Marchese's Forgotten Bride

‘Don’t make me out to be so pathetic,’ he bit out. ‘And stop looking at me through those anxious emerald eyes because it turns me on like a flaming gas jet! Just do something sensible and go, Cassie.’

He pulled the door open then just stood there, expecting her to get out—wanting her to get out even though he claimed she turned him on.

Well, there was no sign in him of gas jets right now, she recognised, just a hard, grim, remote man.

So she left, her lips pressed together to stop them from quivering, and her eyelashes trembling against her cheeks. He stood at the door and watched her until the lift doors closed between them. Then, like a fool, she parted her lips and let them quiver, let her eyes open wide and fill with wretched, unwanted, weak tears.

CHAPTER SIX

CASSIE let herself into her tiny apartment virtually on the stroke of midnight. Everything was quiet and soothingly normal, only the muted sound of the television seeping out from the living room to tell her that anyone else was here.

Taking in a deep breath, she opened the door to find Jenny sitting in the armchair watching TV just as she’d imagined her, with her feet up on the coffee table and the almost empty box of chocolates lying on her lap.

‘Oh, hello.’ Jenny smiled at her, straightening her round, comfortable shape up in the chair. ‘You’ve timed it nicely because my film has just finished. Did you have a nice time?’

I wish, Cassie thought heavily. ‘Yes,’ she heard herself answer with a calm that didn’t sound as unnatural as she feared it would. ‘Have the twins behaved themselves?’

‘Perfect angels. Not a single peep out of them.’ The older woman came to her feet and plied her with interested questions about her evening while she gathered together her bits and pieces and hunted down her discarded shoes.

‘W-would you like a cup of tea before you go?’ Cassie found her good manners from somewhere.

‘No, thank you, love. I’d just had one before you arrived home.’

A few minutes later and Cassie was closing the front door on Jenny’s disappearing figure then turning to lean back against it with a sigh. She’d never felt so battered and wrung out in her entire life.

Then she was pulling herself together and peeling herself away from the door to go and check on the twins. She found two peacefully sleeping faces highlighted by the tiny night lamp set on the table between their beds. Anthony was lying sprawled on his back with his duvet half kicked off him, his thick, dark hair ruffled in a way that made Cassie’s heart squeeze because it looked so like Sandro’s had looked before his fingers had unwittingly smoothed his hair back into place. Bella lay curled neatly on her side as she usually slept, her pale blonde hair streaming out behind her in a silken gold swathe.

They both looked so young, so sweet but so very vulnerable. How were they going to feel about a father they hardly knew anything about if Sandro decided he wanted a role in their lives?

It didn’t bear thinking about. Cassie was too scared to think about it. And, selfishly, her fears were mostly for herself. The twins had always been just hers to love and to be loved by. There hadn’t been a single second since their birth that she hadn’t loved and cherished them with all of her heart. In everything she’d done since she’d known she was pregnant and alone, she’d always placed their well-being first—in her choice of employment, in her choice of nursery accommodation, paying over the odds to secure the best care available for them and negotiating a flexible timetable with her employers so she could work the best hours to suit the twins’ needs. When Angus offered her this chance to come up to London to work for him, it had been the much larger wage packet and his kind offer to let her rent this flat from his property portfolio on reduced terms that had clinched the deal for her.

Still, it had been tough sometimes to reach the end of the financial month still solvent but she’d done it. Cassie was proud of that achievement—fiercely proud. However, she would be willing to bet that Sandro wouldn’t view their tiny flat and their threadbare second-hand furniture as anything to be proud of.

Closing the twins’ bedroom door as quietly as she had opened it, she stepped into her bedroom next to theirs. Both bedrooms were short on space but the twins had the larger room simply because it was practical while the two of them shared.

What happened, though, when it was no longer practical for them to share? she wondered suddenly. What happened if, now he’d sold BarTec, Angus decided it was time to sell his property portfolio too and she found her reduced rent bumped up to the same as that of the other tenants, as it was bound to be?

She thought of Angus again on a sudden wave of guilt because she was thinking selfishly once more instead of feeling concern for her father’s old friend and his failing health. She made herself a promise to visit him next weekend—it couldn’t be this weekend because the twins had a birthday party to attend. Angus loved it when she took the twins on a visit. He might be a die-hard bachelor and seriously ill but he maintained that an afternoon spent with her and the children was a better pick-me-up than any doctor could prescribe for him.

And her dress needed dry-cleaning, she saw as she slipped it onto a hanger. The water spill had dried and left the embossed silk looking like crushed tissue paper. Teach her not to indulge in an expensive dress with a dry-clean-only label, she told herself—and knew she was thinking about mundane things to stop her head from thinking about what she’d just done with Sandro.

She almost jumped out of her skin when the phone beside her bed started to ring. Diving at it to pick it up before the shrill ring disturbed the twins, she flicked out a sharp, ‘Yes?’

‘All right…’ the sound of Ella’s voice hitting her eardrums had her sinking wearily down on the bed ‘…start talking. What’s the history between you and our sexy new boss?’

‘There isn’t any history,’ she lied, wishing with every aching pulse she had in her that it was the truth.

‘Pull the other one, Cassie. That guy almost ate you up and you almost spat him out in disgust. And all of that came before you laid him out cold on the floor!’

‘I did not lay him out,’ she denied.

‘No, you just jumped on him afterwards, called him Sandro and almos

t wept all over his shirt. The next thing we know you’re being hustled away into a back room and we’re being spun a line about jet lag and migraine headaches and get a glimpse of neither one of you again. You know the guy, Cassie,’ Ella insisted. ‘Everyone at BarTec knows you know the guy. Even the MD confirmed that our new boss couldn’t keep his eyes off you all evening. And the beautiful Miss Batiste was not happy about it if the way her lovely dark eyes had turned cat-like was a judge.’

‘She can keep him. I don’t want him,’ Cassie burst out unthinkingly then could have bitten off her unruly tongue.

‘Oh, wow,’ drawled Ella, ‘that sounded to me like a bitter woman talking.’