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

She had no idea why she’d said that. Luca looked frozen into place for a long, taut moment, an arrested expression on his darkly gorgeous face. Then he blinked, and there was nothing but his usual darkness again, leaving Kathryn faintly dizzy.

“Careful, Stepmother,” he said softly. Lethally. “Or I might be tempted to truly give them something to talk about tonight.”

She didn’t believe he’d do anything of the kind—of course she didn’t—but she still had to fight to restrain a shiver at the thought. And she was sure that Luca knew it, that the unholy gleam of something like gold in his dark eyes was that pure male knowledge Kathryn was very much afraid would be her undoing.

But then he turned away, his public smile at the ready, that intensity gone as if it had never been.

And Kathryn reminded herself that it didn’t matter what this man’s sister-in-law, who had once been his stepsister, had said in the bathroom lounge. It didn’t matter what happened in remote hallways in the château. The only truth that mattered was that she was his assistant now, and if she couldn’t do that job as well as she should, everything else he’d ever said about her was true. And not just him.

You’ve had more opportunities than I could have dreamed of having! her mother had said the last time she’d seen her, at Christmas, with that look on her face that had told Kathryn that once again she’d failed Rose terribly, as she’d always managed to do. “And look what you’ve done with them.”

Kathryn hadn’t known what to say or how to defend herself. Because Rose had been the one to encourage Kathryn into marrying Gianni in the first place.

“The world is filled with people who marry for far less reason than this,” she’d said. “But of course, Kathryn, it’s your life. You should do what you think is best for you, no matter who else might benefit.”

And Kathryn hadn’t been able to think of a good reason why not to marry the kindly old man when her mother had put it like that—especially given what she knew she would gain from it. It would cost her so very little. All she had to sacrifice was a couple of years. Not her whole life, as her mother had done, and for far less in return. Though Rose certainly hadn’t objected when Gianni’s money had allowed Kathryn to buy her a cottage in the sweet Yorkshire village of her choice, and then provide her with live-in care.

She never thanked you, either, a little voice pointed out, deep inside her.

But she felt ungrateful and small even thinking such things. Many women wouldn’t have had a baby on their own, with the father adamantly out of the picture. Rose had never faltered.

Which meant Kathryn could do no less—no matter the provocation.

It was time she stopped worrying about Luca Castelli and what he thought about her, and got to work.

* * *

One blue-and-gold California day rolled into the next, filled with meetings and vineyard tours and endless business dinners, and Luca found himself more disgruntled than he should have been by the fact Kathryn was...good at the job. More than good, in fact, in the odd role she had to play. Far better at it than the assistant she’d displaced, though he hated to admit it. Marco had been an excellent administrative assistant, but had always been a little too conspicuously himself when out in the field trying to charm potential clients.

Kathryn, on the other hand—who Luca would have asserted could no more blend than the sun could rise in the west and was anything but charming besides—did it beautifully.

“No,” he barked out one morning, when she’d walked into their shared breakfast room dressed in one of her usual work outfits, a skirt and heels and one of those soft blouses that made him unable to think of anything at all but the breasts pressed just there behind the silk.

Kathryn paused, her hand on the back of the nearest chair, her bearing that of slightly offended royalty. It put his teeth on edge.

“You can’t wear that,” he growled at her, feeling like some kind of sulky child, which was insupportable. He was not one of his nephews, having a tantrum. Why couldn’t he control himself around this woman? “We are walking through the vines with one of the accounts today. They find the Castelli family on the verge of being too European for their tastes as is, so we must be certain to impress them with our homespun, regular-person charm.”

“I don’t think even you can convince someone you are either homespun or regular.”

“I’m a chameleon,” he said drily. And was uncomfortable with how that sat there on the sunny table like truth, when he hadn’t meant it that way. It’s interesting that you’re so determined to hide part of yourself away wherever you go, she’d said, damn her. He scowled at her. “But I doubt you can say the same.”

He was wrong. Kathryn turned and left the room and when she reappeared, she’d transformed herself. She wore jeans, a pair of boots and a soft, casual, long-sleeved shirt. She’d let her hair down to pool around her shoulders and had scrubbed the makeup from her face. She looked like a host of fantasies he hadn’t realized he had. She looked like an advertisement for healthy Californian living. Like a dream come true.

The emissaries from this tricky account of theirs had agreed, hanging on Kathryn’s every word and acting as if Luca was her assistant, a state of affairs that didn’t annoy him as much as it should have done—because he got to trail behind her, admiring the curve of her bottom in faded denim.

And imagining what it would be like to throw her down in one of the tidy rows between the vines and taste all that sweet, soft skin and that mouth that was driving him to the brink of madness.

When they were finally alone again, having waved off the ebullient account managers who’d doubled their national order based entirely on the force of Kathryn’s smile, he found himself watching her much too closely. As if he might pounce.

“I told you I could do the job,” she said, and he wondered if she knew how fierce she sounded. “Any job.”

“So you did.”

“But don’t worry, Luca,” she said, and he had the sense she’d collected herself—remembered who they were. He hated that he felt it as a kind of loss—and it seemed to collect inside him with all the other things he hated about himself. “I won’t let that get in the way of all my whoring around. I know you need that to feel better about yourself and, of course, my only aim is to please you.”

He felt his jaw clench and every muscle in his body tense. But there was something about the way she stood there in the bright winter sun, her hands tucked into the back pockets of her jeans and the Sonoma wind toying with her dark hair. He had the strangest sense of tightness around his chest, as if there was a steel band clamping down on him.

He didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t know how to handle it. Or her.

Or worst of all, himself.

“Why did you marry him?” he asked.

Her marvelous eyes were dove gray in all that too-blue California light, and she didn’t look away from him.

“I don’t see why it matters to you.”

“And yet it does.”

“I think you want there to be some kind of rationale,” she said quietly. “Something you can point to that makes it all okay in your head. Because otherwise you’re just a man who has grabbed his father’s widow. Twice.”

“Is there one, then? A rationale? Were you a street urchin he saved? Did you personally support a threatened orphanage and his money saved a host of children from eviction?”

She smiled at him, and it wasn’t her usual smile. It wasn’t that serene, bulletproof smile she trotted out for work and had used on him at least a thousand times in the past three weeks alone. This one hurt. It was sad and it was reflected in her eyes, and he didn’t understand what was happening here.

What had already happened, if he was honest with himself.

Luca decided honesty was overrated. But it was too late. She was speaking.

“No,” she said. “I married him because I wanted to marry him. He was rich and I was struggling through my degree and some personal issues, and he told me he could make all my troubles go away. I liked that. I wanted that.” His mouth twisted, but her smile only deepened, and still it hurt. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“What do you think marriage is, Luca?” she asked, and she tilted her head slightly to one side.

He was mesmerized by it, by her, and it occurred to him that they’d never actually talked before. It had been all insults and glares, that scene in the library or in the hallway between their rooms, what he still thought was just another rehearsed story on the plane. She shook her hair back from her face and he wanted to do that for her. He wanted to touch her, he realized, more than he could recall ever wanting anything else.

And nothing had ever been more impossible.

“Not the transaction it was for you,” he said, aware that his voice was too raw, too rough. It gave him away. “Not a bit of cold calculation with a monetized end.”

But Kathryn only continued to smile at him in that same way, as if he made her sad. As if he was doing something to her. That tight band around his chest seemed to pull even tauter. It pinched.

“Who are you to judge?” she asked softly, and it was more of a slap, perhaps, because it lacked heat or accusation. She simply asked. “We were happy with our arrangement. We fulfilled the promises we made to each other.”

He couldn’t take it. He moved toward her, aware but not caring that they were standing out in front of the château where anyone could see them, and he took her face between his hands. This would be so much easier if she weren’t so pretty, he told himself—if she was a little more plastic and a whole lot less polished.

If she didn’t short-circuit every bit of control he’d ever had.