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