Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Shocking Scandals: Castelli's Virgin Widow / Expecting a Royal Scandal / The Guardian's Virgin Ward
As if he’d flipped a switch.
Affable and approachable. Quick to make everyone around him laugh. He always had a drink in his hand and appeared to be ever so slightly tipsy, though this close to him, Kathryn discovered that he didn’t actually drink much. He slapped backs and kissed cheeks. He flirted with everybody. He was delightful and about as unthreatening as a man who looked like him and moved like him and wore black tie as easily as he did ever could.
Kathryn didn’t have to ask him why he bothered to put on such an elaborate act. The why of it became clear almost instantly.
She’d spent a great deal of time smiling prettily next to Gianni, too, and no one had found him particularly delightful. They’d always been guarded. Distant and cagey. Especially if they were somehow involved in the business.
But it was as if no one could believe that this Luca Castelli, who commanded the attention of the whole party simply by entering it, was the same one who ran the Rome office with such a deft hand. This bright, gleaming, careless creature. Even though there was no other name on that door in Rome but his.
Kathryn had heard the rumors. That it was Gianni himself who’d propped up Luca’s office—except, of course, for the small problem that an old man with dementia could not possibly have run anything. Perhaps he simply had a particularly good team to support him, the rumor mill had countered. But no matter what people speculated about in private, when they were in Luca’s presence, they basked in it. In him. In that effortless sort of sunshine he spread about him so easily.
And they told him everything.
Secrets. Rumors. Things their supervisors—who were often standing across the room—would kill them for saying out loud.
Everyone succumbed to the golden myth of Luca Castelli, Kathryn saw. Everyone. Captains of industry, wine connoisseurs and college-age caterers alike lost in the perfection of his inviting smile.
Watching him in action told her a great many things, but most of all, it made her feel better about herself for falling so completely under his spell every time he got too close to her. It wasn’t something fatal in her own design, as she’d imagined. It wasn’t that weakness in her that her mother had always despaired of and had gone to such lengths to stamp out of her. It was him.
She ducked into the mostly hidden powder room off the main ballroom when Luca got into an intense discussion about a documentary Kathryn had never seen with a handful of very intellectual types who’d made it clear they both recognized her and thought her beneath them. Far beneath them. She was happy to let them think so.
Inside the luxurious bathroom suite, she sat down on the couch in the lounge area and took a little breather. Away from the crush of the crowd, most of whom looked at her with nothing but ugly supposition on their faces. Away from Luca, whom she really should hate.
Why didn’t she hate him the way she should? The way he unapologetically hated her?
“Being fascinated with him is only making everything worse,” she snapped at herself, out loud—and then jumped when the door to the lounge swung open.
“Oh,” Lily said. She looked around as if she expected there to be more people in the room—or as if she’d heard Kathryn talking to herself like a crazy person. Kathryn trotted out her smile automatically. “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
“Only me,” Kathryn said mildly. “Depending on your point of view, that may or may not count.”
Rafael’s wife laughed, then smoothed her hands over the swell of her pregnant belly, looking resplendent in a gleaming blue gown. And happy. That it took her a moment to recognize what that expression meant made something inside Kathryn catch. As if happiness was so foreign to her.
“Don’t pay any attention to Luca,” Lily said, her eyes meeting Kathryn’s in the mirror then moving away. “The man is such a control freak. He can’t stand surprises, that’s all.”
She ran the water in the sink and then smoothed her damp palms over the coils of heavy braids she wore, all collected into a fat bun at the back of her head. Kathryn had always liked Lily. She was the least judgmental member of the Castelli family. She’d been the most welcoming to Kathryn, and Kathryn had even imagined that under different circumstances they might have been friends. Perhaps that, too, was naive.
She was beginning to realize that she was naive, in every possible way—something she’d have thought was impossible, given how hard her mother had worked to wring that out of her. And yet.
“Am I a surprise?” she asked, when she was sure she could keep her voice light and easy. “I don’t think that’s the word Luca would use.”
Lily slanted an amused look at her. “Everything about you is a surprise,” she said. “From the day you arrived. You refuse to slot yourself into one of Luca’s depressingly functional and supernaturally clean boxes. He hates that.”
“He hates surprises?” Kathryn laughed lightly. Very lightly, which was at odds with how her heart punched at her, as if this information about Luca was the most important detail of all she might have collected here tonight. “Here I thought the only thing he hated was me.”
It was Lily’s turn to laugh, though hers seemed far less for show.
“He hates messes,” she said. “He always has. If he hates you? It’s because you’re messing things up for him, and he doesn’t know how to handle something he can’t sanitize and shelve somewhere. And between you and me, that’s probably a good thing.”
Then she smiled her goodbyes and went back out into the crush, leaving Kathryn to mull that over.
But not for long. Her mobile buzzed in her clutch and she knew it was Luca, which got her moving out of the bathroom lounge and back into the party before she even looked at the display.
“Are you taking a holiday?” he growled into the phone when she answered, all spleen and fury. “If not, you’d better be right here when I turn around. I’m not paying you to gallivant around the château like one of the guests.”
“Are you paying me at all?” she asked mildly, spotting him several groups away and moving around them as she spoke. “I thought your father set up a trust for me so you couldn’t hold a paycheck over my head. Or maybe for other reasons, and that’s just a happy accident?”
“I’m turning around now,” he said, and she came to a stop before him as he did.
Their eyes met. Held.
It was harder than it should have been to pull herself away. To concentrate on tucking her mobile back in her clutch. To tell herself there was nothing at all in his dark eyes but what there always was: some or other form of fury, brightened up with dislike.
She didn’t understand why no one could see the truth about him but her. She told herself she was making it up. That it wouldn’t be there when she looked up at him again—that he’d be that half lazy, half obnoxious man he should have been and nothing more.
But it was still there. That fury, that need. That hunger that terrified her and intrigued her in equal measure. A whole world in that gaze of his, and she had no earthly idea what to do about it.
“I think you’re being paged,” she told him, nodding toward a bejeweled woman in a slinky dress made entirely of sequins, who was bearing down on Luca from afar. “You wouldn’t want to disappoint your fans with this show of seriousness, would you?”
“It’s not a show. It’s business. Not a concept I expect you to comprehend.”
“I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself,” she said unwisely. So very unwisely. “But it’s interesting that you’re so determined to hide part of yourself away wherever you go, don’t you think?”
She had no idea why she’d said that. Luca looked frozen into place for a long, taut moment, an arrested expression on his darkly gorgeous face. Then he blinked, and there was nothing but his usual darkness again, leaving