‘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 drop-down 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.
H
EAT
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 halfconvincing 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 cutandthrust 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.