Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

by Caitlin Crews

  “My mother spent her life chasing the next high. Men. Drugs. Whatever. Your father gets married for sport. You call those flaws? I’d call it something more like pathological.”

  “Are you and I any better?” Rafael asked, and he couldn’t know, she thought, how much the heat of his hand warmed her. How much she wanted to simply topple into it and let him hold her there forever... He couldn’t possibly know that, could he?

  “That’s my point.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “I told you the truth and you wanted nothing to do with me. I told you I’d take your child away from you again and you’d let me do it. You and I are worse than our parents, Rafael. We’re much, much worse.”

  He shifted then, bringing his other hand up to hold her on the other side and tipping her face toward his.

  “No,” he said, in his uncompromising way. So certain. So ruthlessly sure. “We are not.”

  But she was warming to her theme, to that knotted thing inside her, as if it might choke her if she didn’t get all of this out.

  “And what I don’t understand is what it’s all for,” she threw at him. “What’s the point? The things you did or I did, then or now. The things anyone does. What is there to show for any of it?”

  “You,” Rafael said. “Me. Arlo.” He shrugged in that way of his, Italian and uncompromisingly male, his dark eyes fixed to hers. “This is what love is. This is what life is. Complicated. Brutal. Glorious.” His hands tightened and he drew her closer, until they stood in what was nearly a kiss. Nearly. “Ours, Lily. This is ours.”

  “Rafael...”

  “I will put you on that plane myself,” he gritted out. “If that’s what you want. If you really want to put this—me—behind you.”

  And she opened her mouth to tell him that was exactly what she wanted, but didn’t. She couldn’t, somehow. It all whirled around inside her. All the fear, the pain. The running and the hiding across all these years. The lies, then and now. Had she cut herself off from her life because of Rafael? Or had Rafael been the last strike in a life spent coming a distant second to whatever her mother was losing herself in that month?

  Maybe, just maybe, it was all the same running away.

  And maybe it was finally time she stopped.

  She’d never stopped loving this man. She’d simply never learned how to do it without losing everything in the process. Her life. Herself.

  “And if I don’t?” she dared to ask, if softly. “If I don’t want that?”

  Rafael studied her face for a long, long time. So long that Lily forgot everything except the stark male beauty of his face. So long that she forgot herself, too, all those dark things that crowded their past, and smiled up at him with every last bit of that shaking, knotted thing inside her that she was very much afraid was hope.

  And it was worth everything, she thought, to see that answering curve take over his face, transforming him before her eyes from that grim, hard man to the Rafael she’d loved before she’d known she shouldn’t. The Rafael who had been so beautiful to a sixteen-year-old girl that she hadn’t dared to look at him directly.

  As if she’d known even then that once she did, she’d never look away.

  “I want to make you smile, Lily. I want to make you happy.” His mouth brushed hers, a smile to a smile, and made her shiver deep inside. “But I don’t have the slightest idea how to do that.”

  So she wrapped her arms around his neck and she pulled him close, resting her forehead against his.

  “Love me,” she said, all of that emotion making her voice thick and her knees feel weak in turn. “I think that’s a good start.”

  “I always have,” he told her, his words resonating like a vow. “I always will.”

  She breathed in deep, then breathed out all the dark and the pain, the hurt and the fury. She let it go, like snow into the water of those dark Venice canals.

  “Rafael,” she whispered, “I’ve been in love with you all my life. I wouldn’t know how to go about stopping. I never have. I don’t think I ever will.”

  “I’ll make sure of it,” he promised her.

  And Lily didn’t know if he kissed her or she kissed him, only that they came together and this time, she felt that knotted thing open up, hope like light inside her and inside him, flooding them both. Love. Life. Complicated and wonderful—and for the first time in her life, she truly believed she could have all of those things. With him. Finally, with him.

  Rafael lifted her up into his arms and carried her across the room. Then he laid her down beneath the sparkling lights of the first Christmas tree that was truly theirs, on the very first day of the rest of their lives, and started working on forever.

  Kiss by perfect kiss.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR Arlo was his parents’ only attendant in their Christmas wedding, there in the chapel in the woods near the grand old house by the lake, in the shadow of those towering Italian mountains that felt like eternity.

  “I have something to tell you,” Rafael had told his son that first Christmas morning together, after the little boy had lost himself in a frenzy of gifts and wrapping paper and subsided to playing with his current favorite video game. That day.

  “Is it about cake?” Arlo had asked without setting the game aside. “I like cake. Yellow cake, but chocolate is okay.”

  “No,” Rafael had said, wondering how it had been possible to feel that awkward and yet that right at the same time. “I wanted to tell you that I’m your father.”

  Lily had been sitting there on the couch, pretending not to listen. She’d been doing it loudly.

  Arlo had seemed preoccupied with his game. Then he’d asked, “Forever?” after considering the matter.

  “Yes,” Rafael had told him solemnly. “Forever. That’s how it works.”

  “Cool,” Arlo had said, and that had been that.

  His mother had been a different matter.

  Rafael gazed at her now as she took one of Arlo’s hands and he took the other. They smiled at each other as they walked toward the priest who waited for them at the small altar.

  “Marry me because you want to,” he’d said as Christmas gave way into the brand-new year. They were still together. They were filled with that half hope, half certainty that their complicated past meant they’d already weathered the worst storms anyone could. “Not because I told you to.”

  “Because your son must have your name?” she’d replied lightly, with that teasing glint in her blue eyes but, he thought, something more serious beneath it.

  “My son will have my name,” Rafael had assured her, every inch of him the powerful head of his family’s fortune. And the man who loved them both. “It is only a question of when.”

  But it turned out Lily thought there was some ground to cover first.

  There was the issue of her resurrection, first and foremost. For Arlo’s sake, they decided to say she’d had amnesia all these years. That running into Rafael on the street had jolted her back to herself.

  “And in a way,” Lily told him one night as they lay tangled together in his house in San Francisco, “that’s even true.”

  “It’s the kinder story to tell,” Rafael had agreed, smoothing a hand down the length of her lovely back. “For all of us.”

  She’d fielded questions from all sides, and not all of it the media. Her old friends, who’d mourned her death and now wanted nothing but to bask in her return. All the various parts of the life she’d left behind and found so different now that she’d come back to it. She’d discovered her time running Pepper’s kennels gave her rather more managerial skills than she’d imagined they might, and when a position came up at the Castelli Wine corporate office in Sonoma, she took it. She’d visited her mother’s grave and told Rafael that she found some comfort in knowing that the
woman was finally at peace.

  But it was dealing with his family that she was the most worried about, he knew.

  It helped, Rafael thought, that they’d already had a son. There was no hoping the family would get used to the idea—there was a little boy who didn’t care whom his grandparents had been married to before his birth.

  And after the initial shock, Gianni Castelli had shrugged in a rueful way of his that reminded Rafael of when his father had been a younger man. The child bride—Corinna—had been having a loud conversation on her mobile phone out in the abundant sunshine that danced through the cypress trees at the Sonoma Valley château, and Gianni had gazed at her fondly before turning his gaze back to his son.

  “Love levels every one of us, one way or another,” he said. “It helps if you don’t brace yourself against the fall. You’re more likely to break something that way. Better by far to let gravity do what it will. It will anyway.”

  Luca, of course, had merely laughed. Then clapped Rafael on the back, hard. Then laughed again, but that time, Rafael had laughed with him.

  Lily reconnected with Pepper under her real name, and even tracked down the sweet Canadian couple who had spirited her out of California that fateful night, finally able to pay them back for their kindness to her.

  And then, on an autumn day in the south of France where they’d flown for a wine show, she’d finally agreed to marry him.

  “I don’t know what took you so long,” Rafael said gruffly.

  “Because,” she said fiercely, stopping dead in the middle of a bustling market in Nice to look up at him solemnly, “I wanted to be sure this time.”

  He’d been unable to keep himself from touching her. He hadn’t tried. “That I wouldn’t run away?”

  “That I wouldn’t,” she said softly, and she smiled up at him, her strawberry blond hair like a halo in the fine French light. “And I won’t, Rafael. Not ever again.”

  And so at last they stood there in the small chapel and recited their vows, to each other and for their son. When they were finally husband and wife, they walked back to the house while Arlo ran on ahead, pressing their shoulders together the way they had long ago. Inside, the rest of the family waited to join in the celebration and tip it straight into Christmas, but first, Rafael stopped her at the door before she would have gone in.

  It was cold, but when he held out his hand, palm facing her, she met it with hers.

  This was who they were. This heat. This connection. It had defied their scandalous beginnings, the possibility of death and far too many lies. It had endured when they didn’t trust each other at all, and while they’d taught each other how to smile.

  “All the rest of our days,” Rafael said. “Mi appartieni.”

  “And you belong to me,” Lily agreed, the glimmer of tears in her gorgeous blue eyes. “Forever.”

  And then he took her hand in his, his wife at last, and led them safely home.

  * * * * *

  If you loved Rafael’s story, you won’t want to miss his brother Luca’s!

  CASTELLI’S VIRGIN WIDOW by Caitlin Crews

  Available in February 2016!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from A MARRIAGE FIT FOR A SINNER by Maya Blake.

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  A Marriage Fit for a Sinner

  by Maya Blake

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘ONE PLATINUM CHRONOGRAPH WATCH. A pair of diamond-studded cufflinks. Gold signet ring. Six hundred and twenty-five pounds cash, and...Obsidian Privilege Card. Right, I think that’s everything, sir. Sign here to confirm return of your property.’

  Zaccheo Giordano didn’t react to the warden’s sneer as he scrawled on the barely legible form. Nor did he react to the resentful envy in the man’s eyes when his gaze drifted to where the sleek silver limousine waited beyond three sets of barbed wire.

  Romeo Brunetti, Zaccheo’s second-in-command and the only person he would consider draping the term friend upon, stood beside the car, brooding and unsmiling, totally unruffled by the armed guard at the gate or the bleak South East England surroundings.

  Had Zaccheo been in an accommodating mood, he’d have cracked a smile.

  But he wasn’t in an accommodating mood. He hadn’t been for a very long time. Fourteen months, two weeks, four days and nine hours to be exact. Zaccheo was positive he could count down to the last second if required.

  No one would require it of him, of course. He’d served his time. With three and a half months knocked off his eighteen-month sentence for good behaviour.

  The rage fused into his DNA bubbled beneath his skin. He showed no outward sign of it as he pocketed his belongings. The three-piece Savile Row suit he’d entered prison in stank of decay and misery, but Zaccheo didn’t care.

  He’d never been a slave to material comforts. His need for validation went far deeper. The need to elevate himself into a better place had been a soul-deep pursuit from the moment he was old enough to recognise the reality of the life he’d been born into. A life that had been a never-ending whirlpool of humiliation, violence and greed. A life that had seen his father debased and dead at thirty-five.

  Memories tumbled like dominoes as he walked down the harshly lit corridor to freedom. He willed the overwhelming sense of injustice that had festered for long, harrowing months not to explode from his pores.

  The doors clanged shut behind him.

  Zaccheo froze, then took his first lungful of free air with fists clenched and eyes shut. He absorbed the sound of birds chirping in the late-winter morning sun, listened to the distant rumble of the motorway as he’d done many nights from his prison cell.

  Opening his eyes, he headed towards the fifteen-foot gate. A minute later, he was outside.

  ‘Zaccheo, it’s good to see you again,’ Romeo said gravely, his eyes narrowing as he took him in.

  Zaccheo knew he looked a sight. He hadn’t bothered with a razor blade or a barber’s clippers in the last three months and he’d barely eaten once he’d unearthed the truth behind his incarceration. But he’d spent a lot of time in the prison gym. It’d been that or go mad with the clawing hunger for retribution.

  He shrugged off his friend’s concern and moved to the open door.

  ‘Did you bring what I asked for?’ he asked.

  Romeo nodded. ‘Sì. All three files are on the laptop.’

  Zaccheo slid onto the plush leather seat. Romeo slid in next to him and poured them two glasses of Italian-made cognac.

  ‘Salute,’ Romeo muttered.

  Zaccheo took the drink without responding, threw back the amber liquid and allowed the scent of power and affluence—the tools he’d need for his plan to succeed—to wash over him.

  As the low hum of the luxury engine whisked him away from the place he’d been forced to call home for over a year, Zaccheo reached for the laptop.

  Icy rage trembled through his fingers as the Giordano Worldwide Inc. logo flickered to life. His life’s work, almost decimated through another’s greed and lust for power. It was only with Romeo’s help that GWI hadn’t gone under in the months after Zaccheo had been sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He drew quiet satisfaction that no
t only had GWI survived—thanks to Romeo—it had thrived.

  But his personal reputation had not.

  He was out now. Free to bring those culpable to justice. He didn’t plan on resting until every last person responsible for attempting to destroy his life paid with the destruction of theirs.

  Shaking out his hand to rid it of its tremble, he hit the Open key.

  The information was thorough although Zaccheo knew most of its contents. For three months he’d checked and double-checked his sources, made sure every detail was nailed down tight.

  He exhaled at the first picture that filled his screen.

  Oscar Pennington III. Distant relative to the royal family. Etonian. Old, if spent, money. Very much part of the establishment. Greedy. Indiscriminate. His waning property portfolio had received a much-needed injection of capital exactly fourteen months and two weeks ago when he’d become sole owner of London’s most talked about building—The Spire.

  Zaccheo swallowed the savage growl that rumbled from his soul. Icily calm, he flicked through pages of Pennington celebrating his revived success with galas, lavish dinner parties and polo tournaments thrown about like confetti. One picture showed him laughing with one of his two children.

  Sophie Pennington. Private education all the way to finishing school. Classically beautiful. Ball-breaker. She’d proven beyond a doubt that she had every intention of becoming Oscar’s carbon copy.

  Grimly, he closed her file and moved to the last one.

  Eva Pennington.

  This time the growl couldn’t be contained. Nor could he stem the renewed shaking in his hand as he clicked her file.

  Caramel-blonde hair tumbled down her shoulders in thick, wild waves. Dark eyebrows and lashes framed moss-green eyes, accentuated dramatically with black eyeliner. Those eyes had gripped his attention with more force than he’d been comfortable with the first time he’d looked into them. As had the full, bow-shaped lips currently curved in a smouldering smile. His screen displayed a head-and-shoulders shot, but the rest of Eva Pennington’s body was imprinted indelibly on Zaccheo’s mind. He didn’t struggle to recall the petite, curvy shape, or that she forced herself to wear heels even though she hated them, in order to make herself taller.