after a pause. ‘He spoke to you…’
Cassie closed her eyes and saw the deep, dark chasms of Sandro’s eyes when he’d opened them and looked into her face. ‘Cassie—Madre di Dio…’ he’d mouthed weakly, then he’d closed his eyes again and Gio had pulled her away from him.
‘Please,’ she said anxiously, ‘will one of you go and find out how he is?’
‘You called him Sandro,’ Pandora Batiste took over, ignoring Cassie’s plea. ‘Nobody calls him Sandro. He despises it. He has been known to blow into a spectacular rage if he’s ever referred to by that name. So why did you—a supposed stranger to him—feel free to use it?’
A wry kind of smile tilted Cassie’s tense, pale lips. It was news to her that Sandro held such an aversion to the name, since it was he who’d given it to her in the first place. Call me Sandro. Will you allow me to buy you lunch? A coffee, then? OK, may I just sit here and worship in silence…?
‘You know each other,’ the glassy eyed beauty insisted. ‘I witnessed your initial shock when you first caught sight of him in the bar. I felt Alessandro’s shock when he saw you.’
With an effort Cassie lifted up her face to look at them both standing there, leaning against the desk with their arms folded and their eyes fixed on her while she sat shivering on her chair.
It annoyed her. Their whole superior and dominating attitude infuriated her. ‘You have no right to interrogate me like this,’ she protested.
‘We are not interrogating you,’ Gio denied the charge, ‘we are simply concerned about what took place and—’
‘Curious,’ Cassie amended curtly, feeling a return of some much-needed mental strength, ‘but I will not have this conversation with you,’ she informed the two of them. ‘And I would be more impressed by your so-called concern for Sandro if you were out there with him instead of in here with me.’
‘Alessandro is being taken care of—’ It was Pandora Batiste who stressed the name.
‘How can you know that?’ Cassie looked at her. ‘I would have thought your time could be better spent finding out why he passed out like he did!’
‘That’s what we’re doing—’
‘No, you’re not. You’re trying to bully information out of me that you have no right to demand. Is he drunk?’ she asked sharply then. ‘Has Sandro turned into a drunk, as well as a—?’
‘As well as a what?’ a different voice prompted from behind her.
Shooting to her feet, Cassie spun around to find the man himself standing in the office doorway. Her throat dried up. He looked dreadful, still as pale as death even if he was standing on his own two feet. And his eyes were too dark—as black as deep caverns hollowed into his skull.
‘Are you all right?’ She couldn’t stop the strained question from leaving her aching throat.
He didn’t answer. Flattening out his mouth, he just moved his eyes away from her to look at his two assistants and dismissed them with the barest shift of his dark head.
‘Damage control,’ he instructed as they both shot away from the desk in unison. ‘Jet lag, migraine—I don’t care what excuse you use so long as you make it convincing,’ he added as they walked towards him, ‘then find me a route out of here that does not require an audience.’
The door closed behind their retreating figures, leaving Cassie blinking at the mute obedience Sandro had commanded from them. If Pandora Batiste was his lover then she had to be a pretty darn subservient lover to take that kind of attitude on her beautiful chin.
As he returned his gaze to Cassie, she felt her own small chin shoot upwards in a defiant gesture brought on by what she had just witnessed. She was regretting now that she’d asked him how he was feeling, because he was clearly very all right, going by that tough performance. And if he was standing there like that and looking at her like that because he intended to bully her around in the same way, then he had another think coming.
Tension sparked in the atmosphere, generated mostly by her defiant stance. And still he said nothing, just slowly drifted his eyes over her as if he was carefully dissecting her inch by nerve-stripping inch.
How old was he now? she questioned as she suffered his scrutiny without allowing herself to flinch. Thirty-two—thirty-three? If he’d told her the truth about his age six years ago, that was. He’d given her a different name, so why not a different age? Anyway he looked years older right now as he stood there, leaning heavily against the door and with his face still drawn by the ravages of whatever it was that had sent him crashing to the ground in the first place.
Nor did he look so sensationally elegant, she noticed, her eyelashes flickering as she glanced down to where his shirt hung open at its snowy white collar and the knot of his tie rested low on his chest.
‘You have not answered my question.’
Cassie lifted her cool gaze back to his. ‘I have absolutely nothing to say to you,’ she informed him.
‘You had plenty to say to my two assistants.’
‘You think so?’ Her arms snapped up to wrap around her narrow ribcage in a piece of body language that had to be screaming self-protection at him. ‘Then why don’t you go and ask them for your answers so you won’t need to hold any kind of conversation with me?’
There was a short silence while his eyes narrowed. Her insides started to sting as if she were being attacked by a swarm of bees. ‘You are very hostile,’ he murmured eventually.
‘Yes, aren’t I?’ Cassie agreed. ‘And you don’t think I should be?’
To her surprise he offered up a gut-stingingly attractive half-twist of a smile. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m not sure.’
Baffled by that answer, Cassie pressed her lips together and waited to find out where he intended to go with this weird conversation. She had been expecting anger, she’d been expecting threats. He couldn’t want the ugly truth about the real him to come out because it would tarnish his supercharming image. Closeting himself away in this room with her was, in her view, only helping to increase the fever of speculation that must already be rife out there.
‘Look,’ she said when she couldn’t stand the silence between them any longer, ‘neither of us wants this confrontation, Sandro. So why don’t you move away from the door and I’ll just leave?’
‘Sandro,’ he echoed and uttered an odd laugh, then he lifted his hand to rub at his forehead when it suddenly creased with pain again, triggering a twinge of concern inside Cassie she did not want to feel.
‘I think you need to sit down,’ she advised stiffly.
‘Mmm,’ he responded but made no move to leave the door.
Watching him rub at his brow for a few seconds longer, she let out a sigh and gave in to the growing pulse of concern that was nagging at her. Picking up the chair she had been sitting in earlier, she carried it across the room to set it down against the wall next to the door.
‘Here,’ she said abruptly. ‘Sit down before you fall down
