Unable to hang around here for another heart-wrenching second of this, Cassie found herself standing on the other side of his office door experiencing her second sense of déjà vu in as many minutes—this one spinning her back to the restaurant on Friday night.
The big difference this time being that she now found herself standing here with her composure shot to pieces and staring at a room full of curious eyes instead of a thankfully empty space. She felt her face drain of colour, her eyes moving on what felt like guilty wings to focus on the narrow-eyed glitter spitting out from the black eyes of Pandora Batiste.
Guilty fire came to lick up her neck to burn a mortified path to her cheeks. If the other woman was Sandro’s lover then she had every right to pin her to the door with a look like that, Cassie accepted. Did she know—could Pandora know what she and Sandro had done on Friday night?
Telephones suddenly started ringing—half a dozen of them bursting simultaneously into life. Watching smart-suited people jump to their workstations, Cassie took her chance while she had it and hurried across the room. As she slipped out through the door she heard a cumulative murmur of, ‘Sí, Alessandro,’ and almost felt the backlash as a dozen or so bodies made a mass move towards Sandro’s office door.
He’d done it to divert their attention away from her, she realised with a small laugh that deteriorated into a strangled choke.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘HE’S very good with them, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’ Cassie nodded, wishing she knew whether to laugh or to weep, as she watched Sandro go down in a huddle on the lawn in his bungled attempt to stop the ball Bella had just kicked into his improvised goal area, marked by two anoraks provided by the twins.
Bella certainly found it hilariously funny because she was jumping up and down and squealing with delight as the ball rolled right past him, setting Anthony running to go and catch it.
The afternoon was bright and sunny but way too cool to tempt Angus outside. Electing to stay inside with him, the two of them now sat by the French windows with Angus occupying his favourite chair that Sandro had carried there so he could watch the children play. Seated on a low stool beside him, Cassie leant forward so she could rest her chin on the heels of her hands.
All in, she’d had a pretty lousy week, she reflected bleakly. Monday she’d felt wrecked by her confrontation with Sandro. Tuesday she’d felt wrecked by the discovery that Pandora Batiste was the real new boss Sandro had put in Angus’s place. Sandro should not have even been at BarTec on Monday. The fact that he’d arrived there and commandeered Angus’s office—which was now Pandora’s office, apparently—exclusively to be private with Cassie had gone down with Pandora like a lead balloon.
By the end of Wednesday she knew she’d made a serious enemy in Pandora Batiste. She’d been hauled in front of the other woman to defend her commitment to the company. Her timekeeping had been called into question, and why she felt she had the right to finish work half an hour earlier than anyone else. When she’d explained that she took half an hour less at lunchtime to compensate, Pandora wasn’t impressed. Did she know she took more holiday breaks than her colleagues? Was she aware that said extra holidays were not a part of her employment contract with BarTec? A verbal agreement with Angus that she could catch up by working from home during school breaks did not suit her new boss, who, she was told, did not approve of unequal favours built on the flimsy excuse of verbal agreements. When she promised to make new arrangements for collecting and caring for her children Pandora still wasn’t pleased.
Not once was Sandro’s name mentioned, but his spectre wove in and out of each criticism she was forced to take on the chin. She spent Thursday mostly on the phone trying to fill in the half-hour gap between the twins leaving school and her being able to collect them and did not dare to even try to think about the half-term break due in a couple of weeks. By Friday she knew she was in serious trouble when she arrived at BarTec to discover that her every working moment was to be shadowed by one of Sandro’s team.
Ella spent the day trying to bully her into telling Sandro what Pandora was doing but Cassie would rather have cut out her tongue than sneak to Sandro about it. Her pride had taken enough of a beating from Pandora.
And all because of this man, who was playing with her children as if he’d always been there for them.
‘He told you everything before we arrived, didn’t he?’ she murmured flatly to Angus.
‘It is in his nature to meet uncomfortable issues head-on,’ her father’s old friend supplied.
Not with me, thought Cassie.
‘Look at the way he faced the twins when you arrived,’ Angus highlighted. ‘No playing it cagey, he just went straight in there.’
Sliding her fingers up to hide the revealing wobble suddenly attacking her mouth, Cassie closed her eyes in pained reflection of that heart-wrenching moment when Sandro had stood in this same room, and faced his children for the first time.
Wearing jeans and a soft grey jumper over an open-neck shirt, he’d looked so fabulously tall, dark, handsome…and so alarmingly tense and pale she’d feared he was going to drop to the floor in one of his blackouts.
‘Sandro…’ she’d murmured, unable to keep her concern hidden.
‘I’m OK,’ he’d husked out, but the way he could not keep the unevenness from his voice told her otherwise. So had the blacker than black eyes he’d locked on the twins, who’d come to a standstill halfway across the room, the happy way they’d run in here to go straight to Angus, stunted by their surprise at being confronted with a stranger.
And no one, not Cassie, not Angus, who observed all from his chair, not even two five-year-olds, missed the tension holding Sandro, or the way he’d burned lingering looks from one twin to the other, seeing what Cassie already knew was there.
One green-eyed, golden-haired little girl and one dark-eyed, dark-haired little boy—two miniature replicas of their parents.
Ca
ssie’s throat closed on a lump of agony. At that point she would have given anything not to put the three of them through this. She’d watched Sandro swallow, watched him lift his eyes up to meet with hers, felt the ferocious sweep of emotion crash into her because he exposed so much vulnerability in that short, strained, heart-stopping glance.
‘Anthony, Bella…’ she’d tried her best to ease it for him ‘…this is Alessandro. S-say hello…’
The twins’ obedient responses had been mumbled. A muscle running along the rigid edge of Sandro’s jaw jerked as he’d looked back at them. Like a guy fighting a mammoth battle with himself he’d fought to place a smile on his mouth as he dropped into a squat in front of the two children.
Then he’d knocked Cassie sideways with his, ‘Hello. I am your father. I am sorry we have not met before now…’