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CHAPTER FOUR

THREE HARD WEEKS and two days later, Kathryn boarded the Castelli family private jet on the airfield outside Rome, this time in her capacity as the most hated employee in Luca’s office. She marched up the folded-down stairs with her back straight and her head high—because that title, of course, was an upgrade compared to her previous role as the most hated stepmother in Castelli family history.

She thought she had this being-loathed thing under control.

It was all about the smile.

Kathryn smiled every time conversation halted abruptly when she entered a room. She smiled when her coworkers pretended they didn’t understand her and made her repeat her question once, then twice, so she’d feel foolish as her words hung there in the air between them. She smiled when she was ignored in meetings. She smiled when she was called on to answer questions about past projects she couldn’t possibly know anything about. She smiled when Luca berated her for allowing unrestricted access to him and she smiled brighter when he let his people in and out the side door of his office himself, so he could do it all over again.

She smiled and she smiled. The benefit of having been splashed across a thousand tabloids and held to be so good and so self-sacrificing was that she found she could use Saint Kate as a guide through each and every one of her chilly office interactions. Especially because she was well aware that the less she reacted, the more it annoyed her coworkers.

Luca, of course, was a different issue altogether.

She ducked into the plane and made her way into the upgraded living room space, smiling serenely as she took her seat on the curved leather sofa that commanded the center of the room. Luca was already sprawled out at one of the tables to the side that seated three apiece in luxurious leather armchairs, one hand in his hair as usual and the other clamping his mobile to his ear.

He eyed her as he finished his conversation in low Italian, and didn’t stop when it was done.

“You’re still here,” he said. Eventually.

She smiled brighter. “Of course. I told you I wouldn’t leave.”

“You can’t possibly have enjoyed these past few weeks, Kathryn.”

“You certainly went out of your way to make sure of that,” she agreed. She showed him her teeth. “Much appreciated.”

He frowned, and she smiled, and that went on for so long, she was tempted to turn on the big-screen television and ignore him—but that was not how an employee would behave, she imagined.

“You were at the office when I arrived this morning,” he said gruffly.

“Every morning.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m at the office when you arrive every morning,” Kathryn said mildly. “Your assistant can’t be late the way I was that first day, can she? It sends the wrong message.”

She didn’t expect him to admit that he’d deliberately kept her waiting that day, simply so he could chastise her for tardiness. He didn’t disappoint her, though there was a gleam she didn’t quite understand in his dark eyes as they remained level on hers.

“Surely you have other things to do with your time.” He waved a hand at her, as if she was displaying herself in a tiny string bikini rather than wearing another perfectly unobjectionable blouse and skirt, chosen specifically to blend in with everyone else and be unworthy of comment. “Trips to the places rich men frequent, the better to identify your next target, for example.”

“I had that all planned for this weekend, of course,” she said in her sweetest, most professional tone, “but then you scheduled this trip to California. I guess the gold digging will have to wait.”

He didn’t speak to her again until the plane reached its cruising altitude and the single, deferential air steward had set out trays of food for their dinner on the dark wood coffee table that sprawled in the center of the jet’s deeply comfortable and faintly decadent living room. Kathryn’s stomach rumbled at her, reminding her that she’d worked through lunch. And breakfast, for that matter, not that her dedication ever seemed to make a difference in Luca’s slippery slope of an office, where she literally could do no right.

You’re used to that, aren’t you? a voice inside her asked—but she shoved it away. Her mother’s disappointment in her hurt, yes, but it wasn’t invalid. Kathryn was well aware of her own deficiencies, and not only because she’d heard about them so often.

If she hadn’t been so deficient, she reminded herself, she wouldn’t have found marrying Gianni to be such a perfect option for her. She’d have excelled at her MBA the way she’d been supposed to do.

“Tell me the story,” Luca said after they’d eaten in silence for a while, surprising her.

He had a plate on the table before him and was lounging in his leather armchair as he picked languidly at it, but his seeming nonchalance didn’t make her heart beat any slower. Nor did it help matters that they were trapped in a plane together, and Kathryn couldn’t seem to make herself think about anything but that. All the gilt edges and wood accents and noncommercial setup and decor in the world couldn’t change the fact that she and Luca were suspended above the Atlantic Ocean in the dark, with no buffer between them.

Alone.

That hit her like a punch then slid down deep into her belly and pulsed there, as worrying as it was entirely too hot.

She had never actually been alone with Luca before.

There had always been someone else around. Always. Gianni. Some other member of the Castelli family. Staff. All the people in his office, especially because they all lived to catch her out in a misstep as she muddled her way through her first weeks on the job. Rafael and his family the week of the funeral, never more than a room or two away, liable to walk in at any moment.

This was the first time in over two years that it had ever been just the two of them.

There’s a pilot, she told herself as her heart slowed, then beat too hard against her ribs. You’re not really alone.

But she knew even as she thought it that it didn’t mean anything. Neither the pilot nor the air steward would disturb Luca unless he summoned them himself. She might as well have stranded herself on a desert island with the man.

That, she reflected helplessly, her mind suddenly full of images of a half-naked Luca gleaming beneath some far-off tropical sun, is not a helpful line of thought.

And there was a certain hunger in that dark gaze of his that made her think he was entertaining the same rush of images that she was.

“What story?” she asked, and hated how insubstantial her voice was. And the way his dark gaze sharpened at the sound, as if he knew why.

“The lovely and touching fairy tale of how an obviously virtuous young woman like yourself fell passionately in love with a man who could easily have fathered your parents, of course. What else?”

That was meant to insult her, Kathryn knew. But he’d never asked her that before. No one had. The entire world thought they knew exactly why a younger woman had married a much older man—and that wasn’t entirely untrue, of course. There were reasons, and some of those reasons were financial. But that didn’t mean it had been as cold or as calculated as Luca was determined to believe.

“It wasn’t a fairy tale,” she told him, tucking her feet up beneath her on the butter-soft leather sofa and smoothing the edges of her skirt down farther toward her knees. She frowned at him. “It was just...nice. I met him very much by accident at a facility that caters to seniors and people with degenerative health challenges.”

He didn’t quite snort at that. “How touching.”

“Surely you know that your father wasn’t well, Luca.” She shrugged. “He was visiting a specialist. I was in the waiting area and we got to talking.”

“You were there, one assumes, to gather some extra polish for your halo and crow about it to the tabloids?”

Kathryn thought of her mother, and the way her body had betrayed her, growing so old and knotted before her time. She thought of the gnarled hands that had scrubbed floors to give Kathryn every possible chance—I had plans for my life, Kathryn, Rose had always said in that sharp way of hers, but I put them aside for you.

How could Kathryn do anything less than the same in return for her?

“Something like that,” she said now, to this man who didn’t deserve to know anything about her mother or her struggles, or the choices Kathryn had made to honor the sacrifices that had been made for her, no matter how badly she’d done at that sometimes. “I do so prefer it when my halo shines, you know.”

Luca laughed—and it was that laugh. That famous spill of light and life and perfection, illuminating his face and making the air between them dance and shimmer for a long, taut moment before he stopped himself, as if he hadn’t realized what was happening.

But she could hoard it anyway, Kathryn thought, feeling dazed. She could hold it close. An unexpected gift she could take out and warm herself with during her next sleepless night—and this was not the time to ask herself why she thought anything this man did was a gift. Not when she knew he’d hate her even more for thinking such a thing.

“And a driving, inescapable passion for a septuagenarian overtook you in this waiting area?” he asked, his voice darker than before, his gaze much too shrewd. “I hear that happens. Though not often to young women in their twenties, unless, of course, you were discussing his net worth.”

“I liked him,” Kathryn said, and that was the truth about her marriage, no matter the extenuating circumstances. She shrugged. “He made me laugh and I made him laugh, too. It wasn’t seedy or mercenary, Luca, no matter how much you wish that it was. He was a good friend to me.”

A better friend than most, if she was honest.

“A good friend.”

“Yes.”

“My father. Gianni Castelli. A good friend.”

Kathryn sighed, and set her plate down on the coffee table, her appetite gone. “I take it you’ve decided in your infinite wisdom that this, too, must be impossible.”

Luca’s laugh this time was no gift. Not one anyone in her right mind would want anyway.

“My father was born into wealth, and his single goal was to expand it,” he told her harshly, the Italian inflection in his voice stronger than usual. “That was his art and his calling, and he dedicated himself to it with single-minded purpose from the time he could walk. His favorite hobby was marriage—the more inappropriate, the better. Do not beat yourself up. Most of his wives misunderstood the breakdown of his affections and attention.”

“I don’t think you knew your father very well,” Kathryn suggested. She lifted up her hands when Luca’s eyes blazed. “Not in the way I did. That’s all I mean.”

“You’re speaking of the two years of your acquaintance with him, as opposed to the whole of my life?”

“A son can’t possibly know the man his father was.” She lifted a shoulder then dropped it. “He can only know what kind of father he was or wasn’t, and piece together what clues he can about the man from that. Isn’t that the history of the world? No one ever knows their parents. Not really.”

She certainly didn’t know hers. Her father had buggered off before she was born, and her mother had given up everything that had mattered to her so Kathryn wouldn’t have to bear the weight of that. Kathryn knew the sacrifice. Her mother reminded her of what she’d left behind for Kathryn’s sake at every opportunity, and fair enough. But she still couldn’t say she understood the woman—much less the way she’d treated Kathryn all her life.

A muscle leaped in Luca’s lean jaw.

“I knew my father a great deal longer than you did,” he gritted out after a moment. “He had no friends, Kathryn. He had business associates and a collection of wives. Everyone in his life was accorded a role and expected to play it, and woe betide the fool who did not live up to his expectations.”

“Is that what this has been about all this time? All the hatred and the nastiness and the threats and so on?” she asked. She tilted her head to one side and said the thing she knew she shouldn’t. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “You...have daddy issues?”

The crack of his temper was very nearly audible. If the plane itself had been thrown off course and sent into a spiraling nosedive toward the ocean, she wouldn’t have been at all surprised—and it took Kathryn a long, tense, shuddering moment to understand that the jet they sat on was fine. The plane flew on, unaffected by the minor explosion that had taken over the cabin—and the aftershocks that were still rolling through her.

The only steep and terrible free fall was in her stomach as it plummeted to her feet.

Luca hadn’t moved. It only felt as if he had.

She watched, as fascinated as she was alarmed, as he tamped that bright current of fury down. He still didn’t move. He stared back at her as if he’d very much like to throttle her. One hand twitched as if he’d considered it. This suggested to her that she’d been more on target than she’d imagined when she’d said it.

But then he blinked and the crisis passed. There was only the usual force of his dislike staring back at her. That and the leftover adrenaline trickling through her veins, making her shift against the sofa cushions.

“Why me?” he asked, his dark voice a spiked thing as it slammed into her. “I’ve made no secret of my opinion of you. What sort of masochism led you to throw yourself in my path when you must know you’d have had a much better time in another branch of the company?”

“Is that a thinly veiled way of asking if I’m pursuing you for my usual gold-digging ends?” she asked, unable to tear her gaze from his and equally unsure why that was. Why did he invade her like this? Why did she feel as if he had more control over her than she did?

“Was it veiled, thinly or otherwise?” he asked, his voice soft. If no less harsh. “I must be doing it wrong.”

Kathryn’s smile felt forced, but she didn’t let it fade. She had the wild notion, suddenly, that it was all she had.

“I considered working for your brother, of course,” she said quietly. “I doubt he’s particularly fond of me, but there’s certainly none of...this.” She waved her hand between them, in that too-thick air and that taut electric storm that charged it. “It would have been easier, certainly.”

“Then, why?” Luca’s mouth curled into something much too dark to be any kind of smile, and the echo of it pulsed inside her. “To punish us both?”

“The fact is that your brother maintains the business and he’s very good at it,” Kathryn said. “He will make certain the Castelli name endures, that no ground will be lost on his watch. He’s a very steady hand on the wheel.”

“And I am what?” Luca didn’t quite laugh. “The drunken driver in this scenario? I drive too fast, Kathryn. But never drunk.”

“You’re the innovator,” she said quietly. It felt...dangerous to praise him to his face. To do something other than suffer through his darkness. “You’re the creative force in the company. Never satisfied. Always pushing a new boundary.” She shrugged, more uncomfortable than she could remember ever having been around him before, and that was saying something. “My personal feelings about you aside, there’s no more exciting place to work. You must know this. I assume that’s why all your employees are so—” Kathryn smiled that little bit brighter, and that, too, was harder than it should have been “—fiercely protective.”

Luca looked thrown, which she might have considered a victory at any other time—but there was something about the way he gazed at her then. It seemed to sneak into her, wrapping itself around her bones and drawing tight. Too tight.

“Can you do that?” he asked, his voice mild but with that something beneath it. “Put your personal feelings aside?”

She met his gaze. She didn’t flinch.

“I have to if I want this job to mean something,” Kathryn told him, aware as she spoke that this might have been the most honest she’d ever been with him. As if she had nothing to lose, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. This was her only chance to prove that she could make something of herself without her mother’s input or directives. This was her only chance to honor her mother’s sacrifices—and also stay free. “And I do. Unlike you, I don’t have a choice.”

* * *

The Castelli château, the center of Castelli Wine’s operations in the States, perched at the top of Northern California’s fertile Sonoma Valley like a particularly self-satisfied grande dame. The vineyards stretched out much like voluminous queenly skirts, rolling out over the hills in all directions, seeming to take over this part of the valley all the way to the horizon and back. Tonight the winery gleamed prettily through the crisp winter night, bright lights in every window as a line of cars snaked down the long drive between the marching rows of cypress trees.

Luca loved the unapologetic spectacle of it—the high Italianate drama in every detail, from the epic sweep of the house itself to the grounds kept in a condition to rival the Boboli Gardens in Florence, delighting the tourists on their wine-tasting tours of Sonoma—despite himself.

Tonight was the annual Castelli Wine Winter Ball. This was the reason Luca had flown across the world, landing only a scant hour earlier, which he was sure Rafael would think was cutting it a bit close. He and Rafael needed to make it abundantly clear to all and sundry that nothing had changed since Gianni’s passing. That everything was business as usual at Castelli Wine.

And as with most things in life, the more elegant and relaxed and attractive the face of a thing, the more people were likely to believe it.

Kathryn, Luca thought grimly, certainly proved that rule. And so did he. He banked on it, in fact.

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.