Marchese's Forgotten Bride

‘Stop fighting me,’ he advised. ‘I understand why you feel the need to do it but I won’t let it change the final outcome. We get married in two days. Accept it, Cassie.’

She turned to look at him, green eyes Arctic-cool, her soft mouth small. ‘Most decent men would have the grace to ask me to marry them.’

Wry acknowledgement stretched his mouth to a grin—then suddenly he wasn’t grinning as a vivid flashback completely caught him out. Sandro thought he’d done with them during his three days of hell, but this flashback was different from the rest he’d experienced and sent a blanket of heat flooding through his body as he captured an image of her lying naked on a narrow bed with her long, slender body backed by a pale pink coverlet and her hair fanned out around her face. Those cool green eyes were shy and dark and luminous, that stubborn mouth softly parted, red and ripe.

Marry me, Cassie…

‘Dio,’he breathed at the husky, dark echo of his own deep voice, and slammed his eyes shut as her soft response ignited a blazing fire in his loins with a force that actually made him shake.

‘Tomorrow,’ she’d whispered.

‘Sandro…?’ The sound of her voice saying his name cut into the flow of this new memory. He felt her hand curve around his arm.

‘Sandro,’ she repeated anxiously, ‘don’t.’

Like a man flung from one place to another he came back to a sense of the present with his full attention focusing on her trembling fingers clutching his arm through his suit jacket. She thought he was about to black out again but nothing could be further from the truth. What he’d just experienced had arrived with crystal clarity backed up by a three-day war he’d been waging with his past.

The one that got away, he thought ruefully as he fought to control the heat of his raging hormones. Lifting his gaze to her face, he found he was drowning in dark green anxiety. He loved it. He loved the way her teeth were worrying her full, soft lower lip.

‘I’m OK,’ he said, but she wasn’t having it.

‘No, you’re not.’ Straining the seatbelt to reach out with her other hand, she laid it against the rapid beat of his heart. ‘What triggered it this time?’

From aggravatingly stubborn to gloriously concerned, Sandro observed, relaxing like a stroked cat into the seat, ruthlessly ready to pump this moment for all that it was worth.

‘You did—who else?’ he responded truthfully, then confided, ‘I saw you lying gloriously naked on a very girly pink bed.’

Hot colour poured into her cheeks and he had to fight the urge to laugh. She understood what it was he was referring to. She knew exactly what he’d seen.

‘It was very—intense.’ Reaching up, he lifted her hand away from his chest and raised it to his lips. ‘Sexy,’ he added, laying kisses along the tops of her fingers, ‘disgracefully passionate.’

‘I…You…’ Her slender body tensed like a bow string.

Sandro let his eyes take on a darkling glint. ‘I was telling you I loved you—’

‘You don’t have to describe it,’ Cassie cut in. ‘I’m not the one with the patchy memory!’

‘And you whispered back to me, “I love you too, Sandro…”’

Cassie hid her eyes beneath her trembling eyelashes and tried to pull away from him but Sandro tightened his grip.

‘Did you mean it, mi amore?’ he persisted softly. ‘Did I mean it?’

At the time…? ‘Yes,’ she breathed.

‘Then we can mean it again. All it needs is a leap of faith.’

He was talking marriage again. He hadn’t really stopped talking marriage! Only now he was calling it a leap of faith. Unclipping her fingers from his hard-muscled bicep, she tried once again to retreat.

‘I asked you to marry me—’

She swung on him hotly. ‘Will you stop telling me what I already know?’

She’d been there, after all! She didn’t have a single problem recalling every detail of their first time together in her tiny apartment in her even tinier bedroom with its narrow, girly pink bed!

‘So I’m asking you again—will you marry me?’

He was remorseless, that was what he was—pig remorseless! Shame he couldn’t remember the way he’d kissed her goodbye the morning after and walked away!