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.
‘E
XPLAIN
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 supercharming 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.