Sandro suddenly launched to his feet. ‘Don’t try telling me they are not my children!’
‘I’m not!’ she denied, tensing up all over because she didn’t like the way he swayed before he gained control of his stance. ‘But without a chance meeting in a restaurant bar last week, you could have lived the rest of you
r life not knowing the twins and I even existed! And are you sure, Sandro—can you be positively certain that they are yours? If I were in your shoes I would be demanding DNA tests to make sure before I committed myself to anything.’
He uttered a thick laugh. ‘You sound like my legal advisors.’
‘So they’ve said the same thing?’ Cassie picked up. ‘Have they also advised you to have me investigated?’
He sighed impatiently. ‘I might not remember you but I do know you,’ he insisted. ‘There’s this…link between us which keeps on lighting up inside my head that tells me I know you, though it will not stay around long enough for me to capture it thoroughly.’
‘You might be catching brief glimpses of a clever golddigger, for all you know—a greedy little scrubber with an eye on the main chance!’
‘I might have gaps in my memory but not in my intelligence,’ he threw back. ‘I still possess the ability to recognise greedy little scrubbers when I set eyes on them. And you are not one of them.’
‘Then what other reason can you come up with for making me the only person you’ve wiped out of your head?’
A strange expression crossed his face before he blanked it out with a hiss of impatience. ‘I don’t understand why you are obsessing about this.’
‘Because it hurts!’ Cassie flung at him. ‘I don’t understand it, and it hurts! And I won’t let you talk me into a marriage with you, Sandro, when I will be constantly waiting for your memory to come back and tell you why you needed to forget me!’
In the sizzling silence that followed her outburst, if it was possible his face bleached even paler than it already was. Cassie could feel his stress, his simmering tension. And that scary blank look was back in his eyes, as if he was remembering something else. She watched him fight with it, watched his eyelids fold downwards to half cover the look with a tense black frown that made her hold on to her breath because she knew—just knew he was about to tell her something so devastating to her it was going to rip her to shreds.
A sound coming from the other side of the living-room door warned them then that the twins were about to come back in here. Sandro’s curse as he pushed his hand back up to his face cut through the tension like a knife.
‘I’ll h-head them off.’ Cassie jerked into movement, making for the door on knocking knees and trembling legs.
‘Give me a few minutes to…get myself together,’ he husked out. ‘Then I will take you home.’
‘We’ll catch the train—’
‘Don’t,’ he growled, ‘start that argument again. I will take you,’ he insisted. ‘Find my driver. He can usually be found out by the garages, drinking tea with Angus’s driver.’
That he had not driven himself here swung Cassie round in surprise. Sandro was still on his feet but only just, she judged anxiously as she watched the way he flexed his wide shoulders as if he was trying to shake off what was affecting him, and a sudden ribbon of understanding slithered down her front. He didn’t trust himself to drive a car right now while these blackouts kept on catching him out.
Moistening her lips, her heart thumping, she heard the husky concern shadowing her voice. ‘Sandro, you—’
The door flew open, forcing whatever she had been going to say back down her throat, and sent her attention zipping away from him to the twins. With the efficiency of a mother used to dealing with two boisterous children, she herded them back out of the room before they could lay eyes on their father, diverting them with the tempting promise that they were about to travel home in style instead of catching a busy train.
Sandro waited until the door had closed behind them before he dropped back down into the chair then reached into his pocket for his mobile phone. ‘Marco,’ he said brusquely, ‘I’m giving in. I will take that scan now….’
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE journey back home was completed in an atmosphere of strange, tense, chattering normality, made to work because Sandro had elected to take the seat beside his driver, which left space in the rear of the car for Cassie and the twins. The two children were so impressed by this luxury mode of transport that they did not notice their father’s silence or the quiet tension threading their mother’s husky voice whenever she spoke to them.
He declined her invitation to come in with them. On one level Cassie was relieved because she knew she needed time out of his dominating sphere. On another level she ached with concern for him because he still looked so strained and pale.
He smiled for the twins, though, promised to come and see them again soon. He squatted down on the dusty pavement so he could look them directly in their eyes as he made the promise then remained like that, drinking in their solemn little faces as if for the last time. Then Bella stepped in and wrapped her arms around his neck, and Sandro reached out to loop a big arm around his son to draw him into the hug too.
Why this touching little scene should fill Cassie with fresh anxiety she couldn’t work out, but when he rose to his full height and turned that same intense look on her she almost copied her daughter and threw herself at him. The way he cupped her cheek and brushed his thumb across her soft, trembling mouth stopped her. His husky, ‘I’ll call you,’ before he turned and climbed back in the car without saying anything else left her feeling wrung out and devastated because he’d used the exact same words and touch when he’d driven away from her six years ago.
She spent Sunday living with that empty feeling, while the twins plied her with non-stop questions about their father and marriage plans and Sandro’s proposed move to Italy, about which she knew nothing. Bella was excited about it. Anthony worried about leaving his school and his friends. Cassie lived in an anxious state over Sandro and that final scene on the pavement, which grew more sickeningly familiar each time she replayed it in her head.
And he didn’t call.
Monday she turned up for work and made the pretence it was like any other Monday morning with no major upheaval happening in her life—because she just didn’t know what else to do. Her shadow followed her every moment, helping to keep her concentration focused on work. But she was uptight and uncommunicative, alert for the sound of Sandro’s name being mentioned, wondering if he was in the building, wanting to find out, reassure herself that he was OK, but refusing to give herself the right to ask those questions outright.
And then there was Pandora. She did not seem to be in the building either, although that was yet another question Cassie refused to seek confirmation about.