Marchese's Forgotten Bride(38)

He released an odd laugh. ‘Could be the mind-blowing way you kissed me,’ Sandro suggested, still struggling to deal with the real trigger that had almost knocked him to the floor this time, ‘which is going to make ours an interesting marriage.’

‘Shut up about marriage.’ Frowning fiercely now, unable to stop her other hand from reaching up to touch her fingers against the worrying clammy skin covering his cheek, she added, ‘You shouldn’t have brought the subject up at all. If you ask me we shouldn’t even occupy the same room!’

‘No comment about your kissing technique, then.’

The lid almost blew off Cassie’s temper. Only the sight of his dreadful pallor kept the lid on. His eyes were still closed, the skin covering his face drawn tight across the bones, and she was worried and scared, her insides were churning around like mad and he was turning it into a joke!

Sitting back on her heels, Cassie released a tense breath. ‘You’ve got as much sensitivity as a doorstop.’

On a sigh, he dropped his hand and opened his eyes to pin her with an inky black stare of dead certainty. ‘We are getting married.’

‘Why?’ she cried out. ‘Because of the twins?’

‘Because we both know that marriage between us has to be the logical solution, so you tell me, why do you feel the need to fight against it?’

The answer to that was simple. ‘You don’t even know me.’

‘I know myself and I know I would have been there for you and the twins from the beginning if I had not had the accident and lost my memory. Marriage between us would have been an essential part of that.’

Would it? Cassie wasn’t sure.

Getting to her feet, she paced away from him, that inner core of uncertainty nagging at her as she walked. Swinging around, ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘who else did you forget about in your missing weeks?’

‘No one—that I know of.’ He frowned at her. ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you to wonder why your brain singled me out to wipe from your head?’

His frowned deepened. ‘Probably because you are the only person I met for the first time during those weeks.’ Fingers going up to rub at his brow again, he sat forward on the chair. ‘I don’t see that it matters.’

Well, it mattered to Cassie. ‘I could be anyone, then. I could be feeding you a pack of lies, for all you know.’

He dropped the hand. ‘Why would you want to do that?’

‘Money?’ she suggested. ‘The pot of gold from the filthyrich man? Security for my children?’

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 your 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.