Marchese's Forgotten Bride

by Michelle Reid

  Without thinking about it she stretched out to drag the jacket towards her then reached into the pocket and pulled out the phone.

  ‘Alessandro, it’s Gio. I’ve just had a call from—’

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ Cassie breathed with shaking relief. ‘Gio, it’s Cassie. Sandro has collapsed again. He needs a doctor or an—’

  ‘Leave it to me.’ To his credit, Gio didn’t waste time demanding explanations, he just said, ‘I’ll have someone there in a few minutes.’

  The next five minutes dragged by in a frightened haze while Cassie sat beside Sandro, hugging her knees to her chin with one tense arm while the other hand rested against his chest so she could feel the comforting beat of his heart. He still hadn’t come around by the time the door bell rang, forcing her back to her feet to go and answer it.

  Gio stood on the doorstep along with the man she’d seen in the foyer when they’d first arrived here this evening.

  Gio said, ‘This is Marco, Alessandro’s—’

  ‘Brother. Yes, I know.’ Cassie glanced at the other man with a strained smile quivering on her lips, which he did not return.

  ‘Where is he?’ he demanded brusquely.

  A bit shaken by his attitude, ‘In—in the living room,’ she responded, and he brushed past her into the apartment.

  ‘Marco is also a physician,’ Gio explained dryly as he too stepped past her.

  And the brother’s brusque manner began to make sense. The argument between the two brothers down in the foyer must have been about Sandro’s blackout at the restaurant. Someone must have called Marco to meet his brother here but Sandro had sent him away.

  Following the two men into the living room, Cassie lowered herself into a chair to watch helplessly as both men went down on their knees beside Sandro. Her heart was pumping very slowly now and she had a vague suspicion that she might be going into shock because she couldn’t seem to feel anything else at all.

  Even when Sandro showed signs of coming round she still didn’t feel anything. Eventually he sat up, holding his head in his hands. His brother was murmuring something to him and Sandro was answering in low, thick Italian. All three men seemed to understand what had happened, which left only Cassie without a clue. A severe shock could make a woman faint, she knew that. It could make a man black out. But she knew that what she had witnessed with Sandro was much more than that.

  Then she heard Marco murmur in English, ‘We need to get you to bed, Alessandro.’

  And she came alive like a phoenix rising up from the ashes of numbed senses. Without saying a word she just leapt up and ran out of the living room and into Sandro’s bedroom, then began rushing around it, madly trying to tidy the evidence of their recent activities in there before the others came in and saw it and guessed what had been going on.

  She found her stockings and Sandro’s socks then remembered with a sharp jolt that he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Gio and his brother had to be curious as to why he wasn’t, which meant…

  Oh, shut up! she slammed at the riddling squirm of her own guilty conscience and was just straightening the rumpled blue coverlet when a sound by the door made her look up then go perfectly still.

  Sandro was leaning heavily against the doorframe. ‘I see we are both on the same wavelength, which makes a change…’ he drawled, glancing around the hastily tidied bedroom.

  ‘You look dreadful,’ Cassie breathed, slowly straightening up.

  ‘I feel it.’ He grimaced. ‘I’m sorry. Did I scare you again?’

  Her throat felt so thick she couldn’t get any words out, so she swallowed tensely and nodded. Then because he looked as if he was going to keel over again she went and slid her arm around his waist.

  ‘Y-you need to be in bed.’

  One of his arms arrived heavy across her shoulders. ‘So I do,’ he agreed.

  ‘Let me call your brother and Gio to come and help you—’

  ‘You can’t. I sent them packing.’

  ‘But—why?’ Cassie gasped out.

  ‘Their presence here embarrassed you.’

  ‘What has that got to do with anything?’ She flashed a sharp green look at him. ‘Your health is more important than my embarrassment. Not five minutes ago you were lying unconscious—again!’

  ‘Now I’m not,’ he responded with cool logic, ‘though I cannot guarantee to remain upright for much longer, so if you think you could…’

  ‘Oh.’ Cassie tightened her grip on his waist. ‘Let’s get you to bed, then.’

  ‘Best invitation I’ve had all day—’

  ‘Don’t you dare make a joke of it!’ she choked out. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like to watch you drop like that? I thought you were dead! I thought you’d suffered a m-massive heart attack or s-something and I…’

  ‘OK—OK,’ Sandro cut in soothingly. ‘Don’t start weeping on me, brave Cassie. Just help me across the room so I can fall on that bed.’

  Pinning her trembling lips together, she did as he bade her. Brave Cassie indeed. She hadn’t felt brave while she’d sat beside him. She’d felt helpless and useless and scared.

  As they reached the bed Sandro swung his arm off her shoulders and sat down heavily, then just keeled over like a drunk.

  Still without allowing herself to say another word, Cassie busied herself doing the mothering thing and placed a knee on the bed so she could reach across to the other side of him and catch up the cover so she could flip it over his length.

  ‘I’m not cold,’ he told her, his ink-dark eyes fixed on her pale profile.

  ‘You feel it,’ she insisted.

  ‘I thought you did not want to come near me again.’

  It was a taunt, a soft and husky-voiced kind of taunt that made the muscles around Cassie’s heart flutter in response. She opened her mouth to insist that she didn’t want to be near him, then on a heavy sigh she changed her mind and sank down beside him on the bed, slumping her shoulders in a weary gesture of defeat.

  ‘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 bee
n 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  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.

  Still, it had been tough sometimes to reach the end of the financial month still solvent but she’d done it. Cassie was proud of that achievement—fiercely proud. However, she would be willing to bet that Sandro wouldn’t view their tiny flat and their threadbare second-hand furniture as anything to be proud of.

  Closing the twins’ bedroom door as quietly as she had opened it, she stepped into her bedroom next to theirs. Both bedrooms were short on space but the twins had the larger room simply because it was practical while the two of them shared.

  What happened, though, when it was no longer practical for them to share? she wondered suddenly. What happened if, now he’d sold BarTec, Angus decided it was time to sell his property portfolio too and she found her reduced rent bumped up to the same as that of the other tenants, as it was bound to be?

  She thought of Angus again on a sudden wave of guilt because she was thinking selfishly once more instead of feeling concern for her father’s old friend and his failing health. She made herself a promise to visit him next weekend—it couldn’t be this weekend because the twins had a birthday party to attend. Angus loved it when she took the twins on a visit. He might be a die-hard bachelor and seriously ill but he maintained that an afternoon spent with her and the children was a better pick-me-up than any doctor could prescribe for him.

  And her dress needed dry-cleaning, she saw as she slipped it onto a hanger. The water spill had dried and left the embossed silk looking like crushed tissue paper. Teach her not to indulge in an expensive dress with a dry-clean-only label, she told herself—and knew she was thinking about mundane things to stop her head from thinking about what she’d just done with Sandro.

  She almost jumped out of her skin when the phone beside her bed started to ring. Diving at it to pick it up before the shrill ring disturbed the twins, she flicked out a sharp, ‘Yes?’

  ‘All right…’ the sound of Ella’s voice hitting her eardrums had her sinking wearily down on the bed ‘…start talking. What’s the history between you and our sexy new boss?’

  ‘There isn’t any history,’ she lied, wishing with every aching pulse she had in her that it was the truth.

  ‘Pull the other one, Cassie. That guy almost ate you up and you almost spat him out in disgust. And all of that came before you laid him out cold on the floor!’

  ‘I did not lay him out,’ she denied.

  ‘No, you just jumped on him afterwards, called him Sandro and almos
t wept all over his shirt. The next thing we know you’re being hustled away into a back room and we’re being spun a line about jet lag and migraine headaches and get a glimpse of neither one of you again. You know the guy, Cassie,’ Ella insisted. ‘Everyone at BarTec knows you know the guy. Even the MD confirmed that our new boss couldn’t keep his eyes off you all evening. And the beautiful Miss Batiste was not happy about it if the way her lovely dark eyes had turned cat-like was a judge.’

  ‘She can keep him. I don’t want him,’ Cassie burst out unthinkingly then could have bitten off her unruly tongue.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ drawled Ella, ‘that sounded to me like a bitter woman talking.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, straightening her wilting shoulders and hunting around for an explanation that would shut Ella’s curiosity up, ‘I don’t know him exactly but I—I used to know an…acquaintance of his…’ which wasn’t an outright lie, she reflected grimly ‘…and that’s it. No mystery.’

  There followed a long silence that made Cassie’s tense fingers pluck at the quilt covering her bed. Then Ella spoke again. ‘He knows the twins’ father.’

  Cassie closed her eyes on a silent groan. ‘Will you please put your imagination to bed?’ she pleaded. ‘And while you’re at it put yourself to bed at the same time, because that’s where I’m going!’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ mocked Ella. ‘To dream of no-good Italian love-rats that get a girl pregnant then dump her, and their handsome acquaintances that drop down dead in shock when the twins are mentioned.’

  ‘Weird dreams for you to have, sweetie,’ Cassie mocked right back. ‘I wonder what the bodybuilder would think if he knew…?’

  ‘Clever,’ Ella acknowledged. ‘Now tell me where you disappeared to with him.’

  As she discovered she was staring at the black dress on its hanger, Cassie’s next excuse lit like a lightbulb in her head. ‘I managed to drench my dress in the—commotion,’ she said, telling yet another lie that wasn’t quite a lie. ‘His driver brought me home.’