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?”
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