‘When are they going to start herding us upstairs to eat?’ Ella sighed a while later. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I think we must be waiting for the new boss to arrive,’ Cassie said, squeezing a sip of wine from her glass.

‘Well, if it gets any more crowded in here we’ll be like sardines in a can,’ her friend complained, ‘although I wouldn’t mind playing sardines with the guy that’s just walked in here with our MD and a clutch of scary bigwig types…’

Turning her head to look in the direction that Ella was looking, Cassie just wasn’t prepared for what came next. Shock struck her blindside. For the next few horrible seconds she felt as if she were falling off the edge of a cliff! Her legs went hollow beneath her then started to fill up again from her toes with a tingling wild rush of hot static as instant recognition screamed through her head. She had not laid eyes on him in six long years, yet each lean, hard, vital inch of him battered her senses with a familiarity that dragged her heart to a shuddering stop.

And who could miss him? she thought helplessly as her heart lurched into action again with a blunt, hammering beat. He was so tall he stood a good head and shoulders above the others clustered around him, even with his dark head tilted down a little so he could hear what their short and portly MD was saying over the noisy buzz of conversation filling up the bar. Yet Cassie knew the top of that head; she knew it so intimately it could have been only an hour ago that she’d run her fingers through the thick layers of vibrant black silk. Her fingers even twitched tautly around her wineglass in stinging recognition, almost sending the glass and its contents crashing to the white marble floor beneath her strappy black mules.

‘Methinks we are getting our first eyeful of our new boss,’ Ella murmured beside her, ‘and just feel the change to the buzz in here…’

It took Cassie several seconds to absorb that piece of information because she was too busy trying to deal with the buzz going on inside herself.

‘No,’ she managed with a shivery cold whisper, ‘that isn’t him.’

‘Are you sure…?’ Ella took a moment to reassess the man in question, while all Cassie could do was to stand there, locked in her own private form of hell. Then, ‘No, it’s got to be him, Cassie,’ her friend determined. ‘That totally gorgeous piece of manhood just can’t go by any other name than the oh-so-sexy-sounding Alessandro Marchese.’

The name rolled off Ella’s tongue like a sensual fantasy. Cassie suffered a stinging, sharp jolt to her chest. Alessandro Marchese? Was Ella looking at a different man?

‘You mark my words, we are looking at a few billion dollars of hot Italian breeding standing over there, cara,’ Ella mocked dryly, ‘and, if I’m not mistaken, the lady in red clinging to his arm can match him gene for superior gene…’

The lady in red…

Wrenching her gaze sideways, Cassie confirmed that indeed she and Ella were looking at the same man as she stared at the fabulously beautiful, glossy black-haired creature wearing an exquisitely cut blood-red dress who was clinging to his arm while she listened to what the two men were saying. They looked at ease with each other—intimate—like two lovers who’d been lovers for a very long time.

And Ella was right, they did suit each other—in the same way that the name Alessandro Marchese suited him far better than the plain Sandro Rossi Cassie had known him by did!

As she dragged her eyes back to him, a burning, sick bitterness dried up her throat when she discovered that he’d lifted his head up and she was now getting a full-on view of his face—a face that had lost none of its raw masculine impact in the six years since she’d last looked at it, she acknowledged painfully. Those long, lazy eyelids, the straight, fleshless nose, the slender and firm yet shatteringly sensual mouth…Like someone harbouring a death wish, Cassie drank in the smooth stretch of gold skin across his stunning high cheekbones and the way his lavishly long and thick black eyelashes almost brushed against those stunning cheekbones as he turned a wry, sexy smile on the woman in the red dress.

If she’d had the strength in her legs she would be walking over there to slap that smile off his lying face! Alessandro Marchese…Who was he trying to kid? Was he a crook or something that he had to use an assumed name these days? Or was she the one who’d been lied to? The one who’d been sucked in by his fabulous dark looks and his gorgeously intense sincerity, the one who’d been so skilfully romanced and thoroughly seduced then left like an unwanted breakfast when he’d swanned off back to his native Italy to get on with his real life?

The sting of betrayal stalked down her backbone like taunting fingers as she studied the way he was standing there exuding the supremely relaxed self-assurance which came automatically to smooth-tongued, sexually confident brutes. Cassie hated him yet she could not stop herself from feasting on him, couldn’t stop her eyes from sliding down the column of his strong, bronzed throat to the width of his broad shoulders set inside a superbly crafted dark lounge suit, and across the white shirt that did absolutely nothing to subdue the hard-muscled power in his long, lean physique.

And she remembered it all, every intimate detail, from the hair-roughened power of his rich golden torso, with its satintight abdomen that felt like warm, living satin to touch, and the sleek, corded sinew which angled so dramatically down the narrow bowl of his hips to the—

She had to get out of here—

The need struck with a startling punch of delayed reaction that sent her slender body jerking up straight. As if he picked up the violence in her reaction, he lifted those heavy eyelids and looked directly into her face, forcing her into a head-on collision with a pair of piercingly deep-set blacker-than-black eyes that she’d wished, hoped, prayed she would never have to look into again!