Kathryn let out a breath that was more like a sigh.
“She wanted me to be an investment banker, too. That was always her preference, because she could teach me everything I needed to know and because her experience meant she could direct me.”
“I believe that is called living through one’s child. Not the best form of parenting, I think.”
She frowned at him. “Not in this case. I could never get my head around the math. My mother tried to tutor me herself, but it was a waste of time. I can’t think the way she can. My brain simply won’t work the way hers does.”
“My brain does not work the way my brother’s does,” Luca pointed out mildly, “and yet we’ve muddled along, running a rather successful company together for some time.”
“That’s different.” Kathryn lifted a shoulder then dropped it. “I nearly killed myself getting a First in economics. I spent hours and hours torturing myself with the coursework. But I did it. Then I went on to an MBA course because that was what my mother thought was the best path toward the brightest future.” She blew out a breath that made her fringe dance above her brow. “But the MBA was beyond torture. I was used to putting the hours in, but it wasn’t enough. No matter what I did, it wasn’t enough.”
She shook her head, frowning down at her hands, and Luca had never wanted to touch another person more than he did then. She looked too small and something like defeated, and it lodged in his chest like a bullet.
It occurred to him that he’d never seen her look like this. That she’d fought him every step of the way, if sometimes only with a straight spine and a head held high. But defeat was not a word he’d ever associated with her before.
He found he hated it.
Kathryn met his gaze again then. “And that was when I met your father.”
He shifted position and realized he was holding himself back as much as anything else. As if he didn’t know what he might do if he stopped—as if he still had that little control, when it still involved Kathryn yet wasn’t about sex. He couldn’t say he much enjoyed the sensation.
But one great mess at a time, he thought darkly.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “In that mythic waiting room, the birthplace of your epic friendship. The only friendship the old man ever had, as far as I am aware.”
“You asked me to tell you this story,” she pointed out. “You keep asking.”
Luca couldn’t trust himself to speak, one more novel experience where this woman was concerned—and one he knew he would have to think about later. He inclined his head, silently bidding her to continue.
“It happened just as I told you,” Kathryn said, her gaze reproving. “We started talking. Your father was charming. Funny.”
Luca snorted. “Old.”
“Maybe everyone is not as ageist as you are,” she snapped at him.
He raked his hand through his hair then, annoyed and frustrated in equal measure.
“It is time for the truth, cucciola mia,” he said then, roughly.
He moved before he knew he meant to, crossing over to place himself directly in front of her, at the foot of the high bed. She tilted up that chin of hers, as if she expected him to take a swing, and Luca was obviously deeply perverse, that such a thing should excite him. Or maybe it was simply that he liked it when she fought. When she stood up for herself, even against him. When she was nothing remotely like defeated.
“I’m telling you the truth. I can’t help it if it’s not the truth you want to hear.” She eyed him, as if his proximity bothered her. Luca hoped it did. It would make them even. “I think we’ve already established that you have a history of believing what you want to believe, no matter what the actual truth might be.”
He felt his mouth curve in acknowledgment. “But this is not a question of innocence. This is a question of how a young woman meets a much older man in a medical facility, so she could have no fantasy that there was anything virile about him at all, and decides to marry him anyway. I have no doubt that he proposed to you. That was what he did, always. But what made you agree?”
Kathryn held his gaze, and Luca didn’t move. He didn’t even blink, aware somehow that she was making a momentous decision. And he needed it to be the right one. He needed it—and he wasn’t sure he wanted to investigate why that need was so intense. After a long while, she let out a sigh.
“My mother has crippling arthritis,” Kathryn explained. “When it flares up she can hardly move. It had become very difficult for her to take care of herself.” She shook her head, more as if she was shaking off a wave of emotion than negating anything. “I should have been there to help her, but between the classes for my degree and all the studying I had to do to barely keep up, I couldn’t even do that well. I lived with her, which was one thing, but it was all beginning to feel a lot like drowning.” She sucked in a breath. “But when my mother came out of her appointment, she recognized your father at a glance. One thing led to another, and we all went out for a meal.”
Luca waited.
“Your father is very easy to talk to, actually.”
“That was not a common sentiment.”
“My mother told him everything. My struggles with my degree. Her battle with her arthritis. He was very kind.” Her gray eyes grew distant, and he thought she tipped her chin up that much farther. “And at the end of the evening, he asked if he could see me—just me—again.”
“This is where I think I need some clarification,” Luca murmured. “Did you date a great deal?”
“I didn’t date at all,” she retorted, and he almost didn’t recognize that fierce thing that soared in him at that, possessiveness mixed with a kind of triumph.
“But you dated my father.”
For the first time she looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t necessarily want to date him,” she said softly. “But he’d been so nice, and so sweet, and I didn’t see the harm in having another dinner with him. I thought I was doing a good deed.”
“What did your mother think?”
She didn’t quite flinch. But he saw the tiny, abortive movement she made, and his eyes narrowed.
“She’s always worried that I had more looks than sense,” Kathryn said quietly. “Which I’m afraid I proved to her through my failures with my studies.”
“A first-class degree is, by definition, not any kind of failure.”
“I had to work ten times as hard as she did, and I still only did it by my teeth,” she said with a dismissive wave of one hand. “But when we met your father, it seemed a perfect opportunity to stop worrying about the brains part and let the looks do some good for a change.”
“What,” Luca asked through his teeth, “does that mean?”
“It meant we both knew he liked the look of me,” Kathryn said, with an edge to her voice. She sat up straighter on the bed. “And he was just as funny and kind and charming when I went out with him alone. Still, when he asked me to marry him on the third date, I laughed.”
Her gaze had gone fierce. Protective, Luca thought.
“He told me that he knew he was a foolish old man, vain and silly, to think a young girl like me would want to shackle herself to a man like him. He knew he didn’t have much time left. He assured me that all he wanted was companionship, because he didn’t have any of the rest of it in him any longer. He told me I was the most beautiful thing he’d seen in years, and he couldn’t think of a better way to go than to have me holding his hand.”
“He flattered you.”
“He needed me,” she snapped. “He was old and scared and lonely. He told me that he had sons he wasn’t close to and no particular reason to imagine that might change. He didn’t want to die alone, Luca. I didn’t think that made him a monster.”
He felt as if he was nailed to the floor beneath him. As if he’d turned to stone.
“And this is why you married him? Out of pity? Out of the goodness of your heart? To save an old man from loneliness? You are a saint, indeed.” Her breath hissed from her mouth. Luca kept going. “But he was a very wealthy man, Kathryn, and he did not traffic much in saints or pity. He didn’t have to. He could have bought himself a fleet of nurses to keep him company, if company was what he wanted in his final days. So I’ll ask you again. Why did he buy you?”
“He didn’t buy me, Luca,” she threw at him, sounding as furious as she did vulnerable. “He saved me.”
* * *
Kathryn wanted to snatch the words back the moment she said them.
They hung there in the air between them, the glare of them enough to cast the rest of the room and even Luca in shadow.
She didn’t know what she expected him to do, but it wasn’t to simply stand there and gaze back at her, with all of his intensity focused hard on her, in a way she understood differently today.
The truth was, she understood a whole lot of things differently today.
Her own body. His body. The things he could do with both. What that look in his dark eyes meant—and more, what it had always meant, all these years, though she hadn’t had a clue. Where it had always been leading them, this mad thing between them that not even the night they’d spent together had eased at all.
But she’d never said that out loud before, that little truth about her marriage. She wasn’t entirely sure why she had now.
“Go on, then,” Luca rumbled at her when it seemed whole ages had passed. When she’d died a thousand deaths, each one of them more disloyal than the last. “Explain that to me.”
He stood there like some kind of ancient god of judgment, sculpted and remote, with his arms crossed and that mouth of his in a stern line. And it didn’t seem to matter that he’d had that mouth on parts of her body she’d had no idea could be that sensitive. That he knew her now in a way no one else ever had. That he was the only person on the earth who had ever been inside her. It all made her dizzy.
And it didn’t change the fact that he stared down at her as if he was hewn from rock. Or that compulsion she didn’t understand that worked inside her, that wanted to give him anything he asked for, anything at all.
Anything. Even this.
“My mother was thrilled,” she said, her voice scratchy, as if her own surrender choked her on its way down. “She got a cottage and her own live-in nurses out of the deal, so she never needs to work again.”
Her mother had been something a bit more complicated than simply thrilled, Kathryn thought, though she didn’t know how to explain that to this man. She didn’t quite know how to think about it herself. All these years later.
“Being the wife of a man like Gianni Castelli is a full-time job,” Rose had said imperiously, sitting at the kitchen table in their grotty old flat with the real-estate listings spread out before her. She’d had no doubt that Kathryn would accept Gianni’s proposal. It hadn’t even been a discussion. “It will require study and application, of course, should you want to make it into a career.”
“A career?” Kathryn hadn’t understood. “He’s not well, Mum. He’s not likely to last five years.”
“You need to view this as an internship, my girl. A stepping stone to bigger and better things.” Rose had eyed her up and down then shaken her head. “You’re pretty enough, there’s no denying it. And while you haven’t proved to be as smart as we hoped, I’d imagine you can succeed in this arena anyway. The only figure you’ll need to know is the size of your allowance.”
“Mum,” she’d said then, uncertainly. “I’m just not sure...”
“You listen to me, Kathryn,” Rose had said, and she hadn’t raised her voice. She hadn’t needed to raise her voice, not when she used that withering tone. “I sacrificed everything for you. I worked myself into this state. And what would we have done if Gianni Castelli hadn’t happened along and gone ass over teakettle for that face of yours? You need to capitalize on that.” She’d sniffed. “For my sake, if nothing else. The truth is you’ve proved yourself unequal to the task of a career in finance. How will we pay the bills without this marriage?”
“But...” She’d felt all the usual things she always had when Rose spoke like this. Shame. Guilt. Despair that she was so deficient. Anguish that she couldn’t live up to her mother’s expectations. And that sliver of something else, something stubborn and forlorn, that didn’t quite understand why nothing she did, no matter how hard she worked, was ever good enough. “It isn’t we, Mum. It’s me. I have to marry a man I don’t love—”
“You must be having a laugh.” Though the look on Rose’s face had indicated there was precious little to laugh about. “Love? This isn’t a fairy story, Kathryn. This is about duty and responsibility.” She’d brandished her hands in the air, her gnarled and swollen knuckles. “Look at what I did to myself to do right by you. Look at how I ruined myself and threw away everything that ever mattered to me. It’s between you and your conscience how you want to repay me.”
And put that way, Kathryn hadn’t had a choice.
“It sounds as if your mother got the better part of the bargain,” Luca said quietly, snapping her back into the present.
“She got what she deserved after all she did for me,” Kathryn said stoutly. “And I certainly couldn’t give it to her. Thanks to your father, she can live out the rest of her days in peace. She’s earned that.”
There was a certain tightness to Luca’s expression that suggested he didn’t agree, and she tensed, instantly on the defensive, but he didn’t pursue it. He cocked his head slightly to one side.
“And what did you earn?” he asked. “How did saving your mother save you?”
“I got to quit my MBA course,” she said in a rush, and she felt the heat of that admission wash over her like some kind of flu. “I walked away and I never had to go back, and it didn’t matter that we were out of the tuition money. The whole slate was wiped clean. All that struggle, all those years of never living up to expectations, gone in an instant and forgiven completely, simply because your father wanted to marry me.”
And maybe, just maybe, she’d enjoyed a little holiday from her subservience to her mother’s wishes. Maybe she’d liked having someone treat her like some kind of prize for a change.
“Kathryn,” Luca said, his voice so gentle it made her shiver, “you must know—”
But she didn’t want to hear whatever it was he was going to say. She didn’t want whatever devastation that was lurking there in his dark eyes, lit now with something very much like compassion.
She lurched forward instead, coming up on her knees before him and throwing out her hands to catch herself against the wall of his chest. He didn’t so much as rock on his feet with the impact. He simply studied her.
“Listen to me,” Kathryn said, aware that she sounded desperate. “You can think whatever you like about your father’s intentions. But to me, he was a dream come true. You don’t have to like that,” she said hurriedly when the edges of his mouth turned down, “but it’s the truth. It’s a fact.”
And she was so close to him then. Touching him again. Her palms were propped against the sculpted perfection of his pectoral muscles, and that delirious heat of his poured into her, making her flush all over again.
But this fever she recognized.
Kathryn didn’t want to talk about her marriage. She didn’t want to talk about their complicated families. She didn’t know what that dark thing was that lurked there in the way he was looking at her then, and she didn’t want to know.
She did the only thing she knew to do. The only thing that made sense.
She tipped herself forward and pressed her mouth to his.
And it felt artless and silly, nothing like the way he’d kissed her—and for a shuddering moment that felt like forever he merely st
ood there, as if he was stunned—but then he moved. He took the back of her head in his palm and he opened his mouth, driving into hers and taking complete and delicious control.
He kissed her and he kissed her. He kissed her until she was wound around him, pressing herself against him, desperate and wild—because now she knew. Now she knew what else there was. Where else they could go.
All the magical things he could do.
But Luca pulled away, still curving that big hand of his over the back of her head, his dark eyes glittering.
“Did you do that to distract me?” he asked, his voice gruff. His breath not entirely steady—which made a whole different fire ignite within her.
“Yes,” she said. Her mouth felt swollen again. And even though she wore his shirt and it covered more of her than some of her own clothes, she felt stripped bare. Naked and vulnerable and wide-open to him in every way.
“Is that the only reason?” If possible, his voice was even rougher.
Kathryn shifted on her knees. She slid her hands up, over his jaw, holding his face between her palms, the way he’d done before to her. And she was so close that she could feel that shake in him, low and deep. So close she could feel that he was unsteady, too.
It made her feel as if she was made of light. As if she was filled with power.
“You might have noticed that I like kissing you, Luca,” she said, and her voice was solemn. Because somehow everything between them had shifted, and there was something much too serious in his eyes. “You’re my first.”
“Your first in bed.”
She waited, still holding him. She saw the exact moment he understood. The very second it crashed through him, leaving him stunned. And then something far darker, hungrier and indescribably male, lit him up. It made his dark eyes gleam. It made him tighten his grip.
“Cucciola mia,” he murmured, his mouth against her lips, “we might kill each other.”
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