Castelli's Virgin Widow

by Caitlin Crews

  ANOTHER WEEK EASED BY, then another, and Luca was forced to face the fact that his driving need for Kathryn wasn’t going anywhere.

  He’d spent more time with her than any other woman he’d ever been with. She worked with him. She traveled with him. She slept with him. He would have imagined that such familiarity could only breed the swiftest contempt, but Kathryn was a revelation. Daily. She fascinated him, from her cool competence in the office that even his staff had been forced to heed to her uninhibited delight in all they did together in bed.

  It was too perfect. Too good. And he had learned the hard way that there was no such thing as “too good to be true.” There was only paying for it.

  His childhood had taught him well.

  He remembered it all too vividly, the various ways he’d acted out in the vain hope of getting his father’s attention. The commotion he’d caused. The precious objects he’d broken. The tantrums, the running away, the back talk. All so someone who was actually related to him would show him that they’d cared about him—but that had never happened.

  And Luca was no longer an abandoned boy. He’d long since forgiven his brother, who had handled their family situation in the best way he’d known how—and had then embroiled himself in a mad relationship with Lily. His mother had killed herself—he didn’t care that the hospital had claimed it had been an accident, he’d never doubted what she’d done—rather than face the children she’d made. And Gianni had never paid the slightest attention to Luca. His heir apparent had been one thing, but Luca had merely been the forgotten spare.

  He didn’t know how to believe in the possibility that Kathryn could truly want him. That she’d chosen him to work with. That all of this wasn’t a giant ploy.

  “What reaction are you looking for?” one of his stepmothers had asked him years ago, when Luca had broken all the dishes at dinner one night. Gianni had merely exited the room, as if Luca was an animal far beneath his notice. His stepmother had remained, brittle and cold.

  “I hate you,” Luca had shouted at her, with all the fury in his ten-year-old heart.

  “No one hates you,” she’d replied, her gaze bland on his. “No one cares either way. The sooner you recognize that, the happier you’ll be.”

  He’d never forgotten it. And he’d never begged for attention again.

  Today was a lazy Sunday that hinted of spring. He breathed it in, hard. He’d woken Kathryn in his usual fashion while it was still dark, left her quivering in his bed and had gone out for a long run around his beautiful city while it was still shaking off the last of the night before. He ran through piazzas that were famed for their crowds, past famous fountains and monuments, all deserted this early in the day, as if Rome was entirely his.

  He was waiting for the other shoe to drop and crush him where he stood. He told himself he expected it, so it couldn’t possibly be too bad. Even if he couldn’t quite imagine what that might be. He ran faster. Harder.

  It was his favorite time to run, these early mornings that were all his. He usually took his time, doing lazy loops through places usually too packed to navigate. But he found that today, knowing Kathryn waited in his penthouse for his return, he ran even faster on his way back home.

  She wasn’t on the first level of the penthouse when he returned, as she often was, usually making coffee or putting together something to eat in his kitchen. He climbed the spiral stairs from his vast living area up to his rooftop bedroom, expecting to find her still sprawled in his bed. But that was empty, too, the duvet tossed back and the pillows still dented.

  Luca peered out through the windows and saw her on the farthest part of the roof, her back to him, her eyes on the city laid out at her feet. He took a quick detour into his bathroom, showering off his run, then pulled on the pair of trousers he’d left at the foot of the bed before he went outside.

  She didn’t turn as he closed the great glass door behind him, or even when he skirted the pool. She stayed as she was, her back perhaps too straight, he thought, as he drew close.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of jumping,” he said as he came up behind her. “I would not find that amusing at all.” Kathryn didn’t respond, not even when he came to stand beside her at the balustrade. She looked pale. Almost...scared, he would have said, if she’d been anyone else. If that made any sense. “Has something happened?”

  She swallowed, and he saw she was hugging herself, wrapped up tight in one of the draped sweaters she preferred, as if she needed armor. Slowly, much too slowly, she turned to face him.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, and even her voice didn’t sound like hers.

  Her eyes were dark gray, the darkest he’d ever seen them. Her lovely mouth was pressed into a vulnerable line. And when Luca reached out to touch her face, she jerked away.

  “I suggest you do it fast,” he said, frowning, as something cold washed over him.

  She looked lost for a moment. Then she seemed to collect herself.

  “After you left,” she said, still in that strangely disembodied voice, as if she was speaking to him from a great distance, “I was sick.”

  “Then, what are you doing out here?” he demanded, a protective impulse he hadn’t known he possessed roaring inside him. “Come. We’ll put you back in bed.”

  “I’ve had this strange stomach thing for a while now,” she told him, not moving at all. “It comes and goes. I thought maybe it was anxiety.” He waited. Sheer misery washed over her face, and she pressed her lips together, hard, as if she was holding back a sob. “But today something else occurred to me. So I went to the supermarket and I got a test. And I had my answer in an instant.”

  Luca felt as if he’d been frozen solid where he stood.

  He was aware of everything. The breeze with its hints of spring that danced between them and toyed with her hair. The way the old gold of the sun made the city gleam all around them. The clatter of traffic in the distance and bells ringing out on the wind.

  And the thing she was about to say, that made all of this—all he’d felt and all that had happened since that night in the car in California—a lie. A scam. That other shoe he’d been expecting all this time, kicking him straight in the face. The ultimate act of a creature who had deceived him completely, snowed him utterly. Made him believe he could be a different man. Made him imagine for an instant that he could live a different life. Made him forget all the truths he knew about this one.

  But he had always known better. He had never given up his control, not ever, until her. He had never begged for anyone’s attention. He had never wanted a damned thing.

  And this was why.

  Luca thought what he would find most unforgivable when the dust cleared was that even now, even in this sharp, unbearable instant when he understood exactly how expertly he’d been played for a fool, he would have given anything at all for her to say something else.

  Anything else.

  Anything that would allow him to keep pretending he could be this other, softer version of himself—

  But that was not his fate.

  And she was an illusion.

  He should have known that from the start.

  Even then, he hoped. God, how he hoped.

  “Luca,” she said, his name in her mouth like a blow. The final betrayal in a war he hadn’t realized she’d been fighting all this while. A war he understood, at last, he’d lost the moment he’d stopped viewing her as his enemy, when she’d never been anything but. Never. And that meant he would hurt her in any way he could. In every way. “I’m pregnant.”

  * * *

  Kathryn found she was clenching her hands together in front of her, and she couldn’t seem to stop it, no matter how revealing that was. No matter that the man she’d fallen in love with despite herself had gone so still he could have been part of the stone wall that s
urrounded his rooftop terrace. Just another Roman statue, and about as approachable.

  She didn’t know what she expected. Luca to grow pale. To shout. To keel over or stagger about dramatically. To react in some over-the-top and awful way, as she’d imagined he would and had braced herself against—because she’d spent a deeply unpleasant hour or so since she’d taken that test imagining all the various horrible ways Luca might take this news, and panicking about each and every one of them in turn.

  He did none of those things.

  Instead, he stared.

  His gaze dropped from her face to her belly, where he should know perfectly well there would be no sign of anything. Not this soon. It took him a long time to drag that dark gaze of his back up. He stared at her far past the point where it could be considered anything but aggressive, while a muscle clenched in his lean jaw, and every nerve in Kathryn’s body tied itself into a painful knot.

  And yet when Luca finally spoke, his voice was something like lazy. Ripe with disinterest and bland insult.

  She recognized that voice instantly. She’d forgotten how much she hated it.

  “You have the necessary paperwork, I assume, to support this claim.”

  Kathryn blinked. “Paperwork? I took a pregnancy test. It’s a...stick, not paper.”

  Luca’s dark eyes gleamed, and not in a nice way.

  “Kathryn, please,” he said, with a little laugh that was like sandpaper against her skin. “Surely you cannot imagine that you are the first woman to share my bed and then decide she’d quite like to nurse at the Castelli teat for the rest of her life.” He shrugged. Horribly. “I like sex, as you have discovered, and in these things there is always risk. I would never dismiss a paternity claim out of hand.” His dark gaze hurt as it bored into her. “But I do insist that it be proved beyond any doubt.”

  She realized her hands had balled into fists. “Do you have a great many accidental children, then?”

  “I have none, in fact,” Luca said viciously. As if he meant it to be a blow. “Such is the perfidy of the average woman.”

  “You mean the average woman you choose to sleep with,” Kathryn threw at him, because she couldn’t seem to help herself. When he’d left this morning to go on his run she’d been toying with the idea of telling him how she felt, because it was so huge, so overwhelming, she didn’t think she could keep it to herself. Now she rather thought she’d prefer to die. “Maybe the common denominator is less their treachery and more you.”

  He eyed her from his place a foot or so away with that same searing fury and simmering dislike that had always made her feel...restless before. When she hadn’t known him. When she hadn’t understood what that thing was between them.

  Now it simply made her feel sick.

  “I will assemble the usual team of lawyers and doctors,” Luca said, sounding deeply bored. “I’ll inform them you’ll be in tomorrow for the typical workup.” Despite that tone, there wasn’t a trace of boredom in the searing fury of those dark eyes of his. Not the faintest hint. “Does that suit your schedule? You’ll have a great deal of free time, if that helps. My father’s will means I can’t fire you, but I think you’ll find you’ll work better as a distant telecommuter from here on out.”

  “I...” Kathryn shook her head again, refusing to succumb to the wave of dizziness that buffeted her. She shouldn’t have been surprised by this, either. When had she ever had the upper hand with Luca? Why had she foolishly held out some kernel of hope that he’d react better? She hadn’t realized how much she’d been holding on to that hope until now, she realized. When he’d crushed it. “But...”

  “I’m sorry if this does not live up to your fantasies of melodrama, Stepmother,” he said, his voice like steel and that word as harsh as if he’d backhanded her with it. Kathryn fell back a step as if he really had. “You should be aware that eighty percent of the women who make these claims do not return for the appointment that would prove them liars. The other twenty percent must imagine that I’m kidding when I say I’ll run these tests. I’m not. Which will you be, I wonder?”

  Kathryn felt off balance and worse, something like half hollow, half sick. And beyond that, she had the sickening sense that this had all happened before. Not to her, but because of her. Her own mother had been forced to have a conversation just like this one. Kathryn, too, had been an accident. She found she couldn’t get her head around that—it was too much déjà vu to take in at once.

  But one thing was perfectly clear. She’d failed her mother. Again. And this time, in the one way she knew Rose could never forgive. That was fair enough. Kathryn was quite sure she’d never forgive herself, either.

  “Luca,” she said, and she didn’t care that her voice shook, that her eyes were blurry with tears, “you don’t have to do this.”

  He laughed. The derisive note in it scraped at her, as she supposed it was meant to do. “Your acting skills are impressive, Kathryn. Maybe far more impressive than I realized.”

  Her teeth ached. She realized she was gritting them. “You know perfectly well I was a virgin.”

  “I know that’s what you wanted me to think,” he threw back at her, his tone mild and unperturbed, though his eyes blazed. “But who can say what is true and what is one more bit of theater from one such as you? A DNA test is far more straightforward.”

  She shook her head at him, furious with herself that she was so susceptible to him. Furious that he always won. Always.

  Furious that despite everything, she’d forgotten that deep down, this man hated her. Everything else was sex. The truth was that Luca had always hated her and always would. And they’d made a child out of that. Out of her profound stupidity in the face of the one temptation she hadn’t denied herself.

  It only takes one mistake, her mother had always told her.

  And Kathryn had made it. But that didn’t mean she had to make another one. She’d told Luca she wanted to save herself. Now she had someone else to think about, and the best thing she could do for her baby was keep it the hell away from Luca Castelli and all that hate that burned in him like coals and never, ever went out.

  It didn’t matter that she thought she loved him. Maybe she did. But what mattered was what kind of life she could provide for the baby she carried. That swept over her with all the grace and conviction of a plan, as if this hadn’t been a mistake at all. As if she’d made this decision instead of having it thrust upon her.

  Kathryn supposed it didn’t matter either way. None of this mattered. Someday her child would tell the story of his or her father with a shrug, just as Kathryn did, and the world would go right on turning.

  Her broken heart didn’t matter to anyone. It never had.

  She cleared her throat and got on with it. “Let me make this simple, then,” she said, pleased her voice sounded, if not quite even, like hers again. “I quit. I’ll contact Rafael and let him know I’d prefer the bulk sum your father left me, and you’ll never see me again. Are you happy now?”

  If possible, his gaze got darker. More intense. The blast of his temper scorched her, the fire of it crowding her as if it had eaten the whole of Rome alive, the flames licking over her skin. She braced herself as if she expected him to haul off and hit her, because his gorgeously elegant fingers curled up into fists right there at his sides—

  But he didn’t hit her. Of course he didn’t hit her.

  That would have been easier to bear.

  Instead, Luca reached over, curled a hard hand around her neck and hauled her mouth to his.

  He tasted like sin and redemption, fury and betrayal, and Kathryn was a fool.

  An inexcusable fool, but she couldn’t stop kissing him back. Even if this was the last time.

  Or especially because it was the last time.

  He angled his jaw, taking her mouth as if he owned her, and the burn of it
flooded through her. He hauled her even closer, so her breasts were crushed against his chest, and she arched into him despite herself.

  Her heart kicked at her, a wild and desperate drumming.

  He sank his hands into her hair and he devoured her, kissing her again and again. Until she was pliant against him. Until she was kissing him back with the same wildfire, the same mindless need.

  And only then did he let her go.

  “Luca...” she whispered.

  But his face twisted with dislike and disillusion, and something so harsh it made her stomach ache.

  “Get out,” he told her, in a stranger’s pitiless voice that rocked through her like a terrible hurricane, destroying everything in its path. She knew she’d bear the mark of it forever, her own, secret scar. “And, Kathryn...”

  She waited, unable to see through the misery that clouded her eyes. Aware that she was trembling, and not sure she’d ever stop. The look he gave her ripped her apart, but when he spoke, his voice was arctic.

  “Don’t come back here. Ever.”

  * * *

  Three days later, Luca was seething his way through a meeting in his conference room when every mobile phone in his office blew up with texts and calls.

  His particularly.

  He grimly ignored it, gesturing for the man in front of him to continue his presentation. But as the meeting droned on, he saw entirely too much activity on the other side of the glass. His mobile kept buzzing.

  And finally, his senior PR person came and stood at the door with an expression on her face that boded nothing but ill.

  “Excuse me,” Luca said. “It appears I am needed.”

  He swiped his mobile from the tabletop and stepped out into the office, scowling at Isabella.

  “What is it?”

  “Ah, well.” She actually backed away from him. “The tabloids. I think you’d better look.”

  He refused to think her name, even though it burst through him then like a song. He felt that like another betrayal. His mobile vibrated in his hand, but he didn’t glance at it. Not with every person in his office trying so hard not to stare at him.