The moon was huge and so bright it lit up the whole of the valley and all Kathryn could see in all directions, pouring over the cypress trees and dancing over the gnarled rows of vines. Making the pockets of night where it didn’t touch even darker, and turning the world a spectral silver. The breeze was high, whipping into her, just cold enough to feel like exhilaration.
She closed her eyes and leaned into it.
“Couldn’t sleep?” asked a low male voice from far too close. “Perhaps it’s your conscience.”
Kathryn looked over, as slowly as possible, as a counterpoint to the sudden clatter of her heart. She’d forgotten that the balconies of these rooms all ran together here at the far end of the château, despite half walls between the rooms that were little more than decorative gestures toward privacy and did nothing to conceal her from Luca. Nothing at all.
He was sprawled on one of the soft loungers, wearing nothing but a pair of exercise trousers very low on his hips, as if he was impervious to the winter air around him.
And the moonlight crawled all over him. Sliding across that vast expanse of his chest, cavorting in the ridges and hollows, licking him and writhing over him, illuminating every inch of his shocking male beauty. And doing nothing at all to temper that stark expression on his face or that dark hunger in his eyes.
“Says the man who’s clearly been out here awhile,” Kathryn replied. Lightly. So very lightly. As if he was nothing to her. As if his voice did nothing to her. As if this was as unremarkable as having any other sort of meeting with him in the broad daylight, surrounded by other people.
But it was as if he knew exactly what she was trying to hide, or perhaps the moon showed him far too much, because he made it worse. He stood.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” he said in a low voice, his gaze still on her. “Something I’m certain I’ll regret. But that is nothing new.”
The clatter of her heart became a deep bass drumming.
Luca raked back that thick fall of hair, the gesture as lazy as his hot eyes were not. Then he started toward her in that low, rolling gait that marked him as exactly the sort of predator she needed most to avoid.
Kathryn knew she shouldn’t try to tough this out. She knew that there was no shame at all in simply turning tail and running, barring herself in her room against a man who looked at her with that much intent. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t let him see how much he affected her. She couldn’t let him know how he got to her. She couldn’t.
More than that, she couldn’t seem to move.
He walked over to the little half wall and then, his eyes never leaving hers, he simply swung himself over it with an offhanded show of male grace that made everything inside Kathryn clench tight. Then run hot, pooling low in her belly and making her think she might simply melt where she stood. Making her think that perhaps she already had.
Luca didn’t stop. He walked straight to her and he sank his hands in her hair and he hauled her close to him. To that mouth of his, dangerous and impossible and lush. To his flashing dark eyes that saw too much and condemned too deeply.
“What are you doing?” she asked again.
But her voice was a whisper, not a protest, and he knew it. She could tell by the way his fingers sank deeper into her hair, holding her that much more immobile.
“Sleepwalking, I think,” he told her in that low voice of his that wound around inside her, making her burn. “It’s a terrible habit. Worse than alcohol. There’s no telling what I’ll do in the middle of the night and then forget come morning.”
“Luca—”
“I’ll show you what I mean.”
His voice was little more than a growl.
And then he slid his mouth over hers.
CHAPTER SIX
KATHRYN TOLD HERSELF it was a dream.
The moonlight. This man.
It was a dream, that was all, and so it didn’t matter if she simply opened to him. If she let him sweep her up his bare chest, cool to the touch but still so hard, like steel. If she made no sign of protest.
If all she did was kiss him back as hungrily and greedily as if she’d been the one to go to him.
And everything was heat. Fire. Need and longing made real in the silvery night.
His hands were big and hard, slipping from her hair to cradle her face, holding her where he wanted her.
And he plundered her mouth, using his lips and his teeth and that clever tongue of his, angling his jaw to take the kiss deeper, wilder.
She felt dizzy again—unmoored and lost—and was only dimly aware that he’d hauled her off the ground and up into his arms. She didn’t care. It was a dream, so what did it matter if he was carrying her somewhere, his mouth still fused to hers? He was tall and so very strong, and the feel of him surrounding her made her shake and quiver deep inside.
He walked back through her door and straight to her bed, laying her across the piled-high linens and following her down into the clutch of all that softness, and it was...astonishing. There was no other word for the press of him against her, so male and darkly perfect, so hard and Luca. There was no other way to describe that absurdly sculpted body rubbing all over hers.
Making her feel new. Like a strange creature, red-hot and molten, taking over the body she’d thought until this moment she knew so well.
This is only a dream, she told herself, and so she indulged herself.
He stroked his way deep into her mouth, tasting her deeply, and she met him. She ran her fingers through that thick dark hair of his, crisp and warm to her touch. She traced the magnificent line of his wide, muscled back down to his narrow hips, then worked her way back up those ridges on his abdomen that she could admit, here in this dream where nothing counted, fascinated her to the point of distraction.
Beyond that point, perhaps.
He tore his mouth from hers even as his hands moved. He propped himself up on one forearm and smoothed his other hand over her cashmere top, pausing at the top and then tugging—and it was a measure of how dazed she was that she didn’t comprehend what he was doing until he’d unzipped her and the cool air teased over her bare breasts.
And she was panting as if she was running. As if she’d been running for miles.
Luca muttered something in Italian that washed over her like a caress, and then he bent his head and took one nipple she hadn’t realized had pebbled into a hard point deep into his mouth.
Kathryn heard a noise that could not possibly have been her, so high-pitched and keening, bouncing back from the canopy above them, the ornate ceiling. She felt the dark current of his laughter shake through him and into her, making his shoulders move beneath her hands and shudder against her breasts. The sheer physicality of that stunned her, and then he simply sucked on her, that rich tugging setting off an explosion inside her. It seared its way through her, like a lightning bolt from his mouth straight down the center of her body to kick between her legs.
Hard and something like beautiful, all at once.
And Kathryn didn’t know what to do. There was too much of him, everywhere. All over her, pressing her down with him into the embrace of her soft, soft mattress, making her wish this mad dream could go on and on forever.
He made a low, greedy sound that she recognized somehow, in a deep feminine place inside her she’d never known was there, and thrilled to at once. She dug her hands in his hair, but not to guide him—only to anchor herself as he smoothed his wicked palm down over her exposed belly, pausing to test the indentation of her navel, then dipping even lower to slip beneath the waistband of her soft trousers.
Kathryn opened her mouth to speak, to say something—to do something—
But Luca knew exactly what he was about. He didn’t pause. He simply slid his hand
down, so hot and hard, and then held the core of her, molten and hot and swollen with need, in his palm.
She made a noise, and he laughed again. He used the faint edge of his teeth against her nipple and made that lightning bolt roar through her again, wider and hotter and far more dangerous, and then he ground the heel of his hand against the place she ached most.
And Kathryn disappeared. She went up in a column of flame that tore her apart. She lost herself, shattering into too many pieces to count. She shook and she shook, bucking against him and unable to stop or hold on or do anything but survive the explosion—and when she finally came back to earth it was with a giant thud and a heartbeat so hard against her ribs that it hurt.
It hurt.
There was no pretending that was a dream.
Luca’s hand was still down her trousers, tracing lazy patterns in her wet heat, and he’d propped himself up next to her while he did it. Watching her. Learning her. And Kathryn found she couldn’t quite breathe. Something he made that much worse when he shifted from watching his own hand play with her, letting his gaze slam into hers.
His eyes were dark. So very dark. There was something powerful and supremely knowing in the way he looked at her then, and she shuddered again, as if she couldn’t keep herself from falling apart. As if now he needed only to look at her to make her crack wide-open.
“Luca...” But she didn’t sound like herself. She didn’t recognize that small, profoundly needy voice that came out of her own mouth.
And she had no idea what to say.
He murmured something else in Italian, a low string of syllables that danced over her the way he did as he moved down the bed, hooking his fingers in the waistband of her trousers and yanking them down over her hips. He peeled them down her legs and tossed them aside, and Kathryn was shaking. She couldn’t stop shaking.
And she was still so hot. So needy. Helpless, somehow, in the face of all that yearning and that intense look on his beautiful face.
“Luca,” she said again, forcing herself to speak because this wasn’t a dream, and reality was coming at her as hard as if the canopy had collapsed above her, bringing the whole of the château down with it.
“I have to taste you,” he growled at her, his voice thicker and rougher than she’d ever heard it before, and that, too, slicked through her like lightning. Then he said something in Italian, and that, somehow, was worse. Or better.
“I don’t think...” she tried to say.
“Good. Don’t think.”
He moved to take her hips in his hands, then settled himself between her legs as if he belonged there. He wedged her thighs open with his sculpted shoulders, and then he made a growling sort of sound that made a wave of goose bumps crash over the whole of her body.
“Bellissima,” he murmured, directly into the heart of her need.
And then he simply licked his way straight into her core.
* * *
She tasted sweet and hot, the richest cream and all woman, and Luca drank deep.
Kathryn went stiff beneath him, shuddering anew, her hands tugging at him as if she couldn’t decide whether to pull him closer or shove him away.
He took her over. He licked and he hummed, throwing her straight back into that fire, until she was rolling her hips to get closer to his mouth, begging him with her body.
He was so hard he thought it might kill him.
He found his way to the hot little center of her and sucked, hard.
And Kathryn made a low sound, long and wild. Then she was bucking against him, her hoarse cry rebounding off the walls, shattering beneath him all over again, and if he had ever seen anything better in all his life, he couldn’t recall it.
Luca waited her out. She sobbed something incomprehensible and he liked that. He liked it too much.
He knelt up, letting his gaze trace over her as she lay sprawled there before him, more beautiful than he could have imagined—and the truth was, he’d imagined this very thing far more often than he was comfortable admitting, even to himself.
Her breasts were the perfect small handfuls, tipped in rose, and the center of her femininity was slick and hot. The taste of her poured through him like fire, arousal and need, the spice of a woman and her own particular sweetness besides.
And even here, open and shuddering, splayed out before him, there was something about her. A certain innocence, however impossible that seemed, that made him that much harder—the need in him taking on a near vicious edge.
He shoved his hair back from his face and looked around, wondering where she kept her condoms. Because surely she had some. Or perhaps she dealt with birth control a different way entirely, which meant he could—
And Luca froze then.
Because if Kathryn was on birth control, that would have been to keep herself from getting pregnant with his father. To keep herself from giving birth to a child that would have been Luca’s own sibling.
Disgust and self-loathing hit him like a blow. Like an attack. He felt dazed.
How could he have forgotten who she was? How could he have let this happen?
You didn’t let this happen, you fool, he growled at himself. You did this all yourself.
Kathryn was a spider at best, and now he knew exactly how sweet her web was, and he was ruined. Ruined.
Damn her.
He pushed back, levering himself off the bed and letting the chill of the winter night, even here inside her bedroom, sink into him from his bare feet up. He hadn’t been able to sleep. No surprise, given the direction of his thoughts and his knowledge that she’d slept just there on the other side of his wall.
He’d tortured himself with the temperature, bathing himself in the winter moon as if it had been a form of cold shower. He had no idea how long he’d been out there, fighting a pitched battle with an enemy that he knew wasn’t Kathryn at all. It was him. It was this need in him, gripping him hard and mercilessly even now, making him want to forget all over again and lose himself in that sweet, dangerous oblivion between her thighs.
You are the worst kind of idiot, he told himself harshly.
He watched her come back to herself, flushed and satisfied and more beautiful than any woman should be. And far more dangerously compelling than this woman should be, especially to him.
He hated himself.
He told himself he hated her more.
“Is this how you do it?” he asked, and his voice was as cold as the night outside. “Stepmother?”
Kathryn jerked against the pillows as if he’d thrown a bucket of cold water on her. She looked stunned for a moment, and Luca felt something snake through him, hot and low and much too black to bear. It felt a good deal like shame—but he refused to let that stop him.
His breath sawed out of his chest, and Kathryn didn’t help things. She sat up slowly, as if she ached. As if she didn’t understand what he’d done to her—what he was doing—and he hated that she could keep the act going even now. When he was still so hard it hurt, and worse, he knew how she tasted now. And she was rumpled and flushed from his hands and his mouth—yet looked at him with her gray eyes dark as if she couldn’t comprehend how that had happened.
He gritted his teeth as she swallowed, so hard he heard it, and then tugged her clothing back into place. And his curse was that howling thing inside him that wanted to strip her down and worship her, glut himself in her, until this madness in him subsided. Until he could think.
“I’m touched by this performance,” he told her, his voice a dark thing in the moonlit room. “Truly I am. You look nothing less than ravished and yet innocent besides, as if I didn’t just make you come. Twice.”
He watched the way she shivered. The way she pulled her longer sweater tighter around her as if it was made of chain mail and could fend him off. The way she didn’t quite meet
his gaze.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure of her own voice, “I’d prefer not to have this postmortem just now.”
“I imagine you don’t.”
She swallowed again, and there was nothing but shadows in her eyes when she finally looked at him.
“You were sleepwalking,” she said softly. “I was dreaming. This never happened.”
“Yet it did,” he gritted out at her. “I can still taste you.”
She pulled her knees up beneath her and hugged them close, and he loathed himself. He did. She looked like a lost little girl, and he was still hard and furious, and beyond all of that, she was still his father’s widow.
His father’s widow.
“Why did you marry him?”
He didn’t mean to ask that again. He didn’t know why he had.
But this time, when she gazed back at him, her gray eyes were like storms.
“To torture you,” she told him, her voice still hoarse, but something hard beneath it. “Is that what you want to hear?”
“I suspect that’s not far from the truth, if likely not so personal.”
She made a frustrated sort of noise and rolled off the bed—but kept her distance, he noticed, as she skirted around to its foot.
“I’m taking a bath,” she said in a low tone. “I want to wipe this entire night off me.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “Torture yourself all you want, Luca. But I’ll thank you to do it somewhere else.”
And this time when she walked away from him, Luca told himself he was glad of it. That it was better.
No matter that his body still wanted her.
But that was all the information he needed, surely. The things he wanted were always the things that destroyed him—his family being a case in point. That was why, so long ago now he could hardly remember anything else, he’d stopped allowing himself to want anything.
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