Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Shocking Scandals: Castelli's Virgin Widow / Expecting a Royal Scandal / The Guardian's Virgin Ward
do you think marriage is, Luca?” she asked, and she tilted her head slightly to one side.
He was mesmerized by it, by her, and it occurred to him that they’d never actually talked before. It had been all insults and glares, that scene in the library or in the hallway between their rooms, what he still thought was just another rehearsed story on the plane. She shook her hair back from her face and he wanted to do that for her. He wanted to touch her, he realized, more than he could recall ever wanting anything else.
And nothing had ever been more impossible.
“Not the transaction it was for you,” he said, aware that his voice was too raw, too rough. It gave him away. “Not a bit of cold calculation with a monetized end.”
But Kathryn only continued to smile at him in that same way, as if he made her sad. As if he was doing something to her. That tight band around his chest seemed to pull even tauter. It pinched.
“Who are you to judge?” she asked softly, and it was more of a slap, perhaps, because it lacked heat or accusation. She simply asked. “We were happy with our arrangement. We fulfilled the promises we made to each other.”
He couldn’t take it. He moved toward her, aware but not caring that they were standing out in front of the château where anyone could see them, and he took her face between his hands. This would be so much easier if she weren’t so pretty, he told himself—if she was a little more plastic and a whole lot less polished.
If she didn’t short-circuit every bit of control he’d ever had.
“Tell me more about how happy you were,” he dared her, aware that he was furious. More than furious. “How perfect your marriage was—a union of two identical souls, yes?”
But she didn’t back down. She didn’t flush hot or look the least bit ashamed. Her hands came up and hooked around his wrists, but she didn’t pull him away.
“Go on, then,” Luca urged her, his voice an aching thing that simmered in the scant space between them. “Tell me how you fulfilled those promises to the old man. Were you contractually obligated to kneel before him and pleasure him a certain number of nights per week? Or was he past that point—did he have you tend to yourself while he watched? What promises did you keep, Kathryn?”
Something gleamed in that gaze of hers and turned her eyes a darker shade of gray, but she didn’t jerk away from him.
“What amazes me about you,” she whispered, “is how you think it’s your right to ask these questions. You don’t get to know what happened in my marriage. You can drive yourself crazy with all your dark imaginings, and I hope you do. You can whisper your filthy thoughts to anyone who will listen. It doesn’t make them true, and it certainly doesn’t require me to comment on them. If you want to believe that’s what happened between me and your father, then go ahead. Believe it.”
There was a resolve in her gaze Luca didn’t like, and he didn’t know what he might have done then, but down at the bottom of the château’s long drive, a busload of wine tasters pulled in and started up the winding way toward them.
And he had no choice but to let her go.
* * *
Kathryn woke when the moonlight poured in her windows, making her blink in confusion at the clock. It was just before four in the morning, and that was, she realized after a moment or two of uncertainty, very definitely the moon and not the sun.
Her internal clock was still a mess, even after nearly a week in California, and she only had to lie there a little while before she accepted the reality that she was not going to fall back asleep. Not tonight.
She swung her feet over the side of the tall, canopied bed piled high with soft linens, and dressed quickly in the clothes she’d left draped over her chair, a simple pair of terry lounging trousers and a cashmere hooded top. She twisted her hair back out of her way, tying it in a knot at her nape. She wrapped a long merino wool sweater around her to cut the chill, and then she pushed open the glass doors that led out onto her balcony and stepped outside.
The moon was huge and so bright it lit up the whole of the valley and all Kathryn could see in all directions, pouring over the cypress trees and dancing over the gnarled rows of vines. Making the pockets of night where it didn’t touch even darker, and turning the world a spectral silver. The breeze was high, whipping into her, just cold enough to feel like exhilaration.
She closed her eyes and leaned into it.
“Couldn’t sleep?” asked a low male voice from far too close. “Perhaps it’s your conscience.”
Kathryn looked over, as slowly as possible, as a counterpoint to the sudden clatter of her heart. She’d forgotten that the balconies of these rooms all ran together here at the far end of the château, despite half walls between the rooms that were little more than decorative gestures toward privacy and did nothing to conceal her from Luca. Nothing at all.
He was sprawled on one of the soft loungers, wearing nothing but a pair of exercise trousers very low on his hips, as if he was impervious to the winter air around him.
And the moonlight crawled all over him. Sliding across that vast expanse of his chest, cavorting in the ridges and hollows, licking him and writhing over him, illuminating every inch of his shocking male beauty. And doing nothing at all to temper that stark expression on his face or that dark hunger in his eyes.
“Says the man who’s clearly been out here awhile,” Kathryn replied. Lightly. So very lightly. As if he was nothing to her. As if his voice did nothing to her. As if this was as unremarkable as having any other sort of meeting with him in the broad daylight, surrounded by other people.
But it was as if he knew exactly what she was trying to hide, or perhaps the moon showed him far too much, because he made it worse. He stood.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” he said in a low voice, his gaze still on her. “Something I’m certain I’ll regret. But that is nothing new.”
The clatter of her heart became a deep bass drumming.
Luca raked back that thick fall of hair, the gesture as lazy as his hot eyes were not. Then he started toward her in that low, rolling gait that marked him as exactly the sort of predator she needed most to avoid.
Kathryn knew she shouldn’t try to tough this out. She knew that there was no shame at all in simply turning tail and running, barring herself in her room against a man who looked at her with that much intent. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t let him see how much he affected her. She couldn’t let him know how he got to her. She couldn’t.
More than that, she couldn’t seem to move.
He walked over to the little half wall and then, his eyes never leaving hers, he simply swung himself over it with an offhanded show of male grace that made everything inside Kathryn clench tight. Then run hot, pooling low in her belly and making her think she might simply melt where she stood. Making her think that perhaps she already had.
Luca didn’t stop. He walked straight to her and he sank his hands in her hair and he hauled her close to him. To that mouth of his, dangerous and impossible and lush. To his flashing dark eyes that saw too much and condemned too deeply.
“What are you doing?” she asked again.
But her voice was a whisper, not a protest, and he knew it. She could tell by the way his fingers sank deeper into her hair, holding her that much more immobile.
“Sleepwalking, I think,” he told her in that low voice of his that wound around inside her, making her burn. “It’s a terrible habit. Worse than alcohol. There’s no telling what I’ll do in the middle of the night and then forget come morning.”
“Luca—”
“I’ll show you what I mean.”
His voice was little more than a growl.