Michelle Reid - Power - Marchese's Forgotten Bride / Ruthlessly Bedded, Forcibly Wedded

‘Tell me what’s wrong with you,’ she requested.

He was silent for so long that she thought he must have gone to sleep but when she turned her head to look at him he was still watching her through those unfairly captivating, fathom-dark eyes and a lump formed in her throat because—oh, dear God—she knew deep down inside her that she was still in love with him.

‘They knew what was going on—Gio and your brother the doctor,’ she prompted. ‘I saw it in their faces the moment I opened the door to them. For ninety-nine per cent of the time you’re so strong and vital I would challenge a tank to try and knock you over…’ without knowing she was doing it, she reached out to rest her hand against his chest above his beating heart ‘… but I’ve seen you drop twice now, and you usually rub your brow and frown just before it happens as if—as if—’

‘I’m in pain, which I am,’ Sandro finished for her. ‘The car accident left a—pressure on my brain which makes itself felt now and then.’

‘So it isn’t just m-me that causes it?’

She sounded so vulnerable when she said that, Sandro released a small sigh and his hand arrived to cover hers. ‘It can be bad sometimes…’ He hedged the question.

‘Bad enough to make you pass out—a lot?’

‘No,’ he denied. ‘Occasionally—rarely. I get these flashes of memory which hit me out of nowhere. They’re sometimes followed by…’

‘A complete shut-down.’

‘Sí.’

‘Can anything be done to ease the—pressure?’

‘Can we talk about the twins instead?’

The twins…! Once again, Cassie was hit by a jolt of reality. ‘Oh, heck,’ she gasped, jumping to her feet. She’d done it again and forgotten all about the twins! Flicking a glance at her watch, ‘It’s late. I’ve got to go…’

‘To relieve the babysitter?’ He sounded grim again.

‘Yes.’ Looking around her, trying to remember where she’d stashed her stockings in her rush to hide the evidence of what they’d been doing in here, she explained, ‘Jenny is very good but I promised her I would be back home by midnight—’

‘Like Cinderella.’

‘No…’ impatience added bite to her answer ‘… like a single mother who cherishes a reliable babysitter so does not take advantage of her time!’

Sandro frowned at his watch then, noted what Cassie already knew—that she had only fifteen minutes left to her midnight deadline—and with a lithe stretching movement he discarded the cover and rose up off the bed.

‘I will take you—’

‘No!’ Cassie cried out. ‘You should have stayed where you were! I can call a cab—’

He turned on her, scowling now as if she’d offended his masculinity. ‘Either I take you home or you will use my driver!’ he slammed out with a force that made Cassie blanch.

‘All right!’ she shot back in quivering reaction. ‘I’ll let your driver take me! I don’t know why you needed to shout.’

‘Grazie,’ he teethed out, and reached over to pick up a phone by the bed.

Cassie bit into her bottom lip to stop herself from saying anything else. Having stabbed in the required number, he pushed the phone to his ear and showed her the length of his back.

To Cassie it was another one of his cold dismissals. In response to it she spun on her heel and walked out of the bedroom. Every time they held a conversation, they went from calm into a raging storm without any pause in the middle. Now her insides were fizzing with—she no longer recognised what it was that was going on inside her or what was making her wait around in the hallway until he joined her there.

When he appeared, striding towards her with his expression still drawn and now irritable too, she could not stop herself from asking, ‘Will you be all right here on your own?’

‘Don’t make me out to be so pathetic,’ he bit out. ‘And stop looking at me through those anxious emerald eyes because it turns me on like a flaming gas jet! Just do something sensible and go, Cassie.’

He pulled the door open then just stood there, expecting her to get out—wanting her to get out even though he claimed she turned him on.

Well, there was no sign in him of gas jets right now, she recognised, just a hard, grim, remote man.

So she left, her lips pressed together to stop them from quivering, and her eyelashes trembling against her cheeks. He stood at the door and watched her until the lift doors closed between them. Then, like a fool, she parted her lips and let them quiver, let her eyes open wide and fill with wretched, unwanted, weak tears.

CASSIE let herself into her tiny apartment virtually on the stroke of midnight. Everything was quiet and soothingly normal, only the muted sound of the television seeping out from the living room to tell her that anyone else was here.

Taking in a deep breath, she opened the door to find Jenny sitting in the armchair watching TV just as she’d imagined her, with her feet up on the coffee table and the almost empty box of chocolates lying on her lap.

‘Oh, hello.’ Jenny smiled at her, straightening her round, comfortable shape up in the chair. ‘You’ve timed it nicely because my film has just finished. Did you have a nice time?’

I wish , Cassie thought heavily. ‘Yes,’ she heard herself answer with a calm that didn’t sound as unnatural as she feared it would. ‘Have the twins behaved themselves?’

‘Perfect angels. Not a single peep out of them.’ The older woman came to her feet and plied her with interested questions about her evening while she gathered together her bits and pieces and hunted down her discarded shoes.

‘W-would you like a cup of tea before you go?’ Cassie found her good manners from somewhere.

‘No, thank you, love. I’d just had one before you arrived home.’

A few minutes later and Cassie was closing the front door on Jenny’s disappearing figure then turning to lean back against it with a sigh. She’d never felt so battered and wrung out in her entire life.

Then she was pulling herself together and peeling herself away from the door to go and check on the twins. She found two peacefully sleeping faces highlighted by the tiny night lamp set on the table between their beds. Anthony was lying sprawled on his back with his duvet half kicked off him, his thick, dark hair ruffled in a way that made Cassie’s heart squeeze because it looked so like Sandro’s had looked before his fingers had unwittingly smoothed his hair back into place. Bella lay curled neatly on her side as she usually slept, her pale blonde hair streaming out behind her in a silken gold swathe.

They both looked so young, so sweet but so very vulnerable. How were they going to feel about a father they hardly knew anything about if Sandro decided he wanted a role in their lives?

It didn’t bear thinking about. Cassie was too scared to think about it. And, selfishly, her fears were mostly for herself. The twins had always been just hers to love and to be loved by. There hadn’t been a single second since their birth that she hadn’t loved and cherished them with all of her heart. In everything she’d done since she’d known she was pregnant and alone, she’d always placed their well-being first—in her choice of employment, in her choice of nursery accommodation, paying over the odds to secure the best care available for them and negotiating a flexible timetable with her employers so she could work the best hours to suit the twins’ needs. When Angus offered her this chance to come up to London to work for him, it had been the much larger wage packet and his kind offer to let her rent this flat from his property portfolio on reduced terms that had clinched the deal for her.