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.
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
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.
Castelli's Virgin Widow Page 3
