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

But instead of another version of fake-breasted and otherwise entirely plastic Corinna, when he’d strode into the library where his father waited with Arlo, he’d found Kathryn.

Kathryn, who should not have been there.

That had been his first thought, like a searing blaze through his mind. He’d stopped, thunderstruck, halfway across the library floor and scowled at the woman who’d stood there smiling politely at him in that reserved British way of hers. Until his inability to do anything but glower at her had made that curve of her lips falter, then straighten into a flat line.

She doesn’t belong here, he’d thought again, harsher and more certain. Not standing next to his old, crotchety father tucked up in his armchair before the fire, all wrinkles and white hair and fingers made of knots, thanks to years of arthritis. Not wringing her hands together in front of her like some kind of awkward schoolgirl instead of resorting to the sultry, come-hither glances Luca’s stepmothers normally threw his way.

Not his stepmother.

That thought had been the loudest.

Not her.

Her hair was an inky dark brown that looked nearly black, yet showed hints of gold when the firelight played over it. It poured down past her shoulders, straight and thick, and was cut into a long fringe over smoky-gray eyes that edged toward green. She wore a simple pair of black trousers and a cleanly cut caramel-colored sweater open over a soft knit top that made no attempt whatsoever to showcase her cleavage. She looked elegantly efficient, not plastic or cheap in any way. She was small and fine boned, all big gray eyes and that dark hair and then, of course, there was her mouth.

Her mouth.

It was the mouth of a sulky courtesan, full and suggestive, and for a long, shocking moment, Luca had the strangest notion that she had no idea of its carnal wallop. That she was an innocent—but that had been absurd, of course. Wishful thinking, perhaps. No innocent married a very rich man old enough to be her own grandfather.

“Luca,” Gianni had barked, in English for his new wife’s benefit. “What is the matter with you? Show some manners. Kathryn is my wife and your new stepmother.”

It had filled Luca with a kind of terrible smoke. A black, choking fury he could not have named if his life had depended upon it.

He hadn’t been aware that he was moving, only that he’d been across the room and then was right there in front of her, looming over her, dwarfing her with his superior height and size—

Not that she’d backed down. Not Kathryn.

He’d seen far too much in those expressive eyes of hers, wide with some kind of distress. And awareness—he’d seen the flare of it, followed almost instantly by confusion. But instead of simpering or shifting her body to better advantage or sizing him up in any way, she’d squared her slender shoulders and stuck out her hand.

“Pleased to meet you,” she’d said, her English-accented voice brisk. Matter-of-fact. The sound of it had fallen through him like a hail of ice and had done nothing to soothe that fire in him at all.

Luca had taken her hand, though he’d known it was a terrible mistake.

And he’d been right. It had been.

He’d felt the drag of her skin against his, palm to palm, like a long, slow lick down the length of his sex. He should have jerked his hand away. Instead, he’d held her tighter, feeling her delicacy, her heat and, more telling, that wild tumult of her pulse in her wrist. Her lips had parted as if she’d felt it, too.

He’d had to remind himself—harshly—that they were not only not alone, she was also not free.

She was something a whole lot worse than not free, in fact.

“It is my pleasure, Stepmother,” he’d said, his voice low and dark, that terrible fire in him shooting like electricity all through his limbs and then into her. He’d seen her stiffen—whether in shock at his belligerence or with that same stunned awareness that stampeded in him, he’d never know. “Welcome to the family.”

And it had been downhill from there.

All leading him here. To the same library, two years later, where Kathryn stood like a lonely wraith in a simple black dress that somehow made her look fragile and too pretty at once, her dark hair clipped back and no hint of color on her face below that same inky fringe that kissed the tops of her eyelashes.

She was gazing off into the distance through the windows that opened up over the lake, and she looked genuinely sad. As if she truly mourned Gianni, the man she’d used shamelessly for her own ends—ends that, apparently, included forcing herself into Luca’s office against his will.

And it enraged him.

He told himself that was the thing that washed over him then, digging in its claws. Rage. Not that far darker, far more dangerous thing that lurked in him, as much that terrible hunger he’d prefer to deny as it was the familiar companion of his own self-loathing.

“Come, now, Kathryn,” Luca said into the heavy quiet of the book-lined room, making his voice a dark and lazy thing just this side of insulting, and taking note of how she instantly stiffened against it. Against him. “The old man is dead and the reporters have gone home. Who is this maudlin performance for?”

CHAPTER TWO (#u5aee10b1-8172-5b5f-a3e6-9e51a22fc8dd)

LUCA CASTELLI’S TRADEMARK GROWL, his English laced with an undercurrent of both his native Italian and that particular harsh ruthlessness that Kathryn had only ever heard directed at her, jolted through her like an electric shock.

She jerked where she stood near the library window, actually jumping in a way he’d be unlikely to miss, even from all the way on the other side of the long, luxurious, stunningly appointed room.

Well done, she thought, despairing of herself anew. Now he knows exactly how much he gets to you.

She didn’t expect that anything she did would make this man like her. Luca had made it clear that could never happen. Over and over and over again, these past two years. But she wanted him—needed him—not to actively hate her as she started this new phase of her life.

Kathryn figured that was better than nothing. As good a start as she could hope for, really. And her mother certainly hadn’t raised her to be a coward, despite how disappointing she knew she’d always been. Rose Merchant had never let hardship get between her and what needed to be done, as she’d reminded Kathryn at every opportunity. Forging ahead into the corporate world the way Rose hadn’t been able to do with a child to raise all on her own was, truly, the least Kathryn could do to honor all of her sacrifices.

And to assuage the guilt she felt about her marriage to Gianni—the one time “honoring her mother’s sacrifices” had allowed her to do something purely for herself, too. But she couldn’t let herself think about that too closely. It made her feel much too ungrateful.

Kathryn straightened from her place at the window, aware that her movements were jerky and awkward, the way she always seemed to be around this man, who noticed every last embarrassing detail about her and never hesitated to use each and every one of them against her. She nervously smoothed down the front of her dress. Nervously and also carefully, as if the dress was a talisman.

She’d agonized over what to wear today because she’d wanted to look as unlike the gold-digging whore she knew the family—Luca—thought she was as possible. And still, she was terribly afraid she’d ended up looking rather more like a poor man’s version of an Audrey Hepburn wannabe instead. The papers would trumpet that possibility, call it an homage to Audrey or something equally embarrassing, and Luca would assume it was all part of a deliberate campaign toward some grim end he believed she’d been angling toward since the start, rather than simply riding out the attention as best she could. The cycle of his bitter condemnation would continue, turning and turning without end...

But she was delaying the inevitable. She’d always wanted a chance to prove herself, to work on the creative side of a corporation and try her hand at something fun and interesting like marketing or branding instead of the deadly dull figures at which she was utterly hopeless. She’d spent her whole marriage excited at the prospect of working in the family company with Luca and his creative genius.

Even if, other than that corporate flair of his, he was pretty much just awful. She assured herself powerful men often were. That Luca was run-of-the-mill in that sense.

Kathryn took a deep breath, resolutely squared her shoulders and turned to face her own personal demon at last.

“Hello, Luca,” she said across the acres of space that separated them in this vast room, and she was proud of herself. She sounded so calm, so cool, when she was anything but.

For any number of reasons, but mostly because looking at Luca Castelli was like staring directly into the sun. It had been from the start.

And as usual, she was instantly dizzy.

Luca moved like a terrible shadow across the library floor, and tragically, he was as beautiful as ever. Tall and solid and impressively athletic, his rangy form was sculpted to lean, male perfection and was routinely celebrated in slick, photo-heavy tabloid exultations across at least five continents. His thick black hair always looked messy, as if he lived such a reckless, devil-may-care life that it required he run his hands through it all the time and rake it back from his darkly handsome face as punctuation to every sentence—despite the fact he was now the chief operating officer of the family company.

Even here, on the day of his father’s funeral, where he wore a dark suit that trumpeted his rampant masculinity and excellent taste in equal measure, he gave off that same indolent air. That lazy, playful, perpetually relaxed state that only a man cresting high on the wealth of generations of equally affluent and pedigreed ancestors could achieve. As if no matter what he was actually doing, some part of him was always lounging about on a yacht somewhere with a cold drink in his hand and women presenting themselves for his pleasure. He had the look of a man who lived forever on the verge of laughter, deep and whole bodied, from his gorgeous mouth to his flashing dark eyes.

Kathryn had seen a hundred pictures of him exactly like that, lighting up the whole of the Amalfi Coast and half of Europe with that irrepressible gleam of his—

Except, of course, when he looked at her.

The scowl he wore now did nothing to make him any less beautiful. Nothing could. But it made Kathryn shake deep, deep inside, as if she’d lost control of her own bones. She wanted to bolt. She might have, if that wouldn’t have made this whole situation that much worse.

Besides, if she’d learned anything these past two years, it was that there was no outrunning Luca Castelli. There was no outmaneuvering him. There was only surviving him.

“Hello, Stepmother,” he said, that awful dark thing in his voice wrapping around her and sinking hot and blackened tendrils of something like shame into every part of her body, so deep it hurt to breathe. He seemed unaffected as ever, sauntering toward her with his usual deceptively lazy deadliness and those dark eyes so burning hot she could feel them punching into her from afar. “Or should we concoct a different title for you? The Widow Castelli has a certain gothic ring to it. I think. I’ll have it engraved on your business cards.”