‘I…You…’ Her slender body tensed like a bow string.
Sandro let his eyes take on a darkling glint. ‘I was telling you I loved you—’
‘You don’t have to describe it,’ Cassie cut in. ‘I’m not the one with the patchy memory!’
‘And you whispered back to me, “I love you too, Sandro…”’
Cassie hid her eyes beneath her trembling eyelashes and tried to pull away from him but Sandro tightened his grip.
‘Did you mean it, mi amore?’ he persisted softly. ‘Did I mean it?’
At the time…? ‘Yes,’ she breathed.
‘Then we can mean it again. All it needs is a leap of faith.’
He was talking marriage again. He hadn’t really stopped talking marriage! Only now he was calling it a leap of faith. Unclipping her fingers from his hard-muscled bicep, she tried once again to retreat.
‘I asked you to marry me—’
She swung on him hotly. ‘Will you stop telling me what I already know?’
She’d been there, after all! She didn’t have a single problem recalling every detail of their first time together in her tiny apartment in her even tinier bedroom with its narrow, girly pink bed!
‘So I’m asking you again—will you marry me?’
He was remorseless, that was what he was—pig remorseless! Shame he couldn’t remember the way he’d kissed her goodbye the morning after and walked away!
‘If I am willing to take the leap then why can’t you take it with me…?’
Cassie opened her eyes to stare at him. There was no hint of strain blanching out his lean golden features, no sign at all of that terrible weakness that usually befell him after a memory flash like this. He was simply Sandro, lean, dark, beautiful Sandro, with the disgustingly long, curling black eyelashes framing dark, dark sexy brown eyes and the warm, smooth, achingly sensual mouth she just wanted to…
‘OK!’ she snapped out in resentful surrender. ‘I’ll marry you! But don’t think for one second that your lousy lost memory means I forgive you for what you did to me because it doesn’t!’ She rose up on the back of that surrender. ‘And nor will I forgive you for the unscrupulous way you dragged the twins into this!’
His response was immediate and downright arrogant. With a fast, graceful movement of his long body he had her imprisoned in her own corner of the seat. Her quivering gasp of surprise found a vent in a stinging, ‘You’ve unfastened your seatbelt!’
‘The car is stopped; now I can do what I want with you.’
And he did. It was no use pretending she didn’t let him when she didn’t put up even a token fight to the hot, consuming demand of his kiss. She came out of it breathless and disheveled, her jacket spread open, her blouse buttons undone and the twin peaks of her breasts stinging against the flimsy lace bra cups because they wanted his caressing fingers back on them. Her hair flowed around her shoulders now, though she couldn’t recall him setting it free, and her mouth tingled hot and bruised and swollen.
‘There…’ with husky satisfaction he ran the tip of his tongue along her pulsing upper lip ‘…leap of faith, sealed with a kiss. Now let’s go shopping….’
CHAPTER NINE
CLIMBING out of the car to find the driver had parked in the middle of Bond Street put a deeper blush into Cassie’s already hot cheeks. For a moment she froze, agonisingly aware that she’d barely been given time to do up enough blouse buttons before Sandro had caught hold of her hand and pulled her out onto the street.
And they’d stopped outside one of the most famous jewellers in London. Staring at its elegant glass frontage, she saw none of the glistening riches set out on display because she was staring at her own reflection in shocked dismay.
She looked like a lush again, a tousle-haired, deepcleavaged blonde lush with a thoroughly kissed mouth and dazed, dark, river-green eyes. It took only a glance at Sandro’s expression to know that he was very happy with what he saw as he looked back at her. And he looked no different from the way he had when he’d first appeared in front of her in the park. His clothes were still immaculate, his hair smooth and neat. Yet she knew, because she’d watched him do it, that he’d had to adjust certain parts of his anatomy before he’d opened the car door.
And recalling why he’d had to do that did not ease the heat from her cheeks as he walked her across the pavement, or what was still taking place between her trembling thighs.
‘I really do hate you,’ she whispered as they waited for a liveried security person to swing the jeweller’s shop door open for them.