Marchese's Forgotten Bride

‘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 do

n’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.’