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 halfhidden 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…
Those words had been eating him up since she’d quoted them back to him. It didn’t matter that he could not remember having said them. The point was he
had
to have said them. He didn’t dare let himself wonder what she must have felt like to be on the receiving end of such brutality.
A spark of pain sent his fingers up to rub at his brow. He needed to remember but all he kept getting were these flashes that seared through his head, only to lock him out again.
‘I want to meet them, Cassie,’ he repeated determinedly.
‘Three nights ago you didn’t even know you had two children!’ she cried out painfully. ‘You can’t even remember me! N-no,’ she refused yet again, trying desperately to control her shaking voice, ‘not yet at least, n-not until I can be sure…’
‘Be sure of what?’ he prompted when the rest dried on her tongue.
Cassie pulled in a breath. ‘Be sure that you m-mean to stay around for them.’
‘And you don’t think I will?’
Lowering her eyes, she just shrugged and said nothing.
‘On what evidence do you make this judgement of my character?’ he demanded haughtily.
Was he joking? No, he wasn’t, she saw by his taut, proud stance. ‘Since you’re the man I spent two weeks with and didn’t see again for six years, I don’t know how you dare stand there and say that.’
‘And you hold this against me though I’ve explained the circumstances?’
Yes, that was exactly what she was saying, Cassie had to concede. ‘Look.’ She sighed, accepting that he had a point. ‘I just think it’s too soon to bring the twins into this. They’re so young and vulnerable, Sandro! Letting you walk into their lives because you’re curious about them and because you feel you have the right to do it does not—’
‘So at least you accept that I do possess the right!’
Moistening her lips, Cassie nodded. ‘But I think you need more time to consider what it’s going to mean to your life
before
you decide to meet them.’
‘If they are my children then I don’t need to take time to decide anything,’ he declared stiffly.
‘If,’ Cassie picked up.
‘If
they’re your children? You see, you
don’t
really even know for sure!’
It was stalemate. He knew it, Cassie knew it. Releasing a hard sigh of frustration, he lifted a hand up to rub at his brow.
Cassie watched tensely as the colour began to drain from his face. It was happening again, and the aching thrum of concern for him began to war with her need to maintain her defences against him. She was scared of what he could do to her, scared of this man called Alessandro Marchese because of the power he possessed over the most important things in her life—her children and her job. Sandro Rossi had been a different person. Younger, way less intimidating because he had not worn the hard shell of maturity and the aura of power and inner strength she was seeing now, despite the physical weakness presently troubling him.
And she was even more scared of how he could make her feel. Even now her muscles were twitching with a need to go back across the room to him, her heart thumping heavy and slow in her chest because…because no matter which name he went by there was this fine-wire link of intimacy at work between them, tugging so strongly on her emotions that in the end she had to give in to it.
Walking back to him, she reached up to touch the back of his hand. ‘OK?’ she questioned huskily.
‘Sí
,
’
he responded.