Castelli's Virgin Widow

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He swam and he swam, he pushed himself hard, and it was no good. She was still right there, cluttering up his head, reminding him how empty he was everywhere else.

Wide gray eyes. All that dark hair and that fringe that made her seem more mysterious somehow. All of her, wedged in him like a jagged splinter he could never remove, that he’d never managed to do anything but shove in that much farther. She worried at him and worried at him and he had no idea anymore who he was when he was near her. What he might do.

Luca stopped swimming, slamming his hands down on the lip of the pool, sending water splashing everywhere.

He did not dip his quill in his company’s ink, ever. He knew better than to throw grenades like that into the middle of his life. He did not touch his employees, and he certainly did not avail himself of his father’s leftovers. He had been a loud, angry child often abandoned by his single living parent for months at a time in the old manor house because of the trouble he’d caused. He’d gotten over that kind of behavior while he’d still been a child. This kind of mess was precisely what he’d spent his adult life avoiding.

This was a nonissue.

Luca climbed out of the pool and wrapped himself in one of the towels his staff kept at the ready, and then made his way back inside, hardly noticing the way the sun had turned the rambling old city orange and pink as it sank toward the horizon. Not even when he stood at one of the high windows that looked out over the winding, cobbled streets that led toward Piazza di Spagna and the famous Spanish Steps, where it seemed half of Rome congregated some evenings.

He saw nothing but Kathryn, dressed in her funeral clothes like some waifish fairy tale of a widow, and it had to stop. She’d already had two black marks against her before today. Her marriage to his father in the first place. And the unpalatable fact of her tabloid presence, the endless canonization of Saint Kate, nauseatingly described as the plucky English lass who’d bearded any number of dragons in his twisted old-Italian family.

It repulsed him. He told himself she did, too.

That kiss today was the third black mark. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t started it, hauling her to him with the kind of heedless passion he’d been so certain he’d completely excised from his life. How many times had he seen this or that foolish longing lay his father low? How often had he rolled his eyes at his brother’s enduring anguish over Lily? How many times had his own pointless emotions bit him in the ass as a child? He’d promised himself a long time ago that he would stay clear of such quagmires, and the truth was, it had never been particularly difficult.

Until Kathryn. And the truth remained: he’d been the one to kiss her. He accepted that failing, even if he couldn’t quite understand it.

The problem was the way she’d kissed him back.

The way she’d melted against him. The way she’d opened her mouth and met him. The way she’d poured herself into him, against him, until he’d very nearly forgotten who and where they were. That she was his stepmother, his father’s widow, and that they’d been standing much too near the family mausoleum where the old man had only just been interred.

Luca was sick, there was no doubt about that—and the fact he was hard even now, at the mere memory of her taste, proved it.

But what game had she been playing?

She was good, he could admit it. She’d tasted like innocence. He still had the flavor of her on his tongue.

That was the most infuriating thing by far.

And Luca vowed, as the last bit of winter sun fell down behind Rome’s enduring skyline, that he would not only make this little corporate adventure for his father’s child bride of a widow as unpleasant as possible—he would also do much worse than that.

He would take Saint Kate’s halo and tarnish it. And her.

Irredeemably.

* * *

By the time Kathryn made it to the ornate Castelli Wine offices in one of the most charming neighborhoods in Rome that Monday morning at exactly nine o’clock sharp, she’d prepared herself.

This was a war. A drawn-out siege. She might have lost a battle in that library far to the north in all those forbidding, foggy mountains, but that meant nothing in the scheme of things. It was a small battle. A kiss, that was all.

The war was what mattered.

The receptionist greeted her in icy Italian and pretended not to understand Kathryn’s halting attempts to speak the language—then picked up the phone and spoke in flawless English, staring at Kathryn all the while. Her expression was impassive when she ended the call, but Kathryn was certain she could see triumph lurking there in the depths of the other woman’s haughty gaze.

She ordered herself not to react.

“How lovely,” Kathryn said, her own tone cool. “You speak English after all. Please tell Luca I’m here.”

She didn’t wait for the other woman’s response. She went and sat in one of the rigid antique chairs that lined the waiting area and pretended to be perfectly comfortable as she waited. And waited.

And waited.

But this was a war, she reminded herself. And it had occurred to her at some point over the weekend that for all his bluster, Luca had no idea who she was or what he was dealing with. All he saw was his image of her as the gold digger who’d snared his father. That meant, Kathryn had decided, that she had the upper hand. So if he wanted to leave her stranded in purgatory all morning, cooling her heels in his waiting room as some childish gesture of pique and temper, let him. She wouldn’t give him—or his receptionist, for that matter—the satisfaction of looking even the slightest bit impatient.

She kept her attention on her mobile, keeping her expression as smooth as glass as she dutifully emailed her mother to let her know she’d started work in Castelli Wine as planned, then thumbed through the news. For an hour.

When Luca finally appeared, she sensed him before she saw him. That dark, thunderous, electric thing that made every hair on her body leap to attention, filling the whole of the great cavern of a waiting room that had until that moment been bright with the Rome morning, light pouring in from the windows to dance across the marble floor. She forced herself to take her time looking up.

And there he was.

He was even more devastatingly gorgeous today, in a more casual suit than the one he’d worn at the funeral, the open white collar of his shirt offering her a far too tempting glimpse of the expanse of his olive skin and the hint of that perfect chest she knew—from the tabloid pages dedicated to him and that one Castelli family outing to Positano that had involved a boat and Luca without his shirt, God help her—had a dusting of dark hair and all those finely carved ridges in his abdomen.

She told herself she was starting to find that scowl on his face almost charming. Like a love song from an ogre.

“You’re late,” he said.

That was astoundingly unfair at best, but Kathryn didn’t have to look to the smug receptionist to understand that there was no point arguing. Besides, Luca had warned her not to complain. She wouldn’t. Kathryn stood, smoothing out her skirt as she rose.

“I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

“Somehow,” Luca replied, sounding very nearly merry—which was alarming, “I doubt that.”

Kathryn didn’t bother to reply. She walked toward him, telling herself with every click of her heels against the hard floor that she remembered nothing from last week in that old library up north. Not his taste. Not that thrilling, masterful way he’d simply taken her mouth with his. Not the searing, impossible heat of his hand against the side of her face and that deep stroke of his clever tongue—

She hadn’t dreamed those things. They hadn’t kept her wide-awake and gasping at the ceiling, not sure how to handle the riot all those searing images and memories had caused inside her. Certainly not.

Luca’s expression was unreadable as she drew close to him, and she hated that she had no idea what was going on behind his gleaming dark eyes as he ushered her deep into the heart of the Castelli Wine offices. She thought she felt him glance over her outfit, a pencil skirt and a conservative silk blouse that could offend no one, she was sure, but when she sneaked a look at him, his attention was focused straight ahead.

He stopped at the door to a large glassed-in conference room and waved a hand at the group of people sitting around the table inside. My coworkers, Kathryn thought—with what she realized was an utterly naive surge of pleasure when she realized not a single one of them was looking out at her with anything approaching a smile on their faces.

She froze beside Luca, who already had his hand on the door.

“What did you tell them?” she asked.

“My people?” He sounded far too triumphant, mixed in with that usual hint of laziness that she was beginning to suspect was all for show. “The truth, of course.”

“And which truth is that?”

“There is only the one,” Luca said. Happily, she thought. Again. “My father’s petulant trophy wife has insisted she be given a job she does not deserve. We do not have jobs hanging about without anyone to fill them, so there was some reshuffling required.”

“I assumed you’d be giving me janitorial duties.” She arched a brow at him. “Wasn’t the idea to make sure this was as unpleasant for me as possible?”

“I made you my executive assistant,” Luca replied smoothly, his dark eyes glittering. “It is the most coveted position in this branch of the company.” He shifted back slightly. Relaxing, she realized. Because he was obviously enjoying himself. That sent a shiver of ice straight down her spine. So did his smile—which she was close enough to see did not reach his eyes. “It is second only to me, you see. That’s quite a bit of power to wield.”

She frowned at him. “Why would you do that? Why not make me file things in some basement?”

“Because, Stepmother,” Luca said in that slow, dark way of his that should not have gotten tangled up in all her breathless memories of that kiss, not when it was clearly meant to be a blow, “that would only delay the inevitable. I am quite certain you won’t make it the allocated three years. But if you leave after three days? Three weeks? All the better.”

She stiffened. “I won’t leave.”

He nodded toward the group of people inside, all eyeing her with ill-disguised hostility.

“Each and every person in that room was handpicked by me. They earned their positions here. They function together as a tight and usually congenial team. But I have informed them that all of that is a thing of the past, as you must be shoehorned in whether we like it or not.” He turned his gaze on her. “As you can see, they’re thrilled.”

Kathryn’s stomach sank to her feet, because she understood what he’d done. Her pathetic little fantasies of distinguishing herself somehow through hard work in some forgotten corner of the office where she could quietly shine crumbled all around her.

Her mother would be furious. She’d claim that this was exactly what had happened when Kathryn tried to defy her and strike out on her own. Kathryn felt a sinking feeling in her gut, as if maybe Rose was right.

And maybe it was hideously disloyal, maybe it made her a terrible person and an ungrateful child, but Kathryn really, really didn’t want that to be true.

“You painted a target on my back,” she said now, her lips feeling numb. “You did it deliberately.”

This time, Luca’s smile reached his eyes, but that didn’t make it any warmer. Or this situation any better. “I did.”

Then he pushed open the conference room door and fed her straight to the wolves.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_353af7ea-ea21-56b8-81c0-bf13cdbfd26f)

THREE HARD WEEKS and two days later, Kathryn boarded the Castelli family private jet on the airfield outside Rome, this time in her capacity as the most hated employee in Luca’s office. She marched up the folded-down stairs with her back straight and her head high—because that title, of course, was an upgrade compared to her previous role as the most hated stepmother in Castelli family history.

She thought she had this being-loathed thing under control.

It was all about the smile.

Kathryn smiled every time conversation halted abruptly when she entered a room. She smiled when her coworkers pretended they didn’t understand her and made her repeat her question once, then twice, so she’d feel foolish as her words hung there in the air between them. She smiled when she was ignored in meetings. She smiled when she was called on to answer questions about past projects she couldn’t possibly know anything about. She smiled when Luca berated her for allowing unrestricted access to him and she smiled brighter when he let his people in and out the side door of his office himself, so he could do it all over again.

She smiled and she smiled. The benefit of having been splashed across a thousand tabloids and held to be so good and so self-sacrificing was that she found she could use Saint Kate as a guide through each and every one of her chilly office interactions. Especially because she was well aware that the less she reacted, the more it annoyed her coworkers.

Luca, of course, was a different issue altogether.

She ducked into the plane and made her way into the upgraded living room space, smiling serenely as she took her seat on the curved leather sofa that commanded the center of the room. Luca was already sprawled out at one of the tables to the side that seated three apiece in luxurious leather armchairs, one hand in his hair as usual and the other clamping his mobile to his ear.

He eyed her as he finished his conversation in low Italian, and didn’t stop when it was done.

“You’re still here,” he said. Eventually.

She smiled brighter. “Of course. I told you I wouldn’t leave.”

“You can’t possibly have enjoyed these past few weeks, Kathryn.”

“You certainly went out of your way to make sure of that,” she agreed. She showed him her teeth. “Much appreciated.”

He frowned, and she smiled, and that went on for so long, she was tempted to turn on the big-screen television and ignore him—but that was not how an employee would behave, she imagined.