Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Shocking Scandals: Castelli's Virgin Widow / Expecting a Royal Scandal / The Guardian's Virgin Ward

“I don’t think you knew your father very well,” Kathryn suggested. She lifted up her hands when Luca’s eyes blazed. “Not in the way I did. That’s all I mean.”

“You’re speaking of the two years of your acquaintance with him, as opposed to the whole of my life?”

“A son can’t possibly know the man his father was.” She lifted a shoulder then dropped it. “He can only know what kind of father he was or wasn’t, and piece together what clues he can about the man from that. Isn’t that the history of the world? No one ever knows their parents. Not really.”

She certainly didn’t know hers. Her father had buggered off before she was born, and her mother had given up everything that had mattered to her so Kathryn wouldn’t have to bear the weight of that. Kathryn knew the sacrifice. Her mother reminded her of what she’d left behind for Kathryn’s sake at every opportunity, and fair enough. But she still couldn’t say she understood the woman—much less the way she’d treated Kathryn all her life.

A muscle leaped in Luca’s lean jaw.

“I knew my father a great deal longer than you did,” he gritted out after a moment. “He had no friends, Kathryn. He had business associates and a collection of wives. Everyone in his life was accorded a role and expected to play it, and woe betide the fool who did not live up to his expectations.”

“Is that what this has been about all this time? All the hatred and the nastiness and the threats and so on?” she asked. She tilted her head to one side and said the thing she knew she shouldn’t. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “You...have daddy issues?”

The crack of his temper was very nearly audible. If the plane itself had been thrown off course and sent into a spiraling nosedive toward the ocean, she wouldn’t have been at all surprised—and it took Kathryn a long, tense, shuddering moment to understand that the jet they sat on was fine. The plane flew on, unaffected by the minor explosion that had taken over the cabin—and the aftershocks that were still rolling through her.

The only steep and terrible free fall was in her stomach as it plummeted to her feet.

Luca hadn’t moved. It only felt as if he had.

She watched, as fascinated as she was alarmed, as he tamped that bright current of fury down. He still didn’t move. He stared back at her as if he’d very much like to throttle her. One hand twitched as if he’d considered it. This suggested to her that she’d been more on target than she’d imagined when she’d said it.

But then he blinked and the crisis passed. There was only the usual force of his dislike staring back at her. That and the leftover adrenaline trickling through her veins, making her shift against the sofa cushions.

“Why me?” he asked, his dark voice a spiked thing as it slammed into her. “I’ve made no secret of my opinion of you. What sort of masochism led you to throw yourself in my path when you must know you’d have had a much better time in another branch of the company?”

“Is that a thinly veiled way of asking if I’m pursuing you for my usual gold-digging ends?” she asked, unable to tear her gaze from his and equally unsure why that was. Why did he invade her like this? Why did she feel as if he had more control over her than she did?

“Was it veiled, thinly or otherwise?” he asked, his voice soft. If no less harsh. “I must be doing it wrong.”

Kathryn’s smile felt forced, but she didn’t let it fade. She had the wild notion, suddenly, that it was all she had.

“I considered working for your brother, of course,” she said quietly. “I doubt he’s particularly fond of me, but there’s certainly none of...this.” She waved her hand between them, in that too-thick air and that taut electric storm that charged it. “It would have been easier, certainly.”

“Then, why?” Luca’s mouth curled into something much too dark to be any kind of smile, and the echo of it pulsed inside her. “To punish us both?”

“The fact is that your brother maintains the business and he’s very good at it,” Kathryn said. “He will make certain the Castelli name endures, that no ground will be lost on his watch. He’s a very steady hand on the wheel.”

“And I am what?” Luca didn’t quite laugh. “The drunken driver in this scenario? I drive too fast, Kathryn. But never drunk.”

“You’re the innovator,” she said quietly. It felt...dangerous to praise him to his face. To do something other than suffer through his darkness. “You’re the creative force in the company. Never satisfied. Always pushing a new boundary.” She shrugged, more uncomfortable than she could remember ever having been around him before, and that was saying something. “My personal feelings about you aside, there’s no more exciting place to work. You must know this. I assume that’s why all your employees are so—” Kathryn smiled that little bit brighter, and that, too, was harder than it should have been “—fiercely protective.”

Luca looked thrown, which she might have considered a victory at any other time—but there was something about the way he gazed at her then. It seemed to sneak into her, wrapping itself around her bones and drawing tight. Too tight.

“Can you do that?” he asked, his voice mild but with that something beneath it. “Put your personal feelings aside?”

She met his gaze. She didn’t flinch.

“I have to if I want this job to mean something,” Kathryn told him, aware as she spoke that this might have been the most honest she’d ever been with him. As if she had nothing to lose, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. This was her only chance to prove that she could make something of herself without her mother’s input or directives. This was her only chance to honor her mother’s sacrifices—and also stay free. “And I do. Unlike you, I don’t have a choice.”

* * *

The Castelli château, the center of Castelli Wine’s operations in the States, perched at the top of Northern California’s fertile Sonoma Valley like a particularly self-satisfied grande dame. The vineyards stretched out much like voluminous queenly skirts, rolling out over the hills in all directions, seeming to take over this part of the valley all the way to the horizon and back. Tonight the winery gleamed prettily through the crisp winter night, bright lights in every window as a line of cars snaked down the long drive between the marching rows of cypress trees.

Luca loved the unapologetic spectacle of it—the high Italianate drama in every detail, from the epic sweep of the house itself to the grounds kept in a condition to rival the Boboli Gardens in Florence, delighting the tourists on their wine-tasting tours of Sonoma—despite himself.

Tonight was the annual Castelli Wine Winter Ball. This was the reason Luca had flown across the world, landing only a scant hour earlier, which he was sure Rafael would think was cutting it a bit close. He and Rafael needed to make it abundantly clear to all and sundry that nothing had changed since Gianni’s passing. That everything was business as usual at Castelli Wine.

And as with most things in life, the more elegant and relaxed and attractive the face of a thing, the more people were likely to believe it.

Kathryn, Luca thought grimly, certainly proved that rule. And so did he. He banked on it, in fact.

He checked his watch for the fifth time in as many seconds, unreasonably irritated that she hadn’t been waiting for him when he’d emerged from his bedroom suite, showered and dressed and as recovered from their flight as it was possible to be in such a short time. He could already hear the band in the great ballroom and the sound of very well-heeled enjoyment below, all clinking glasses and graceful laughter, wafting up into the far reaches of the family wing and down the long hall to this remote set of rooms set apart from the rest.

Luca glared at Kathryn’s door, as if that might make her appear.

And when it did—when it started to open as if he’d commanded it with that glare—he scowled even more.

Until she stepped out into the hall, and then, he was fairly certain, all the blood in his head sank with an audible thud to his sex.

“What—” and his voice was a strangled version of his own, even from the great distance that ringing in his ears made it sound “—the hell are you wearing?”

Kathryn eyed him with that cool expression of hers that he was beginning to think might be the death of him. It clawed at him. It made him want nothing more than to heat her up and see what lurked beneath it.

“I believe it’s called a dress,” she said crisply.

“No.”

She stood there a moment. Blinked. “No? Are you sure? The last time I checked a dictionary, the word was definitely dress. Or perhaps gown? A case could be made for each, though I think—”

“Be quiet.”

Her mouth snapped closed and she had no idea how lucky she was that he hadn’t silenced her in the way he’d much prefer. He could already taste her again, as if he had. Luca pushed off the wall opposite her door, unable to control himself. Unable to think.

A red haze of sheer lust kicked through him, making everything else dim.

Yes, Kathryn was wearing a dress. Barely. It was in an off-white shade that should have made her look like a ghost, with that English complexion of hers, but instead made her seem to glow. As if she’d been lit from within by a buttery shimmer. It had a delicate, high neckline and no sleeves, and an elegant sort of wide belt that wrapped around her waist before the full skirt cascaded all the way to the floor.

None of that was the problem. That could have been Grace Kelly, it was all so effortlessly tasteful and stylish.

It was the damned cutouts that made his entire body feel like a single, taut ache. Two huge wedges that edged in at sharp angles from the sides, cutting into the lower bodice of the dress and showing sheer acres of her bare skin in that sweet spot below her breasts and above her navel, then flaring out over the curves of her sides.

Luca wanted to taste her everywhere he saw skin. Right here. Right now.

He didn’t realize he’d said that out loud until her eyes went wide and turned that fascinating slate-green shade, and then it didn’t matter anyway, because he’d lost his mind—and worse, his control. He backed her into her own closed door, bracing himself over her with a hand on either side of her head.

“You can’t,” Kathryn said. Whispered, more like, her voice a rough little scrape that he could feel in the hardest part of him. “Luca. We can’t.”

Luca didn’t ask himself what he was doing. He didn’t care. That dress pooled around her, seductive and impossible, and he was lost in the elegant line of her neck and the hair she’d swept back into a complicated chignon at her nape.