‘No!’ he bit out. ‘If you want the truth, she had become a pain in the damn neck! When Gio told me she was giving you a hard time at BarTec, I decided it was time I did something more permanent about her…emotional attachment, so I sent her back to Florence with notice to find herself another job. This…’ the laptop was waved at ‘…was her vindictive response!’
‘OK,’ Cassie whispered. ‘I believe you.’
‘Grazie,’ he responded with stiff-necked thinness, not in the least bit happy about being put on the rack about Pandora in the first place.
‘Don’t think for one second that I forgive you for any of it!’ She instantly fired up. ‘You should have told me about your f-fiancée, Sandro!’
‘I tried to several times but…’ he stopped to sigh then pushed his fingers through his hair ‘…I knew it was going to hurt you. And I could not predict how you were going to react. So I decided to wait until we were safely married before I explained about—about Phebe.’ He couldn’t even say her name without swallowing first! ‘And I also had to think about what was best for the twins.’
‘Don’t you dare bring them into this!’ Cassie ch
oked out. ‘And I am not in the least bit impressed by your excuses! Right from the start it’s always been what you decided. What you wanted to do! Well, what about me and what I might have wanted?’
‘You wanted me,’ he declared harshly. ‘From the moment you looked at me in that damn restaurant, Cassie, you—wanted—me! Well, now you have me, tied, trussed and bloody gift-wrapped! I’m giving you what you wanted!’
‘Y-you conceited devil!’ she gasped.
‘I wanted you the same way. Why deny it that we both want the same thing?’
‘I did not want to be the cross you’ve decided to bear to salve your lousy guilty conscience!’
She hated him for turning her into that—she would hate him forever for it!
‘Did she—your fiancée know about me?’ she spun at him chokily.
‘No,’ he roughed out.
One tiny chink of relief in a black storm of shame and misery, Cassie thought painfully.
‘She came to meet me at the airport the day I left here,’ he continued heavily. ‘We hit an oil spill on the way into Florence. She—died later…’ He took another thick pause for several long seconds before he added, ‘I think that’s all you need to know.’
Cassie nodded as a sickly quiver of muddled emotions riddled her insides. She felt sorry for poor, tragic, beautiful Phebe Pyralis. She even felt a pang of sorrow for Sandro and what he had lost that night. A six-week black hole in his memory seemed like nothing now when held up against the vivid images he had just sketched out.
Two people, a car, an oil slick, two broken bodies…Her hand went up to cover her mouth. Two lives shattered in the skidding grind of twisting metal. Three more lives—her own and the twins’—spinning off into the black hole Sandro’s mind had become.
‘“I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you,”’ she whispered. ‘No wonder you said those words to me.’ His brain had refused to let him remember her on any level, even her cry for help.
He threw back his shoulders, his fabulous bone structure fiercely pronounced. ‘What I said to you that day was—is—unforgivable,’ he accepted tautly. ‘All I can say in my defence is that I did not remember you. And Phebe…’ he stopped to swallow, his expression raw and ravaged ‘…Phebe and I were both left in deep comas after the accident. She—she did not come through it…I did…’
Raw agony scored his elegant cheekbones—survivor guilt, Cassie recognised, feeling the pain with him, though she wished that she didn’t.
‘The day you made that call to me was the same day we buried her…’ he went on once he found the control to do so. ‘It was, cara, the worst day of my life.’
Oh, dear God…Cassie spun away again, her hand jerking back up to cover her mouth. Nothing—nothing she had been feeling back then had felt as bad as this did right now.
‘I was in a mess,’ Sandro continued starkly. ‘I was barely functioning as a human being. I don’t remember deleting your calls from my mobile’s memory, and know now that I blocked them out afterwards as I had blocked out everything else about you…’
Cassie closed her eyes, trying to think past the strangle of emotions twisting around inside her and couldn’t. She hurt for poor Phebe. She hurt for Sandro, for herself and the twins.
‘When we met again—’
‘Please,’ Cassie whispered. ‘Don’t say anything else.’
She’d heard enough—understood enough. Phebe, poor, beautiful Phebe, had been Sandro’s real love and he’d cheated on her. Blocking out everything about her had been the only way he could live with his guilt. That did not make him a bad man, just a—a flawed one.
For six long years she had seen herself as Sandro’s sleazy one-night stand. Learning about his accident and his lost memory had given her back her dignity, the right to lift herself up from that lowly place. Now here she was, sunk right back down in the sleaze by the introduction of the beautiful Phebe Pyralis, who, if she had not died in that wretched car accident, would be blissfully married to Sandro by now, probably surrounded by the gift of their own children, and she and the twins would still be cast out of his life like unwanted garbage.
Instead, and because of a trick of fate, she had been offered the star prize in Phebe Pyralis’s stead: marriage to Sandro. A father for her children. Great, she thought emptily. Aren’t I the lucky one?