Marchese's Forgotten Bride

Tuesday went the same way as Monday. By Wednesday Sandro’s contact cards had found their way out of her purse and now burned a hole in the slanted pocket of her pencil skirt. Several times she’d slid her fingers around them, desperately tempted to give him a call. Then the past would flood in, crawling around her senses with painful reminders of what had happened the last time she’d tried to reach him.

‘Are you feeling all right, Cassie?’ Ella came to stand beside her desk. ‘You look dreadfully pale.’

Her shadow honed his sharp eyes on her. Fresh tension fizzed across her skin. ‘I’m fine,’ she responded, ‘just—’

‘Feeling hunted,’ Ella put in, flicking a knife-edged glance at the shadow, who quickly lowered his gaze. ‘Come on, let’s take an early lunch,’ she insisted. ‘You look like you could do with some fresh air and a break.’

They bought sandwiches and coffee from the local sandwich bar and walked across the road to the small gated park set in the middle of the square on which the BarTec building was situated. Finding a vacant bench beneath a tree, they sat down. It was quite warm for October and the sun glinted down through the tree branches still heavy with autumn-gold leaves.

‘OK,’ Ella said, flipping the lid off her coffee, ‘let me tell you what I know, then you can fill in the empty spaces…Our sexy new boss is the twins’ father. Don’t bother to deny it because I worked that one out straight away,’ she warned when Cassie opened her mouth to speak. ‘I don’t think Pandora Batiste has worked out that part yet but she certainly feels threatened by you, which is why she spent last week on your case.’

Cassie laughed bleakly. ‘Wouldn’t you feel threatened if he was your lover?’

‘Maybe,’ Ella conceded. ‘More than maybe, if she knows that you and the twins spent Saturday with him—and don’t deny that one either because I was coming to see you when I saw you return in his car. That sweet little scene on the pavement outside your apartment made me change my mind and leave you all to it.’

‘You should have hung around longer, then,’ Cassie murmured dryly. ‘You would have been able to watch him depart.’

‘For good?’ Ella questioned sharply.

Cassie shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘Is that why you’ve looked so done-in and pale this week?’

This time Cassie’s shrug arrived without an added comment.

‘Idiot.’ Ella sighed. ‘Want to tell me how the two of you came together in the first place?’ she encouraged. ‘Six years ago you must have been a real babe-in-arms to a man like him.’

‘He’s only five years older than me, Ella! You can’t label him a cradle-snatcher.’

‘Just a rake on the take?’

‘No!’ She sighed out, frowning because wasn’t that exactly how she’d come to think of Sandro until he turned up again and told her about his accident and his lost memory? ‘Can we stop this now? I’m hungry; I want to eat my sandwich!’

‘I’m not stopping you eating,’ Ella denied. ‘You’re doing that to yourself because you’re in waste-away mode.’

Waste-away mode probably described her perfectly, Cassie acknowledged heavily—or lost in a limbo caused by Sandro’s continuing silence. Perhaps he was intending to just turn up at BarTec on Friday morning and haul her off to be married before he delivered her back to her desk. Or perhaps he’d done another U-turn and changed his mind about the whole crazy—

‘Perhaps you will cheer up when I tell you that Pandora Batiste hasn’t shown her face because she’s been sent back

to Florence at the boss’s command,’ Ella said coolly.

So that was why she hadn’t seen the other woman. And she didn’t feel any better about the news because…what was Florence except for another city for two lovers to meet up in?

Shifting restlessly where she sat, Cassie almost knocked over her Styrofoam coffee cup where she’d placed it beside her on the bench. Catching it before it spilt, she set it straight again then dropped her untouched sandwich beside it with a sigh.

A squirrel scurried past them with its mouth stuffed with acorns. Cassie watched it disappear into a mound of fallen leaves at the base of a tree. It was busy, focused, absolutely certain about what it was doing and why it was doing it and she envied it that because she wasn’t sure about anything.

Why hadn’t he called as he’d promised? Was he with Pandora in Florence? Would he do that to her? Her head told her no. Her head told her that he possessed a perfectly acceptable and forgivable reason for what he’d done six years ago, but her emotions still clung to the hurt he’d inflicted on them when he’d told her to get lost in that phone call she’d made to him, and a need to maintain her defences so he couldn’t hurt her like that again.

She didn’t know him, not really, and he certainly didn’t know her. They were like two strangers linked by an act of fate that had given them equal shares in two children conceived during a single night of fabulous sex. Was that enough to warrant marriage between them? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to arrange joint custody with equal shares in the twins’ upbringing? Had she even agreed that she would marry him at all?

No, she hadn’t, and Sandro had no darn right to assume that she had done, or to leave her hanging in limbo like this.

‘And here’s the really interesting bit,’ Ella continued, sipping at her Styrofoam cup. ‘Just before I hauled you out here to grill you, I received a call from Gio, instructing me to clear your diary of all your appointments and to pass them to your shadow. Apparently the boss is—’

‘Standing right in front of you,’ Sandro’s own smooth, fabulously accented voice cut in.

Both heads shot up in unison, Ella choking back the words she had been about to speak, Cassie gripped by a shockingly violent surge of relief.