Lips trembling, she parted them to take in a small breath before asking, ‘Have you remembered anything over the weekend?’
Sandro gave a shake of his head. ‘Nothing I can hold on to before it is gone again.’
‘Did—did you see your…your brother, the doctor, again?’
Compressed mouth stretching into a smile, he lowered his hand and Cassie found herself drowning in the rueful glow in his dark eyes. ‘I know what’s wrong with me, Cassie—my memory is trying to return to me. What can any doctor do other than to advise me to be patient and expose myself as much as possible to the trigger that’s helping me to remember? You and I both know that you are that trigger.’ Reaching up, he touched a gentle finger to the corner of her mouth. ‘Your face, your hair, your sparkling green eyes, your smooth, slender body and this soft, quivering mouth I want to lean in and kiss so badly that I’m aching again.’
The last part made Cassie blink then take a jerky step backwards. Watching her do it brought back his wry smile.
‘No kindly offer to help me out here?’ he quizzed. ‘A more charitable woman would lean in and kiss me, if only for experiment.’
‘Who is Sandro Rossi?’ The question arrived right out of the middle of the hot cloud of temptation Cassie found she was bathed in.
‘Ah.’ He grimaced. ‘Were you always this heartless?’
‘I can’t remember,’ she shot back. ‘You tell me.’
‘I will one day, I promise you.’
‘So who is Sandro Rossi?’ she repeated firmly, wishing…wishing she could just turn and walk away from him but she couldn’t, for he was, bottom line, the father of her children and nothing was ever going to change that, whatever name he used.
‘I am Sandro Rossi,’ he announced, ‘Alessandro Giancola Marchese Rossi,’ he extended like a sensually loaded introduction that plied melting heat along Cassie’s bones. ‘It is a family thing. Alessandro comes from my paternal grandfather. My grandmother brought the Marchese name into the family along with the Marchese wealth and power.’
Reaching into his inside jacket pocket, he produced two cards which he handed to Cassie. One was clearly a business card bearing the Marchese logo above the shortened name
Alessandro Marchese
along with the usual contact details. The other card brought a lump to her throat because she recognised it as similar to the one he had given to her six years ago. It was simply scribed with the name
Alessandro Rossi
.
‘I did not lie to you, Cassie,’ he stated quietly. ‘I am so used to having two names that I rarely bother to think about it. The Rossi family was not poor but it could not match the Marchese wealth and power. When my great-grandfather married his only child off to a Rossi, he insisted that all first-born sons thereafter must have Marchese included in their name and adopt it when the time came for them to inherit. I inherited the name when my father died two years ago. Until then I still called myself a Rossi….’
Eyes stinging now as she stared down at the cards held in her fingers, Cassie thought about Anthony, Sandro’s first-born son. ‘Now you’ve broken with tradition.’
‘Sí
, I have broken with tradition.’
‘And the other name you mentioned?’ Her eyelashes trembled as she looked up at him and saw a rueful kind of smile touch his attractive mouth.
‘Giancola brings together two uncles, Gianni and Nicola—my father’s brothers—in respect of their memory…they died at birth…’ As if he couldn’t stop himself from doing it, Sandro reached up to gently comb a stray lock of hair from her cheek. ‘They were twins,
cara
. See how the pieces begin to fit together?’
Some, she agreed, but not all of them. ‘Pandora told me that you hate being called Sandro, yet you introduced yourself to me by that name.’
To her surprise he uttered a short laugh. ‘It’s a strange phenomenon that makes sense to me only now that I’ve met you again. Pandora was telling the truth—I have hated hearing myself called Sandro for years…six years to be exact,’ he added ironically. ‘Then you arrive back in my life, spitting Sandro at me, and it all began to make a crazy kind of sense.’
‘To you perhaps but not to me.’
‘I might have holes in my memory where you are concerned,
cara
, but I must have maintained a pretty powerful link with you through the use of that name. No one else is allowed to use it without earning my anger, yet I love to hear you use it. Think about it,’ he urged. ‘It’s been a six-year trigger just waiting to happen.’
‘And may never have happened but for a chance meeting in a restaurant bar,’ Cassie tagged on, placing a dampener on the power he seemed to be applying to the use of a name.
She offered the cards back to him but he refused to take them. ‘Keep them in case you need to call me.’
The icy shiver of
déjà vu
that lanced down her spine was an even more powerful trigger to Cassie. Maybe he realised it because he breathed out a short sigh. ‘My mobile phone was in my pocket on the day I had the accident. I did not see or touch it again until I was fit and able to start work again. I did not intentionally ignore your calls.’
But he had to have picked up those missed calls eventually, Cassie extended silently. Had he assumed that she was some kind of nutcase calling him because by then he did not remember her? If so then by the time she made her last frantic call he was ready for her;
I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Please don’t call this number again.
‘I’m sorry I was so brutal with you,’ he murmured, seemingly able to read her mind when he couldn’t even read his own. ‘I wish I could remember doing it—I feel I deserve to remember being so brutal.’ His hand lifted up to cover his frowning brow again. ‘But I promise you I will never let it happen again.’
Fine words, Cassie thought, knowing she had to accept them because—what other choice did she have? She could continue to resent him to hell and back for his cruel rejection but he would always remain the father of her children. Nothing, not even an apology, was going to change that.
So, pressing her lips together, she just nodded and closed her fingers around the contact cards then turned and walked back to the door. As she reached it she paused, the uneven beat of her aching heart telling her what she was going to do next before she had even formed the words.
‘I’m going to visit Angus on Saturday,’ she announced with an unsteady thickness. ‘Perhaps you could turn up there too. Th-the twins love it there…I can let them loose to run wild in Angus’s garden…It—it’s as neutral a place I can think of for the three of you to m-meet.’
‘Sí
…Yes…Thank you,’ Sandro responded with a rough catch in his voice.
Cassie stared down at her shoes. ‘Their names are…’
‘I know their names,
cara
,’ he inserted gruffly, ‘Anthony and Isabelle….’
Cassie nodded. ‘Sh-she—Isabelle prefers to be called Bella,’ she managed to push past the constriction trying to strangle her throat. ‘Bella was born first, three minutes before her brother. Th-the Bella name stuck because—because it was the way Anthony first said her name, whereas he…’ She had to stop to swallow. She wasn’t facing him but she knew he wasn’t moving a single muscle and tears were pushing at the backs of her eyes now. ‘H-he’s always Anthony because Bella never had trouble saying his name. But then…but then Bella is like that, sh-she’s sharp and quick and—Have a good trip and we’ll see you on Saturday.’
Unable to hang around here for another heart-wrenching second of this, Cassie found herself standing on the other side of his office door experiencing her second sense of
déjà vu
in as many minutes—this one spinning her back to the restaurant on Friday night.
The big difference this time being that she now found herself standing here with her composure shot to pieces and staring at a room full of curious eyes instead of a thankfully empty space. She felt her face drain of colour, her eyes moving on what felt like guilty wings to focus on the narrow-eyed glitter spitting out from the black eyes of Pandora Batiste.
Guilty fire came to lick up her neck to burn a mortified path to her cheeks. If the other woman was Sandro’s lover then she had every right to pin her to the door with a look like that, Cassie accepted. Did she know—
could
Pandora know what she and Sandro had done on Friday night?
Telephones suddenly started ringing—half a dozen of them bursting simultaneously into life. Watching smart-suited people jump to their workstations, Cassie took her chance while she had it and hurried across the room. As she slipped out through the door she heard a cumulative murmur of,
‘Sí, Alessandro,’
and almost felt the backlash as a dozen or so bodies made a mass move towards Sandro’s office door.
He’d done it to divert their attention away from her, she realised with a small laugh that deteriorated into a strangled choke.
‘H
E’S
very good with them, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’ Cassie nodded, wishing she knew whether to laugh or to weep, as she watched Sandro go down in a huddle on the lawn in his bungled attempt to stop the ball Bella had just kicked into his improvised goal area, marked by two anoraks provided by the twins.
Bella certainly found it hilariously funny because she was jumping up and down and squealing with delight as the ball rolled right past him, setting Anthony running to go and catch it.
The afternoon was bright and sunny but way too cool to tempt Angus outside. Electing to stay inside with him, the two of them now sat by the French windows with Angus occupying his favourite chair that Sandro had carried there so he could watch the children play. Seated on a low stool beside him, Cassie leant forward so she could rest her chin on the heels of her hands.
All in, she’d had a pretty lousy week, she reflected bleakly. Monday she’d felt wrecked by her confrontation with Sandro. Tuesday she’d felt wrecked by the discovery that Pandora Batiste was the real new boss Sandro had put in Angus’s place. Sandro should not have even been at BarTec on Monday. The fact that he’d arrived there and commandeered Angus’s office—which was now Pandora’s office, apparently—exclusively to be private with Cassie had gone down with Pandora like a lead balloon.
By the end of Wednesday she knew she’d made a serious enemy in Pandora Batiste. She’d been hauled in front of the other woman to defend her commitment to the company. Her timekeeping had been called into question, and why she felt she had the right to finish work half an hour earlier than anyone else. When she’d explained that she took half an hour less at lunchtime to compensate, Pandora wasn’t impressed. Did she know she took more holiday breaks than her colleagues? Was she aware that said extra holidays were not a part of her employment contract with BarTec? A verbal agreement with Angus that she could catch up by working from home during school breaks did not suit her new boss, who, she was told, did not approve of unequal favours built on the flimsy excuse of verbal agreements. When she promised to make new arrangements for collecting and caring for her children Pandora still wasn’t pleased.
Not once was Sandro’s name mentioned, but his spectre wove in and out of each criticism she was forced to take on the chin. She spent Thursday mostly on the phone trying to fill in the half-hour gap between the twins leaving school and her being able to collect them and did not dare to even try to think about the half-term break due in a couple of weeks. By Friday she knew she was in serious trouble when she arrived at BarTec to discover that her every working moment was to be shadowed by one of Sandro’s team.
Ella spent the day trying to bully her into telling Sandro what Pandora was doing but Cassie would rather have cut out her tongue than sneak to Sandro about it. Her pride had taken enough of a beating from Pandora.
And all because of this man, who was playing with her children as if he’d always been there for them.
‘He told you everything before we arrived, didn’t he?’ she murmured flatly to Angus.
‘It is in his nature to meet uncomfortable issues head-on,’ her father’s old friend supplied.
Not with me
, thought Cassie.
‘Look at the way he faced the twins when you arrived,’ Angus highlighted. ‘No playing it cagey, he just went straight in there.’
Sliding her fingers up to hide the revealing wobble suddenly attacking her mouth, Cassie closed her eyes in pained reflection of that heart-wrenching moment when Sandro had stood in this same room, and faced his children for the first time.
Wearing jeans and a soft grey jumper over an open-neck shirt, he’d looked so fabulously tall, dark, handsome…and so alarmingly tense and pale she’d feared he was going to drop to the floor in one of his blackouts.
‘Sandro…’ she’d murmured, unable to keep her concern hidden.
‘I’m OK,’ he’d husked out, but the way he could not keep the unevenness from his voice told her otherwise. So had the blacker than black eyes he’d locked on the twins, who’d come to a standstill halfway across the room, the happy way they’d run in here to go straight to Angus, stunted by their surprise at being confronted with a stranger.
And no one, not Cassie, not Angus, who observed all from his chair, not even two five-year-olds, missed the tension holding Sandro, or the way he’d burned lingering looks from one twin to the other, seeing what Cassie already knew was there.
One green-eyed, golden-haired little girl and one dark-eyed, dark-haired little boy—two miniature replicas of their parents.
Cassie’s throat closed on a lump of agony. At that point she would have given anything not to put the three of them through this. She’d watched Sandro swallow, watched him lift his eyes up to meet with hers, felt the ferocious sweep of emotion crash into her because he exposed so much vulnerability in that short, strained, heart-stopping glance.
‘Anthony, Bella…’ she’d tried her best to ease it for him ‘…this is Alessandro. S-say hello…’
The twins’ obedient responses had been mumbled. A muscle running along the rigid edge of Sandro’s jaw jerked as he’d looked back at them. Like a guy fighting a mammoth battle with himself he’d fought to place a smile on his mouth as he dropped into a squat in front of the two children.
Then he’d knocked Cassie sideways with his, ‘Hello. I am your father. I am sorry we have not met before now…’
‘It was quite courageous, considering.’ Angus spoke beside her.
Considering what? Cassie wondered as sharp tears sliced across her eyes. ‘A considerate man would have warned me he was going to announce it like that instead of just dropping it on the twins like a bomb.’
‘A considerate woman would perhaps have prepared her children to expect it to come.’
Cassie flushed, tensing up at what she read as a criticism of her mothering instincts. ‘I was hoping to give them breathing space between meeting Sandro and learning who he really is,’ she defended her own reasoning.
Doing it Sandro’s way had turned a simple first meeting into an emotional storm the likes of which she had never seen her children display. Bella had burst into a flood of wild tears. ‘But we don’t need a daddy!’ she’d sobbed.
‘And we don’t want you as one!’ Anthony had tagged on, his arm going around his twin in a fiercely protective gesture that said it all as far as the little boy was concerned.
‘I never, not once, realised just how dreadfully vulnerable they felt about having no father,’ Cassie confided with Angus.
‘Alessandro was vulnerable too, Cassie,’ Angus pointed out. ‘He was as close to tears as you and Bella.’
It had been a horrible few seconds when nobody could find a thing to say that might have taken the edge off his distress. Bella kept on sobbing and Cassie had gone to hug her. Anthony had just stood glaring at Sandro while Sandro looked helplessly back.
‘I’m amazed now that I never noticed the likeness before,’ Angus put in thoughtfully.
‘Why should you?’ Cassie asked. ‘You didn’t know Sandro and I had even met each other.’
‘Anthony has his father’s hair and eyes and features, and his intense personality,’ Angus said, ‘as Bella possesses your golden beauty and fiery nature.’
‘I’m not fiery!’ she protested. In fact, she’d always believed herself to be a very calm and placid person—except with Sandro, of course, she was forced to acknowledge. Where he was concerned she—
‘And he seemed to know instinctively how to handle them.’
Yes, he’d just taken control of his own emotions, reached out and gently taken Bella out of Cassie’s arms, turned the little girl around and encouraged her to weep on his shoulder. When Anthony aimed a kick at him for touching his sister, he’d ignored the kick, smiled at his son then held out his free hand to him.
And Anthony had taken the hand, Cassie recalled as the lump in her throat, which had rarely been missing since she’d witnessed that wrenching little scene, thickened some more. Sandro had lowered himself into a chair still holding Bella against him, drawing a reluctant Anthony towards him until the small boy stood glowering at him from his wooden stance by Sandro’s thigh. Then he’d talked to them. He’d talked and he’d talked in his low, soft accented voice that held the two children totally engrossed and turned Cassie’s emotions inside out.
‘He doesn’t even remember me,’ she whispered to Angus, unwittingly revealing how much that little truth hurt.
‘No…’ Angus sounded thoughtful. ‘Human instinct is a fascinating thing when you think about it. He doesn’t remember you yet he looks at you as if you are already his wife.’
His wife?
Cassie shot to her feet on a surge of new-found energy. ‘I don’t know what it is you’re cooking up in your head, Angus,’ she said sternly, ‘but I can tell you straight, I am not going to
marry
him!’
Her father’s old friend smiled one of those I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself kind of smiles that softened some of the ravages of his illness out of his thin face. ‘Fiery, as I said.’
Ignoring that, ‘Has Sandro mentioned this marriage thing to you?’ she demanded sharply.
Making a gesture with one of his long, frail, bony hands, ‘That’s something you will have to take up with him, not with me,’ he replied.
Not while I live and breathe
, thought Cassie, frowning fiercely because she couldn’t understand why she was getting so het up about something that just was not going to be. Unsettled, restless now, unhappy about the feelings suddenly running around inside her, she glanced at her watch.
‘It’s time for us to leave if we want to catch our train,’ she mumbled, turning towards the French windows with the intention of calling in the twins.
‘Running away, Cassie?’ Angus said gently. ‘Perhaps you are living with the badly mistaken fear that the man you see out there playing with his children is going to disappear out of your lives as quickly as he came into them.’
Her shoulders tensed. ‘He did it once.’
‘Due to a car accident that came at a very inopportune time for the two of you,’ Angus pointed out. ‘Now here you both are, being given an opportunity to put right something which perhaps would not have happened if Alessandro had not been so…incapacitated. Think about it, Cassie. Fate does not hand out these chances so often that you can afford to pass them by because you are feeling hurt by what you still think of as his desertion.’
‘Forgive and forget?’ She laughed, a glimpse of her old dry humour creeping out. ‘Perhaps I need a knock on the head, then, to help even things out a bit between us!’
Angus laughed too. ‘Meeting him halfway would be much less painful.’
Meet him halfway over what though? The twins? Well, she’d already accepted she had to do that for their sake.
‘If it helps, I think your father would have approved of him.’
Turning round, Cassie walked back to Angus and leant down to press a kiss against his cool, bony cheek. ‘Stop playing Cupid for your own amusement,’ she scolded, then added more softly, ‘And you look tired, so we’re going to leave before you exhaust yourself trying to soften me up for Sandro.’
But Sandro didn’t need Angus to champion his cause because he’d found two much better candidates for the role—as she discovered ten seconds later when the French windows suddenly flew open to let the twins run inside along with a gust of cool air.
‘Guess what, Uncle Angus,’ Bella announced, ‘our mummy and daddy are going to get married!’
‘And we’re all going to live in Italy!’ Anthony tagged on.
Having spun around in time to catch the excited glow on the twins’ faces, Cassie raised her eyes to meet with Sandro’s steady gaze and just froze.
He’d planned all of this with the precision of an army general. She could see it declared right there in the cool expression stamped on his face. He’d taken the neutral ground she’d offered him for this meeting at Angus’s home and invaded it before she’d even got here. Then he’d moved on to phase two, by wooing the twins into accepting him as their father, then wooed them some more with what must amount to them as the solid gold prize!
Marriage—a real family unit. A home together in an exciting new place. And he’d mapped it all out for the twins during an improvised game of football played out on Angus’s lawn.
Clever, smooth, stunningly slick, she allowed him as she continued to stand there taking in his supremely relaxed almost arrogant stance, while the twins shot past her to go and lean on the arms of Angus’s chair. They were telling him everything, though Cassie barely listened. They were ordering him to hurry up and get well so he could come and visit them in Italy. And throughout this minor commotion they were creating, Sandro did not let his gaze drop from hers.
Sandro suspected that if they’d been alone she would be issuing another hit to his face. He’d outmanoeuvred and trapped her before she’d been aware there was a trap to be sprung.
Marriage. ‘The only answer,’ he announced under cover of the twins’ excited chatter.
He watched her lips part and quiver. He watched the ice in her eyes melt to a dull shade of green. Hurt, he recognised with a twinge of remorse which still did not touch his resolve. ‘Next week,’ he extended. ‘Arrangements are already in place for a quiet civil ceremony here in London. We will do the proper wedding thing later, once we are…settled as a family.’
‘Why?’ she breathed.
Breaking his lock on her eyes, instead of answering he flicked a glance towards Angus. Like a puppet pulled by the younger man’s strings, the older man rose up from his chair and led the twins out of the room on the promise of a snack before they had to leave.
The silence their departure left behind hung around Cassie’s throat like a noose. Sandro moved away from the French windows to place the twins’ coats down on a chair then turned back to face her. The cool breeze outside had blanched his skin of some of its warm colour and she could smell the fresh air still permeating his clothes. Like herself, he was wearing casual jeans and a sweater, the difference being that his outfit was designer quality whereas hers was made up from the cheapest high-street bargains she could find. But then everything about Sandro was like that, she mused bleakly—designed to impress: his dominating height, the undeniable physical attraction built into his long, masculine framework, the silky blackness of his hair even when it had been ruffled by a breeze, and the stunning bone structure that made up his too-handsome face. Naked he looked fabulous, dressed he looked fabulous—but did the quality of the inner man match the quality of the outer shell?