Castelli's Virgin Widow

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.

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.

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