Marchese's Forgotten Bride

‘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.