There was nothing to do but surrender. To the molten fire that rolled through her. To the heaviness in her breasts, pressed hard against his chest. And to that restless, edgy, weighted thing that sank low into her belly and then pulsed hot.

Needy. Insistent.

And Kathryn forgot.

She forgot who he was. That she had been his stepmother for two years even though he was some eight years older than she was. She forgot that in addition to being her harshest critic and her bitter enemy, through no fault of her own Luca was now going to be her boss.

She forgot everything but the taste of him.

That harsh, sweet magic he made … the way he commanded her and compelled her—as if he knew the things her body wanted and could do when she had no idea. When she was simply lost—adrift in the fire.

USA TODAY bestseller and RITA® Award-nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

Castelli’s Virgin Widow

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my wonderful editor Flo Nicoll for our fantastic year together!

Thank you so much for taking such great care of me—and my books!

Contents

Cover

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

“PLEASE TELL ME this is a bad attempt at levity, Rafael. A practical joke from the least likely clown in Italy.”

Luca Castelli made no attempt to temper his harsh tone or the scowl he could feel on his face as he glared across the private library at his older brother. Rafael was also his boss and the head of the family company, a state of affairs that usually did not trouble Luca at all.

But there was nothing usual about today.

“I wish that it was,” Rafael said from where he sat in an armchair in front of a bright and cheerful fire that did nothing at all to dispel Luca’s sense of gloom and fury. “Alas. When it comes to Kathryn, we have no choice.”

His brother looked like a monk carved from stone today, his features hewn from granite, which only added to Luca’s sense of betrayal and sheer wrongness. That was the old Rafael, that heavy, joyless creature made entirely of bitterness and regret. Not the Rafael of the past few years, the one Luca greatly preferred, who had married the love of his life he’d once thought dead and was even now expecting his third child with her.

Luca hated that grief had thrown them all so far back into unpleasant history. Luca hated grief, come to that. No matter its form.

Their father, the infamous Gianni Castelli, who had built an empire of wine and wealth and brusque personality that spanned at least two continents, but was better known around the world for his colorful marital life, was dead.

Outside, January rain lashed the windows of the old Castelli manor house that sprawled with such insouciance at the top of an alpine lake in Northern Italy’s Dolomite Mountains, as it had done for generations. The heavy clouds were low over the water, concealing the rest of the world from view, as if to pay tribute to the old man as he’d been interred in the Castelli mausoleum earlier this morning.

Ashes rendered ashes and dust forever dust.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

Rafael, who had been acting CEO of the family business for years now despite Gianni’s blustery refusal to formally step aside, was now indisputably in charge. That meant Luca was the newly minted chief operating officer, a title that did not come close to describing his pantheon of responsibilities as co-owner but was useful all the same. Luca had initially thought these finicky bits of official business were a good thing for the Castelli brothers as well as the company, not to mention long overdue, given they’d both been acting in those roles ever since the start of their father’s decline in health some years back.

Until now.

“I fail to understand why we cannot simply pay the damned woman off like all the rest of the horde of ex-wives,” Luca said, aware that his tone was clipped and bordering on unduly aggressive. He felt restless and edgy in his position on the low couch opposite Rafael, but he knew if he moved, it would end badly. A fist through a wall. An upended bookshelf. A broken pane of glass. All highly charged reactions he did not care to explore, much less explain to his brother—given they smacked of a loss of control, which Luca did not allow. Ever. “Settle some of Father’s fortune on her, send her on her way and be done with it.”

“Father’s will is very clear in regard to Kathryn,” Rafael replied, and he sounded no happier about it than Luca felt. Luca told himself that was something anyway. “And she is his widow, Luca. Not his ex-wife. A crucial distinction.”

Luca nearly growled but checked it at the last moment. “That’s nothing but semantics.”

“Sadly not.” Rafael shook his head, but his gaze never left Luca’s. “The choice is hers. She can either accept a lump settlement now, or a position in the company. She chose the latter.”

“This is ridiculous.”

It was something far worse than merely ridiculous, but Luca didn’t have a word to describe that gnawing, hollow thing inside him that always yawned open at any mention of his father’s sixth and final wife. Kathryn.

The one who was even now in the larger, more formal library downstairs, crying what appeared to be real tears over the death of a husband three times her age she could only have married for the most cynical of reasons. Luca had seen them trickle silently down her cheeks, one after the next, as they’d all stood about in the frigid air earlier, giving the impression she could not manage to contain her grief.

He didn’t believe it. Not for a second.

If Luca knew anything, it was this: the kind of love that might lead to such grieving was rare, exceedingly unlikely and had never made a great many appearances in the Castelli family. He thought Rafael’s current happiness was perhaps the only evidence of it in generations.

“For all we know, Father found her hawking her wares on the streets of London,” he muttered now. Then glared at his brother. “What the hell will I do with her in the office? Do we even know if she can read?”

Rafael shifted, the dark eyes that were so much like Luca’s own narrow and shrewd. “You will find something to keep her busy, because the will assures her three years of employment. Ample time to introduce her to the joys of the written word, I’d think. And whether you like her or not is irrelevant.”

Like was not at all the word Luca would have used to describe what happened inside him at the mention of that woman. It wasn’t even close.

“I have no feelings about her whatsoever.” Luca let out a laugh that sounded hollow to his own ears. “What is one more child bride—acquired solely to cater to the old man’s ego—to me?”

His brother only gazed at him for a moment that seemed to stretch on for far too long. The old windows rattled. The fire crackled and spat. And Luca found he had no desire whatsoever to hear whatever his older brother might say next. He’d preferred Rafael when he’d been lost in a prison of fury and regret, he told himself, and unable to concentrate on anything outside his own pain. At least then he’d been a known quantity. This new Rafael was entirely too insightful.

“If you are determined to do this,” he said before Rafael could open his mouth and say things Luca would have to fend off, “why not set her up with something in Sonoma? She can get a hands-on experience at the vineyards in California, just as we did when we were boys. It can be a delightful holiday for her, far, far away.”

From me, he did not say. Far, far away from me.

Rafael shrugged. “She chose Rome.”

Rome. Luca’s city. Luca’s side of their highly competitive wine business. The marketing power and global reach of the Castelli Wine brand were, he flattered himself, all his doing—and possible in large part because he’d been left to his own devices for years. He had certainly not been required to play babysitter for one of his father’s legion of mistakes.

His father’s very worst mistake, to his way of thinking. In a lifetime of so very many—including Luca himself, he’d long thought. He knew his father would have agreed.

“There’s no room,” he said now. “The team is lean, focused and entirely handpicked. There’s no place for a bit of fluff on sabbatical from her true vocation as an old man’s trophy.”

Rafael was his boss then, he could see. Not his brother.

And entirely pitiless. “You’ll have to make room.”

Luca shook his head. “It may set us back months, if not years, and cause incalculable damage in the process as we try to arrange the team around such a creature and what are sure to be her many, many mistakes.”

“I trust you’ll ensure that none of that happens,” Rafael said drily. “Or do you doubt your own abilities?”

“This sort of vulgar nepotism will likely cause a riot—”

“Luca.” Rafael’s voice was not loud, but it silenced Luca all the same. “Your objections are noted. But you are not seeing the big picture.”

Luca tried to contain the seething thing within that pushed out from the darkest part of him and threatened to take him over. He thrust his legs out in front of him and raked a hand through his hair as if he was languid. Indolent. Unbothered by all of this, despite his arguments.

The role he’d been playing all his life. He had no idea why it had become so difficult these past couple of years to maintain his profoundly unconcerned facade. Why it had started to feel as if it was more of a cage than a retreat.

“Enlighten me,” he said, mildly enough, when he was certain he could manage to speak in his usual half bored, half amused tone.

Rafael did not look fooled. But he only picked up his glass from the antique side table and swirled the amber liquid within.

“Kathryn has captured the public’s interest,” he said after a moment. “I shouldn’t have to remind you of that. Saint Kate has been on every cover of every tabloid since the news of Father’s death broke. Her grief. Her selflessness. Her true love for the old man against all odds. Et cetera.”

“You will excuse me if I am skeptical about the truth of her devotion.” At least he sounded far more amused than he felt. “To put it mildly. The truth of her interest in his bank account I find a far more convincing tale, if less entertaining.”

“The truth is malleable and has little to do with the story that ends up splashed across every gossip site and magazine in existence,” Rafael said, and there was the hint of a rueful smile on his face when he looked at Luca again. “No one knows this better than me. Can we really complain if this time the coverage is not exactly in our favor?”

Luca wasn’t sure he found his latest stepmother’s obvious manipulation of the press to be in the same realm as the stories Rafael and his wife, Lily—who also happened to be their former stepsister, because the Castelli family tree was nothing if not tangled and bent back on itself—had told to explain the fact she’d been thought dead for five years.

But he thought better of saying anything.

After a moment, Rafael continued, “The reality is this. Even though you and I have been running things for years now, the perception from the outside is very different. Father’s death gives anyone and everyone the opportunity to make grand claims about how his upstart, ungrateful sons will ruin what he built. If we are seen to shun Kathryn, to treat her badly, that can only reflect negatively on us and add fuel to that fire.” He set his glass down without drinking from it. “I want no fuel, no fire. Nothing the tabloids can sink their dirty little claws into. You understand. This is necessary.”

What Luca understood was that this was a directive. From the chief executive officer of Castelli Wine and the new official head of his family to one among his many underlings. The fact that Luca owned half of the company did not change the fact he answered to Rafael. And that none of this sat well with him didn’t alter the fact that Rafael wasn’t asking his opinion on the matter.

He was delivering an order.

Luca stood abruptly, before he said things he wasn’t sure he meant in an effort to sway his brother’s opinion. Rafael stayed where he was.

“I don’t like this,” Luca said quietly. “It can’t end well.”

“It must end well,” Rafael countered. “That’s the whole point.”

“I’ll remind you that this was entirely your idea when it becomes a vast and unconquerable disaster, sinking the whole of Castelli Wine in the wake of this woman’s incompetence,” Luca said, and started for the door. He needed to do something. Run for miles and miles. Swim even farther. Lift very heavy weights or find a willing and eager woman. Anything but stay here and brood about this terrible new reality. “We can discuss it as we plummet to the bottom of the sea. In pieces.”

Rafael laughed.

“Kathryn is not our Titanic, Luca,” he said, and there was a note Luca did not like at all in his voice. Rafael tilted his head slightly to one side. “But perhaps you think she’s yours?”

What Luca thought was that he could do without his brother’s observations today—and on any day, should those observations involve Kathryn, who was without doubt the bane of his existence.

Damn that woman. And damn his father for foisting her upon his sons in the first place.

He left Rafael behind in the private library with a rude hand gesture that made his brother laugh, and headed downstairs through the grand old hallways of the ancient house that he hardly noticed the details of anymore. The portraits cluttering the walls. The statuary by this or that notable Italian artist flung about on every flat surface. It was all the same as it had been before Luca had been born, and the same as it would be when Rafael’s eldest son, Arlo, was a grandfather. Castellis endured, no matter the messes they made.

He imagined that meant he would, too, despite this situation.

Somehow.

He heard Lily’s voice as he passed one of the reception rooms and glanced in, seeing his pregnant sister-in-law, some six months along, having one of her “discussions” with eight-year-old Arlo and two-year-old Renzo about appropriate behavior. Luca hid a grin as he passed, thinking the lecture sounded very similar to ones he’d received in the very same place when he’d been a child. Not from his mother, who had abdicated that position as quickly as possible following Luca’s birth, or from his father, who had been far too important to trouble himself with domestic arrangements or child rearing. He’d been raised by a parade of well-meaning staff and a series of stepmothers with infinitely more complicated motives.

Perhaps that was where he’d learned his lifelong aversion to complications.

And to stepmothers, for that matter.

Luca had grown up in the midst of a very messy family who’d broadcasted their assorted private dramas for all the world to see, no matter if the relentless publicity had made it all that much worse. He’d hated it. He preferred things clean and easy. Orderly. No fusses. No melodrama. No theatrics that ended up splashed across the papers, the way everything always did in the Castelli family, and were then presented in the most hideous light imaginable. He didn’t mind that he was seen as one of the world’s foremost playboys—hell, he’d cultivated that role so no one would ever take him seriously, an asset in business as well as in his personal life. He didn’t break hearts—he simply didn’t traffic in the kind of emotional upheavals that had marked every other member of his family, again and again and again. No, thank you.

But Kathryn was a different story, he thought as he made his way to the grand library on the ground floor and saw the slight figure standing all alone in the farthest corner, staring out at the rain and the fog as if she was competing with it for the title of Most Desolate. Kathryn was more than a mess.

Kathryn was a disaster.

He wasn’t the least bit surprised that Saint Kate, as she’d been dubbed around the world for her supposed martyrdom to the cause that was old Gianni Castelli and his considerable fortune, was all over the papers this week. Kathryn did convincingly innocent and easily wounded so well that Luca had always thought she’d have been much better off dedicating her life to the stage.

Though he supposed she had, really. Playing the understanding mistress and undemanding trophy wife to a man so much older than her twenty-five years was a performance all its own. What Luca couldn’t understand was why an obvious trollop like Kathryn made his skin feel too tight against his frame and his hands itch to test the smoothness of hers, even now. It didn’t make any sense, this stretched-taut, heavy thing in him that nothing—not time, not space, not the odious fact of her marriage to his own father, not even the prospect of her polluting the refuge of his office in Rome—ever eased or altered in any way.

He glared at her from the doorway, down the length of the great room with so many books lining the floor-to-ceiling shelves, as if he could make it disappear. Or barring that, make her disappear.

But he knew better.

It had always been like this.

Luca’s father had made a second career out of marrying a succession of unsuitable younger women who’d let him act the savior. He’d thrived on it. Gianni had never had much time for his sons or the first wife he’d shunted out of sight into a mental institution and mourned very briefly after her death, if at all. But for his parade of mistresses and wives with their endless needs and worries and crises and melodramas? He had been always and ever available to play the benevolent God, solver of all calamities, able to sort out all manner of troubles with a wave of his debit card.

When Gianni had arrived back in Italy a scant month after his fifth wife had divorced him with his sixth wife in tow, Luca hadn’t been particularly surprised.

“There is a new bride,” Rafael had told him darkly when Luca had arrived in the Dolomites as summoned that winter morning two years ago. “Already.”

Luca had rolled his eyes. What else was there to do?

“Is this one of legal age?”

Rafael had snorted. “Barely.”

“She’s twenty-three,” the very pregnant Lily had said reprovingly, her hands on the protruding belly that would shortly become Renzo. She’d glared at both of them. “That’s hardly a child. And she seems perfectly nice.”

“Of course she seems nice,” Rafael had retorted, and had only grinned at the look Lily had thrown at him, the connection between them as bright and shining as ever, as if Castellis could actually make something good from one of their grand messes after all. “That is her job, is it not?”

Luca had prepared himself for a stepmother much like the last occupant of the role, the sharp blonde creature whom Gianni had inexplicably adored despite the fact she’d spent more time on her mobile or propositioning his sons than she had with him. Corinna had been nineteen when she’d married Gianni and already a former swimsuit model. Luca hadn’t imagined his father had chosen her for her winning personality or depth of character.

But instead of another version of fake-breasted and otherwise entirely plastic Corinna, when he’d strode into the library where his father waited with Arlo, he’d found Kathryn.

Kathryn, who should not have been there.

That had been his first thought, like a searing blaze through his mind. He’d stopped, thunderstruck, halfway across the library floor and scowled at the woman who’d stood there smiling politely at him in that reserved British way of hers. Until his inability to do anything but glower at her had made that curve of her lips falter, then straighten into a flat line.

She doesn’t belong here, he’d thought again, harsher and more certain. Not standing next to his old, crotchety father tucked up in his armchair before the fire, all wrinkles and white hair and fingers made of knots, thanks to years of arthritis. Not wringing her hands together in front of her like some kind of awkward schoolgirl instead of resorting to the sultry, come-hither glances Luca’s stepmothers normally threw his way.

Not his stepmother.

That thought had been the loudest.

Not her.

Her hair was an inky dark brown that looked nearly black, yet showed hints of gold when the firelight played over it. It poured down past her shoulders, straight and thick, and was cut into a long fringe over smoky-gray eyes that edged toward green. She wore a simple pair of black trousers and a cleanly cut caramel-colored sweater open over a soft knit top that made no attempt whatsoever to showcase her cleavage. She looked elegantly efficient, not plastic or cheap in any way. She was small and fine boned, all big gray eyes and that dark hair and then, of course, there was her mouth.

Her mouth.

It was the mouth of a sulky courtesan, full and suggestive, and for a long, shocking moment, Luca had the strangest notion that she had no idea of its carnal wallop. That she was an innocent—but that had been absurd, of course. Wishful thinking, perhaps. No innocent married a very rich man old enough to be her own grandfather.

“Luca,” Gianni had barked, in English for his new wife’s benefit. “What is the matter with you? Show some manners. Kathryn is my wife and your new stepmother.”

It had filled Luca with a kind of terrible smoke. A black, choking fury he could not have named if his life had depended upon it.

He hadn’t been aware that he was moving, only that he’d been across the room and then was right there in front of her, looming over her, dwarfing her with his superior height and size—

Not that she’d backed down. Not Kathryn.

He’d seen far too much in those expressive eyes of hers, wide with some kind of distress. And awareness—he’d seen the flare of it, followed almost instantly by confusion. But instead of simpering or shifting her body to better advantage or sizing him up in any way, she’d squared her slender shoulders and stuck out her hand.

“Pleased to meet you,” she’d said, her English-accented voice brisk. Matter-of-fact. The sound of it had fallen through him like a hail of ice and had done nothing to soothe that fire in him at all.

Luca had taken her hand, though he’d known it was a terrible mistake.

And he’d been right. It had been.

He’d felt the drag of her skin against his, palm to palm, like a long, slow lick down the length of his sex. He should have jerked his hand away. Instead, he’d held her tighter, feeling her delicacy, her heat and, more telling, that wild tumult of her pulse in her wrist. Her lips had parted as if she’d felt it, too.

He’d had to remind himself—harshly—that they were not only not alone, she was also not free.

She was something a whole lot worse than not free, in fact.

“It is my pleasure, Stepmother,” he’d said, his voice low and dark, that terrible fire in him shooting like electricity all through his limbs and then into her. He’d seen her stiffen—whether in shock at his belligerence or with that same stunned awareness that stampeded in him, he’d never know. “Welcome to the family.”

And it had been downhill from there.

All leading him here. To the same library, two years later, where Kathryn stood like a lonely wraith in a simple black dress that somehow made her look fragile and too pretty at once, her dark hair clipped back and no hint of color on her face below that same inky fringe that kissed the tops of her eyelashes.

She was gazing off into the distance through the windows that opened up over the lake, and she looked genuinely sad. As if she truly mourned Gianni, the man she’d used shamelessly for her own ends—ends that, apparently, included forcing herself into Luca’s office against his will.

And it enraged him.

He told himself that was the thing that washed over him then, digging in its claws. Rage. Not that far darker, far more dangerous thing that lurked in him, as much that terrible hunger he’d prefer to deny as it was the familiar companion of his own self-loathing.

“Come, now, Kathryn,” Luca said into the heavy quiet of the book-lined room, making his voice a dark and lazy thing just this side of insulting, and taking note of how she instantly stiffened against it. Against him. “The old man is dead and the reporters have gone home. Who is this maudlin performance for?”

CHAPTER TWO

LUCA CASTELLI’S TRADEMARK GROWL, his English laced with an undercurrent of both his native Italian and that particular harsh ruthlessness that Kathryn had only ever heard directed at her, jolted through her like an electric shock.

She jerked where she stood near the library window, actually jumping in a way he’d be unlikely to miss, even from all the way on the other side of the long, luxurious, stunningly appointed room.

Well done, she thought, despairing of herself anew. Now he knows exactly how much he gets to you.

She didn’t expect that anything she did would make this man like her. Luca had made it clear that could never happen. Over and over and over again, these past two years. But she wanted him—needed him—not to actively hate her as she started this new phase of her life.

Kathryn figured that was better than nothing. As good a start as she could hope for, really. And her mother certainly hadn’t raised her to be a coward, despite how disappointing she knew she’d always been. Rose Merchant had never let hardship get between her and what needed to be done, as she’d reminded Kathryn at every opportunity. Forging ahead into the corporate world the way Rose hadn’t been able to do with a child to raise all on her own was, truly, the least Kathryn could do to honor all of her sacrifices.

And to assuage the guilt she felt about her marriage to Gianni—the one time “honoring her mother’s sacrifices” had allowed her to do something purely for herself, too. But she couldn’t let herself think about that too closely. It made her feel much too ungrateful.

Kathryn straightened from her place at the window, aware that her movements were jerky and awkward, the way she always seemed to be around this man, who noticed every last embarrassing detail about her and never hesitated to use each and every one of them against her. She nervously smoothed down the front of her dress. Nervously and also carefully, as if the dress was a talisman.

She’d agonized over what to wear today because she’d wanted to look as unlike the gold-digging whore she knew the family—Luca—thought she was as possible. And still, she was terribly afraid she’d ended up looking rather more like a poor man’s version of an Audrey Hepburn wannabe instead. The papers would trumpet that possibility, call it an homage to Audrey or something equally embarrassing, and Luca would assume it was all part of a deliberate campaign toward some grim end he believed she’d been angling toward since the start, rather than simply riding out the attention as best she could. The cycle of his bitter condemnation would continue, turning and turning without end...

But she was delaying the inevitable. She’d always wanted a chance to prove herself, to work on the creative side of a corporation and try her hand at something fun and interesting like marketing or branding instead of the deadly dull figures at which she was utterly hopeless. She’d spent her whole marriage excited at the prospect of working in the family company with Luca and his creative genius.

Even if, other than that corporate flair of his, he was pretty much just awful. She assured herself powerful men often were. That Luca was run-of-the-mill in that sense.

Kathryn took a deep breath, resolutely squared her shoulders and turned to face her own personal demon at last.

“Hello, Luca,” she said across the acres of space that separated them in this vast room, and she was proud of herself. She sounded so calm, so cool, when she was anything but.

For any number of reasons, but mostly because looking at Luca Castelli was like staring directly into the sun. It had been from the start.

And as usual, she was instantly dizzy.

Luca moved like a terrible shadow across the library floor, and tragically, he was as beautiful as ever. Tall and solid and impressively athletic, his rangy form was sculpted to lean, male perfection and was routinely celebrated in slick, photo-heavy tabloid exultations across at least five continents. His thick black hair always looked messy, as if he lived such a reckless, devil-may-care life that it required he run his hands through it all the time and rake it back from his darkly handsome face as punctuation to every sentence—despite the fact he was now the chief operating officer of the family company.

Even here, on the day of his father’s funeral, where he wore a dark suit that trumpeted his rampant masculinity and excellent taste in equal measure, he gave off that same indolent air. That lazy, playful, perpetually relaxed state that only a man cresting high on the wealth of generations of equally affluent and pedigreed ancestors could achieve. As if no matter what he was actually doing, some part of him was always lounging about on a yacht somewhere with a cold drink in his hand and women presenting themselves for his pleasure. He had the look of a man who lived forever on the verge of laughter, deep and whole bodied, from his gorgeous mouth to his flashing dark eyes.

Kathryn had seen a hundred pictures of him exactly like that, lighting up the whole of the Amalfi Coast and half of Europe with that irrepressible gleam of his—

Except, of course, when he looked at her.

The scowl he wore now did nothing to make him any less beautiful. Nothing could. But it made Kathryn shake deep, deep inside, as if she’d lost control of her own bones. She wanted to bolt. She might have, if that wouldn’t have made this whole situation that much worse.

Besides, if she’d learned anything these past two years, it was that there was no outrunning Luca Castelli. There was no outmaneuvering him. There was only surviving him.

“Hello, Stepmother,” he said, that awful dark thing in his voice wrapping around her and sinking hot and blackened tendrils of something like shame into every part of her body, so deep it hurt to breathe. He seemed unaffected as ever, sauntering toward her with his usual deceptively lazy deadliness and those dark eyes so burning hot she could feel them punching into her from afar. “Or should we concoct a different title for you? The Widow Castelli has a certain gothic ring to it. I think. I’ll have it engraved on your business cards.”

“You know,” Kathryn said, because she was still entirely too light-headed and not managing her tongue the way she should, “if you decided not to be horrible to me for five minutes the world wouldn’t actually screech to a halt. We’d all survive. I promise.”

His face was like stone, his full lips thin with displeasure, and he was closing the distance between them much too fast for Kathryn’s peace of mind.

“I have no idea why you feel you need to bring this particular performance of yours into an office setting,” he said as he drew closer. “Much less mine. I’m certain there are any number of hotel bars across Europe that cater to your brand of desperation and craven greed. You should have no trouble finding your next mark within the week.”

That he could still hate her so much should not have surprised her, Kathryn knew, because Luca had been remarkably consistent in that since the day she’d arrived in Italy with Gianni two years ago. And yet, like that cold winter morning when he’d charged at her across this very same floor, dark and furious and terrifying in a way she hadn’t entirely understood, it did.

Though surprise wasn’t really the right word to describe the thing that rolled inside her, flattening everything it touched.

“I suppose the world really would end if you accepted the possibility that I might not be who you think I am,” she said now, straightening her spine against the familiar rush of pointless grief that was her absurd response to the fact this angry, hateful man had never liked her. Kathryn channeled that odd, scraped-raw feeling into temper instead. “You’d have to reexamine your prejudices, and who knows what might happen then? Of course a man like you would find that scary. You have so many of them.”

The truth was that she hardly knew Luca, despite two years of having forced, unpleasant interactions with him. What she did know was that he’d taken an instant and intense and noticeable dislike to her. On sight. Why she’d subsequently spent even three seconds—much less the whole of her marriage to his father—trying to convince him that he was wrong about her was a mystery to her. It no doubt spoke to deep psychological problems on her part, but then again, what about her relationship with this family didn’t?

But she did know that poking at him was unwise.

Kathryn had a moment to regret the fact she’d done it anyway as Luca bore down on her, striding across the expanse of polished old floors and priceless rugs tossed here and there below rows of first editions in more languages than she’d known existed, all as smug and wealthy and resolutely untouchable as he was.

“This is as good a time as any to discuss the expectations I have for all Castelli Wine employees who work in my office in Rome.” Luca’s voice was dark. Cold. And as he moved toward her he regarded her with that sharpness in his eyes that made her feel...fluttery, low in her belly. “First, obedience. I will tell you when I am interested in hearing from you. If you are in doubt, you can assume I prefer you remain silent. You can assume that will always be the case. Second, confidentiality. If you cannot be trusted, if you are forever running off to the tabloids to give whining interviews about the many ways you have been wronged and victimized, Saint Kate—”

Kathryn flinched. “Please don’t call me that. You know that’s something the tabloids have made up.”

Her mum had sniffed at the name and the image more than once, then reminded Kathryn that she had given Kathryn everything and received little in return, yet had never been called a saint by anyone. She’d even suggested that perhaps it had been Kathryn who’d come up with that name and that obnoxious storyline in the first place. It hadn’t been.

That wasn’t to say she hadn’t played to it now and again. She’d always been fascinated with a good brand and widespread global marketing.

The fact that no one believed she hadn’t made it all up herself, however, she found maddening. “Saint Kate has nothing to do with me.”

“Believe me,” Luca said in that quiet, horrible way of his, “I am under no delusions about you or your purity.”

An actual slap would have hurt less. Kathryn blinked, managed not to otherwise react and forced herself to stay right where she was instead of reeling at that. Because his opinion of her aside, this was her chance to do something she really, truly believed she’d be good at instead of what other people thought she ought to be good at. She knew he hated her. She might not know why, but it didn’t matter in the end. Kathryn had never wanted status or jewels or whatever the stepmothers before her had wanted from Gianni. She’d wanted this. A chance to prove herself at a job she knew she could do, in a company that had international reach and a bold, bright future, and to finally show her mother that she, too, could succeed in business. Her way, not Rose’s way. This was what Gianni had promised her when he’d persuaded her to leave her MBA course in London and marry him—the opportunity to work in the family business when the marriage was over.

This was what she wanted. She knew that if she did what every last nerve in her body was shrieking at her to do and broke for the door, she’d never come back, and Luca, certainly, would never give her another chance, no matter what it said in Gianni’s will.

Her mother would never, ever forgive her. And the lonely little girl inside Kathryn, who had never wanted anything but Rose’s love no matter how out of reach that had always been, simply couldn’t let that happen.

“Luca,” she said now, “before you really warm up to your insults, which are always so creative and comprehensive, I want to make sure you understand that I have every intention—”

“May the angels save me from the intentions of unscrupulous women.” He was almost upon her, and one of the most unfair parts of this was that she couldn’t seem to keep herself from feeling something like mesmerized by the way he moved. That impossible, offhanded grace of his he didn’t deserve, and she shouldn’t notice the way she did. It made her limbs feel precarious. Uncertain. “Third, my father’s will says only that I must accommodate your desire to play at an office job, not what that job entails. If you complain, about anything at all, it will get worse. Do you understand?”

She felt a dark, hard pulse inside her then. It felt like running. Like fright. It gripped her, hard. In her temples. In the hollows behind her knees. In her throat.

In her sex.

Kathryn didn’t have any idea what was happening to her. She struck out at him instead.

“Oh, what fun.” She stared back at him when his scowl edged over into something purely ferocious, and she made no attempt to rein in her sarcastic tone. Gianni was dead. The gloves were off. “Are you planning to make me scrub the floors? Let me guess, on my hands and knees with a toothbrush? That will teach me...something, I’m sure.”

“I doubt that very much,” he gritted out. He stopped a few feet away from her. Too close. Luca stood there then, in all his male fury while that dark thing that had always flared between them wound tighter and tighter around them and stole all the air from the graceful room. “But if I ask you to do it, whatever it is, I expect it to be done. No excuses.”

Kathryn forced herself to speak. “And what if it turns out you’re wrong about me and I’m not quite as useless as you imagine? I’m guessing abject apologies aren’t exactly your strong suit.”

His hard mouth—that she shouldn’t find so fascinating, because what was wrong with her? She might as well find a shark cuddly—shifted into a merciless curve that was entirely too harsh to be a smile. “Have I ever told you how much I hate women like you?”

That word. Hate. It was a very strong word, and Kathryn had never understood how everything between them could feel so intense. She wasn’t any clearer about that now. Nor why it scraped at that raw place inside her, as if it mattered deeply to her. As if he did.

When of course, he couldn’t. He didn’t. Luca was a means to an end, nothing more.

“It was rather more implied than stated outright,” she replied, fighting to keep her voice even. “Nonetheless, you can take pride in the fact you managed to make your feelings perfectly clear from the start.”

“My father married ever-younger women the way some men change their shoes,” Luca said darkly, as if this was news to either one of them. “You are nothing but the last in his endless, pointless game of musical beds. You are not the most beautiful. You are not even the youngest. You are merely the one who survived him. You must know you meant nothing to him.”

Kathryn shook her head at him. “I know exactly what I meant to your father.”

“I would not brag, were I you, about your calculating and conniving ways,” he threw back at her. “Especially not in my office, where you will find that the hardworking people who are rewarded on their merits rather than their various seduction techniques are unlikely to celebrate that approach.”

Luca shook his head, judgment written in every line of his body in that elegant suit that a man as horrible as he was shouldn’t have been able to wear so well. Seduction techniques, he’d said, the way someone might say the Ebola virus. It offended her, Kathryn thought.

He offended her.

Maybe that was why she lost her mind a little bit. He’d finally pushed her too far.

“I spent most of my marriage trying to figure out why you hated me so much,” she bit out, heedless of his overwhelming proximity. Not caring the way she should about that glittering thing in his dark eyes. “That a grown man, seemingly of sound mind and obviously capable of performing great corporate feats when it suited him, could loathe another person on sight and for no reason. This made no sense to me.”

She was aware of the grand house arrayed behind him, its ancient Italian splendor pressing in on her from all sides. Of the crystal clear lake that stretched off into the mist and the mountains that rose sharp and imposing above it. Of Gianni, sweet old Gianni, who she would never make laugh again and would never call her cara again in his gravelly old voice. Even this rarefied, beautiful world felt diminished by the loss of him, and here Luca was, as hateful as ever.

She couldn’t bear it.

“I’m a decent person. I try to do the right thing. More to the point—” Kathryn raised her voice slightly when Luca made a derisive noise “—I’m not worth all the hatred and brooding you’ve been directing at me for years. I married your father and took care of him, the end. Neither you nor your brother had any interest in doing that. Some men in your position might thank me.”

It was as if Luca expanded to fill the whole of the library then, he was so big, suddenly. Even bigger than he already was. So big she couldn’t breathe, and he hadn’t moved a muscle. He was simply dark and terrible, and that awful light in his eyes burned when he scowled at her.

“You were one more in a long line of—”

“Yes, but that’s the thing, isn’t it?” He looked astonished that she’d interrupted him, but Kathryn ignored that and kept going. “If you’d seen the likes of me before, why hate me at all? I should have been run-of-the-mill.”

“You were. You were sixth.”

“But you didn’t despise the other five,” Kathryn snapped, frustrated. “Lily told me all about them. You liked her mother. The last one tried to crawl into bed with you more than once, and you laughed each time you dumped her out in the hall. You simply told her to stop trying because it would never happen with you—you didn’t even tell your father. You didn’t hate her, and you knew she was every single thing you accuse me of being.”

“Are you truly claiming you are not those things? That you are, in fact, this unrecognizable paragon I’ve read so much about in the papers? Come now, Kathryn. You cannot imagine I am so naive.”

“I never did anything to you, Luca,” she hurled at him, and she couldn’t control her voice then.

There were nearly two years of repressed feelings bottled up inside her. Every slight. Every snide remark. Every cutting word he’d said to her. Every vicious, unfair glare. Every time he’d walked out of a room she entered in obvious disgust. Every time she’d looked up from a conversation to find that stare of his all over her, like a touch.

It was true that on some level, it was refreshing to meet someone who was so shockingly direct. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

“I have no idea why you hated me the moment you saw me. I have no idea what goes on in that head of yours.” She stepped forward, far too close to him and then, no longer caring what his reaction would be, she went suicidal and poked two fingers into his chest. Hard. “But after today? I no longer care. Treat me the way you treat anyone else who works for you. Stop acting as if I’m a demon sent straight from hell to torture you.”

He’d gone deathly still beneath her fingers. Like marble.

“Remove your hand.” His voice was frozen. Furious. “Now.”

She ignored him.

“I don’t have to prove that I’m a decent person to you. I don’t care if the world knows your father forced you to hire me. I know I’ll do a good job. My work will speak for itself.” She poked him again, just as hard as before, and who cared if it was suicidal? There were worse things. Like suffering through another round of his character assassinations. “But I’m not going to listen to your abuse any longer.”

“I told you to remove your hand.”

Kathryn held his dark gaze. She saw the bright warning in it, and it should have scared her. It should have impressed her on some level, reminded her that whatever else he was, he was a very strong, very well built man who was as unpredictable as he was dangerous.

And that he hated her.

But instead, she stared right back at him.

“I don’t care what you think of me,” she told him, very distinctly.

And then she poked him a third time. Even harder than before, right there in that shallow between his pectoral muscles.

Luca moved so fast she had no time to process it.

She poked him, then she was sprawled across the hard wall of his chest with her offending hand twisted behind her back. It was more than dizzying. It was like toppling from the top of one of the mountains that ringed the lake, then hurtling end over end toward the earth.

Her heart careened against her ribs, and his darkly gorgeous face was far too close to hers and she was touching him, her dress not nearly enough of a barrier to keep her from noticing unhelpful things like his scent, a hint of citrus and spice. The heat that blazed from him, as if he was his own furnace. And that deceptively languid strength of his that made something deep inside her flip over.

Then hum.

“This, you fool,” Luca bit out, his mouth so close to hers she could taste the words against her own lips. She could taste him, and she shuddered helplessly, completely unable to conceal her reaction. “This is what I think of you.”

And then he crushed his mouth to hers.

CHAPTER THREE

HE DID NOT ASK. He did not hesitate. He simply took.

Luca’s mouth descended on hers, and Kathryn waited for that kick of terror, of unease, of sheer panic that had always accompanied any hint of male sexual interest in her direction before—

But it never came.

He kissed her with all that lazy confidence that made him who he was. He took her mouth again and again, still holding her arm behind her back and then sliding his free hand along her jaw to guide her where he wanted her.

Slick. Hot.

Deliciously, wildly, stunningly male.

He kissed her as if they’d done this a thousand times before. As if the past two years had been leading nowhere but here. To this hot, impossible place Kathryn didn’t recognize and couldn’t navigate.

There was nothing to do but surrender. To the molten fire that rolled through her and pooled in all the worst places. A heaviness in her breasts, pressed hard against his chest. And that restless, edgy, weighted thing that sank low into her belly and then pulsed hot.

Needy. Insistent.

And Kathryn forgot.

She forgot who he was. That she had been his stepmother for two years, though he was some eight years older than she was. She forgot that in addition to being her harshest critic and her bitter enemy through no fault of her own, he was now going to be her boss.

She forgot everything but the taste of him. That harsh, sweet magic he made, the way he commanded her and compelled her, as if he knew the things her body wanted and could do when she had no idea. When she was simply lost—adrift in the fire. The greedy, consuming flames that licked all over her and through her and deep inside her and made her meet every stroke of his tongue, every glorious taste—

He set her away from him. As if it hurt.

“Damn you,” he muttered. Followed by something that sounded far harsher in Italian.

But it seemed to take him a very long time to let go of her.

Kathryn couldn’t speak. She didn’t understand the things that were storming through her then, making her blood seem like thunder in her veins and her skin seem to stretch too tight to contain all the feelings she didn’t know how to name.

They stared at each other in the scant bit of space between them. His face was drawn tight, stark and harsh, and it still did absolutely nothing to detract from his sheer male beauty.

“You kissed me,” Kathryn said, and she could have kicked herself.

But her lips felt swollen and she had the taste of him in her mouth, and she didn’t know how to process that hot and slippery feeling that charged through her and then concentrated between her legs.

If possible, that dark look on his face got blacker. As if he was a storm.

“Don’t you dare try that innocent game on me,” he gritted out.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I know the difference between a virgin and a whore, Kathryn,” Luca said, the fury in him like a brand that pressed into her, searing her flesh, and she didn’t understand how she could feel it the same way she had that desperate kiss. “I can certainly taste it.”

She realized she had absolutely no idea how to respond to that.

“Luca,” she said, as carefully as she could when her entire body was lost in the tumult of that endless kiss. When she had no idea how she was even capable of speech. “I think we should chalk that up as nothing more than an emotional response to a very hard day and—”

“I will not be your next target, Kathryn,” Luca told her, a frozen sort of outrage in his voice and pressed deep into the fine lines of his beautiful face. “Hear me on this. It will not happen.”

“I don’t have targets.” She blinked, the room seeming to shimmer everywhere he was not, as if he was a black hole. “I’m not a weapon. What kind of life do you lead that you think these things?”

He reached over and took her upper arm in his hand, pulling her close to him again, and that fire that hadn’t really banked at all blazed. Fierce and wild. Almost knocking her from her feet.

“I don’t want you in my office,” he growled. “I don’t want you polluting the Castelli name any more than you already have. I don’t want you anywhere near the things that matter to me.”

Kathryn’s teeth chattered, though she wasn’t cold.

“That would probably be far more terrifying a threat if you weren’t touching me,” she managed to point out, though her voice wasn’t nearly as cool as she’d have liked. “Again.”

Luca laughed, though it bore no resemblance to that carefree, golden laughter that had helped make him so beloved the world over, and released her. If she didn’t know better, if he’d been some other man with the usual collection of weaknesses instead of a monolith where his heart should have been, she’d have thought he hadn’t meant to grab her in the first place.

“I will never lower myself to my father’s discards,” he told her, horribly, his gaze hard on hers in case she was tempted to pretend she hadn’t heard that. “Nor will I allow you to corrupt the good people in my office with your repulsive little schemes. Your game won’t work on me.”

“Right,” she said, and maybe it was because this was all so out of control already. Maybe that was why she couldn’t seem to keep herself in check any longer around him. What was the point? She’d tried to rise above him for two years, and here they were anyway. “That’s why you kissed me, I imagine. To demonstrate your immunity.”

Luca went very still.

So still that Kathryn stopped breathing herself, as if the slightest noise might set him off. His dark eyes were fixed on her as if she was the kind of target he’d mentioned before, and she’d never felt more like one in her life. Between them, that spinning, tightening, desperate and dangerous electric band seemed to wrap tighter, pull harder. So hard it pulsed inside her, insistent and rough. So lethal she swore she could see it stamped across every tightly held, hard-packed muscle on his sculpted form.

Rain clattered against the windows behind her, and off in some other part of this massive house, little Renzo let loose one of his ear-piercing toddler screams that could as easily be joy as peril.

Luca shook his head slightly, as if he’d been released from a spell. He stepped back, his expression shifting from whatever that harsh, hard thing was to something far closer to disgust.

“You will regret this,” he promised her.

She swallowed. “You’ll have to be more specific. That could cover a lot of ground.”

“I will make sure of it,” Luca told her, as if she hadn’t spoken. “If it’s the very last thing I do.”

His voice had the ring of a certain finality, and it clanged inside her like a gong. She stood there, stricken, her mouth still aching from his kiss and her body lost in its own strange riot, and watched as he simply turned and began to walk away from her.

She wanted nothing more than to forget all about this. To take the lump payment Rafael had offered her and disappear with it. She could have any life she wanted now. She could be anyone she wanted, far away from the long shadow of the Castellis where she’d lived for so long.

But that would mean the past two years of her life had been for nothing. That she’d simply thrown them away for cash. It would mean she was exactly the woman Luca thought she was—and that all her mother’s sacrifices would have been for nothing in the end. That there was nothing to Kathryn’s own life but guilt and falling short.

And Kathryn could bear a lot of things. She’d had no choice, given what a failure she’d turned out to be in her mother’s eyes. She simply didn’t have it in her to make it that much worse. There was that part of her that was convinced, after all this time, that if she tried hard enough she could make her mother love her. If she could just do the right thing, for once.

“I’m so glad we had this talk,” she called after him, directing her not-quite-sweet tone straight toward the center of his tall, broad back. He wanted to play target practice? She could do that. “It will make Monday so much better for everyone.”

He didn’t turn back to face her, though he slowed. “Monday?”

If she was the good person she’d always believed herself to be, Kathryn thought then, surely she wouldn’t take quite so much pleasure in this tiny little moment, this almost pointless victory.

“Oh, yes,” she said, with deliberate calm and that triumph right there in her voice. “That’s when I start.”

* * *

He should never have touched her.

He should certainly not have tasted her.

But he had always been a fool where that woman was concerned, and in case he’d been tempted to doubt that, she haunted him all the way back to Rome.

Luca drove himself into the city from the family’s private airfield, risking death in an appropriately sleek and low-slung car that made Rome’s famously chaotic traffic a game of wits and daring and delicious speed. And he regretted it when he arrived at the Renaissance-era villa that housed both his business and his home, because playing games with his life at high speeds through the streets of the ancient city he loved was far preferable—and much less dangerous—than letting himself think about Kathryn.

Though he supposed both edged into that same dark place inside him, as if he was as much of a damned mess as every other Castelli in history down deep, beneath all the controls he’d spent his life putting into place to prevent exactly that.

He tossed his keys to the waiting attendant in his garage and stalked into the building, only to find himself standing stock-still in his own empty reception area, his head filled with those damned eyes of hers, turned a dreamy slate green after he’d kissed her, and that sulky mouth—

Luca muttered a chain of curses. He raked both his hands through his hair as he headed into the offices that sprawled across the first two levels of this lovingly maintained building in Rome’s Tridente neighborhood, a mere stone’s throw from the Spanish Steps and Piazza del Popolo.

His office. His one true love. The only thing he’d ever loved, in point of fact. The only thing that had ever come close to loving him back, with one success after the next.

He lived in the penthouse that rambled over the top two levels, and that was where he headed now, taking his private lift up into the rooms he’d furnished with steel and chrome, wide-open spaces and minimalist art, the better to play off the history in every bit of stone and craftsmanship in the walls and the high, frescoed ceilings and every view of gorgeous, sleepless, frenetic Rome out of his windows. He tore off his clothes in his rooftop bedroom of glass and steel before making his way out to the pool on the wraparound terrace that surrounded the master suite and offered a three-hundred-sixty-degree perspective on the Eternal City.

If Rome could stand for more than two and a half thousand years, surely Luca could survive the onslaught of Kathryn. She had no idea what she was setting herself up for. Luca was a tough boss at the best of times, demanding and fierce, and that was what the loyal employees he’d handpicked said about him to his face. What could a former trophy wife know of the corporate world? She might have some fantasy of herself as a businesswoman, but it was unlikely she’d last the week.

Of course she won’t be able to handle it, he thought with something a great deal like relief—how had he failed to realize that earlier? He was called upon to indulge her whim, not alter the whole of his carefully controlled existence. The sooner she understood how ill suited she was to a life that involved more work than play, the sooner she’d drift off to find her next conquest. The problem would take care of itself.

Luca still felt edgy and entirely too messed up, despite the chill of the winter evening and the kick of the wind. Out of control. Jittery and appalled with himself. He told himself it must be grief, though he hadn’t been close with his father. He might have wished, from time to very rare and sentimental time, that he’d had a better understanding of the man whose shadow had fallen over him all these years—but he never had.

Perhaps the funeral had hit him harder than he’d realized.

Because he could not understand why he’d kissed Kathryn. What the hell was the matter with him?

How could he—a man who prided himself on always, always keeping his life clean and trimmed down and free from anything even resembling this kind of emotional clutter—have no idea?

He dived into the pool then, cutting into the heated water and then pulling hard as he began to swim. He lost himself in the rhythm of his strokes, the weight and rush of the water against him and the growing heat in his body as he kept going, kept pushing.

Lap after lap. Then again.

He swam and he swam, he pushed himself hard, and it was no good. She was still right there, cluttering up his head, reminding him how empty he was everywhere else.

Wide gray eyes. All that dark hair and that fringe that made her seem more mysterious somehow. All of her, wedged in him like a jagged splinter he could never remove, that he’d never managed to do anything but shove in that much farther. She worried at him and worried at him and he had no idea anymore who he was when he was near her. What he might do.

Luca stopped swimming, slamming his hands down on the lip of the pool, sending water splashing everywhere.

He did not dip his quill in his company’s ink, ever. He knew better than to throw grenades like that into the middle of his life. He did not touch his employees, and he certainly did not avail himself of his father’s leftovers. He had been a loud, angry child often abandoned by his single living parent for months at a time in the old manor house because of the trouble he’d caused. He’d gotten over that kind of behavior while he’d still been a child. This kind of mess was precisely what he’d spent his adult life avoiding.

This was a nonissue.

Luca climbed out of the pool and wrapped himself in one of the towels his staff kept at the ready, and then made his way back inside, hardly noticing the way the sun had turned the rambling old city orange and pink as it sank toward the horizon. Not even when he stood at one of the high windows that looked out over the winding, cobbled streets that led toward Piazza di Spagna and the famous Spanish Steps, where it seemed half of Rome congregated some evenings.

He saw nothing but Kathryn, dressed in her funeral clothes like some waifish fairy tale of a widow, and it had to stop. She’d already had two black marks against her before today. Her marriage to his father in the first place. And the unpalatable fact of her tabloid presence, the endless canonization of Saint Kate, nauseatingly described as the plucky English lass who’d bearded any number of dragons in his twisted old-Italian family.

It repulsed him. He told himself she did, too.

That kiss today was the third black mark. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t started it, hauling her to him with the kind of heedless passion he’d been so certain he’d completely excised from his life. How many times had he seen this or that foolish longing lay his father low? How often had he rolled his eyes at his brother’s enduring anguish over Lily? How many times had his own pointless emotions bit him in the ass as a child? He’d promised himself a long time ago that he would stay clear of such quagmires, and the truth was, it had never been particularly difficult.

Until Kathryn. And the truth remained: he’d been the one to kiss her. He accepted that failing, even if he couldn’t quite understand it.

The problem was the way she’d kissed him back.

The way she’d melted against him. The way she’d opened her mouth and met him. The way she’d poured herself into him, against him, until he’d very nearly forgotten who and where they were. That she was his stepmother, his father’s widow, and that they’d been standing much too near the family mausoleum where the old man had only just been interred.

Luca was sick, there was no doubt about that—and the fact he was hard even now, at the mere memory of her taste, proved it.

But what game had she been playing?

She was good, he could admit it. She’d tasted like innocence. He still had the flavor of her on his tongue.

That was the most infuriating thing by far.

And Luca vowed, as the last bit of winter sun fell down behind Rome’s enduring skyline, that he would not only make this little corporate adventure for his father’s child bride of a widow as unpleasant as possible—he would also do much worse than that.

He would take Saint Kate’s halo and tarnish it. And her.

Irredeemably.

* * *

By the time Kathryn made it to the ornate Castelli Wine offices in one of the most charming neighborhoods in Rome that Monday morning at exactly nine o’clock sharp, she’d prepared herself.

This was a war. A drawn-out siege. She might have lost a battle in that library far to the north in all those forbidding, foggy mountains, but that meant nothing in the scheme of things. It was a small battle. A kiss, that was all.

The war was what mattered.

The receptionist greeted her in icy Italian and pretended not to understand Kathryn’s halting attempts to speak the language—then picked up the phone and spoke in flawless English, staring at Kathryn all the while. Her expression was impassive when she ended the call, but Kathryn was certain she could see triumph lurking there in the depths of the other woman’s haughty gaze.

She ordered herself not to react.

“How lovely,” Kathryn said, her own tone cool. “You speak English after all. Please tell Luca I’m here.”

She didn’t wait for the other woman’s response. She went and sat in one of the rigid antique chairs that lined the waiting area and pretended to be perfectly comfortable as she waited. And waited.

And waited.

But this was a war, she reminded herself. And it had occurred to her at some point over the weekend that for all his bluster, Luca had no idea who she was or what he was dealing with. All he saw was his image of her as the gold digger who’d snared his father. That meant, Kathryn had decided, that she had the upper hand. So if he wanted to leave her stranded in purgatory all morning, cooling her heels in his waiting room as some childish gesture of pique and temper, let him. She wouldn’t give him—or his receptionist, for that matter—the satisfaction of looking even the slightest bit impatient.

She kept her attention on her mobile, keeping her expression as smooth as glass as she dutifully emailed her mother to let her know she’d started work in Castelli Wine as planned, then thumbed through the news. For an hour.

When Luca finally appeared, she sensed him before she saw him. That dark, thunderous, electric thing that made every hair on her body leap to attention, filling the whole of the great cavern of a waiting room that had until that moment been bright with the Rome morning, light pouring in from the windows to dance across the marble floor. She forced herself to take her time looking up.

And there he was.

He was even more devastatingly gorgeous today, in a more casual suit than the one he’d worn at the funeral, the open white collar of his shirt offering her a far too tempting glimpse of the expanse of his olive skin and the hint of that perfect chest she knew—from the tabloid pages dedicated to him and that one Castelli family outing to Positano that had involved a boat and Luca without his shirt, God help her—had a dusting of dark hair and all those finely carved ridges in his abdomen.

She told herself she was starting to find that scowl on his face almost charming. Like a love song from an ogre.

“You’re late,” he said.

That was astoundingly unfair at best, but Kathryn didn’t have to look to the smug receptionist to understand that there was no point arguing. Besides, Luca had warned her not to complain. She wouldn’t. Kathryn stood, smoothing out her skirt as she rose.

“I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

“Somehow,” Luca replied, sounding very nearly merry—which was alarming, “I doubt that.”

Kathryn didn’t bother to reply. She walked toward him, telling herself with every click of her heels against the hard floor that she remembered nothing from last week in that old library up north. Not his taste. Not that thrilling, masterful way he’d simply taken her mouth with his. Not the searing, impossible heat of his hand against the side of her face and that deep stroke of his clever tongue—

She hadn’t dreamed those things. They hadn’t kept her wide-awake and gasping at the ceiling, not sure how to handle the riot all those searing images and memories had caused inside her. Certainly not.

Luca’s expression was unreadable as she drew close to him, and she hated that she had no idea what was going on behind his gleaming dark eyes as he ushered her deep into the heart of the Castelli Wine offices. She thought she felt him glance over her outfit, a pencil skirt and a conservative silk blouse that could offend no one, she was sure, but when she sneaked a look at him, his attention was focused straight ahead.

He stopped at the door to a large glassed-in conference room and waved a hand at the group of people sitting around the table inside. My coworkers, Kathryn thought—with what she realized was an utterly naive surge of pleasure when she realized not a single one of them was looking out at her with anything approaching a smile on their faces.

She froze beside Luca, who already had his hand on the door.

“What did you tell them?” she asked.

“My people?” He sounded far too triumphant, mixed in with that usual hint of laziness that she was beginning to suspect was all for show. “The truth, of course.”

“And which truth is that?”

“There is only the one,” Luca said. Happily, she thought. Again. “My father’s petulant trophy wife has insisted she be given a job she does not deserve. We do not have jobs hanging about without anyone to fill them, so there was some reshuffling required.”

“I assumed you’d be giving me janitorial duties.” She arched a brow at him. “Wasn’t the idea to make sure this was as unpleasant for me as possible?”

“I made you my executive assistant,” Luca replied smoothly, his dark eyes glittering. “It is the most coveted position in this branch of the company.” He shifted back slightly. Relaxing, she realized. Because he was obviously enjoying himself. That sent a shiver of ice straight down her spine. So did his smile—which she was close enough to see did not reach his eyes. “It is second only to me, you see. That’s quite a bit of power to wield.”

She frowned at him. “Why would you do that? Why not make me file things in some basement?”

“Because, Stepmother,” Luca said in that slow, dark way of his that should not have gotten tangled up in all her breathless memories of that kiss, not when it was clearly meant to be a blow, “that would only delay the inevitable. I am quite certain you won’t make it the allocated three years. But if you leave after three days? Three weeks? All the better.”

She stiffened. “I won’t leave.”

He nodded toward the group of people inside, all eyeing her with ill-disguised hostility.

“Each and every person in that room was handpicked by me. They earned their positions here. They function together as a tight and usually congenial team. But I have informed them that all of that is a thing of the past, as you must be shoehorned in whether we like it or not.” He turned his gaze on her. “As you can see, they’re thrilled.”

Kathryn’s stomach sank to her feet, because she understood what he’d done. Her pathetic little fantasies of distinguishing herself somehow through hard work in some forgotten corner of the office where she could quietly shine crumbled all around her.

Her mother would be furious. She’d claim that this was exactly what had happened when Kathryn tried to defy her and strike out on her own. Kathryn felt a sinking feeling in her gut, as if maybe Rose was right.

And maybe it was hideously disloyal, maybe it made her a terrible person and an ungrateful child, but Kathryn really, really didn’t want that to be true.

“You painted a target on my back,” she said now, her lips feeling numb. “You did it deliberately.”

This time, Luca’s smile reached his eyes, but that didn’t make it any warmer. Or this situation any better. “I did.”

Then he pushed open the conference room door and fed her straight to the wolves.

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.