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But Kathryn was a different story, he thought as he made his way to the grand library on the ground floor and saw the slight figure standing all alone in the farthest corner, staring out at the rain and the fog as if she was competing with it for the title of Most Desolate. Kathryn was more than a mess.
Kathryn was a disaster.
He wasn’t the least bit surprised that Saint Kate, as she’d been dubbed around the world for her supposed martyrdom to the cause that was old Gianni Castelli and his considerable fortune, was all over the papers this week. Kathryn did convincingly innocent and easily wounded so well that Luca had always thought she’d have been much better off dedicating her life to the stage.
Though he supposed she had, really. Playing the understanding mistress and undemanding trophy wife to a man so much older than her twenty-five years was a performance all its own. What Luca couldn’t understand was why an obvious trollop like Kathryn made his skin feel too tight against his frame and his hands itch to test the smoothness of hers, even now. It didn’t make any sense, this stretched-taut, heavy thing in him that nothing—not time, not space, not the odious fact of her marriage to his own father, not even the prospect of her polluting the refuge of his office in Rome—ever eased or altered in any way.
He glared at her from the doorway, down the length of the great room with so many books lining the floor-to-ceiling shelves, as if he could make it disappear. Or barring that, make her disappear.
But he knew better.
It had always been like this.
Luca’s father had made a second career out of marrying a succession of unsuitable younger women who’d let him act the savior. He’d thrived on it. Gianni had never had much time for his sons or the first wife he’d shunted out of sight into a mental institution and mourned very briefly after her death, if at all. But for his parade of mistresses and wives with their endless needs and worries and crises and melodramas? He had been always and ever available to play the benevolent God, solver of all calamities, able to sort out all manner of troubles with a wave of his debit card.
When Gianni had arrived back in Italy a scant month after his fifth wife had divorced him with his sixth wife in tow, Luca hadn’t been particularly surprised.
“There is a new bride,” Rafael had told him darkly when Luca had arrived in the Dolomites as summoned that winter morning two years ago. “Already.”
Luca had rolled his eyes. What else was there to do?
“Is this one of legal age?”
Rafael had snorted. “Barely.”
“She’s twenty-three,” the very pregnant Lily had said reprovingly, her hands on the protruding belly that would shortly become Renzo. She’d glared at both of them. “That’s hardly a child. And she seems perfectly nice.”
“Of course she seems nice,” Rafael had retorted, and had only grinned at the look Lily had thrown at him, the connection between them as bright and shining as ever, as if Castellis could actually make something good from one of their grand messes after all. “That is her job, is it not?”
Luca had prepared himself for a stepmother much like the last occupant of the role, the sharp blonde creature whom Gianni had inexplicably adored despite the fact she’d spent more time on her mobile or propositioning his sons than she had with him. Corinna had been nineteen when she’d married Gianni and already a former swimsuit model. Luca hadn’t imagined his father had chosen her for her winning personality or depth of character.
But instead of another version of fake-breasted and otherwise entirely plastic Corinna, when he’d strode into the library where his father waited with Arlo, he’d found Kathryn.
Kathryn, who should not have been there.
That had been his first thought, like a searing blaze through his mind. He’d stopped, thunderstruck, halfway across the library floor and scowled at the woman who’d stood there smiling politely at him in that reserved British way of hers. Until his inability to do anything but glower at her had made that curve of her lips falter, then straighten into a flat line.
She doesn’t belong here, he’d thought again, harsher and more certain. Not standing next to his old, crotchety father tucked up in his armchair before the fire, all wrinkles and white hair and fingers made of knots, thanks to years of arthritis. Not wringing her hands together in front of her like some kind of awkward schoolgirl instead of resorting to the sultry, come-hither glances Luca’s stepmothers normally threw his way.
Not his stepmother.
That thought had been the loudest.
Not her.
Her hair was an inky dark brown that looked nearly black, yet showed hints of gold when the firelight played over it. It poured down past her shoulders, straight and thick, and was cut into a long fringe over smoky-gray eyes that edged toward green. She wore a simple pair of black trousers and a cleanly cut caramel-colored sweater open over a soft knit top that made no attempt whatsoever to showcase her cleavage. She looked elegantly efficient, not plastic or cheap in any way. She was small and fine boned, all big gray eyes and that dark hair and then, of course, there was her mouth.
Her mouth.
It was the mouth of a sulky courtesan, full and suggestive, and for a long, shocking moment, Luca had the strangest notion that she had no idea of its carnal wallop. That she was an innocent—but that had been absurd, of course. Wishful thinking, perhaps. No innocent married a very rich man old enough to be her own grandfather.
“Luca,” Gianni had barked, in English for his new wife’s benefit. “What is the matter with you? Show some manners. Kathryn is my wife and your new stepmother.”
It had filled Luca with a kind of terrible smoke. A black, choking fury he could not have named if his life had depended upon it.
He hadn’t been aware that he was moving, only that he’d been across the room and then was right there in front of her, looming over her, dwarfing her with his superior height and size—
Not that she’d backed down. Not Kathryn.
He’d seen far too much in those expressive eyes of hers, wide with some kind of distress. And awareness—he’d seen the flare of it, followed almost instantly by confusion. But instead of simpering or shifting her body to better advantage or sizing him up in any way, she’d squared her slender shoulders and stuck out her hand.
“Pleased to meet you,” she’d said, her English-accented voice brisk. Matter-of-fact. The sound of it had fallen through him like a hail of ice and had done nothing to soothe that fire in him at all.
Luca had taken her hand, though he’d known it was a terrible mistake.
And he’d been right. It had been.
He’d felt the drag of her skin against his, palm to palm, like a long, slow lick down the length of his sex. He should have jerked his hand away. Instead, he’d held her tighter, feeling her delicacy, her heat and, more telling, that wild tumult of her pulse in her wrist. Her lips had parted as if she’d felt it, too.
He’d had to remind himself—harshly—that they were not only not alone, she was also not free.
She was something a whole lot worse than not free, in fact.
“It is my pleasure, Stepmother,” he’d said, his voice low and dark, that terrible fire in him shooting like electricity all through his limbs and then into her. He’d seen her stiffen—whether in shock at his belligerence or with that same stunned awareness that stampeded in him, he’d never know. “Welcome to the family.”
And it had been downhill from there.
All leading him here. To the same library, two years later, where Kathryn stood like a lonely wraith in a simple black dress that somehow made her look fragile and too pretty at once, her dark hair clipped back and no hint of color on her face below that same inky fringe that kissed the tops of her eyelashes.
She was gazing off into the distance through the windows that opened up over the lake, and she looked genuinely sad. As if she truly mourned Gianni, the man she’d used shamelessly for her own ends—ends that, apparently, included forcing herself into Luca’s office against his will.
And it enraged him.
He told himself that was the thing that washed over him then, digging in its claws. Rage. Not that far darker, far more dangerous thing that lurked in him, as much that terrible hunger he’d prefer to deny as it was the familiar companion of his own self-loathing.
“Come, now, Kathryn,” Luca said into the heavy quiet of the book-lined room, making his voice a dark and lazy thing just this side of insulting, and taking note of how she instantly stiffened against it. Against him. “The old man is dead and the reporters have gone home. Who is this maudlin performance for?”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_6a5c1ba6-fb2b-5e33-b6ff-bf1badbfe672)
LUCA CASTELLI’S TRADEMARK GROWL, his English laced with an undercurrent of both his native Italian and that particular harsh ruthlessness that Kathryn had only ever heard directed at her, jolted through her like an electric shock.
She jerked where she stood near the library window, actually jumping in a way he’d be unlikely to miss, even from all the way on the other side of the long, luxurious, stunningly appointed room.
Well done, she thought, despairing of herself anew. Now he knows exactly how much he gets to you.
She didn’t expect that anything she did would make this man like her. Luca had made it clear that could never happen. Over and over and over again, these past two years. But she wanted him—needed him—not to actively hate her as she started this new phase of her life.
Kathryn figured that was better than nothing. As good a start as she could hope for, really. And her mother certainly hadn’t raised her to be a coward, despite how disappointing she knew she’d always been. Rose Merchant had never let hardship get between her and what needed to be done, as she’d reminded Kathryn at every opportunity. Forging ahead into the corporate world the way Rose hadn’t been able to do with a child to raise all on her own was, truly, the least Kathryn could do to honor all of her sacrifices.
And to assuage the guilt she felt about her marriage to Gianni—the one time “honoring her mother’s sacrifices” had allowed her to do something purely for herself, too. But she couldn’t let herself think about that too closely. It made her feel much too ungrateful.
Kathryn straightened from her place at the window, aware that her movements were jerky and awkward, the way she always seemed to be around this man, who noticed every last embarrassing detail about her and never hesitated to use each and every one of them against her. She nervously smoothed down the front of her dress. Nervously and also carefully, as if the dress was a talisman.
She’d agonized over what to wear today because she’d wanted to look as unlike the gold-digging whore she knew the family—Luca—thought she was as possible. And still, she was terribly afraid she’d ended up looking rather more like a poor man’s version of an Audrey Hepburn wannabe instead. The papers would trumpet that possibility, call it an homage to Audrey or something equally embarrassing, and Luca would assume it was all part of a deliberate campaign toward some grim end he believed she’d been angling toward since the start, rather than simply riding out the attention as best she could. The cycle of his bitter condemnation would continue, turning and turning without end...
But she was delaying the inevitable. She’d always wanted a chance to prove herself, to work on the creative side of a corporation and try her hand at something fun and interesting like marketing or branding instead of the deadly dull figures at which she was utterly hopeless. She’d spent her whole marriage excited at the prospect of working in the family company with Luca and his creative genius.
Even if, other than that corporate flair of his, he was pretty much just awful. She assured herself powerful men often were. That Luca was run-of-the-mill in that sense.
Kathryn took a deep breath, resolutely squared her shoulders and turned to face her own personal demon at last.
“Hello, Luca,” she said across the acres of space that separated them in this vast room, and she was proud of herself. She sounded so calm, so cool, when she was anything but.
For any number of reasons, but mostly because looking at Luca Castelli was like staring directly into the sun. It had been from the start.
And as usual, she was instantly dizzy.
Luca moved like a terrible shadow across the library floor, and tragically, he was as beautiful as ever. Tall and solid and impressively athletic, his rangy form was sculpted to lean, male perfection and was routinely celebrated in slick, photo-heavy tabloid exultations across at least five continents. His thick black hair always looked messy, as if he lived such a reckless, devil-may-care life that it required he run his hands through it all the time and rake it back from his darkly handsome face as punctuation to every sentence—despite the fact he was now the chief operating officer of the family company.
Even here, on the day of his father’s funeral, where he wore a dark suit that trumpeted his rampant masculinity and excellent taste in equal measure, he gave off that same indolent air. That lazy, playful, perpetually relaxed state that only a man cresting high on the wealth of generations of equally affluent and pedigreed ancestors could achieve. As if no matter what he was actually doing, some part of him was always lounging about on a yacht somewhere with a cold drink in his hand and women presenting themselves for his pleasure. He had the look of a man who lived forever on the verge of laughter, deep and whole bodied, from his gorgeous mouth to his flashing dark eyes.
Kathryn had seen a hundred pictures of him exactly like that, lighting up the whole of the Amalfi Coast and half of Europe with that irrepressible gleam of his—
Except, of course, when he looked at her.
The scowl he wore now did nothing to make him any less beautiful. Nothing could. But it made Kathryn shake deep, deep inside, as if she’d lost control of her own bones. She wanted to bolt. She might have, if that wouldn’t have made this whole situation that much worse.
Besides, if she’d learned anything these past two years, it was that there was no outrunning Luca Castelli. There was no outmaneuvering him. There was only surviving him.
“Hello, Stepmother,” he said, that awful dark thing in his voice wrapping around her and sinking hot and blackened tendrils of something like shame into every part of her body, so deep it hurt to breathe. He seemed unaffected as ever, sauntering toward her with his usual deceptively lazy deadliness and those dark eyes so burning hot she could feel them punching into her from afar. “Or should we concoct a different title for you? The Widow Castelli has a certain gothic ring to it. I think. I’ll have it engraved on your business cards.”
“You know,” Kathryn said, because she was still entirely too light-headed and not managing her tongue the way she should, “if you decided not to be horrible to me for five minutes the world wouldn’t actually screech to a halt. We’d all survive. I promise.”
His face was like stone, his full lips thin with displeasure, and he was closing the distance between them much too fast for Kathryn’s peace of mind.
“I have no idea why you feel you need to bring this particular performance of yours into an office setting,” he said as he drew closer. “Much less mine. I’m certain there are any number of hotel bars across Europe that cater to your brand of desperation and craven greed. You should have no trouble finding your next mark within the week.”
That he could still hate her so much should not have surprised her, Kathryn knew, because Luca had been remarkably consistent in that since the day she’d arrived in Italy with Gianni two years ago. And yet, like that cold winter morning when he’d charged at her across this very same floor, dark and furious and terrifying in a way she hadn’t entirely understood, it did.
Though surprise wasn’t really the right word to describe the thing that rolled inside her, flattening everything it touched.
“I suppose the world really would end if you accepted the possibility that I might not be who you think I am,” she said now, straightening her spine against the familiar rush of pointless grief that was her absurd response to the fact this angry, hateful man had never liked her. Kathryn channeled that odd, scraped-raw feeling into temper instead. “You’d have to reexamine your prejudices, and who knows what might happen then? Of course a man like you would find that scary. You have so many of them.”
The truth was that she hardly knew Luca, despite two years of having forced, unpleasant interactions with him. What she did know was that he’d taken an instant and intense and noticeable dislike to her. On sight. Why she’d subsequently spent even three seconds—much less the whole of her marriage to his father—trying to convince him that he was wrong about her was a mystery to her. It no doubt spoke to deep psychological problems on her part, but then again, what about her relationship with this family didn’t?
But she did know that poking at him was unwise.
Kathryn had a moment to regret the fact she’d done it anyway as Luca bore down on her, striding across the expanse of polished old floors and priceless rugs tossed here and there below rows of first editions in more languages than she’d known existed, all as smug and wealthy and resolutely untouchable as he was.
“This is as good a time as any to discuss the expectations I have for all Castelli Wine employees who work in my office in Rome.” Luca’s voice was dark. Cold. And as he moved toward her he regarded her with that sharpness in his eyes that made her feel...fluttery, low in her belly. “First, obedience. I will tell you when I am interested in hearing from you. If you are in doubt, you can assume I prefer you remain silent. You can assume that will always be the case. Second, confidentiality. If you cannot be trusted, if you are forever running off to the tabloids to give whining interviews about the many ways you have been wronged and victimized, Saint Kate—”
Kathryn flinched. “Please don’t call me that. You know that’s something the tabloids have made up.”
Her mum had sniffed at the name and the image more than once, then reminded Kathryn that she had given Kathryn everything and received little in return, yet had never been called a saint by anyone. She’d even suggested that perhaps it had been Kathryn who’d come up with that name and that obnoxious storyline in the first place. It hadn’t been.
That wasn’t to say she hadn’t played to it now and again. She’d always been fascinated with a good brand and widespread global marketing.
The fact that no one believed she hadn’t made it all up herself, however, she found maddening. “Saint Kate has nothing to do with me.”
“Believe me,” Luca said in that quiet, horrible way of his, “I am under no delusions about you or your purity.”
An actual slap would have hurt less. Kathryn blinked, managed not to otherwise react and forced herself to stay right where she was instead of reeling at that. Because his opinion of her aside, this was her chance to do something she really, truly believed she’d be good at instead of what other people thought she ought to be good at. She knew he hated her. She might not know why, but it didn’t matter in the end. Kathryn had never wanted status or jewels or whatever the stepmothers before her had wanted from Gianni. She’d wanted this. A chance to prove herself at a job she knew she could do, in a company that had international reach and a bold, bright future, and to finally show her mother that she, too, could succeed in business. Her way, not Rose’s way. This was what Gianni had promised her when he’d persuaded her to leave her MBA course in London and marry him—the opportunity to work in the family business when the marriage was over.
This was what she wanted. She knew that if she did what every last nerve in her body was shrieking at her to do and broke for the door, she’d never come back, and Luca, certainly, would never give her another chance, no matter what it said in Gianni’s will.
Her mother would never, ever forgive her. And the lonely little girl inside Kathryn, who had never wanted anything but Rose’s love no matter how out of reach that had always been, simply couldn’t let that happen.
“Luca,” she said now, “before you really warm up to your insults, which are always so creative and comprehensive, I want to make sure you understand that I have every intention—”
“May the angels save me from the intentions of unscrupulous women.” He was almost upon her, and one of the most unfair parts of this was that she couldn’t seem to keep herself from feeling something like mesmerized by the way he moved. That impossible, offhanded grace of his he didn’t deserve, and she shouldn’t notice the way she did. It made her limbs feel precarious. Uncertain. “Third, my father’s will says only that I must accommodate your desire to play at an office job, not what that job entails. If you complain, about anything at all, it will get worse. Do you understand?”
She felt a dark, hard pulse inside her then. It felt like running. Like fright. It gripped her, hard. In her temples. In the hollows behind her knees. In her throat.
In her sex.
Kathryn didn’t have any idea what was happening to her. She struck out at him instead.
“Oh, what fun.” She stared back at him when his scowl edged over into something purely ferocious, and she made no attempt to rein in her sarcastic tone. Gianni was dead. The gloves were off. “Are you planning to make me scrub the floors? Let me guess, on my hands and knees with a toothbrush? That will teach me...something, I’m sure.”
“I doubt that very much,” he gritted out. He stopped a few feet away from her. Too close. Luca stood there then, in all his male fury while that dark thing that had always flared between them wound tighter and tighter around them and stole all the air from the graceful room. “But if I ask you to do it, whatever it is, I expect it to be done. No excuses.”
Kathryn forced herself to speak. “And what if it turns out you’re wrong about me and I’m not quite as useless as you imagine? I’m guessing abject apologies aren’t exactly your strong suit.”
His hard mouth—that she shouldn’t find so fascinating, because what was wrong with her? She might as well find a shark cuddly—shifted into a merciless curve that was entirely too harsh to be a smile. “Have I ever told you how much I hate women like you?”
That word. Hate. It was a very strong word, and Kathryn had never understood how everything between them could feel so intense. She wasn’t any clearer about that now. Nor why it scraped at that raw place inside her, as if it mattered deeply to her. As if he did.
When of course, he couldn’t. He didn’t. Luca was a means to an end, nothing more.
“It was rather more implied than stated outright,” she replied, fighting to keep her voice even. “Nonetheless, you can take pride in the fact you managed to make your feelings perfectly clear from the start.”
“My father married ever-younger women the way some men change their shoes,” Luca said darkly, as if this was news to either one of them. “You are nothing but the last in his endless, pointless game of musical beds. You are not the most beautiful. You are not even the youngest. You are merely the one who survived him. You must know you meant nothing to him.”
Kathryn shook her head at him. “I know exactly what I meant to your father.”
“I would not brag, were I you, about your calculating and conniving ways,” he threw back at her. “Especially not in my office, where you will find that the hardworking people who are rewarded on their merits rather than their various seduction techniques are unlikely to celebrate that approach.”
Luca shook his head, judgment written in every line of his body in that elegant suit that a man as horrible as he was shouldn’t have been able to wear so well. Seduction techniques, he’d said, the way someone might say the Ebola virus. It offended her, Kathryn thought.
