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He offended her.
Maybe that was why she lost her mind a little bit. He’d finally pushed her too far.
“I spent most of my marriage trying to figure out why you hated me so much,” she bit out, heedless of his overwhelming proximity. Not caring the way she should about that glittering thing in his dark eyes. “That a grown man, seemingly of sound mind and obviously capable of performing great corporate feats when it suited him, could loathe another person on sight and for no reason. This made no sense to me.”
She was aware of the grand house arrayed behind him, its ancient Italian splendor pressing in on her from all sides. Of the crystal clear lake that stretched off into the mist and the mountains that rose sharp and imposing above it. Of Gianni, sweet old Gianni, who she would never make laugh again and would never call her cara again in his gravelly old voice. Even this rarefied, beautiful world felt diminished by the loss of him, and here Luca was, as hateful as ever.
She couldn’t bear it.
“I’m a decent person. I try to do the right thing. More to the point—” Kathryn raised her voice slightly when Luca made a derisive noise “—I’m not worth all the hatred and brooding you’ve been directing at me for years. I married your father and took care of him, the end. Neither you nor your brother had any interest in doing that. Some men in your position might thank me.”
It was as if Luca expanded to fill the whole of the library then, he was so big, suddenly. Even bigger than he already was. So big she couldn’t breathe, and he hadn’t moved a muscle. He was simply dark and terrible, and that awful light in his eyes burned when he scowled at her.
“You were one more in a long line of—”
“Yes, but that’s the thing, isn’t it?” He looked astonished that she’d interrupted him, but Kathryn ignored that and kept going. “If you’d seen the likes of me before, why hate me at all? I should have been run-of-the-mill.”
“You were. You were sixth.”
“But you didn’t despise the other five,” Kathryn snapped, frustrated. “Lily told me all about them. You liked her mother. The last one tried to crawl into bed with you more than once, and you laughed each time you dumped her out in the hall. You simply told her to stop trying because it would never happen with you—you didn’t even tell your father. You didn’t hate her, and you knew she was every single thing you accuse me of being.”
“Are you truly claiming you are not those things? That you are, in fact, this unrecognizable paragon I’ve read so much about in the papers? Come now, Kathryn. You cannot imagine I am so naive.”
“I never did anything to you, Luca,” she hurled at him, and she couldn’t control her voice then.
There were nearly two years of repressed feelings bottled up inside her. Every slight. Every snide remark. Every cutting word he’d said to her. Every vicious, unfair glare. Every time he’d walked out of a room she entered in obvious disgust. Every time she’d looked up from a conversation to find that stare of his all over her, like a touch.
It was true that on some level, it was refreshing to meet someone who was so shockingly direct. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.
“I have no idea why you hated me the moment you saw me. I have no idea what goes on in that head of yours.” She stepped forward, far too close to him and then, no longer caring what his reaction would be, she went suicidal and poked two fingers into his chest. Hard. “But after today? I no longer care. Treat me the way you treat anyone else who works for you. Stop acting as if I’m a demon sent straight from hell to torture you.”
He’d gone deathly still beneath her fingers. Like marble.
“Remove your hand.” His voice was frozen. Furious. “Now.”
She ignored him.
“I don’t have to prove that I’m a decent person to you. I don’t care if the world knows your father forced you to hire me. I know I’ll do a good job. My work will speak for itself.” She poked him again, just as hard as before, and who cared if it was suicidal? There were worse things. Like suffering through another round of his character assassinations. “But I’m not going to listen to your abuse any longer.”
“I told you to remove your hand.”
Kathryn held his dark gaze. She saw the bright warning in it, and it should have scared her. It should have impressed her on some level, reminded her that whatever else he was, he was a very strong, very well built man who was as unpredictable as he was dangerous.
And that he hated her.
But instead, she stared right back at him.
“I don’t care what you think of me,” she told him, very distinctly.
And then she poked him a third time. Even harder than before, right there in that shallow between his pectoral muscles.
Luca moved so fast she had no time to process it.
She poked him, then she was sprawled across the hard wall of his chest with her offending hand twisted behind her back. It was more than dizzying. It was like toppling from the top of one of the mountains that ringed the lake, then hurtling end over end toward the earth.
Her heart careened against her ribs, and his darkly gorgeous face was far too close to hers and she was touching him, her dress not nearly enough of a barrier to keep her from noticing unhelpful things like his scent, a hint of citrus and spice. The heat that blazed from him, as if he was his own furnace. And that deceptively languid strength of his that made something deep inside her flip over.
Then hum.
“This, you fool,” Luca bit out, his mouth so close to hers she could taste the words against her own lips. She could taste him, and she shuddered helplessly, completely unable to conceal her reaction. “This is what I think of you.”
And then he crushed his mouth to hers.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_17622f39-159e-5712-8e58-1c05dcf14014)
HE DID NOT ASK. He did not hesitate. He simply took.
Luca’s mouth descended on hers, and Kathryn waited for that kick of terror, of unease, of sheer panic that had always accompanied any hint of male sexual interest in her direction before—
But it never came.
He kissed her with all that lazy confidence that made him who he was. He took her mouth again and again, still holding her arm behind her back and then sliding his free hand along her jaw to guide her where he wanted her.
Slick. Hot.
Deliciously, wildly, stunningly male.
He kissed her as if they’d done this a thousand times before. As if the past two years had been leading nowhere but here. To this hot, impossible place Kathryn didn’t recognize and couldn’t navigate.
There was nothing to do but surrender. To the molten fire that rolled through her and pooled in all the worst places. A heaviness in her breasts, pressed hard against his chest. And that restless, edgy, weighted thing that sank low into her belly and then pulsed hot.
Needy. Insistent.
And Kathryn forgot.
She forgot who he was. That she had been his stepmother for two years, though he was some eight years older than she was. She forgot that in addition to being her harshest critic and her bitter enemy through no fault of her own, he was now going to be her boss.
She forgot everything but the taste of him. That harsh, sweet magic he made, the way he commanded her and compelled her, as if he knew the things her body wanted and could do when she had no idea. When she was simply lost—adrift in the fire. The greedy, consuming flames that licked all over her and through her and deep inside her and made her meet every stroke of his tongue, every glorious taste—
He set her away from him. As if it hurt.
“Damn you,” he muttered. Followed by something that sounded far harsher in Italian.
But it seemed to take him a very long time to let go of her.
Kathryn couldn’t speak. She didn’t understand the things that were storming through her then, making her blood seem like thunder in her veins and her skin seem to stretch too tight to contain all the feelings she didn’t know how to name.
They stared at each other in the scant bit of space between them. His face was drawn tight, stark and harsh, and it still did absolutely nothing to detract from his sheer male beauty.
“You kissed me,” Kathryn said, and she could have kicked herself.
But her lips felt swollen and she had the taste of him in her mouth, and she didn’t know how to process that hot and slippery feeling that charged through her and then concentrated between her legs.
If possible, that dark look on his face got blacker. As if he was a storm.
“Don’t you dare try that innocent game on me,” he gritted out.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I know the difference between a virgin and a whore, Kathryn,” Luca said, the fury in him like a brand that pressed into her, searing her flesh, and she didn’t understand how she could feel it the same way she had that desperate kiss. “I can certainly taste it.”
She realized she had absolutely no idea how to respond to that.
“Luca,” she said, as carefully as she could when her entire body was lost in the tumult of that endless kiss. When she had no idea how she was even capable of speech. “I think we should chalk that up as nothing more than an emotional response to a very hard day and—”
“I will not be your next target, Kathryn,” Luca told her, a frozen sort of outrage in his voice and pressed deep into the fine lines of his beautiful face. “Hear me on this. It will not happen.”
“I don’t have targets.” She blinked, the room seeming to shimmer everywhere he was not, as if he was a black hole. “I’m not a weapon. What kind of life do you lead that you think these things?”
He reached over and took her upper arm in his hand, pulling her close to him again, and that fire that hadn’t really banked at all blazed. Fierce and wild. Almost knocking her from her feet.
“I don’t want you in my office,” he growled. “I don’t want you polluting the Castelli name any more than you already have. I don’t want you anywhere near the things that matter to me.”
Kathryn’s teeth chattered, though she wasn’t cold.
“That would probably be far more terrifying a threat if you weren’t touching me,” she managed to point out, though her voice wasn’t nearly as cool as she’d have liked. “Again.”
Luca laughed, though it bore no resemblance to that carefree, golden laughter that had helped make him so beloved the world over, and released her. If she didn’t know better, if he’d been some other man with the usual collection of weaknesses instead of a monolith where his heart should have been, she’d have thought he hadn’t meant to grab her in the first place.
“I will never lower myself to my father’s discards,” he told her, horribly, his gaze hard on hers in case she was tempted to pretend she hadn’t heard that. “Nor will I allow you to corrupt the good people in my office with your repulsive little schemes. Your game won’t work on me.”
“Right,” she said, and maybe it was because this was all so out of control already. Maybe that was why she couldn’t seem to keep herself in check any longer around him. What was the point? She’d tried to rise above him for two years, and here they were anyway. “That’s why you kissed me, I imagine. To demonstrate your immunity.”
Luca went very still.
So still that Kathryn stopped breathing herself, as if the slightest noise might set him off. His dark eyes were fixed on her as if she was the kind of target he’d mentioned before, and she’d never felt more like one in her life. Between them, that spinning, tightening, desperate and dangerous electric band seemed to wrap tighter, pull harder. So hard it pulsed inside her, insistent and rough. So lethal she swore she could see it stamped across every tightly held, hard-packed muscle on his sculpted form.
Rain clattered against the windows behind her, and off in some other part of this massive house, little Renzo let loose one of his ear-piercing toddler screams that could as easily be joy as peril.
Luca shook his head slightly, as if he’d been released from a spell. He stepped back, his expression shifting from whatever that harsh, hard thing was to something far closer to disgust.
“You will regret this,” he promised her.
She swallowed. “You’ll have to be more specific. That could cover a lot of ground.”
“I will make sure of it,” Luca told her, as if she hadn’t spoken. “If it’s the very last thing I do.”
His voice had the ring of a certain finality, and it clanged inside her like a gong. She stood there, stricken, her mouth still aching from his kiss and her body lost in its own strange riot, and watched as he simply turned and began to walk away from her.
She wanted nothing more than to forget all about this. To take the lump payment Rafael had offered her and disappear with it. She could have any life she wanted now. She could be anyone she wanted, far away from the long shadow of the Castellis where she’d lived for so long.
But that would mean the past two years of her life had been for nothing. That she’d simply thrown them away for cash. It would mean she was exactly the woman Luca thought she was—and that all her mother’s sacrifices would have been for nothing in the end. That there was nothing to Kathryn’s own life but guilt and falling short.
And Kathryn could bear a lot of things. She’d had no choice, given what a failure she’d turned out to be in her mother’s eyes. She simply didn’t have it in her to make it that much worse. There was that part of her that was convinced, after all this time, that if she tried hard enough she could make her mother love her. If she could just do the right thing, for once.
“I’m so glad we had this talk,” she called after him, directing her not-quite-sweet tone straight toward the center of his tall, broad back. He wanted to play target practice? She could do that. “It will make Monday so much better for everyone.”
He didn’t turn back to face her, though he slowed. “Monday?”
If she was the good person she’d always believed herself to be, Kathryn thought then, surely she wouldn’t take quite so much pleasure in this tiny little moment, this almost pointless victory.
“Oh, yes,” she said, with deliberate calm and that triumph right there in her voice. “That’s when I start.”
* * *
He should never have touched her.
He should certainly not have tasted her.
But he had always been a fool where that woman was concerned, and in case he’d been tempted to doubt that, she haunted him all the way back to Rome.
Luca drove himself into the city from the family’s private airfield, risking death in an appropriately sleek and low-slung car that made Rome’s famously chaotic traffic a game of wits and daring and delicious speed. And he regretted it when he arrived at the Renaissance-era villa that housed both his business and his home, because playing games with his life at high speeds through the streets of the ancient city he loved was far preferable—and much less dangerous—than letting himself think about Kathryn.
Though he supposed both edged into that same dark place inside him, as if he was as much of a damned mess as every other Castelli in history down deep, beneath all the controls he’d spent his life putting into place to prevent exactly that.
He tossed his keys to the waiting attendant in his garage and stalked into the building, only to find himself standing stock-still in his own empty reception area, his head filled with those damned eyes of hers, turned a dreamy slate green after he’d kissed her, and that sulky mouth—
Luca muttered a chain of curses. He raked both his hands through his hair as he headed into the offices that sprawled across the first two levels of this lovingly maintained building in Rome’s Tridente neighborhood, a mere stone’s throw from the Spanish Steps and Piazza del Popolo.
His office. His one true love. The only thing he’d ever loved, in point of fact. The only thing that had ever come close to loving him back, with one success after the next.
He lived in the penthouse that rambled over the top two levels, and that was where he headed now, taking his private lift up into the rooms he’d furnished with steel and chrome, wide-open spaces and minimalist art, the better to play off the history in every bit of stone and craftsmanship in the walls and the high, frescoed ceilings and every view of gorgeous, sleepless, frenetic Rome out of his windows. He tore off his clothes in his rooftop bedroom of glass and steel before making his way out to the pool on the wraparound terrace that surrounded the master suite and offered a three-hundred-sixty-degree perspective on the Eternal City.
If Rome could stand for more than two and a half thousand years, surely Luca could survive the onslaught of Kathryn. She had no idea what she was setting herself up for. Luca was a tough boss at the best of times, demanding and fierce, and that was what the loyal employees he’d handpicked said about him to his face. What could a former trophy wife know of the corporate world? She might have some fantasy of herself as a businesswoman, but it was unlikely she’d last the week.
Of course she won’t be able to handle it, he thought with something a great deal like relief—how had he failed to realize that earlier? He was called upon to indulge her whim, not alter the whole of his carefully controlled existence. The sooner she understood how ill suited she was to a life that involved more work than play, the sooner she’d drift off to find her next conquest. The problem would take care of itself.
Luca still felt edgy and entirely too messed up, despite the chill of the winter evening and the kick of the wind. Out of control. Jittery and appalled with himself. He told himself it must be grief, though he hadn’t been close with his father. He might have wished, from time to very rare and sentimental time, that he’d had a better understanding of the man whose shadow had fallen over him all these years—but he never had.
Perhaps the funeral had hit him harder than he’d realized.
Because he could not understand why he’d kissed Kathryn. What the hell was the matter with him?
How could he—a man who prided himself on always, always keeping his life clean and trimmed down and free from anything even resembling this kind of emotional clutter—have no idea?
He dived into the pool then, cutting into the heated water and then pulling hard as he began to swim. He lost himself in the rhythm of his strokes, the weight and rush of the water against him and the growing heat in his body as he kept going, kept pushing.
Lap after lap. Then again.
