallor of contempt.
‘This is our
home
!’ she pressed on him angrily. ‘Don’t you dare turn your rich nose up at it!’
‘I wasn’t—’
‘You were,’ she said on a shimmer of burning offence. ‘But don’t worry, Sandro. Bella is looking forward to the day her handsome daddy prince carries us all off to his fabulous castle! So if you don’t have a castle, take my advice and
buy
one! She will love you to bits for making all her fairy-tale dreams come true! Anthony might not, but then he’s more concerned about communicating when he can’t speak Italian. And I don’t think for one minute that he’s nurturing dreams of you producing your own private rocket to the stars!’
She spun away, her wild, bubbling fever of offended dignity spoiled by the hot burn of hurt tears.
‘I already own the castle.’
Cassie froze in the doorway, narrow shoulders racking back, quivering and taut inside her white blouse.
‘And my own jet.’ His voice sounded jerky and thick. ‘I own several more residences in far-flung, exotic places, a couple of helicopters, an ocean-going yacht and an island in the Caribbean,’ he listed, almost—almost sounding apologetic to Cassie’s oversensitive ears. ‘What I don’t have is what you have right here, which is a
home
, as you said. Warmth, untidy comfort.’ His impatient sigh had her turning about. ‘Now I’m going to have to rethink my whole approach to what it was I thought would impress you and the twins when we hit Florence…’His mouth flattened out even further. ‘You must have hated my London apartment.’
‘It reminded me of a big, echoing mausoleum,’ Cassie murmured, coming down from hurt dignity but still hanging on to the threat of tears. ‘I’m…sorry if I misunderstood your reaction but—’
‘But now you’re in trouble,’ Sandro said for her.
Her own finish for that sentence was swallowed down when she looked into his glowing dark eyes and saw what he was talking about. He reached out to take hold of her shoulders, the small gap between them suddenly shut. A pulse beat accelerated in her throat, a short gasp escaping when her breasts stung as they filled with heat.
‘You’ve been warned before about feeling sorry for me.’ Sliding his hands down the length of her body, he closed them on her hips and tugged.
Shock widened Cassie’s eyes. ‘Y-you…’
‘Sí
,
’
he confirmed, making her feel the full, probing state of his arousal. ‘Liquid green eyes and sympathy…controlkillers,’ he stated darkly.
A vivid image of burning gas jets flew across her mind and brought the pink tip of her tongue snaking out to touch the tingling curve of her upper lip. A lusty growl and he caught that pink tip between his lips and sucked. He was already backing her out of the twins’ bedroom, the shockingly rampant evidence of his intentions building in strength with the stimulation of the move. Her hands had to clutch at his arms to maintain her balance because he was really kissing her now, exploring her mouth with a sensual expertise and urgency that arched her neck, and pressed her breasts into firmer contact with his chest.
She could feel the heavy pump of his heart, his heat, the sheer masculine dominance of his hard male contours turning her female softness to a quivering, sensual flow of warm blood. When she heard the sound of a door shutting and instantly recognised it as her own bedroom door, she had to fight to drag her mouth from his.
‘We can’t,’ she groaned.
‘We can,’ he insisted, then added with a searing rasp of amusement, ‘We must,’ and buried his mouth in the heated hollow of her throat.
‘But school—the twins!’ she tried again—desperately.
At least she succeeded in bringing his dark head up. His eyes looked like black pits filled with flaming frustration, his lips were parted, warm and soft.
‘How long?’ he demanded, tension holding him like a string of prickling barbed wire.
Cassie tried to think without taking her wary eyes off him to look at her bedside clock. She didn’t trust him. She could still feel the powering urgency being pressed against her, and her own body wasn’t behaving itself. There was a pulsing ache taking place deep down in her abdomen, sensual moisture already livening the tender place between her thighs.
She tried for a breath. He was waiting for an answer, taut and bold and still. Her head twisted round, eyelashes flickering as she glanced away from him at the clock then back to him again.
‘H-half an hour.’ She watched his frustration flare to monumental proportions and like a rat throwing itself on a trap she sealed her own immediate destiny. ‘Jenny, m-my neighbour, picks them up, s-so let’s call it forty-f-five minutes before they get back…’
The flare of frustration became a glow of pure arrogance. ‘I can work within those parameters,’ he drawled.
Next second her pencil skirt dropped to the floor. The veins in her slender thighs started to sting as her blood began to race through them. Sandro was yanking his tie off, eyes fixed and intent on her face. He stripped with a grace and a speed that held her breathless and speechless.
‘If you want the truth, I wasn’t going to do this,’ he admitted, the lithe move of his hips seeing his trousers stripped from his legs along with whatever else he was wearing beneath.
‘Do what?’ Cassie couldn’t stop staring. He was magnificent naked.
‘Make love to you again before we married.’ He fed his arms around her and drew her against all of that taut masculinity, uncaring, so assured about the perfection of his own body. ‘I was going to make us wait, build on the tension so you’d be so hot for me you wouldn’t think of changing your mind.’
‘Arrogant,’ Cassie shook out as he slipped her blouse from her body and unclipped her bra.
He didn’t even complain that she’d been too shy to strip herself. He caught the weight of her breasts in his palms and lifted them to meet with his lowering mouth. The sharp sting of pleasure that shot through her body forced a shaken gasp from her throat.