Marchese's Forgotten Bride

by Michelle Reid

  ‘It reminded me of a big, echoing mausoleum,’ Cassie murmured, coming down from hurt dignity but still hanging on to the threat of tears. ‘I’m…sorry if I misunderstood your reaction but—’

  ‘But now you’re in trouble,’ Sandro said for her.

  Her own finish for that sentence was swallowed down when she looked into his glowing dark eyes and saw what he was talking about. He reached out to take hold of her shoulders, the small gap between them suddenly shut. A pulse beat accelerated in her throat, a short gasp escaping when her breasts stung as they filled with heat.

  ‘You’ve been warned before about feeling sorry for me.’ Sliding his hands down the length of her body, he closed them on her hips and tugged.

  Shock widened Cassie’s eyes. ‘Y-you…’

  ‘Sí,’ he confirmed, making her feel the full, probing state of his arousal. ‘Liquid green eyes and sympathy…controlkillers,’ he stated darkly.

  A vivid image of burning gas jets flew across her mind and brought the pink tip of her tongue snaking out to touch the tingling curve of her upper lip. A lusty growl and he caught that pink tip between his lips and sucked. He was already backing her out of the twins’ bedroom, the shockingly rampant evidence of his intentions building in strength with the stimulation of the move. Her hands had to clutch at his arms to maintain her balance because he was really kissing her now, exploring her mouth with a sensual expertise and urgency that arched her neck, and pressed her breasts into firmer contact with his chest.

  She could feel the heavy pump of his heart, his heat, the sheer masculine dominance of his hard male contours turning her female softness to a quivering, sensual flow of warm blood. When she heard the sound of a door shutting and instantly recognised it as her own bedroom door, she had to fight to drag her mouth from his.

  ‘We can’t,’ she groaned.

  ‘We can,’ he insisted, then added with a searing rasp of amusement, ‘We must,’ and buried his mouth in the heated hollow of her throat.

  ‘But school—the twins!’ she tried again—desperately.

  At least she succeeded in bringing his dark head up. His eyes looked like black pits filled with flaming frustration, his lips were parted, warm and soft.

  ‘How long?’ he demanded, tension holding him like a string of prickling barbed wire.

  Cassie tried to think without taking her wary eyes off him to look at her bedside clock. She didn’t trust him. She could still feel the powering urgency being pressed against her, and her own body wasn’t behaving itself. There was a pulsing ache taking place deep down in her abdomen, sensual moisture already livening the tender place between her thighs.

  She tried for a breath. He was waiting for an answer, taut and bold and still. Her head twisted round, eyelashes flickering as she glanced away from him at the clock then back to him again.

  ‘H-half an hour.’ She watched his frustration flare to monumental proportions and like a rat throwing itself on a trap she sealed her own immediate destiny. ‘Jenny, m-my neighbour, picks them up, s-so let’s call it forty-f-five minutes before they get back…’

  The flare of frustration became a glow of pure arrogance. ‘I can work within those parameters,’ he drawled.

  Next second her pencil skirt dropped to the floor. The veins in her slender thighs started to sting as her blood began to race through them. Sandro was yanking his tie off, eyes fixed and intent on her face. He stripped with a grace and a speed that held her breathless and speechless.

  ‘If you want the truth, I wasn’t going to do this,’ he admitted, the lithe move of his hips seeing his trousers stripped from his legs along with whatever else he was wearing beneath.

  ‘Do what?’ Cassie couldn’t stop staring. He was magnificent naked.

  ‘Make love to you again before we married.’ He fed his arms around her and drew her against all of that taut masculinity, uncaring, so assured about the perfection of his own body. ‘I was going to make us wait, build on the tension so you’d be so hot for me you wouldn’t think of changing your mind.’

  ‘Arrogant,’ Cassie shook out as he slipped her blouse from her body and unclipped her bra.

  He didn’t even complain that she’d been too shy to strip herself. He caught the weight of her breasts in his palms and lifted them to meet with his lowering mouth. The sharp sting of pleasure that shot through her body forced a shaken gasp from her throat.

  On a low growl he caught it, licked it from her lips as it arrived there. His hands followed the smooth, squirming contours of her body right down to her bottom, which he cupped, then lifted her into the waiting bowl of his pelvis and the tasting kiss jumped into pure, naked heat. He just took and kept control of her senses through the energy in his body and the direction of his kisses, stripping her of the final layers of her clothing until finally—gratefully, he laid her down beneath him on her narrow bed.

  No more talk—no breath spare for it. The fever took over from the moment he lay down beside her then rolled towards her and sent his long fingers stroking into the warm, moist juncture of her thighs. He roughed out a string of soft curses when he discovered she was so ready for him.

  Weak, fretful, clinging to him, green eyes washed with pleading as they clung to his smouldering dark glare, he caressed her into a writhing turmoil of agitated pleasure, watching—watching as she fell apart for him. It did not occur to her that giving her pleasure heightened his own until she reached down to clasp him and watched him fall apart too. His control fled on the single ragged breath he took, and he ran his eyes over her with a fierce possessiveness that verged on the wild. Her whimper of protest when he drew back from what he was doing for her was replaced by a series of fevered groans in answer to the exquisite caresses he plied across her quivering flesh. By the time the first driving thrust into her came she lost what bit of sanity she had left.

  ‘Cassie…’ he breathed into her mouth as the intensity of what she was experiencing caught hold of him too.

  Her fingernails clawed twin death grips into his shoulder muscles, her lungs fighting for breath against the hot urgency of his mouth. She was aware she was losing touch with reality, aware that he was losing it with her, aware that they climbed the towering walls of excitement together and even let go together, tumbling into the long, rolling waves of intense, soul-shuddering release.

  Last time they’d done this it had been wild and uncontrolled. This time it crossed both those barriers to reach a different level entirely. Coming down from it was physically painful; letting her grip on it slip away was like giving up an elemental part of herself. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t make her limbs work, so they remained wrapped around his hot, sweat-slicked, muscle-flexed frame.

  He touched his lips to her hot cheek and she felt his tremor. His fingers were unsteady as he used them to comb her tumbled hair back from her face. When she managed to lift up her heavy eyelids she saw his eyes were too black to be real, glazed and drunk on what they’d shared. They didn’t speak; their eyes did it for them. No smiles, no teasing, no attempt at a joke to ease them from this point on to what had to follow—the final touchdown with earth again, the separation.

  As her legs finally allowed her to relax their hold on him, they slid down his powerful thighs and legs without breaking contact with his warm golden skin. He was heavy on her but she liked it, liked the way her breasts were crushed against his hair-roughened chest and the flat of her stomach took the weight of his pelvis. He strung slow, gentle kisses along the satin arch of her eyebrows, the top of her nose, then her mouth again, and the tension in her arms slowly relaxed, her fingers feathering across his wide, muscled shoulders then the line of his jaw and onto his cheeks.

  This was how it had been for them their first time together—every time they’d come together during that long, fruitful night in her narrow, girly pink bed.

  How could he have forgotten that? How could he have wiped it from his memory as if it had been nothing worth remembering?

 
The doorbell gave a sharp, stinging peal, screaming through her head like an alarm bell and dumping her rudely back into now.

  ‘Oh, my God, the twins,’ she gasped, launching him off her with the strength of ten women and jackknifing to her feet.

  Her legs were still luxuriating in a million warm tingles, so making them move was the most difficult process. Grabbing up her robe because it was the nearest thing to her, Cassie dragged it on over her love-flushed body. Forty-five minutes…they’d been lost in what they’d been doing for forty-five minutes! It sent her dizzy just thinking about it.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, move, Sandro!’ she shook out at him because he was still lying on her narrow bed how she’d left him, flat on his back with the long length of his nakedness on full display.

  Cassie reeled her gaze away from him and opened the bedroom door, her fingers trembling as they tried to comb her hair out of its disarray as she reached for the front door latch and opened it to face her two children and her next-door neighbour feeling what could only be described as as guilty as her wildly flushing skin.

  ‘Our daddy is here!’ Bella squealed in excitement.

  ‘We saw his car outside!’ Anthony joined in.

  Jenny said nothing; however, her wide-eyed expression had plenty to say, which had Cassie clutching her robe to her throat. ‘S-sorry,’ was all she could find to offer to the other woman. ‘I should have called you to—’

  A sound directly behind her sent her head swivelling round as the twins barged past her with excited shrieks, totally uncaring that their mother was dressed in her bathrobe, only caring about one thing: reaching Sandro, who had come out of the bedroom, when Cassie would have much preferred him to remain hidden away in there. Now he was filling the tiny hallway with his lean, dark presence as he greeted the children with light touches to their heads and smiles.

  She didn’t know how he’d done it in the time available but he’d pulled on his shirt, trousers and shoes—no socks, she noticed with an inconsequence which almost made her burst forth with a hysterical laugh. His dark hair was mussed, eyes still heavy with what they’d been doing, the cuffs of his shirt hanging loose around his wrists. He might as well have stepped out here naked, she thought helplessly, cheeks burning all the more. When he caught her expression he raised a wickedly satirical eyebrow then stepped up and drew her back against him with an arm he looped around her waist.

  The twins were talking ten to the dozen to him. Bella had a grip on his other hand while Anthony became tangled up in his feet. Ignoring her tension, he looked at the older woman over the top of Cassie’s tumbled blonde head and said, ‘Ah, the only person in the world to whom my future wife will entrust the care of our children. It is a great pleasure to meet you at last, Mrs Dean…’

  Charm oozed from every beautifully accented syllable. Jenny wasn’t immune to it. By the time they closed the door, the short and portly fizzy grey-haired lady who’d been happily married for forty-five years had been totally and incurably seduced into adoring a man equipped to turn any woman’s head when he set his mind to it.

  ‘That was horrible,’ Cassie breathed as she wilted against the wall behind her, her whole body still wearing a heated blush.

  ‘I assume by your reaction that your neighbour isn’t used to catching you out like this,’ Sandro said dryly.

  If he’d meant it as a joke, Cassie wasn’t laughing. With no gap in between she turned from hot to ice. He was implying that she brought other men here for a quick roll on her bed—or was he asking her if she did?

  Whichever; aware of the twins’ presence or she would be tearing angry holes into him, ‘Excuse me,’ she murmured frigidly, and with a twist of her body she disappeared to the other side of her bedroom door before he could say anything else.

  How dared he make such an insulting assumption—how dared he believe he even had the right to comment on her love life?

  Her bed still wore the imprint of their bodies. On a flare of skin-flaying anger she stepped over to it and yanked the duvet straight with more violence than the task warranted. The floor was littered with their discarded clothing. It reminded her of the bedroom in his apartment as she started scooping them up. Perhaps these fevered losses of control were all they were fit for, she posed bitterly as she tossed the clothes down onto the bed.

  Had he dared to say that because it was how he ran his own life? Was he so used to being caught out with his pants down that he could be so casual about it? Her breath seethed out from between her tense teeth as she stripped her robe off. Beyond the closed bedroom door she could hear the twins talking excitedly to him and his deep-timbred responses.

  How was she supposed to have carried on a sex life with two children always around? she felt like opening the door to toss at him! He was the one who’d maintained his sexual freedom for the last six years! She was the one who’d had it thoroughly curbed before it had barely begun!

  And he still hadn’t answered the question about his relationship with Pandora Batiste. For all she knew he’d been bedding the dark-haired beauty throughout his disappearance this week!

  Dragging on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved skinny top, she spent a few minutes putting her clothes away then picked up Sandro’s remaining clothes and took them with her out of the bedroom and into the living room, where the sight which met her eyes stopped her dead.

  Sandro was sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa, long legs stretched out beneath the coffee table. Bella was on his lap—curled there wearing a rapt expression Cassie had never seen on her daughter’s face before and it hurt something tender inside her to see it there now. Anthony was standing by Sandro’s right shoulder, gravely instructing him how to fashion an aeroplane out of a piece of brightly coloured A4 paper. The room already wore the evidence of several failed attempts, though she doubted that someone with Sandro’s agile capabilities needed so many tries to get the simple construction right.

  And Sandro himself held his daughter safe within the curve of an arm while his dark gaze was fixed intently on his son. Tears stung the backs of Cassie’s eyelids because she could see the wonder in his expression as he listened to Anthony, feel the edge of his vulnerability in the arm he had looped around Bella. All three were bonding in their own unique fashion, Bella with her innate tactile nature by cuddling, Anthony with the serious practicality of his technical skills, Sandro by accommodating both twins’ needs, at the same time bonding them together as a heart-wrenchingly tight trio.

  For the first time in the twins’ five-year existence Cassie learnt what it felt like to be a separate part of them, and it hurt. She saw what the twins had been missing having no contact with their father. She saw what Sandro had missed out on by not knowing them.

  The reason why she had Sandro’s clothes draped over her arm felt suddenly petty. What had she been intending to do with them—toss them at him before she threw him out on an act of angry bitterness that would have severed that fragile bond she was witnessing here?

  She turned away from the living room undetected, and went to place the clothes back on the bed before slipping quietly into her tiny kitchen, where she stood, staring out of the window with no idea what she was thinking, or what she was feeling, only aware that something inside her had changed.

  The emphasis on what was important had changed, she realised after a few minutes. For the last ten mad days she’d been totally focused on her own emotions—anger, resentment, suspicion, betrayal, the heated passion that kept flaring up between her and Sandro, usually followed by fresh confrontation because everything inside her was so mixed up and defensive and at war. The twins’ wants and needs had become swallowed up by it all; now they rose to the surface and swamped everything else beneath a shivery wave. They needed a father whether or not she needed a husband. They needed Sandro even though she knew she was still fighting demons about him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  His quiet voice came from the kitchen doorway. Turning her head, she saw him sta
nding there with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets and his shirt still open at its collar and cuffs. He looked sombre, wary, as if he’d picked her mood up from the other room and forced himself to come in here.

  ‘Where are the twins?’ she questioned quietly.

  ‘Watching television.’ His eyelids were half covering his eyes. ‘I saw you watching us together. You looked—gutted.’

  Gutted? ‘No.’ Cassie found a brief wry smile from somewhere. ‘Come to my senses, more like.’ She turned to face him fully, slender arms crossing her ribcage as she leant back against the unit behind her. ‘What is your family going to say about you turning up in Florence, married to me and the father of five-year-old twins?’

  ‘My family?’ The hooded look altered into a frown.

  ‘Gio mentioned at the restaurant the other night that you have a large family,’ Cassie enlightened. ‘He said you’re good with families because you have a large one yourself.’

  ‘I have a mother, two older sisters and my brother, Marco—I don’t understand your drift.’

  Cassie gave a shrug. ‘Except for your brother you’ve never mentioned them to me, not once. Not in the past or in the present. I was wondering if there was a reason for that.’

  ‘We have been dealing with us. I believed that was complicated enough.’

  ‘Will they be at our wedding?’

  Infinitesimally, he tensed. ‘No. I felt it was best to keep the ceremony small and private in respect of the twins. I…could not be sure how they were going to feel about me.’ He sketched out a brief smile. ‘I did not know if I was going to have to drag you anchored to my wrist to marry me.’