He would conquer this, too.
* * *
Kathryn decided to treat the entire situation as if it really had been a dream. Everyone had unfortunately detailed and potentially steamy dreams about coworkers sometimes, surely. The trick was acting as if it had only ever happened inside her head.
She told herself she could do that. Why not? Luca was the master at playing whatever role worked best for his purposes. She could do the same.
Though it was harder than she’d anticipated to walk into that breakfast room the way she’d done every other morning in California and act as if her body didn’t flush into shivering awareness at the sight of him.
It was so unfair.
He was gorgeous and terrible, commanding his side of the table with that lazy authority of his that she felt as if his mouth against her center again, bold and insistent. He was dressed in one of his devastatingly perfect suits today, crisp and lethally masculine as if he hadn’t been up half the night, and Kathryn forced herself to stand there with her usual serene smile on her face. She was determined to do her best to look as calm and unruffled as he did.
But there was no controlling that low, wild lick of pure fire that swept through her, curling itself into dark knots deep inside, then blooming into something greedy and consuming in her sex.
You are in so much trouble, a small voice whispered inside her.
Worse, she was sure he knew it. That he could see every last thing she tried to hide from him. When all she could see in him was that harsh light in his dark eyes and that dangerous look on his face.
“Don’t loom there,” he said, all silken threat and a kind of menace that made her pulse pick up. “Sit down. This is meant to be a breakfast meeting to outline my plans for the day, Kathryn.” He waited for her to look at him. To meet that awful gaze of his that tore straight through her. “Not agony.”
There was absolutely no reason that should make her feel as if she might swallow her tongue. Kathryn ordered herself to pull it together. She pulled out her graceful, high-backed chair and sat down, the same way she had every other morning on this endless trip that she worried would leave her a mere shell of herself before it was done.
Maybe it already had, she thought with a shiver she fought to repress when he did nothing more shocking than fill her cup with coffee, a rich, dark brew that she thought was the precise color of his furious eyes—
She needed to stop.
“Tonight will be a family event,” Luca said in a controlled sort of way that made the fact of his temper a living thing, dancing there between them. All the more obvious because it was hidden. Controlled. Just as he always had been—except for last night. Kathryn had to conceal the shiver that moved through her then. “Rafael, Lily and I—and therefore you, as my personal shadow—are expected at another winery in Napa.”
“The next valley over.”
“Yes.” He set the silver coffeepot down on the table between them with a hint of something like violence, if carefully restrained. “Your command of geography is impressive.”
“As is your use of sarcasm.”
“Careful, Kathryn.” His voice seemed darker then. Deeper. Infinitely more dangerous. “I know too much about you now. Far too many secrets about what makes you...” He paused, and she flushed then. She couldn’t help it, no matter that she saw that gleam of satisfaction in his dark gaze and hated the both of them. “Tick.” He eyed her. “You should keep that in mind.”
He meant sex. All of this was about sex, the last topic on earth she wanted to discuss—especially with him. But it shot through her anyway, flame and heat, like the word itself was a heavy stone plummeting from a great height. It hit bottom in that molten-hot place between her legs, where she could still feel him. Where no amount of soaking in that bath earlier had managed to wipe away the exquisite feel of his hands or his mouth. She felt branded. Marked.
Though she thought she’d rather die right where she sat than let him know it.
“I’m so glad you brought that up,” she said crisply. “Obviously, what happened last night can never happen again. You are my late husband’s son and my supervisor, not to mention the fact that you are anything but a fan of mine. I’m appalled that we got as carried away as we did.”
“If you plan to clutch at your pearls, you should have worn some.” Luca’s voice sounded decadent then. Dark and rich, and with that lazy note to it besides, as if he was enjoying himself. “As it is, it’s difficult to take anything you say seriously when I can see how hard your nipples are, Kathryn. I don’t think the word you’re looking for is appalled.”
Kathryn would never know how she managed to keep herself from looking down at her own breasts then, where she could feel a traitorous tightening that suggested he was right. How she only stared back at him with a faintly pitying air instead.
“It’s winter, Luca,” she said, almost gently. “You’re wearing a suit. I am not. Do you need me to explain how female biology works?”
And that impossibly golden smile of his flashed then, as beautiful and bright as it was totally unexpected.
“Do you?” he asked, and there was that same note in his voice that every part of her recognized, down into her bones. It took her a moment to place it.
I have to taste you, he’d growled at her last night before he’d done just that. In exactly this same way.
Kathryn went very still. Or he did. Or maybe it was the world that stopped for a long, taut moment, as if there was nothing but the pounding of her heart and that betraying tightening everywhere else. As if he really could see straight into her. As if he knew. As if, were she to give him the slightest signal, he’d simply sweep all the breakfast things off the table and haul her across it, setting his mouth to her the way he had in all that silvery moonlight.
How could she fear him and want him at the same time?
“Good morning.”
Rafael’s voice from the doorway cut through the tension between them as if he’d used one of the ceremonial swords that hung theatrically in the château’s tasting room in another part of the winery.
Kathryn told herself it was a relief. That it was relief that coursed through her, syrupy and thick.
She swiveled to face him, entirely too aware that Luca did the same thing—entirely too aware of Luca, come to that.
Rafael’s cool gaze moved between them. From Luca to Kathryn and then back, and Kathryn was suddenly certain that he knew. That he could see what had happened between them, that he could hear the echo of those impossible cries she’d made into the night, that she was marked bright red and obvious.
“Lily and I won’t be coming with you tonight” was all he said, in that remote way of his that made him such an excellent CEO. “She’s having some contractions, and it’s better that she stay off her feet.”
“Is she all right?” Kathryn asked, frowning. “Isn’t it a little bit early?” And then she regretted it when two pairs of dark and speculative Castelli eyes fixed on her in a way she didn’t like at all. She forced a smile. “I beg your pardon. Am I not allowed to ask now that I’m merely a Castelli Wine employee?”
“No,” Luca said at once. “It makes me question your motives.”
“You would do that anyway,” she replied smoothly, without looking at him. “As far as I can tell, it’s your favorite pastime.”
Rafael smiled, and Kathryn was certain she didn’t like the way he did it. “Lily is fine, Kathryn. Thank you for asking. This is nothing particularly worrisome, but her doctor would prefer she put her feet up for a few days, and that means another work event would be too much.”
He aimed that smile at his brother then, and it took on a sharper edge that even Kathryn could feel. She was aware of Luca stiffening at his place across the table.
And of Rafael, still there in the doorway, his gaze entirely t
oo assessing. “But it looks as if you have things as well in hand as ever, brother. I leave it to you.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
HALFWAY THROUGH THE formal dinner laid out with luxurious attention to detail in one of the Napa winery’s private rooms up high on a hillside, every plate and glass and carefully arranged bit of food as choreographed as some refined ballet, Luca was so darkly furious he had no idea how he kept to his seat.
He told himself it wasn’t fury. Or it shouldn’t have been. That Kathryn was simply doing what she did, what she had always done and always would, and there was no point reacting to it at all—
But that didn’t help. Every time her musical little laugh floated across the table, he tensed. Every time that silver-haired jackass to her left with the wandering hands touched her, he thought smoke might pour from his ears.
It was one thing to know that this was what she did. That she was no doubt lining up potential selections for her future wherever she went. He’d never expected anything less. Yet it turned out it was something else to witness her in action.
Particularly when he could still feel her. Still hear those cries in his ears. Still taste her, the hard nub of her nipple and that creamy heat below.
Damn her.
He had no memory of the conversations he must have engaged in with the people sitting on either side of him. When the eternal dinner ground to an end at last and he could finally get the hell away, he escorted Kathryn to their waiting car with a hand that was, he could admit, perhaps a little too insistent against the small of her back.
“Is this an attempt at chivalry or are you herding me?” she asked under her breath, that damned smile of hers still welded into place even outside, in the dark, where there was no one to see her but him.
He wanted to mess her up, Luca acknowledged. He wanted to dig his fingers beneath that facade of hers and see what she hid away underneath. He wanted far too much, and all of it wrong. And dangerous, besides.
He was not a man who had ever been interested in entanglements. But tangled was the very least of the things he felt around this woman.
Luca held the passenger door of the sleek limousine open as she climbed inside, nodding brusquely at their driver. Then he swung into the limo’s hushed interior himself, making no particular attempt to keep to his own side of the wide backseat as he slammed the door shut behind him.
Kathryn was digging in her evening bag. She glanced at him as he came close, then froze.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. The faintest frown etched itself between her eyes, where that fringe of hers nearly touched her eyes and drove him utterly crazy with that same sharp longing he was finding it harder and harder—impossible—to control. Just as he could no longer seem to control himself. “What happened?”
“You tell me.”
He felt outsized and more than a little maddened. He sprawled there next to her, too close but not quite touching her. Not quite. His blood was pumping through him much too fast. His heart was trying to kick its way out of his chest. He was holding himself back by the smallest thread.
He wasn’t sure how he was holding himself back at all.
Her frown deepened, which was at least better than that damned smile.
“I don’t know, Luca. I thought that went well enough. I’m not sure what you wanted out of it, but it seems as if every vintner in two valleys is deeply impressed with your varietals. What more can you ask?”
For the first time in his life, Luca did not care the slightest bit about wine or the wine business or anything having to do with his damned vines or vintages or barrels or whatever else.
“I could ask that when we are conducting business, you manage to keep your mind on that,” he seethed at her. He didn’t even try to contain that tone of his or the simmering outrage in it. “And not on laying your trap for your next victim.”
Her gray eyes chilled. “What are you talking about?”
“You weren’t particularly subtle,” he gritted at her as the car began to move, sweeping them out toward the main road and the mountains to the west. “Everyone at the table got to watch you hang all over that poor man and play your little games with him.”
“And by little games, I assume you mean the work you and I were there to do? That I was doing while you sulked?”
“You spent a long time off in the bathroom before dessert,” he continued, not caring that he could see the effect of his harsh tone in the way she shivered slightly. “What were you doing, I wonder? Your target also disappeared for a similar span of time. And God only knows what you were doing beneath the table where no one could see.”
He’d thought of little else. He knew the meal he’d been served had been the finest Californian cuisine, a fusion of the state’s rich bounty presented to perfection, and yet it had all been tasteless and pointless to him.
Kathryn shook her head, her lips pressing together. “This is ridiculous. Not to mention offensive in the extreme.” Her gray eyes flashed. “Of course, that’s your thing, isn’t it? The more horrible, the better.”
“And here’s what I wonder.” He shifted so he was closer to her, looming over her, his whole body humming with that darkness, that tension, that driving need he could neither understand nor control. This was what she did to him. She made him lose the tight control he’d always maintained over himself, his world, his life. Always. He found that the most unforgivable. Maybe that was what made him move his face that much closer to hers—so she could feel his fury in every word he spoke. “How does a noted whore for hire seal the deal? On your knees or on your back? Does it vary with each mark or do you stick to a set routine?”
He didn’t see her move, and that told him more about the blind single-mindedness of that darkness in him than anything else. He felt her palm against his jaw, heard the crack of it fill the car’s interior with the bright burst of the slap she delivered and he saw the fire and the fury in her dark gray eyes.
The pain came a moment later, sharp and swift.
“You’re a vile little man,” she threw at him, and he didn’t disagree with her. But that was neither here nor there. “The only thing more disgusting than your imagination is the fact you think you can dump it out on me whenever you feel like it, like a toxic spill.”
Luca laughed, a darker sound than the night outside the car or the way her breath came out in angry pants, and tested his jaw with his hand.
“That actually hurt.” He shifted his gaze to hers, and eyed the way she sat there, clearly trembling with rage. “Is this where you play the outraged and offended virgin? I must tell you, Kathryn. You’re not that accomplished an actress.”
She paled. He thought she might keel over, or explode, but she pressed her lips together again instead. She lifted a hand, and he thought she might try to hit him once more—and the operative word was try—but she only put her palm to her neck. As if she wanted to control her own pulse. Or her own breath.
Or herself.
And he didn’t know what to do with that notion that swept over him like heat, that she might find herself as out of control in the middle of this mess as he clearly was.
“If you hit me again,” he told her softly, “I’ll return the favor.”
“You’ll hit me?” Her eyes were grim in the dark. “I’m glad your father is dead, Luca. He would have been horrified by you.”
He ignored the little flare of something a good deal like shame deep inside him then, even as it knotted itself in his gut.
“Let’s be very clear about this,” he said, and he was aware on a distant level that the fury that had been riding him all through dinner had eased. Not disappeared, but loosened its hold. He didn’t ask himself why. “It will be a very cold day in hell before I worry myself over what my father, of all people, might have thought about anything I do. Much less what you think. That’s
the moral equivalent of taking lectures on good behavior from the devil himself.” He eyed her in the close confines of the car’s backseat, where he was still too much in her space, and it still wasn’t enough. Not close enough. Not enough. “But I don’t hit women. Not even when they’ve hit me first.”
She had the grace to look faintly abashed at that, and her gaze dropped to her hand. She flexed her fingers out in front of her, and he wondered if her palm stung as much as his jaw did. The idea didn’t make that heavy knot inside him loosen any.
He reached over and took her hand in his, and held on when she tried to jerk it out of his grasp. He ignored the little huff of air that escaped her lips, and smoothed his fingers over her palm as if he was tracing it. As if he wanted to rub the sting out.
As if he didn’t know what the hell he wanted.
“Hit me again, Kathryn,” he said in a low voice, looking at her hand instead of her face, “and I’ll take that as an invitation to finish what we started last night. No matter how many old men you make dance to your tune at a dinner table. No matter who you’re pretending to be tonight.”
Her fingers curled as if she wanted to clench them into a fist.
“I’m not pretending to be anyone,” she snapped at him. “The only person playing a game here is you. And there will never be an invitation to finish anything. That was an aberration. A terrible, horrifying mistake. I have no idea why it happened and—”
“Don’t you?”
He hadn’t meant to ask that question, but once out, it seemed to hover there between them, threatening everything. Pounding in him so hard it became indistinguishable from his own heartbeat.
“No,” she whispered, but her gray eyes were too large and too dark. Her pretty mouth trembled with the lie of it. And he could feel the tremor she fought to repress in that hand he held between his. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I never do.”
And Luca smiled. Hard. “Let me give you some clarity.”
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