And then he bore her back down to the bed and showed her exactly what he meant.
CHAPTER TEN
A WEEK LATER they concluded their business in California and flew back to Italy with Rafael, Lily and a private nurse for Lily and her unborn baby in tow.
Luca could have done without the crowd.
It had been a week of abject torture, having claimed Kathryn in private yet having to act as if nothing had changed between them in public. That she was the assistant he hadn’t wanted, and he the Castelli who had always hated her the most. Luca had found that his much-vaunted control had deserted him almost entirely, making him uneasy about where this madness was leading him—but he couldn’t stop.
Any moment of privacy they had, he exulted in her. Cars. Alcoves. Out walking the property. He kept waiting for this grip she had on him to ease, for the wildfire only she had ever stirred in him like this to abate—but it still hadn’t. If anything, it grew stronger. Every day brighter and hotter than the day before.
It would be different once they were back in Rome, he told himself. There would be no sneaking around to avoid his brother, or at least, far less of that kind of thing. With no element of the forbidden, he was certain the hunger would ease. It always did. He was not the kind of man who formed attachments, and he knew better to want things he couldn’t have. He’d learned that as a child, and he’d never forgotten it.
In truth, it had never been an issue before.
But first they had to make it to Rome, and separate themselves from his brother and Lily, who would be flying on to the family seat in the Dolomites. Several hours into their nighttime flight, only Rafael and Luca remained awake in the lounge area of the jet, the others having long since headed to the jet’s stately guest rooms.
Rafael was talking about their next steps as a company and how best to capitalize on the goodwill they’d sown about the accounts in the wake of the annual ball. Luca, meanwhile, had spent longer than he cared to admit imagining Kathryn spread out against the pillows just down the plane’s narrow hall, her long dark hair—
“Kathryn,” Rafael said, intoning her name as if he could read Luca’s dirty mind.
Luca eyed his brother across the width of the lounge and maintained his infinitely lazy position, stretched out on one of the couches like some kind of dauphin.
“Yes,” he said. “Kathryn. My personal assistant, in fulfillment of our beloved patriarch’s will. I haven’t complained, have I?”
“You have not,” his brother agreed. He looked so stern and austere as he sat there, his bearing far more dignified than Luca’s had ever been. “That is what concerns me.”
Luca forced a laugh he didn’t feel. “I am nothing if not adaptable. And obedient.”
“But that is the point.” Rafael raised his brows. “You are neither one of those things, despite the great joy it gives you to pretend otherwise.”
“You are mistaken, brother. I am nothing but a jumped-up playboy with excellent staff, all of whom are well paid to cover for my incompetence. The tabloids have decreed it, therefore it must be true.”
Rafael said nothing for a moment that dragged on too long. Luca found himself clenching his jaw and forced himself to stop.
“I expected you to run her off within the week.”
Luca shrugged. “She proved somewhat more tenacious than anticipated.”
Rafael considered him. “She was also a surprising asset these past two weeks. The accounts adored her. I suspect half of them raced to the tabloids to submit their own Saint Kate stories within hours of meeting her.” He stretched his legs out before him. “Needless to say, this has put a rather positive spin on things. I had more business associates than I can count commend me—us—on our magnanimity in hiring her. She might as well be the mascot of the company.”
Luca didn’t remember moving, but there he was, sitting up and glaring at his older brother.
“This is a temporary situation,” he said, his voice clipped. “We agreed on that.”
“Maybe we should reconsider.” Rafael shrugged when Luca continued to glare at him. “If using Saint Kate boosts our profile, I don’t see why we wouldn’t use her as long as possible.”
“Perhaps,” Luca said coolly, “the lady no longer wishes to be used. It’s possible she had her fill of it during her commercial transaction of a marriage. Maybe all she wants to do is her job.”
That was, of course, a huge mistake. He knew it the moment he spoke without thinking—as it was the first time he could remember doing so to a family member since he was a child.
Rafael blinked. “I don’t care what she wants, as long as it benefits the company,” he said in a low voice.
“The company,” Luca muttered, again without thinking. Almost as if he couldn’t control himself at all. “Always the company.”
He didn’t much care for the way his brother looked at him then.
“Have our objectives changed without my knowledge, Luca?” Rafael let that sit there for a moment, and the expression on his face was far too shrewd for Luca’s peace of mind. “Have yours?”
* * *
It was not until she was safely barricaded in her little Italian flat that Kathryn really breathed.
And moments after that first, deep, full-bodied breath, she simply sank down on the soft carpet in her cozy lounge, as if the knees that had somehow carried her all the way through her trip to California and the long flight back were no longer up to the task. As if everything that had happened in the past two weeks finally caught up with her.
With a wallop.
She found herself looking around her flat, the morning light streaming in from the high windows that had sold her on the place, as if she’d never seen it before. It was hard to imagine the person she’d been when she’d left here. The person she’d left behind her in Sonoma somewhere.
How could her whole world change so quickly?
Her marriage to Gianni had been a change, certainly, but it had been a change of circumstances, not of who she was inside. She had merely swapped one set of duties and obligations for another, and the truth was, she’d found caring for Gianni infinitely more pleasant than statistics. Or tending to her difficult mother, if she was brutally honest with herself.
This was different. She was different.
And she had no idea if she needed to set about putting herself back together somehow, or if she needed to figure out a way to simply accept who she’d become. Whoever the hell that was.
Kathryn breathed in, deep. Then out again. She did it a few more times, and then she climbed back to her feet and decided that a cup of tea was all the answer she needed just now. Everything else would wait.
She was just finishing that same cup, sitting out on her small balcony with her view over the red-tipped Roman rooftops that made her heart sing a little in her chest, when she heard the banging on her front door.
Luca, she thought at once. Because who else could it be?
And the fact that her heart echoed that pounding told her more than she needed to know about those feelings that the tea hadn’t suppressed at all.
She considered not answering it—but dismissed that thought in an instant. This was Luca. It wasn’t as if he’d simply shrug and wander off.
Kathryn padded to the door in her bare feet and swung it open, not at all surprised to find him braced there against the doorjamb, one arm over his head and a scowl on his face.
“Where did you go?” he demanded.
“Home,” she replied. “Obviously.”
He ignored that. “Why did you race off like that? I looked around and you’d disappeared.”
She didn’t want to let him inside her flat, and she couldn’t have said why. She crossed her arms over her chest and stood in the doorway instead.
“I came home
,” she said, very distinctly. “You told me I didn’t have to go into work today. Has something changed?”
Something ignited in those dark eyes of his, and he pushed himself off the doorjamb. Technically, he’d moved back, and yet he still seemed to fill the doorway. The narrow hallway behind him. The whole of her flat he hadn’t even entered.
“What do you think is happening here, Kathryn?” he asked softly.
She refused to show him her uncertainty. That had been situational, she assured herself. She’d lost her virginity to this man, and he was a very demanding, very detail-oriented lover. Anyone would have trouble finding her footing after that kind of combination.
But she was standing just fine now.
“What’s happening is that after a long, two-week business trip, my boss is standing at my door,” she said crisply. “If you don’t have an assignment for me, I think you should leave.”
She expected his temper, braced herself for it. Luca looked astounded for a beat, but then, impossibly, he laughed. And it was that same delighted, beautiful laugh of his that rivaled the Italian scenery itself and did far worse things to her poor heart. It made her scowl at him, so determined was she to ward him off. To keep that laughter from sinking in deep beneath her skin.
But it was like fighting off sunlight. No matter what she wanted, no matter what she did, it filled her.
“Come here, cucciola mia,” he said when the laughter faded away.
He crooked his finger at her, and she wanted to bite him. He was a foot away at most. He was already too close.
“I’m right here,” she told him. “I don’t need to come any closer, and I’m not your pet.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said in that dark voice of his that made need roll through her like a terrible thirst. “Come, Kathryn. Put that mouth on me. It will feel much better than using it as a battering ram when I can see you don’t mean it.”
“I do.”
“You do not,” he corrected her. He moved toward her then, advancing on her with that intense gleam in his dark gaze that she knew now was hunger. And the remains of that laughter that made him seem even more beautiful than he already was. “You’re afraid.”
“I most certainly am not,” she said, but then she couldn’t move any farther.
He’d backed her up into her flat and straight into the wall of the small foyer, and she hadn’t even noticed. She swallowed, hard.
“I’m not afraid,” she told him, very distinctly. “But I need some time to clear my head.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have to justify how I spend my free time to you.”
“You don’t. But you could spend it beneath me, driving us both insane with the way you move those hips of yours. You can see why I’d agitate for that option.”
Her jaw worked, but no words came out. Luca grinned.
“We can’t just...have sex all the time,” she protested, but even she could hear that her voice was weak. Reedy.
This time that marvelous laughter stayed in his eyes, making them gleam gold and shiver straight through her.
“Why ever not?”
“Sex is a weakness,” she told him, very seriously, the words coming from some part of her she hadn’t known was there. “A weapon.”
“That sounds like the ravings of someone who isn’t very good at it, cucciola mia, and therefore doesn’t enjoy it,” he said with another laugh, obviously unaware that he’d just dismissed one of her mother’s favorite sayings so easily. “A description that does not fit you at all.”
She didn’t know what expression she wore then, but his hard face softened, and he pulled her against him as if she was a fragile little thing, made of spun glass. He smoothed her hair back from her face, as she’d already discovered he loved to do. And when he gazed down at her there was something so bright in his eyes that it made her shake.
And her heart broke open inside her, telling her things she didn’t want to accept. Making her feel things she’d never thought she’d feel for anyone, and certainly not for him. But she might have been a virgin before she’d met Luca, and she might have been completely untouched until he’d handled that, too, but she wasn’t an idiot.
Only an idiot would tell Luca Castelli she was falling in love with him, she scolded herself. He doesn’t want to know.
“I can’t think around you,” she whispered, though she knew she shouldn’t. That it was far too close to a truth even she wanted to pretend wasn’t real. “Sex only makes it worse.”
She felt his chest move against her as if he was laughing, though he didn’t make a sound. Slowly, slowly, his perfect mouth curved.
“I know,” he said, and he ran his hands down the length of her spine, then over the curves of her bottom, pulling her flush against him. “Sex makes everything terrible.”
He was hot and hard against her belly, and she thought he knew the precise moment when she simply...melted. Kathryn thought he always knew.
Luca smiled then. “But then it makes it much, much better.”
And when he set about proving it, Kathryn surrendered.
Because she wanted him more than she wanted to resist him.
And she thought he knew that, too.
* * *
Some ten days after their return from California, Luca paused at his office door after finishing a round of calls to the States and frowned. It was late in the evening, and his staff had long since departed for the day—all except Kathryn.
She sat at her desk in the open space outside his office, where she was meant to act as his guard and first line of support, furiously typing—which didn’t make any sense. He hadn’t given her any work that needed finishing at this hour.
“You should have left hours ago,” he said, and the beast that still paced inside him when it came to her growled in approval when she jolted at the sound of his voice, then melted into a smile. “Didn’t I mention something about swimming naked beneath the stars? That happens upstairs, Kathryn. Away from the computer.”
“I have to finish this,” she said, her fingers flying over the keys. “Then we can stargaze all you like.”
“It’s the naked part that interests me, cucciola mia. The stars are a ploy. You may not have noticed this, but we’re in the middle of the city.”
She wrinkled her nose at him, which he found tugged at him in ways that he wasn’t entirely comfortable exploring, but she typed on. He moved to stand behind her, smoothing his hands over her shoulders and tugging gently on the end of her fashionably sleek ponytail. She sighed happily enough, but she didn’t stop, and he read over her shoulder.
And this time, he scowled. “This is Marco’s report. He told me he’d have it in to me tomorrow morning.”
“And so he will,” Kathryn said, her voice even. “Just as soon as I finish it.”
Luca pulled her chair back from the desk, forcing her to stop, then swiveled it around so he could look her in the eyes. Hers were gray and far too calm when they met his.
“You are not Marco’s assistant,” he told her, perhaps more harshly than necessary. “You are mine.”
Kathryn was far more than that, though Luca knew he didn’t have the words to tell her that. She was that pounding in his heart. She was that heat that never left him. And all of that was wrapped up in those cool gray eyes, that serene little smile, the entire package that was Kathryn. His.
“Perhaps you’re unaware that it’s part of your assistant’s job to pretty up all the reports that make it to your desk,” Kathryn said mildly.
“It is not.”
“How strange,” she murmured. “I have been assured by no less than six different members of the team that it is.”
Of course she’d been told that—and who knew what else? He’d essentially declared open season on her when h
e’d brought her on board. How had he managed to forget that? But of course, he knew how. Because all he thought about was getting his hands on her—and she never, ever complained. She smiled instead.
He shoved his hair back with an impatient hand. “I will speak to them.”
“No,” she countered, “you will not.”
“They cannot continue to abuse you in this fashion.”
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “You can’t interfere. It will work itself out.”
“This is not a cause worth martyring yourself for,” he told her. “I put this target on your back. I’ll take it off.”
“And if you do that, you might as well shoot me yourself,” she said, with an edge to her voice. “I don’t need you to give me special treatment. Everyone knows you were forced to hire me. You stepping in now will only make it worse.”
“Kathryn—”
“I told you I’d be good at this and I am,” she said, her voice low and her chin high. “My work speaks for itself. It will win over your team, and if it doesn’t, doing all the work they don’t want to do means I’ll know their jobs as well as mine. It all only helps me.”
“You don’t need any help.”
“I couldn’t do the job I trained my whole life to do,” she threw at him fiercely. And he knew she meant the job her mother had wanted for her. “This is my chance. I’m not going to waste it, and I’m not going to let you save me, either. I’ll succeed or fail on my own.”
He stared down at her, a kind of battle inside him that he didn’t understand. Maybe he didn’t want to understand it. Maybe what was shaking through him was so outside his experience, understanding the truth of it might break him in two.
“You let my father save you once,” he said quietly.
She didn’t flinch from that. She held his gaze, though he could feel the way it burned, and hers was solemn.
“And now I want to save myself,” she said with soft determination. “And I want you to let me.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Castelli's Virgin Widow Page 13