He checked his watch for the fifth time in as many seconds, unreasonably irritated that she hadn’t been waiting for him when he’d emerged from his bedroom suite, showered and dressed and as recovered from their flight as it was possible to be in such a short time. He could already hear the band in the great ballroom and the sound of very well-heeled enjoyment below, all clinking glasses and graceful laughter, wafting up into the far reaches of the family wing and down the long hall to this remote set of rooms set apart from the rest.
Luca glared at Kathryn’s door, as if that might make her appear.
And when it did—when it started to open as if he’d commanded it with that glare—he scowled even more.
Until she stepped out into the hall, and then, he was fairly certain, all the blood in his head sank with an audible thud to his sex.
“What—” and his voice was a strangled version of his own, even from the great distance that ringing in his ears made it sound “—the hell are you wearing?”
Kathryn eyed him with that cool expression of hers that he was beginning to think might be the death of him. It clawed at him. It made him want nothing more than to heat her up and see what lurked beneath it.
“I believe it’s called a dress,” she said crisply.
“No.”
She stood there a moment. Blinked. “No? Are you sure? The last time I checked a dictionary, the word was definitely dress. Or perhaps gown? A case could be made for each, though I think—”
“Be quiet.”
Her mouth snapped closed and she had no idea how lucky she was that he hadn’t silenced her in the way he’d much prefer. He could already taste her again, as if he had. Luca pushed off the wall opposite her door, unable to control himself. Unable to think.
A red haze of sheer lust kicked through him, making everything else dim.
Yes, Kathryn was wearing a dress. Barely. It was in an off-white shade that should have made her look like a ghost, with that English complexion of hers, but instead made her seem to glow. As if she’d been lit from within by a buttery shimmer. It had a delicate, high neckline and no sleeves, and an elegant sort of wide belt that wrapped around her waist before the full skirt cascaded all the way to the floor.
None of that was the problem. That could have been Grace Kelly, it was all so effortlessly tasteful and stylish.
It was the damned cutouts that made his entire body feel like a single, taut ache. Two huge wedges that edged in at sharp angles from the sides, cutting into the lower bodice of the dress and showing sheer acres of her bare skin in that sweet spot below her breasts and above her navel, then flaring out over the curves of her sides.
Luca wanted to taste her everywhere he saw skin. Right here. Right now.
He didn’t realize he’d said that out loud until her eyes went wide and turned that fascinating slate-green shade, and then it didn’t matter anyway, because he’d lost his mind—and worse, his control. He backed her into her own closed door, bracing himself over her with a hand on either side of her head.
“You can’t,” Kathryn said. Whispered, more like, her voice a rough little scrape that he could feel in the hardest part of him. “Luca. We can’t.”
Luca didn’t ask himself what he was doing. He didn’t care. That dress pooled around her, seductive and impossible, and he was lost in the elegant line of her neck and the hair she’d swept back into a complicated chignon at her nape.
“Did my father give you these diamonds?” he asked, trying to force this red-hazed lust out of him by any means possible. But it didn’t shift at all, not even when he lifted a finger to trace the sparkling stones she wore in both her ears. One, then the next.
All of this was wrong. That pounding ache in his sex. This impossible hunger that stormed through him, casting everything else aside—including his own good intentions. He knew it. He still couldn’t seem to care about that as he should. As he knew he would eventually.
“Answer me,” he urged her, his mouth much too close to the sweet temptation of that tender spot behind her ear, and he couldn’t identify that dark, driving thing that had control of him then. “What did you have to do to earn them, Kathryn?”
She jerked her head to the side, away from his fingers and the way they toyed with the delicate shell of her ear, but it was too late. He could see the way she shivered. He could see the pulse that fluttered madly in her neck. He could see the goose bumps that ran down her bare arms.
There was no ordering himself to pretend he hadn’t seen those things. Or that he didn’t know what they meant.
“You are meant to be here as my assistant, nothing more,” he reminded her, his voice a low throb in the otherwise quiet hallway. “This is not meant to be an opportunity for you to flaunt your wares and pick up new customers.”
“You’re disgusting.”
The icy condemnation in her voice poured over him, gas to a flame.
“That is an interesting choice of words,” Luca murmured, his lips the barest breath away from her warm neck, and she shuddered. “What is more disgusting, do you think—the fact that I do not want you parading around the château, contaminating my family home and my father’s memory? Or the fact you have no qualms about wearing a dress that makes every man in the vicinity think of nothing but you, naked?”
She turned her head to face him then, and her hands came up, shoving futilely at his chest. Luca didn’t budge, and he had the distinct pleasure—or was it pain, he couldn’t tell—of watching the color rise in her exquisite cheeks.
“Only you think that,” she snapped at him, mutiny and feminine awareness and something hotter by far in her furious gaze. “Because only you live your life with your head in the gutter. Everyone else will see a lovely dress by a well-known designer and nothing more.”
“They will see my father’s widow in white, with her naked body on display,” he corrected her. “They will see your complete disregard for propriety, to say nothing of the memory of your very dear friend.”
She laughed. It was a high, outraged sound.
“What should I have worn instead?” she demanded. “A black shroud? What would make you happy, Luca? A tent of shame?”
His hands shook and he flattened them against the wall, because he knew. He knew. If he touched her again, he wouldn’t stop. He didn’t care how much more he’d hate himself for it.
He wasn’t sure he’d even try to stop himself.
“You told me your laughable story,” he reminded her. “An unlikely friendship struck by chance in a far-off waiting room, between one of the wealthiest men in the world and you, our favorite saint.” He studied the way her lush mouth firmed at that, the way her eyes flashed and darkened. “I think I saw the syrupy cable-television movie you based that absurd nursery rhyme on. What is the real story, I wonder?”
“I can’t help it if you’re so cynical and so jaded that all you see in the world is what you put into it,” she threw at him with something more than mere temper in her eyes—and it fascinated him. That was his curse. She fascinated him, damn her. Maybe she had from the start. Maybe that was the truth he’d been burying for two years. “Here’s a news flash, Luca. If you spend your life looking for ulterior motives and cruelty, that’s all you’ll ever see. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Do you know why I hate you, Kathryn?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “It’s not that you married my father for his money. So did everyone else. It’s that you dare to act offended when anyone calls that spade the spade it is. It’s that you believe your own tabloid coverage. Saint Kate is a myth. You are nothing like a saint at all.”
She made a frustrated sound and shoved at him again. “I can’t control what you think of me. I certainly can’t control what the tabloids say about me. And this might come as a giant shock to you, but I don’t care if you hate me or not.”
Somehow he didn’t believe her, and he couldn’t have said why that was.
And something inside him cracked. A chain broke, and he shifted, leaning in closer and then reaching down to trace the cutout angle of her dress that was closest to him. He sketched his way from the tender skin at the juncture of her shoulder and chest down, skating around the tempting swell of her breast, then cutting in with the line of the fabric toward her belly.
Her breath came hard. Broken.
But she didn’t tell him to stop. She didn’t shove at him again. Her hands curled into fists and rested there against his lapels, urging him on.
Luca concentrated on the task of this. Of his fingertip against her insane, impossible smoothness. Of the fire that danced between them, the flames stretching ever higher, until he was wrapped up in the sensation of her skin beneath his and the scent of her besides. The hint of something tropical in her hair and the subtle, powdery notes that whispered of the very expensive perfume he now associated with her so strongly that the hint of it in places she wasn’t made his body clench down hard in awareness.
Once in a distant resort in the Austrian Alps. Once in a seaside hotel in the Bahamas. She hadn’t been in either place, but she was here. Tonight, she was here.
And this was no different. This is madness, he told himself.
He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t dare risk the possibility that he wouldn’t stop this time. But he leaned in closer anyway, until their breaths were the same breath. Until he could see every last thing she felt as it moved through her expressive eyes. Until the fact he wasn’t taking that mouth with his, that their only point of contact was his finger as it danced along that edge where fabric met skin, became erotic.
It became everything.
And he wanted this too much. He wanted her. Luca wanted to lose himself inside her, to hurl them both straight into the heart of this wildfire that was eating them both alive.
“This,” he said softly, “is what a whore wears when she wishes to announce she’s available again. Discreetly, I grant you. But the message is the same.”
He felt the way she stiffened, and then he indulged himself and wrapped the whole of his palm over the exposed indentation of her waist, and, God help him, the smooth heat of her blasted into him. It ricocheted inside him. It lit him on fire.
It made that hunger in him shift from an insistent pulse to a roar.
But even though he could feel the deep, low shudders that moved through her body, that told him she felt the same need that he did, she shoved at him again. Much harder this time, using her fists. He grunted and backed up.
He didn’t remove his hand.
“What’s your plan, Luca?” Her gaze was dark, and he couldn’t read her. Her chin edged higher, and her voice was cool and hard. That was what penetrated the red haze, like shards of ice deep into him. “Are you going to prove I’m a whore by acting like one yourself? Do you think that’s how it’s done?”
Luca dropped his hand then, with far more reluctance than he cared to examine just then. He stood away from her, lust and longing and that greedy kick of need making him scowl at her. Making him wish too many things he shouldn’t.
Making him wonder why she was the only thing he couldn’t seem to control—or, more to the point, his reaction to her.
“I don’t need to prove the truth,” he gritted out. What the hell was happening to him? How had she gotten the better of his control? He tried to shake it off. “It simply is, no matter how you pad it out and pretend otherwise to make yourself look better.”
She straightened, only that flush high on her cheeks and the hectic glitter in her too-dark eyes to mark what had happened here.
What had almost happened.
“I think you’ll find that math doesn’t work,” Kathryn said crisply, and she might as well have shoved a knife deep into his side. He felt as if she had. “Whorish behavior always adds up to two whores, Luca. Not one dirty whore and an innocent with dirty hands by accident, almost but not quite corrupted by doing the exact same thing. No matter what lies you tell yourself.”
And then she pushed past him and started down the hall, her every movement as graceful and elegant as if she was a damned queen, not the grasping little gold digger they both knew full well she was.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PARTY WAS long and bright and painful.
Of course, it always had been. Kathryn told herself that, really, this was no different than the other times she’d had to parade around the Castelli château in this gorgeous little pocket of the Northern California wine country, acting as if she neither heard nor saw the whispers and the overlong, unpleasantly speculative looks.
This was merely part and parcel of being notorious, she told herself. Something every other member of the Castelli family had found a way to handle. Why couldn’t she do the same?
But, of course, she knew.
It was Luca. At every other party she’d ever been to with him, he’d kept as much distance between them as possible, as if he feared too much proximity to her would contaminate him. But this time she was his assistant, no longer his stepmother. That meant her place was at his elbow, no matter what had happened between them in that hallway.
And worse, what had almost happened. What she told herself she absolutely would not have allowed to happen—but she could feel the hollowness of that assertion tying her stomach into knots.
He’d caught up to her on the stairs that led down toward the ballroom and had slid a dark, fulminating look her way as he’d fallen into place beside her.
“I think you should leave me alone,” she’d told him. Through her teeth.
“With pleasure,” he’d replied silkily. “Does this mean you quit?”
She’d glared at him, and he’d caught her by the arm when she’d very nearly missed a step, and then held her fast when she would have yanked herself away from him.
“Careful,” he’d warned her. “We are no longer in private. And in public, you are my father’s widow and my current assistant.”
“That is, in fact, all I am anywhere.” She’d shaken her head at him. “Except for the sewer inside your head, of course.”
“One scandal at a time,” he’d told her, sounding something very much like grim. He’d let her go when they’d reached the ground floor. “Tonight I think the fact the Widow Castelli has joined the workforce will have to carry the gossip news cycle, don’t you? Unless you’d like to use this opportunity to update your global dating profile by announcing to the world that your hunt for a protector has begun anew.”
“And by hunt,” she’d retorted icily, “am I to understand you mean something like you manhandling me in a hallway? Was that your version of an audition?”
Luca’s mouth had curved in that lethal way that was nothing so palatable as a smile.
“It’s a tragedy for you that you can’t manipulate me, I’m sure,” he’d said, sounding anything but tragic. “Make sure you schedule time in my calendar for me to care about that. Maybe next month? In the meantime—” and he’d switched then, from the obnoxious Luca she’d come to expect into the COO version of Luca that she’d only ever seen in action over the past few weeks in his office “—you stay next to me. You do not speak unless spoken to directly. Just smile and look pretty and make sure you remember every detail of every conversation we have so we can compare notes later.”
She’d blinked. “Uh, what details am I looking for?”
He’d stared down at her, and it was getting harder and harder for her to imagine how anyone saw him as a lazy, lackadaisical playboy when the truth of him was stark and obvious and stamped right there on his intensely beautiful face.
“All of them, Kathryn,” he said, as if she was an idiot. She hated that he made her feel like one—and simultaneously feel as if she needed to prove him wrong. Then ag
ain, she’d had a great deal of experience with that feeling. “You never know which little detail will make all the difference.”
And then he’d strode ahead of her straight into the ballroom, and the moment he’d entered it, become that other Luca. As if he’d flipped a switch.
Affable and approachable. Quick to make everyone around him laugh. He always had a drink in his hand and appeared to be ever so slightly tipsy, though this close to him, Kathryn discovered that he didn’t actually drink much. He slapped backs and kissed cheeks. He flirted with everybody. He was delightful and about as unthreatening as a man who looked like him and moved like him and wore black tie as easily as he did ever could.
Kathryn didn’t have to ask him why he bothered to put on such an elaborate act. The why of it became clear almost instantly.
She’d spent a great deal of time smiling prettily next to Gianni, too, and no one had found him particularly delightful. They’d always been guarded. Distant and cagey. Especially if they were somehow involved in the business.
But it was as if no one could believe that this Luca Castelli, who commanded the attention of the whole party simply by entering it, was the same one who ran the Rome office with such a deft hand. This bright, gleaming, careless creature. Even though there was no other name on that door in Rome but his.
Kathryn had heard the rumors. That it was Gianni himself who’d propped up Luca’s office—except, of course, for the small problem that an old man with dementia could not possibly have run anything. Perhaps he simply had a particularly good team to support him, the rumor mill had countered. But no matter what people speculated about in private, when they were in Luca’s presence, they basked in it. In him. In that effortless sort of sunshine he spread about him so easily.
And they told him everything.
Secrets. Rumors. Things their supervisors—who were often standing across the room—would kill them for saying out loud.
Everyone succumbed to the golden myth of Luca Castelli, Kathryn saw. Everyone. Captains of industry, wine connoisseurs and college-age caterers alike lost in the perfection of his inviting smile.
Castelli's Virgin Widow Page 6
