Marchese's Forgotten Bride. Michelle Reid

she vaguely suspected that he’d barely heard a word that Gio was saying. His eyes still burned into her eyes, her hand still lay captive in his. And the electric tension they were generating between them just kept on building and building, dragging a frail, shaken breath from Cassie’s lips. His ridiculously long eyelashes flickered as he lowered his gaze to her parted mouth and she shivered.

      She watched a frown begin to crease his smooth features.

      ‘Cassie is also one of those highly admirable people that successfully juggles the demands of her career with the demands of being mother to five-year-old twins,’ Gio Rozario continued like a well-programmed robot.

      Hearing the twins mentioned snapped Cassie back to reality. Unable to stop the bitter flash that spun out of her eyes into his, she snatched her hand back then dropped it onto her lap, where she returned it to a tense-fisted clench.

      What happened next was pure drama. No one expected it. Certainly not Cassie, who was in the process of dragging her gaze away from his.

      She heard a groan, felt Sandro grab the back of her chair with his hand and flicked a glance up to his face in time to catch the shaft of pain that creased it, followed by his swiftly draining pallor, just before she felt her chair start to shift.

      After that she had no time to register anything because her chair was being pulled right out from beneath her and somehow she was on her feet, trembling and shaking and staring as six feet four inches of powerfully built male dropped like a stone, taking her chair with him, to end up stretched out between two tables near her feet!

      One of those dreadful pin-drop silences hung for a second. The whole thing was so out of the ordinary and bizarre, the entire room just froze in a breathless wait for him to curse or something then climb back to his feet.

      But he didn’t move, and in the next few skin-flaying seconds it took Cassie to register that he looked horribly lifeless, the rest of the room was erupting in a cacophony of sound that shattered the silence.

      Gasps, cries, chairs screeching on the white marble flooring—she was vaguely aware of being pressed to one side as Gio rushed past her, followed closely by a flash of red. Shocked murmurs of, ‘Did he slip?’ ‘Is he drunk?’ ‘Why isn’t he moving?’ ricocheted off Cassie’s buzzing eardrums and she blinked, her shocked eyes swimming into focus on the crouching huddle that was Gio and the woman in red kneeling beside Sandro, urgently yanking at his tie and the collar of his shirt.

      He looked grey—he looked dead.

      Cassie heaved in a deep, thick, gasping breath of air and out of nowhere, just nowhere, she whispered, ‘Sandro,’ and was falling to her knees, all but knocking Gio sideways in her urgency to get to him.

      ‘Sandro!’ She cried out his name again, and sent a second shock wave rampaging around the stunned assembly.

      CHAPTER THREE

      ‘EXPLAIN to us what happened back there, Cassie.’

      For such an outwardly genial character Gio Rozario had suddenly developed a core of steel. He was leaning against the edge of the desk in the restaurant owner’s tiny back office, into which he’d hustled her, having been forced to bodily remove her from Sandro’s prostrate form.

      Standing beside Gio was the woman in the red dress who’d joined them a few seconds later. For such a beautiful creature, Pandora Batiste—as she’d introduced herself—had a way of turning her liquid brown eyes into glass, Cassie noticed as she gave a helpless shake of her head.

      ‘I can’t explain it,’ she answered, still so badly shaken by what had happened that she couldn’t keep her shivering limbs still where she sat.

      ‘You dived on him,’ Gio described.

      Her mouth trembled, cold and shivery like the rest of her because she still—still couldn’t shrug off those horrifying seconds when she’d thought that Sandro had dropped down dead at her feet.

      Because she’d wished for it—oh, so many times over the last six years when things had been tough for her—she’d wished with all of her aching heart to see Sandro dead at her feet.

      ‘So did you,’ she fed back, staring down at her right palm, which still pulsed with the reassuring beat of Sandro’s heart from when she’d laid it against his chest.

      ‘I know him, you do not,’ Gio argued. ‘Or we assumed you did not,’ he then amended after a pause. ‘He spoke to you…’

      Cassie closed her eyes and saw the deep, dark chasms of Sandro’s eyes when he’d opened them and looked into her face. ‘Cassie—Madre di Dio…’ he’d mouthed weakly, then he’d closed his eyes again and Gio had pulled her away from him.

      ‘Please,’ she said anxiously, ‘will one of you go and find out how he is?’

      ‘You called him Sandro,’ Pandora Batiste took over, ignoring Cassie’s plea. ‘Nobody calls him Sandro. He despises it. He has been known to blow into a spectacular rage if he’s ever referred to by that name. So why did you—a supposed stranger to him—feel free to use it?’

      A wry kind of smile tilted Cassie’s tense, pale lips. It was news to her that Sandro held such an aversion to the name, since it was he who’d given it to her in the first place. Call me Sandro. Will you allow me to buy you lunch? A coffee, then? OK, may I just sit here and worship in silence…?

      ‘You know each other,’ the glassy eyed beauty insisted. ‘I witnessed your initial shock when you first caught sight of him in the bar. I felt Alessandro’s shock when he saw you.’

      With an effort Cassie lifted up her face to look at them both standing there, leaning against the desk with their arms folded and their eyes fixed on her while she sat shivering on her chair.

      It annoyed her. Their whole superior and dominating attitude infuriated her. ‘You have no right to interrogate me like this,’ she protested.

      ‘We are not interrogating you,’ Gio denied the charge, ‘we are simply concerned about what took place and—’

      ‘Curious,’ Cassie amended curtly, feeling a return of some much-needed mental strength, ‘but I will not have this conversation with you,’ she informed the two of them. ‘And I would be more impressed by your so-called concern for Sandro if you were out there with him instead of in here with me.’

      ‘Alessandro is being taken care of—’ It was Pandora Batiste who stressed the name.

      ‘How can you know that?’ Cassie looked at her. ‘I would have thought your time could be better spent finding out why he passed out like he did!’

      ‘That’s what we’re doing—’

      ‘No, you’re not. You’re trying to bully information out of me that you have no right to demand. Is he drunk?’ she asked sharply then. ‘Has Sandro turned into a drunk, as well as a—?’

      ‘As well as a what?’ a different voice prompted from behind her.

      Shooting to her feet, Cassie spun around to find the man himself standing in the office doorway. Her throat dried up. He looked dreadful, still as pale as death even if he was standing on his own two feet. And his eyes were too dark—as black as deep caverns hollowed into his skull.

      ‘Are you all right?’ She couldn’t stop the strained question from leaving her aching throat.

      He didn’t answer. Flattening out his mouth, he just moved his eyes away from her to look at his two assistants and dismissed them with the barest shift of his dark head.

      ‘Damage control,’ he instructed as they both shot away from the desk in unison. ‘Jet lag, migraine—I don’t care what excuse you use so long as you make it convincing,’ he added as they walked towards him, ‘then find me a route out of here that does not require an audience.’

      The door closed behind their