Castelli's Virgin Widow

by Caitlin Crews

  Watching him in action told her a great many things, but most of all, it made her feel better about herself for falling so completely under his spell every time he got too close to her. It wasn’t something fatal in her own design, as she’d imagined. It wasn’t that weakness in her that her mother had always despaired of and had gone to such lengths to stamp out of her. It was him.

  She ducked into the mostly hidden powder room off the main ballroom when Luca got into an intense discussion about a documentary Kathryn had never seen with a handful of very intellectual types who’d made it clear they both recognized her and thought her beneath them. Far beneath them. She was happy to let them think so.

  Inside the luxurious bathroom suite, she sat down on the couch in the lounge area and took a little breather. Away from the crush of the crowd, most of whom looked at her with nothing but ugly supposition on their faces. Away from Luca, whom she really should hate.

  Why didn’t she hate him the way she should? The way he unapologetically hated her?

  “Being fascinated with him is only making everything worse,” she snapped at herself, out loud—and then jumped when the door to the lounge swung open.

  “Oh,” Lily said. She looked around as if she expected there to be more people in the room—or as if she’d heard Kathryn talking to herself like a crazy person. Kathryn trotted out her smile automatically. “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”

  “Only me,” Kathryn said mildly. “Depending on your point of view, that may or may not count.”

  Rafael’s wife laughed, then smoothed her hands over the swell of her pregnant belly, looking resplendent in a gleaming blue gown. And happy. That it took her a moment to recognize what that expression meant made something inside Kathryn catch. As if happiness was so foreign to her.

  “Don’t pay any attention to Luca,” Lily said, her eyes meeting Kathryn’s in the mirror then moving away. “The man is such a control freak. He can’t stand surprises, that’s all.”

  She ran the water in the sink and then smoothed her damp palms over the coils of heavy braids she wore, all collected into a fat bun at the back of her head. Kathryn had always liked Lily. She was the least judgmental member of the Castelli family. She’d been the most welcoming to Kathryn, and Kathryn had even imagined that under different circumstances they might have been friends. Perhaps that, too, was naive.

  She was beginning to realize that she was naive, in every possible way—something she’d have thought was impossible, given how hard her mother had worked to wring that out of her. And yet.

  “Am I a surprise?” she asked, when she was sure she could keep her voice light and easy. “I don’t think that’s the word Luca would use.”

  Lily slanted an amused look at her. “Everything about you is a surprise,” she said. “From the day you arrived. You refuse to slot yourself into one of Luca’s depressingly functional and supernaturally clean boxes. He hates that.”

  “He hates surprises?” Kathryn laughed lightly. Very lightly, which was at odds with how her heart punched at her, as if this information about Luca was the most important detail of all she might have collected here tonight. “Here I thought the only thing he hated was me.”

  It was Lily’s turn to laugh, though hers seemed far less for show.

  “He hates messes,” she said. “He always has. If he hates you? It’s because you’re messing things up for him, and he doesn’t know how to handle something he can’t sanitize and shelve somewhere. And between you and me, that’s probably a good thing.”

  Then she smiled her goodbyes and went back out into the crush, leaving Kathryn to mull that over.

  But not for long. Her mobile buzzed in her clutch and she knew it was Luca, which got her moving out of the bathroom lounge and back into the party before she even looked at the display.

  “Are you taking a holiday?” he growled into the phone when she answered, all spleen and fury. “If not, you’d better be right here when I turn around. I’m not paying you to gallivant around the château like one of the guests.”

  “Are you paying me at all?” she asked mildly, spotting him several groups away and moving around them as she spoke. “I thought your father set up a trust for me so you couldn’t hold a paycheck over my head. Or maybe for other reasons, and that’s just a happy accident?”

  “I’m turning around now,” he said, and she came to a stop before him as he did.

  Their eyes met. Held.

  It was harder than it should have been to pull herself away. To concentrate on tucking her mobile back in her clutch. To tell herself there was nothing at all in his dark eyes but what there always was: some or other form of fury, brightened up with dislike.

  She didn’t understand why no one could see the truth about him but her. She told herself she was making it up. That it wouldn’t be there when she looked up at him again—that he’d be that half lazy, half obnoxious man he should have been and nothing more.

  But it was still there. That fury, that need. That hunger that terrified her and intrigued her in equal measure. A whole world in that gaze of his, and she had no earthly idea what to do about it.

  “I think you’re being paged,” she told him, nodding toward a bejeweled woman in a slinky dress made entirely of sequins, who was bearing down on Luca from afar. “You wouldn’t want to disappoint your fans with this show of seriousness, would you?”

  “It’s not a show. It’s business. Not a concept I expect you to comprehend.”

  “I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself,” she said unwisely. So very unwisely. “But it’s interesting that you’re so determined to hide part of yourself away wherever you go, don’t you think?”

  She had no idea why she’d said that. Luca looked frozen into place for a long, taut moment, an arrested expression on his darkly gorgeous face. Then he blinked, and there was nothing but his usual darkness again, leaving Kathryn faintly dizzy.

  “Careful, Stepmother,” he said softly. Lethally. “Or I might be tempted to truly give them something to talk about tonight.”

  She didn’t believe he’d do anything of the kind—of course she didn’t—but she still had to fight to restrain a shiver at the thought. And she was sure that Luca knew it, that the unholy gleam of something like gold in his dark eyes was that pure male knowledge Kathryn was very much afraid would be her undoing.

  But then he turned away, his public smile at the ready, that intensity gone as if it had never been.

  And Kathryn reminded herself that it didn’t matter what this man’s sister-in-law, who had once been his stepsister, had said in the bathroom lounge. It didn’t matter what happened in remote hallways in the château. The only truth that mattered was that she was his assistant now, and if she couldn’t do that job as well as she should, everything else he’d ever said about her was true. And not just him.

  You’ve had more opportunities than I could have dreamed of having! her mother had said the last time she’d seen her, at Christmas, with that look on her face that had told Kathryn that once again she’d failed Rose terribly, as she’d always managed to do. “And look what you’ve done with them.”

  Kathryn hadn’t known what to say or how to defend herself. Because Rose had been the one to encourage Kathryn into marrying Gianni in the first place.

  “The world is filled with people who marry for far less reason than this,” she’d said. “But of course, Kathryn, it’s your life. You should do what you think is best for you, no matter who else might benefit.”

  And Kathryn hadn’t been able to think of a good reason why not to marry the kindly old man when her mother had put it like that—especially given what she knew she would gain from it. It would cost her so very little. All she had to sacrifice was a couple of years. Not her whole life, as her mother had done, and for far less in return. Though Rose certainly hadn’t objected when Gian
ni’s money had allowed Kathryn to buy her a cottage in the sweet Yorkshire village of her choice, and then provide her with live-in care.

  She never thanked you, either, a little voice pointed out, deep inside her.

  But she felt ungrateful and small even thinking such things. Many women wouldn’t have had a baby on their own, with the father adamantly out of the picture. Rose had never faltered.

  Which meant Kathryn could do no less—no matter the provocation.

  It was time she stopped worrying about Luca Castelli and what he thought about her, and got to work.

  * * *

  One blue-and-gold California day rolled into the next, filled with meetings and vineyard tours and endless business dinners, and Luca found himself more disgruntled than he should have been by the fact Kathryn was...good at the job. More than good, in fact, in the odd role she had to play. Far better at it than the assistant she’d displaced, though he hated to admit it. Marco had been an excellent administrative assistant, but had always been a little too conspicuously himself when out in the field trying to charm potential clients.

  Kathryn, on the other hand—who Luca would have asserted could no more blend than the sun could rise in the west and was anything but charming besides—did it beautifully.

  “No,” he barked out one morning, when she’d walked into their shared breakfast room dressed in one of her usual work outfits, a skirt and heels and one of those soft blouses that made him unable to think of anything at all but the breasts pressed just there behind the silk.

  Kathryn paused, her hand on the back of the nearest chair, her bearing that of slightly offended royalty. It put his teeth on edge.

  “You can’t wear that,” he growled at her, feeling like some kind of sulky child, which was insupportable. He was not one of his nephews, having a tantrum. Why couldn’t he control himself around this woman? “We are walking through the vines with one of the accounts today. They find the Castelli family on the verge of being too European for their tastes as is, so we must be certain to impress them with our homespun, regular-person charm.”

  “I don’t think even you can convince someone you are either homespun or regular.”

  “I’m a chameleon,” he said drily. And was uncomfortable with how that sat there on the sunny table like truth, when he hadn’t meant it that way. It’s interesting that you’re so determined to hide part of yourself away wherever you go, she’d said, damn her. He scowled at her. “But I doubt you can say the same.”

  He was wrong. Kathryn turned and left the room and when she reappeared, she’d transformed herself. She wore jeans, a pair of boots and a soft, casual, long-sleeved shirt. She’d let her hair down to pool around her shoulders and had scrubbed the makeup from her face. She looked like a host of fantasies he hadn’t realized he had. She looked like an advertisement for healthy Californian living. Like a dream come true.

  The emissaries from this tricky account of theirs had agreed, hanging on Kathryn’s every word and acting as if Luca was her assistant, a state of affairs that didn’t annoy him as much as it should have done—because he got to trail behind her, admiring the curve of her bottom in faded denim.

  And imagining what it would be like to throw her down in one of the tidy rows between the vines and taste all that sweet, soft skin and that mouth that was driving him to the brink of madness.

  When they were finally alone again, having waved off the ebullient account managers who’d doubled their national order based entirely on the force of Kathryn’s smile, he found himself watching her much too closely. As if he might pounce.

  “I told you I could do the job,” she said, and he wondered if she knew how fierce she sounded. “Any job.”

  “So you did.”

  “But don’t worry, Luca,” she said, and he had the sense she’d collected herself—remembered who they were. He hated that he felt it as a kind of loss—and it seemed to collect inside him with all the other things he hated about himself. “I won’t let that get in the way of all my whoring around. I know you need that to feel better about yourself and, of course, my only aim is to please you.”

  He felt his jaw clench and every muscle in his body tense. But there was something about the way she stood there in the bright winter sun, her hands tucked into the back pockets of her jeans and the Sonoma wind toying with her dark hair. He had the strangest sense of tightness around his chest, as if there was a steel band clamping down on him.

  He didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t know how to handle it. Or her.

  Or worst of all, himself.

  “Why did you marry him?” he asked.

  Her marvelous eyes were dove gray in all that too-blue California light, and she didn’t look away from him.

  “I don’t see why it matters to you.”

  “And yet it does.”

  “I think you want there to be some kind of rationale,” she said quietly. “Something you can point to that makes it all okay in your head. Because otherwise you’re just a man who has grabbed his father’s widow. Twice.”

  “Is there one, then? A rationale? Were you a street urchin he saved? Did you personally support a threatened orphanage and his money saved a host of children from eviction?”

  She smiled at him, and it wasn’t her usual smile. It wasn’t that serene, bulletproof smile she trotted out for work and had used on him at least a thousand times in the past three weeks alone. This one hurt. It was sad and it was reflected in her eyes, and he didn’t understand what was happening here.

  What had already happened, if he was honest with himself.

  Luca decided honesty was overrated. But it was too late. She was speaking.

  “No,” she said. “I married him because I wanted to marry him. He was rich and I was struggling through my degree and some personal issues, and he told me he could make all my troubles go away. I liked that. I wanted that.” His mouth twisted, but her smile only deepened, and still it hurt. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “What do you think marriage is, Luca?” she asked, and she tilted her head slightly to one side.

  He was mesmerized by it, by her, and it occurred to him that they’d never actually talked before. It had been all insults and glares, that scene in the library or in the hallway between their rooms, what he still thought was just another rehearsed story on the plane. She shook her hair back from her face and he wanted to do that for her. He wanted to touch her, he realized, more than he could recall ever wanting anything else.

  And nothing had ever been more impossible.

  “Not the transaction it was for you,” he said, aware that his voice was too raw, too rough. It gave him away. “Not a bit of cold calculation with a monetized end.”

  But Kathryn only continued to smile at him in that same way, as if he made her sad. As if he was doing something to her. That tight band around his chest seemed to pull even tauter. It pinched.

  “Who are you to judge?” she asked softly, and it was more of a slap, perhaps, because it lacked heat or accusation. She simply asked. “We were happy with our arrangement. We fulfilled the promises we made to each other.”

  He couldn’t take it. He moved toward her, aware but not caring that they were standing out in front of the château where anyone could see them, and he took her face between his hands. This would be so much easier if she weren’t so pretty, he told himself—if she was a little more plastic and a whole lot less polished.

  If she didn’t short-circuit every bit of control he’d ever had.

  “Tell me more about how happy you were,” he dared her, aware that he was furious. More than furious. “How perfect your marriage was—a union of two identical souls, yes?”

  But she didn’t back down. She didn’t flush hot or look the least bit ashamed. Her hands came up and hoo
ked around his wrists, but she didn’t pull him away.

  “Go on, then,” Luca urged her, his voice an aching thing that simmered in the scant space between them. “Tell me how you fulfilled those promises to the old man. Were you contractually obligated to kneel before him and pleasure him a certain number of nights per week? Or was he past that point—did he have you tend to yourself while he watched? What promises did you keep, Kathryn?”

  Something gleamed in that gaze of hers and turned her eyes a darker shade of gray, but she didn’t jerk away from him.

  “What amazes me about you,” she whispered, “is how you think it’s your right to ask these questions. You don’t get to know what happened in my marriage. You can drive yourself crazy with all your dark imaginings, and I hope you do. You can whisper your filthy thoughts to anyone who will listen. It doesn’t make them true, and it certainly doesn’t require me to comment on them. If you want to believe that’s what happened between me and your father, then go ahead. Believe it.”

  There was a resolve in her gaze Luca didn’t like, and he didn’t know what he might have done then, but down at the bottom of the château’s long drive, a busload of wine tasters pulled in and started up the winding way toward them.

  And he had no choice but to let her go.

  * * *

  Kathryn woke when the moonlight poured in her windows, making her blink in confusion at the clock. It was just before four in the morning, and that was, she realized after a moment or two of uncertainty, very definitely the moon and not the sun.

  Her internal clock was still a mess, even after nearly a week in California, and she only had to lie there a little while before she accepted the reality that she was not going to fall back asleep. Not tonight.

  She swung her feet over the side of the tall, canopied bed piled high with soft linens, and dressed quickly in the clothes she’d left draped over her chair, a simple pair of terry lounging trousers and a cashmere hooded top. She twisted her hair back out of her way, tying it in a knot at her nape. She wrapped a long merino wool sweater around her to cut the chill, and then she pushed open the glass doors that led out onto her balcony and stepped outside.