‘I hate you!’ Cassie seared at him feverishly.
‘You want me,’ he translated. ‘And—per Dio—you are going to have me night after night after night once I get you safely hitched to me!’
‘With the fortunate Pandora to supplement your daytime needs?’
‘That is up to you. Will I need her?’ He was still touching his lip with a careful finger. ‘And who the hell taught you to be such an aggressive kisser?’ he raked out. ‘It damn well wasn’t me.’
‘How do you know that it wasn’t you?’ Cassie countered.
It happened again like a thunderbolt tossed at his rock-solid jaw. His head went back. He tensed up all over, his eyes turning into deep black holes in his head as he took a step back from her then staggered.
Seeing what was coming, Cassie cried out on the sharp edge of alarm when she thought he was going to drop to the floor the way he’d done twice before. ‘Sandro—don’t—!’
With an impressive shift of his reeling body, he ensured Angus’s chair took his weight with a shudder. With no awareness as to how she had arrived there, Cassie was on her knees between his spread thighs. ‘Sandro,’ she murmured, one of her hands already covering the racing beat of his heart.
‘I’m OK.’ His fingers were at his brow again. ‘I’ve got it…covered.’
But he wasn’t OK! ‘This has got to stop happening!’ she burst out. ‘Every time we get confrontational you almost black out on me!’
‘I’m a big boy, cara. I can take confrontation without blacking out.’
‘Then what the heck triggered it this time?’
He released an odd laugh. ‘Could be the mind-blowing way you kissed me,’ Sandro suggested, still struggling to deal with the real trigger that had almost knocked him to the floor this time, ‘which is going to make ours an interesting marriage.’
‘Shut up about marriage.’ Frowning fiercely now, unable to stop her other hand from reaching up to touch her fingers against the worrying clammy skin covering his cheek, she added, ‘You shouldn’t have brought the subject up at all. If you ask me we shouldn’t even occupy the same room!’
‘No comment about your kissing technique, then.’
The lid almost blew off Cassie’s temper. Only the sight of his dreadful pallor kept the lid on. His eyes were still closed, the skin covering his face drawn tight across the bones, and she was worried and scared, her insides were churning around like mad and he was turning it into a joke!
Sitting back on her heels, Cassie released a tense breath. ‘You’ve got as much sensitivity as a doorstop.’
On a sigh, he dropped his hand and opened his eyes to pin her with an inky black stare of dead certainty. ‘We are getting married.’
‘Why?’ she cried out. ‘Because of the twins?’
‘Because we both know that marriage between us has to be the logical solution, so you tell me, why do you feel the need to fight against it?’
The answer to that was simple. ‘You don’t even know me.’
‘I know myself and I know I would have been there for you and the twins from the beginning if I had not had the accident and lost my memory. Marriage between us would have been an essential part of that.’
Would it? Cassie wasn’t sure.
Getting to her feet, she paced away from him, that inner core of uncertainty nagging at her as she walked. Swinging around, ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘who else did you forget about in your missing weeks?’
‘No one—that I know of.’ He frowned at her. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you to wonder why your brain singled me out to wipe from your head?’
His frowned deepened. ‘Probably because you are the only person I met for the first time during those weeks.’ Fingers going up to rub at his brow again, he sat forward on the chair. ‘I don’t see that it matters.’
Well, it mattered to Cassie. ‘I could be anyone, then. I could be feeding you a pack of lies, for all you know.’
He dropped the hand. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘Money?’ she suggested. ‘The pot of gold from the filthyrich man? Security for my children?’