Marchese's Forgotten Bride

‘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.