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

Kathryn jerked against the pillows as if he’d thrown a bucket of cold water on her. She looked stunned for a moment, and Luca felt something snake through him, hot and low and much too black to bear. It felt a good deal like shame—but he refused to let that stop him.

His breath sawed out of his chest, and Kathryn didn’t help things. She sat up slowly, as if she ached. As if she didn’t understand what he’d done to her—what he was doing—and he hated that she could keep the act going even now. When he was still so hard it hurt, and worse, he knew how she tasted now. And she was rumpled and flushed from his hands and his mouth—yet looked at him with her gray eyes dark as if she couldn’t comprehend how that had happened.

He gritted his teeth as she swallowed, so hard he heard it, and then tugged her clothing back into place. And his curse was that howling thing inside him that wanted to strip her down and worship her, glut himself in her, until this madness in him subsided. Until he could think.

“I’m touched by this performance,” he told her, his voice a dark thing in the moonlit room. “Truly I am. You look nothing less than ravished and yet innocent besides, as if I didn’t just make you come. Twice.”

He watched the way she shivered. The way she pulled her longer sweater tighter around her as if it was made of chain mail and could fend him off. The way she didn’t quite meet his gaze.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure of her own voice, “I’d prefer not to have this postmortem just now.”

“I imagine you don’t.”

She swallowed again, and there was nothing but shadows in her eyes when she finally looked at him.

“You were sleepwalking,” she said softly. “I was dreaming. This never happened.”

“Yet it did,” he gritted out at her. “I can still taste you.”

She pulled her knees up beneath her and hugged them close, and he loathed himself. He did. She looked like a lost little girl, and he was still hard and furious, and beyond all of that, she was still his father’s widow.

His father’s widow.

“Why did you marry him?”

He didn’t mean to ask that again. He didn’t know why he had.

But this time, when she gazed back at him, her gray eyes were like storms.

“To torture you,” she told him, her voice still hoarse, but something hard beneath it. “Is that what you want to hear?”

“I suspect that’s not far from the truth, if likely not so personal.”

She made a frustrated sort of noise and rolled off the bed—but kept her distance, he noticed, as she skirted around to its foot.

“I’m taking a bath,” she said in a low tone. “I want to wipe this entire night off me.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “Torture yourself all you want, Luca. But I’ll thank you to do it somewhere else.”

And this time when she walked away from him, Luca told himself he was glad of it. That it was better.

No matter that his body still wanted her.

But that was all the information he needed, surely. The things he wanted were always the things that destroyed him—his family being a case in point. That was why, so long ago now he could hardly remember anything else, he’d stopped allowing himself to want anything.

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.