Marchese's Forgotten Bride by Michelle Reid Page B

in my bed with your hungry mouth fixed on mine.’
    Cassie tossed her head back. ‘Are you so proud of the way you behaved that you’re this happy to describe it?’
    She watched, astonished, as two streaks of colour shot high across his cheeks. ‘I lost control,’ he confessed. ‘I apologise if I was too—passionate.’
    Too passionate? In her estimation they’d both been too passionate . Hot, wild, out of their…
    ‘I should have apologised to you directly afterwards, but you’d knocked me for six again and I never got around to it.’
    ‘I don’t want your apology.’ Feeling as if she was being eaten alive by her own culpability that night, Cassie gave another tug at her captured arm and this time managed to pull free and step right out of reach. ‘And I’ve already told you I don’t want to have this kind of conversation with you here.’
    ‘Have dinner with me tonight, then,’ he invited. ‘We can talk on neutral ground.’
    ‘No.’ With an abrupt twist she headed for the door.
    His sigh of irritation trembled down her backbone. ‘Saturday, then,’ he offered. ‘I have to go away tomorrow and cannot get back to London until the weekend. Cassie, don’t walk out of that door before we reach a compromise here!’ he warned. ‘I want to meet my children, and I prefer to do it with your permission and blessing but I will meet them without both if you force me to!’
    Cassie whipped around. ‘Are you threatening me?’ she choked out, taut and trembling with a frantic mix of anger and alarm.
    A scowl wrecked the shape of his attractive mouth. ‘No—’ springing up from the desk like some lithe hunting animal annoyed by the self-built cage of his own response ‘—not unless I have to,’ he temporised.
    In other words he was threatening her! Cassie wrapped her arms around her middle, crushing the fabric of her grey suit jacket against her ribs. She wanted to call his bluff and tell him to get lost but she knew she couldn’t. She just didn’t possess that much power over the truth. And the truth was—love it or hate it—Sandro was the father of her children. If he wanted to meet them, what right did she have to throw obstacles in his way? She couldn’t do that to the twins or to him. Her own feelings couldn’t come into it. They—the three of them—had a given right to know each other even if it meant she had to put her own grievances with Sandro aside in order to make it happen.
    But what was it going to mean to her to have Sandro stroll in and out of her life at his leisure? To see him interact with the two people she loved beyond anything else in the world?
    Watching her stand there fighting a battle with herself scraped at the inner walls of Sandro’s chest. He knew this was tough on her. He knew she would rather slap his face again and tell him to go to hell. He’d left her. He’d walked away to leave her to cope on her own. He’d rejected her in the most brutal way a man could do it. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. Please don’t ring this number again… Those words had been eating him up since she’d quoted them back to him. It didn’t matter that he could not remember having said them. The point was he had to have said them. He didn’t dare let himself wonder what she must have felt like to be on the receiving end of such brutality.
    A spark of pain sent his fingers up to rub at his brow. He needed to remember but all he kept getting were these flashes that seared through his head, only to lock him out again.
    ‘I want to meet them, Cassie,’ he repeated determinedly.
    ‘Three nights ago you didn’t even know you had two children!’ she cried out painfully. ‘You can’t even remember me! N-no,’ she refused yet again, trying desperately to control her shaking voice, ‘not yet at least, n-not until I can be sure…’
    ‘Be sure of what?’ he prompted when the rest dried on her tongue.
    Cassie pulled in a breath. ‘Be sure that you m-mean to stay