Marchese's Forgotten Bride(34)

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.

Cassie’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…’

‘It was quite courageous, considering.’ Angus spoke beside her.

Considering what? Cassie wondered as sharp tears sliced across her eyes. ‘A considerate man would have warned me he was going to announce it like that instead of just dropping it on the twins like a bomb.’

‘A considerate woman would perhaps have prepared her children to expect it to come.’

Cassie flushed, tensing up at what she read as a criticism of her mothering instincts. ‘I was hoping to give them breathing space between meeting Sandro and learning who he really is,’ she defended her own reasoning.