‘Backed you into a tight corner?’ He dared to arch one of those super-smooth black eyebrows. ‘Of course.’ He added a super-smooth shrug. ‘You would have fought me to hell and back otherwise. Unfold your arms, cara,’ he went off track to instruct as he walked towards her. ‘You look like a fisherman’s wife ready to go on the warpath.’
She’d barely breathed a gasp of protest before he’d done it for her, reaching out and taking hold of her forearms and urging them to part.
‘I want my children legally bound to me, and I want you,’ he declared without releasing her arms from his grasp. ‘We could have spent weeks…months creeping around the subject of marriage; now it is done. You can be as mad with me as you want to be but we both know you won’t attempt to change a thing if it means upsetting the twins. You gave them a father today, cara…’ his voice deepened to husky ‘…now you must accept the consequences of your—generosity. So we marry next week.’ He even named the date and the venue. ‘Then we go to Florence to live.’
‘And does your mistress come along with us?’ Her acid response flew right out of the centre of her burning frustration because he’d hit her with too many inarguable truths.
Sandro looked at her curiously. ‘Does this very fortunate woman have a name?’
Fortunate…? Cassie tried to pull free of him but he refused to let her. ‘Everyone at BarTec knows Pandora Batiste is your lover—Let go of me,’ she bit out.
‘Pandora is my lover?’ His dark eyes began to gleam, the sensuous shape of his mouth daring to stretch into a grin. ‘I must warn her to be discreet from now on, then.’
Cassie rose to the bait without thinking about it; wrenching an arm free, she threw the flat of her palm at his face! Only this time Sandro was ready for her. He caught the hand before it had a chance to make contact with its target, his long fingers gently imprisoning her tense fingers, the golden flecks in his eyes spinning out a warning into spitting, sparking, icy green as he used her captured hand to tug her closer. Shutting down the space between their two bodies he brought his mouth down onto hers.
An angry kiss was a dangerous kiss, she discovered two seconds later when she went into it like the fisherman’s wife he’d just accused her of being, squirming and fighting him and kissing him back as if she’d been dying to do it for days. When he let go of her captured wrist so he could wrap his arms around her she attacked him with her nails, clawing them down the length of his back and making him heave out a shuddering curse yet arch his body into her so she felt the full power of his burgeoning response. His hands gripped her slender hip bones, holding her clamped against him, his tongue exploring her mouth. When he decided to pull back from her the desperate need to wound him somehow sent her teeth scoring the inner tissue of his lower lip.
‘You little witch,’ he gasped, eyes glinting like gold fires transmitting his surprise.
‘I hate you!’ Cassie seared at him feverishly.
‘You want me,’ he translated. ‘And—per Dio—you are going to have me night after night after night once I get you safely hitched to me!’
‘With the fortunate Pandora to supplement your daytime needs?’
‘That is up to you. Will I need her?’ He was still touching his lip with a careful finger. ‘And who the hell taught you to be such an aggressive kisser?’ he raked out. ‘It damn well wasn’t me.’
‘How do you know that it wasn’t you?’ Cassie countered.
It happened again like a thunderbolt tossed at his rock-solid jaw. His head went back. He tensed up all over, his eyes turning into deep black holes in his head as he took a step back from her then staggered.
Seeing what was coming, Cassie cried out on the sharp edge of alarm when she thought he was going to drop to the floor the way he’d done twice before. ‘Sandro—don’t—!’
With an impressive shift of his reeling body, he ensured Angus’s chair took his weight with a shudder. With no awareness as to how she had arrived there, Cassie was on her knees between his spread thighs. ‘Sandro,’ she murmured, one of her hands already covering the racing beat of his heart.
‘I’m OK.’ His fingers were at his brow again. ‘I’ve got it…covered.’
But he wasn’t OK! ‘This has got to stop happening!’ she burst out. ‘Every time we get confrontational you almost black out on me!’
‘I’m a big boy, cara. I can take confrontation without blacking out.’
‘Then what the heck triggered it this time?’