‘What’s wrong?’
His quiet voice came from the kitchen doorway. Turning her head, she saw him standing there with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets and his shirt still open at its collar and cuffs. He looked sombre, wary, as if he’d picked her mood up from the other room and forced himself to come in here.
‘Where are the twins?’ she questioned quietly.
‘Watching television.’ His eyelids were half covering his eyes. ‘I saw you watching us together. You looked—gutted.’
Gutted? ‘No.’ Cassie found a brief wry smile from somewhere. ‘Come to my senses, more like.’ She turned to face him fully, slender arms crossing her ribcage as she leant back against the unit behind her. ‘What is your family going to say about you turning up in Florence, married to me and the father of five-year-old twins?’
‘My family?’ The hooded look altered into a frown.
‘Gio mentioned at the restaurant the other night that you have a large family,’ Cassie enlightened. ‘He said you’re good with families because you have a large one yourself.’
‘I have a mother, two older sisters and my brother, Marco—I don’t understand your drift.’
Cassie gave a shrug. ‘Except for your brother you’ve never mentioned them to me, not once. Not in the past or in the present. I was wondering if there was a reason for that.’
‘We have been dealing with us. I believed that was complicated enough.’
‘Will they be at our wedding?’
Infinitesimally, he tensed. ‘No. I felt it was best to keep the ceremony small and private in respect of the twins. I…could not be sure how they were going to feel about me.’ He sketched out a brief smile. ‘I did not know if I was going to have to drag you anchored to my wrist to marry me.’
Pressing her lips together, Cassie nodded, accepting that he had a point. The emotional ride they’d been travelling on for the last two weeks had not been conducive to social introductions; even Angus would agree with that, since he’d been dragged onto the ride with them for a while.
‘Your family knows about your blackouts?’
This time his tension was more obvious. ‘Would you like to get where you’re going with this, cara, because I am lost.’
Cassie wished she knew but she didn’t. Something was nagging at her but she couldn’t quite work out what that something was. ‘I suppose it bothers me that we don’t really know anything about each other,’ she said as she tried to sort her own head out. ‘Yet here we are, planning to get married like two reckless teenagers—’
‘The evidence of our two five-year-old children hijacks the teenager part of that,’ Sandro mocked.
‘That’s just arithmetic,’ she dismissed. ‘I still don’t know you and you can’t even remember me. The twins deserve a stable family environment. They don’t deserve a set of parents who marry in haste for their so-called benefit, only to repent their decision later in front of them.’
‘I will not regret marrying you,’ Sandro stated firmly.
Cassie took in a breath. ‘Well, I think we should wait.’
‘No,’ he refuted and now he was really uptight, hands out of his pockets and clenched.
‘I think it would be kinder to the twins in the long run if we—’
‘No!’ he repeated with an angry rasp. ‘I want marriage and I want it now. The twins expect it and I will not let you ruin what I am trying to build up with them! What the hell has got into you in the half an hour since we made love to each other?’
What had happened? Well, there was a clever question, Cassie thought unhappily. Then it hit, the nitty-gritty of what was bothering her.
‘You made the assumption that I’ve had a string of lovers coming into this apartment,’ she told him. ‘If you knew me better you would know I would never do that in front of my children—’
‘Our children—’
‘And I don’t like the way you voiced that assumption as if it didn’t matter to you if I had introduced the twins to a long line of passing-through uncles. What do you think that tells me about your casual attitude to sex?’
‘I don’t do casual sex!’ he denounced angrily, then took in a deep breath. By the time he let the air back out of his lungs again he had shot down the short length of the kitchen so he was standing directly in front of her, his hand coming up to cup her cheek. ‘Any woman with experience would know a man doesn’t fall apart as I do with you if he was putting it out there like a damn stud,’ he imparted huskily. ‘You, mi amore, are not a woman of experience. Therefore my comment earlier was crude and unwarranted. I apologise for making it.’