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