Why Sandro? she asked herself tautly while everyone else was busy talking, joining in the light banter Gio Rozario and Ella were generating between the two of them. Why did he have to be the new owner of BarTec?
A flood of laughter suddenly erupted from the other table, encouraged to do so by a final comment made by the big man himself, then Cassie felt him turn to face them. Like a puppet pulled by his master’s strings, Gio rose to his feet.
Snatching her hands down onto her lap, she balled them together in a tense-fingered clench as she listened to Gio begin the round of smoothly toned introductions and just prayed the screaming tension she was feeling was not showing in her posture or her face. He was standing so close to her one of his long, powerful thighs was in danger of brushing her naked shoulder so the skin there itched and tingled with tension and burned as it absorbed his body heat.
Gio’s short potted history of each one of them was handed to his employer with a light touch which gave Sandro clues as to what to say to put each person at ease. He was fabulous at it, a true social connoisseur with that beautifully relaxed tone of voice and an accent that could probably turn the hardest female to melting mush. Half a dozen times Cassie tensed up inside when he reached out with an arm across her shoulder to shake the hand held out opposite her. Each time her awareness of him intensified to a place somewhere between a wildly hot resentment and sizzling self-defence.
Had he done it deliberately? Had he chosen to stand directly behind her chair so he could put off until the very last moment the point when he had to look her full in the face and acknowledge her?
‘Ella Cole…’ She picked up Gio’s voice as if from a foggy distance. ‘Ella is, she assures me, the lynchpin which keeps the accounts department running smoothly.’
‘A secretarial tyrant in other words,’ Ella happily described herself. ‘Scary but nice,’ she added as Cassie watched with the unblinking eyes of a bat as that long-fingered hand attached to a luxuriously dark silk-suited arm swept across her front to take Ella’s hand.
It would be her turn next. She was the only one left. She was about to be forced into touching the hand that knew her body more intimately than any other man’s hand, and she didn’t know if she could bear it, didn’t know if she could bring herself to touch him, be polite to him, pretend that all of this hurt and bitterness and anger crawling around inside her wasn’t there.
‘And Cassandra Janus.’ Cassie tuned in to the sound of her own name being spoken, and felt a sickening tension grab her stomach as Sandro took a step to one side of her chair so that he could face her side-on.
This was it, she warned herself. Any second now he was going to offer her that hand and she was going to have to accept it—look up into his handsome, lying face and—
‘Cassie is the bright new star in the accounts team…’ Gio explained as the hand oh, so predictably appeared in front of her.
Cold now, so cold her fingers would not allow her to straighten them out of the tense clench she held them in, Cassie flicked her eyes up to his face. It was like being hit full on by six long years of agony. This close up he was even more shockingly spectacular to look at than she’d allowed herself to remember.
‘Cassandra Janus…’ he repeated slowly, turning Janus into the evocatively sexy Janoos the way he had used to do all those years ago, which dried Cassie’s throat until she felt parched. And his eyes, those deep-set, heavy-lidded, rich dark brown eyes, were daring to look at her with such cool, polite interest as he added, ‘I feel I should know the name from somewhere…Have we met before by any chance?’
Had they met before…? Was he joking? Or was this his ruthless way of warning her to take care what she said? Dear God, Cassie thought as hysteria almost erupted from her in a shriek of high-pitched laughter.
Having to draw on every ounce of composure she had stored in her, ‘No,’ she managed as calmly as she could do, ‘we haven’t met before, Mr Marchese.’
Deliberately ignoring the way she’d all but bitten his name out, ‘Alessandro, please,’ he invited.
Cassie throbbed where she sat. He would have to nail her to a wall and threaten to throw knives at her before she’d call him by that name, she vowed fiercely. What did he want from her—blood?
And that hand still waited for her to place her own in it. Feeling light-headed with tension now, she managed somehow to uncurl her cold fingers and lift her hand to place it in his. An instant rush of electric recognition shot up her arm to gather like a hovering bullet just behind her ribs, close to her madly hammering heart.