Marchese's Forgotten Bride (6 page)

And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, she decided as she hovered tensely on the threshold of the room, desperately wanting to snatch up her purse and just go, yet held glued to the spot by a bubbling growth of concern because she could see the strain of what was happening to him was really making itself felt now and he looked so dreadfully pale.

‘Sandro, please, don’t drink that,’ she murmured unsteadily. ‘I don’t think—’

‘Tell me the date you claim we were together,’ he cut in right over her.

‘We
were
together!’ Cassie instantly flared up.

‘All right,’ with another one of those angry slashes with his hand, ‘tell me
when
we were together, then!’

Needing to take in a breath of shaky air, Cassie named the date.

Sandro made a jerky movement that was almost a flinch. ‘For how long?’

‘I’ve told you this too—’

‘Then repeat it. How long?’ he bit out rawly.

Pressing her lips together, she had to push herself beyond the shame barrier before she could answer, ‘Two w-weeks.’

‘Two weeks,’ he echoed in a thick, cursing voice. Then he really scared her by dropping like lead into the nearest chair and made that gesture with his fingers, pushing them up against his brow. ‘Are you claiming that we managed to conceive twins in only two weeks?’

‘N-no.’ Having to bite back the desire to object to the way he had put that, Cassie gave in to her own trembling legs and walked over to a chair to sit down. ‘It took you two weeks to get me to go to bed with you and only one n-night to conceive the twins. The next morning you said you had to fly back to Florence. You promised you would be gone for only a few days but you never came back.’

‘I couldn’t come back.’ Lowering his hand from his brow, he continued the story from his point of view. ‘The accident happened and I lost six seemingly vital weeks of my life.’

‘Will you
stop
this, Sandro?’ A sudden flush of hot anger launched Cassie back to her feet. ‘Your lost weeks have nothing to do with this!’

His head shot up. ‘How the hell do you come to that crazy conclusion?’

‘But I
told
you this too,’ she cried out. ‘I called you on your mobile. You barely gave me the opportunity to speak before you hit me with,
“I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Please don’t ring this number again…”
’ As he jerked to his feet Cassie shuddered because those harsh words were etched in fire on her brain. ‘It was quite a brush-off,’ she continued with a thin laugh that didn’t even touch base with humour. ‘If I had been in a better frame of mind I m-might have appreciated just how callous you could be. But at the time I was more concerned about myself and the—the twins I’d just found out I was carrying. When I tried to tell you about them you put the phone down on me!’

‘But I do not remember this telephone call!’ he thrust out angrily.

Eyes like green fire leapt into contact with his eyes. ‘That conversation took place eight weeks after you left me, Sandro. Are you now saying that your memory loss scans
eight
weeks instead of six?’

In the thickening silence that gathered after that piece of blazing sarcasm, Cassie wondered why she was bothering to repeat any of this when once again he gave no reaction, not even a wince.

‘Even if you did not remember m-me,’ she went on unevenly, ‘a less callous man would have hesitated long enough to ask himself if there was a chance I could belong to his lost weeks.’ And she’d been so scared, almost weeping, begging him to listen to her. ‘But you weren’t interested enough to want to bother to do even that, were you?’

Still he said nothing. And he was emulating a slab of rock now—because he could no longer defend himself against what she’d said?

Probably, Cassie decided as the feelings of bitterness flooded back into play and she turned to walk over to the side-table and picked up her purse. ‘Just do me a favour, and stay right away from me,’ she husked out shakily. ‘If you decide you want contact with my children then you will have to go through my solicitor because I don’t want you anywhere near them.’

And this time she was leaving, Cassie told herself. This time she was
not
going to look back.

As she walked to the door the sound of something falling shattered that vow almost as soon as she’d fixed it inside her head. She swung around, her blood already running cold because she knew what she was going to see even before her eyes locked on to Sandro lying stretched out on the livingroom floor.

Like an action reply of the last time he’d done this, she was on her knees beside him before she’d realised she’d moved.

‘Sandro…’ she breathed, reaching out to touch her trembling fingers to his cheek. His skin felt horribly cold and clammy and the grey cast to his face sent alarm bells jangling up through her insides.

Getting to her feet again, she raced out of the room and down the hall to the kitchen. A minute later she was back on her knees beside him again with a damp cloth and a glass of water that was pretty useless, she thought wildly when he was still showing no sign of coming round.

‘Come on, Sandro…’ she urged tensely, pressing the dampened cloth to his brow then his mouth then his brow again—touching him because she needed to touch him but without a single clue as to what she should be doing to help him.

Another minute went by and he still wasn’t moving. And like a safety switch built inside her, the more practical side of her nature swung into play. He needed a doctor—maybe even an ambulance. Glancing around for her purse, she saw it lying halfway across the room where she must have dropped it as she’d run. She was about to scramble up and get it, when another phone started ringing and her eyes spun dizzily to look at Sandro’s suit jacket still lying across the back of a chair where he’d draped it.

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 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—’