Marchese's Forgotten Bride(21)

Sandro lay heavy on her with his arms still wrapped around her slender body and that feeling of being scraped out from the inside he’d felt earlier this evening, robbing him of the strength to move. They should not have done it and strange, swirling images were floating around his aching head. He’d never been so out of control before, did not know how it had happened or even why it had happened. It was as if someone else had been living inside his body, driving him on.

And those flashes were getting worse now, flinging open doors in his head and slamming them shut with a violence that set his teeth on edge. On an inner groan, he slid his arms from beneath her. ‘Dio,’ he breathed on a thick, husky laugh aimed to lighten the charged atmosphere, ‘did we ever get out of bed once we made it there?’

With Cassie still lying limp-limbed and trembling beneath him, his badly aimed joke brought her alive on a quivering flood of skin-flaying offence that had her pushing him off her before she reared up and swung on him wildly, landing the flat of her hand hard against the side of his face.

Gasping and shaking and dimly horrified by her own outburst of physical violence, ‘Are you referring to the single night we spent there before you upped and left me?’ she sliced into him chokingly. ‘You really like to live up to the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, macho-rat remit, don’t you, Sandro? Two weeks wooing me and one night screwing me. Mission accomplished, so forget that one, leave her pregnant and move on to the next!’

Having collapsed on his back beside her, Sandro took the full blast of her shaking anger the same way he’d taken her slap to his face—with total stillness, nothing showing on his face now except her finger marks standing out on his cheek. And his lack of reaction only made Cassie want to hit him again; she wanted to pummel his chest with her fists!

Instead she scrambled off the bed with a snaking move of trembling limbs and looked wildly around for something with which to cover herself up. She saw Sandro’s shirt lying draped half on and half off the side of the bed and shuddered, spinning away from it. She would rather be flayed alive than wear that next to her now-cringing flesh. How dared he make a joke of what they’d just done here? How had it happened? How had she let him reduce her to this? Grabbing a pillow up off the bed, she hugged it to her front, a well of hot tears building in her throat. Oh, God, she hated herself—she hated him! And her legs could barely hold her upright, her insides still singing like sinful traitors triumphing over what Sandro had done for them.

On a stinging shot of shamed energy she began urgently gathering up her clothes, refusing to look at him, refusing to notice how he was still lying there, saying nothing, or how the hand was back up at his face, long fingertips pressing into his creased brow.

Clutching the pillow to her front along with her skimpy jumble of clothes now, she turned and headed for the door. She had to get away. She just had to—

‘I cannot believe I did that to you.’

The husky sound of his denial froze Cassie taut and quivering in the doorway. ‘Can’t or don’t want to believe it?’ she shook back.

Without thinking, she spun to look at him in time to watch him roll off the bed to land beside it on his feet. Each beautifully toned inch of him was captured by the light from the single lamp burning golden by the bed, sweat-glossed sleek, powerful muscles that expanded and contracted in a lithe display of masculine potency that turned her ravished muscles to hateful, trembling mush.

Why did he have to be the only man who could do this to her? ‘If you ask me, Sandro, your biggest problem is that you don’t seem to want to know yourself—which in my view makes a complete mockery of your so-called lost memory!’

He flinched, one of his hands sweeping out in a sharp, slicing gesture meant to cut her bitter words to shreds. Shaken by the violence of the action, Cassie just stared as he jerked into movement, striding across the room to disappear through a door, closing it behind him with a quiet thud that left her standing there with her heart writhing around in her chest in self-disgust at what she’d let him do to her—again.

A sob of revulsion broke free from her throat and she dropped the pillow and spun around to leave the bedroom at a wild run, making for the bright white bathroom where her foolish downfall had begun. The harsh lights hurt her burning eyes as she dragged on her flimsy briefs and fumbled feverishly with the zip on her dress. She hadn’t found her stockings but she didn’t care, she told herself as she wriggled her bare toes into her shoes.

All she wanted to do was to just get the heck out of here without having to face him. As she turned towards the door she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and a stinging flood of tears lashed her aching throat. She looked like a plump-lipped, hot-cheeked lush! Her hair was all over the place, its waterfall layers all tangled and mussed, and her eyes were so dark she looked as if she’d been indulging in some kind of drug!