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

And she couldn’t. She couldn’t—

“You can,” he said against her mouth, and she realized she’d said that out loud. “You will.”

And he shifted beneath her, then ran his clever fingers down to the place they were joined, and rubbed.

The next time he thrust inside her, she imploded. A brilliant, impossible shattering that rolled out from the place where he maintained that demanding pace, tearing her soul from her body and her limbs apart.

She heard him groan out her name, his mouth against her neck, and then he toppled right over that same cliff beside her.

And for a very long time, that was all there was.

When Kathryn came back to herself, she was still slumped against him and still astride him, and the car was slowing to make its final turn into the Castelli vineyard.

She pushed herself back up to a sitting position and climbed off Luca at the same time, feeling the loss of that length of him inside her like a blow. It made her feel even more awkward as she struggled to wriggle her dress back into place. Even more...off center.

He didn’t speak. She didn’t dare look at him. She heard him zip himself up, and then there was the long drive up from the road to the château to endure in the same heavy silence. Kathryn felt too many things, thought too many things, all of them battering at her like a thousand desperate winds, but she couldn’t let herself do that here. Not while he was still beside her, so male and so hard, and now something entirely different than what he’d been even an hour before.

She didn’t want to change. She didn’t want the shift. She didn’t understand how she’d simply...surrendered to him when she was twenty-five years old and hadn’t felt the slightest urge to give herself to anyone in all her years.

“You’re much too pretty,” her mother had told her when she was barely thirteen, with a frown that told Kathryn that this was not a positive thing. “Mind you don’t let it make you lazy. Pretty is nothing more than a prison sentence. Best you remember that before you let it turn your head.”

And she’d tried. She’d buried herself in her studies. She’d run from the slightest hint of male interest or even friendships with girls who had any kind of active social lives, lest she be tempted into joining in. She’d done everything she could think of to prove to her mother that her looks weren’t a weakness, that she could take advantage of the gifts Rose had given her with all her scrimping and saving and hard work.

But Rose had never been convinced.

“They’ll trap you if they can,” she’d told Kathryn again and again throughout her teenage years. “Tell you it’s love. There’s no such thing, my girl. There are only men who will leave you and babies who need raising once they’re gone. A pretty thing like you will be easy pickings.”

And Kathryn had resolved that whatever else she was, she wouldn’t be that.

Even at university she’d been good at holding herself apart, keeping herself safe. She didn’t want boyfriends or even supposed male friends who might think they could get to her that way, when her defenses were down. She avoided any scenario that might lead to lowered inhibitions or the slightest hint of danger. No pubs with her classmates. No parties. She’d kept herself in her own little tower, locked safely away, where nothing and no one could ever touch her or ruin her or make her a disappointment to her mother, who had given up so much to make her life possible.

All this time, she thought now, as the limo pulled up to the château’s grand entrance, and Rose had been right. It really was a slippery slope, and Kathryn had plummeted straight down it and crashed at the bottom. One single car ride with a man who despised her, and she’d lost a lifetime of her moral high ground, her entire self-definition. She’d become exactly what Luca had always accused her of being, what Rose had always darkly intimated she’d become one day whether she liked it or not.

The whole world was different. She was different. And she didn’t have the slightest idea how to come to terms with any of it, or what it meant.

The driver opened the door, and Kathryn climbed out too quickly, shocked when she felt twinges in all sorts of unfamiliar places. She might have toppled to the ground, but Luca was there, taking her arm as if he’d anticipated this. Holding her steady.

Though he still didn’t say a word.

Kathryn pulled her arm out of his grasp, aware that he let her do it, and felt a rush of sheer, hot embarrassment wash over her. She couldn’t read that expression on his face, making him look like granite in the light that beamed out from the château’s windows and the moon high above. She couldn’t imagine what she must look like—wrinkled and rumpled, used and altered, like a walking neon advertisement for what she’d just done. Was it written on her face? Would the whole world be able to see what had happened right there—what she’d done? What she’d let him do?

The notion made her panic.

She all but ran up the steps and threw open the door, relieved that there was no sign of anyone around as she hurtled herself inside the château’s ornate entry hall like a missile.

It’s fine, she told herself, though she didn’t believe it. Though she could hear the drumming panic in her own head. Everything is perfectly fine.

She made herself slow down. She was aware of Luca just behind her, a solid wall of regret at her heels, but she told herself to ignore it. To pretend he wasn’t there. She forced herself to walk, not run. She headed up the stairs and then down the hall that led to the family wing. She made her way all the way to the far end of the château, and then finally, finally, she could see the door to her own room. She couldn’t wait to close herself inside and...breathe.

She would take another very long bath. She would scrub all of this away. She would curl herself up into a tiny little ball, and she would not permit herself to cry.

She would not.

Luca said her name when she’d finally reached her door, when she had her hand out to grab the handle and was this close—

And Kathryn didn’t want this. She didn’t want whatever cutting, eviscerating, gut punch of a thing he was about to say. Whatever new and inventive way he’d come up with to call her a whore and make her feel like one.

But she wanted him to know how fragile she was even less, so she turned around and faced him.

He stood much too close, his dark eyes glittering, an expression she couldn’t place on his beautiful face. She wished he wasn’t so gorgeous, that he didn’t make her ache. She imagined that might make it easier—might make that tugging thing near her heart dissipate more quickly.

She should say something; she knew she should. But she couldn’t seem to make her mouth work.

“Where are you going, cucciola mia?” he asked softly.

She hated him, she told herself. The only thing worse than his insults was this. That softness she couldn’t understand at all.

“I don’t know what that means. I don’t speak any Italian.”

His mouth moved into that curve again, and his dark eyes were much too intense. He reached over and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, and Kathryn knew he could feel the way that made her shudder. And her breath catch.

“I suppose it means my pet, more or less,” Luca said, as if he hadn’t considered it until that moment.

And the true betrayal was the warmth that spread through her at that, as if it was that laugh of his, bottled up, pure liquid sunshine starting deep inside her. Because he was dangerous enough when he was hateful. Kathryn thought that this other side of him—what she might have called affectionate had they been other people—might actually kill her.

Her throat felt swollen. Scratchy. Because of the noises she’d made in that car that she couldn’t let herself think about? Or because of that brand-new rawness lodged inside her now? She didn’t know. But she forced herself to speak anyway. “I don’t want to be your pet.”

That curve of his mouth deepened. “I don’t know that it’s up to you.”

Kathryn felt restless. Edgy. As if she might burst. Or scream. Or simply crumple to the ground—and he seemed perfectly content to stand there forever, seeing things in her face she was quite certain she’d prefer to hide.

She scowled at him. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

This time, when he reached out, he took her shoulders in his hands and tugged her into his arms, and when he wrapped his arms around her, she melted. God help her, but she simply...fell into him. All that heat and strength, enveloping her like some kind of benediction.

“Come,” he said quietly, letting her go. “I’ll show you.”

Kathryn knew what she needed to do. What her mother would expect her to do. One slip was bad enough. One terrible mistake. There was still time to save herself. There was still the possibility that she could call tonight a lost battle and go on to win the war, surely. She needed only to pull away from him, step inside her room and lock him out, so she could set about the Herculean task of putting herself back together.

But she couldn’t make herself do it.

And when Luca opened the door to his bedroom and held out his hand as if he knew exactly what battles she was fighting and, more than that, how to win them, Kathryn ignored the great riot and tumult that shook inside her, and took it.

* * *

Luca didn’t know how to make sense of any of this.

And that lost look in her too-dark gray eyes, something too close to broken, was too much for him. He had a thousand questions he didn’t ask. A thousand more stacked behind them. He had the sense that there was something lying in wait for him, just over his shoulder or perhaps deep inside him, that he didn’t care to examine.