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look on his face got blacker. As if he was a storm.
“Don’t you dare try that innocent game on me,” he gritted out.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I know the difference between a virgin and a whore, Kathryn,” Luca said, the fury in him like a brand that pressed into her, searing her flesh, and she didn’t understand how she could feel it the same way she had that desperate kiss. “I can certainly taste it.”
She realized she had absolutely no idea how to respond to that.
“Luca,” she said, as carefully as she could when her entire body was lost in the tumult of that endless kiss. When she had no idea how she was even capable of speech. “I think we should chalk that up as nothing more than an emotional response to a very hard day and—”
“I will not be your next target, Kathryn,” Luca told her, a frozen sort of outrage in his voice and pressed deep into the fine lines of his beautiful face. “Hear me on this. It will not happen.”
“I don’t have targets.” She blinked, the room seeming to shimmer everywhere he was not, as if he was a black hole. “I’m not a weapon. What kind of life do you lead that you think these things?”
He reached over and took her upper arm in his hand, pulling her close to him again, and that fire that hadn’t really banked at all blazed. Fierce and wild. Almost knocking her from her feet.
“I don’t want you in my office,” he growled. “I don’t want you polluting the Castelli name any more than you already have. I don’t want you anywhere near the things that matter to me.”
Kathryn’s teeth chattered, though she wasn’t cold.
“That would probably be far more terrifying a threat if you weren’t touching me,” she managed to point out, though her voice wasn’t nearly as cool as she’d have liked. “Again.”
Luca laughed, though it bore no resemblance to that carefree, golden laughter that had helped make him so beloved the world over, and released her. If she didn’t know better, if he’d been some other man with the usual collection of weaknesses instead of a monolith where his heart should have been, she’d have thought he hadn’t meant to grab her in the first place.
“I will never lower myself to my father’s discards,” he told her, horribly, his gaze hard on hers in case she was tempted to pretend she hadn’t heard that. “Nor will I allow you to corrupt the good people in my office with your repulsive little schemes. Your game won’t work on me.”
“Right,” she said, and maybe it was because this was all so out of control already. Maybe that was why she couldn’t seem to keep herself in check any longer around him. What was the point? She’d tried to rise above him for two years, and here they were anyway. “That’s why you kissed me, I imagine. To demonstrate your immunity.”
Luca went very still.
So still that Kathryn stopped breathing herself, as if the slightest noise might set him off. His dark eyes were fixed on her as if she was the kind of target he’d mentioned before, and she’d never felt more like one in her life. Between them, that spinning, tightening, desperate and dangerous electric band seemed to wrap tighter, pull harder. So hard it pulsed inside her, insistent and rough. So lethal she swore she could see it stamped across every tightly held, hard-packed muscle on his sculpted form.
Rain clattered against the windows behind her, and off in some other part of this massive house, little Renzo let loose one of his ear-piercing toddler screams that could as easily be joy as peril.
Luca shook his head slightly, as if he’d been released from a spell. He stepped back, his expression shifting from whatever that harsh, hard thing was to something far closer to disgust.
“You will regret this,” he promised her.
She swallowed. “You’ll have to be more specific. That could cover a lot of ground.”
“I will make sure of it,” Luca told her, as if she hadn’t spoken. “If it’s the very last thing I do.”
His voice had the ring of a certain finality, and it clanged inside her like a gong. She stood there, stricken, her mouth still aching from his kiss and her body lost in its own strange riot, and watched as he simply turned and began to walk away from her.
She wanted nothing more than to forget all about this. To take the lump payment Rafael had offered her and disappear with it. She could have any life she wanted now. She could be anyone she wanted, far away from the long shadow of the Castellis where she’d lived for so long.
But that would mean the past two years of her life had been for nothing. That she’d simply thrown them away for cash. It would mean she was exactly the woman Luca thought she was—and that all her mother’s sacrifices would have been for nothing in the end. That there was nothing to Kathryn’s own life but guilt and falling short.
And Kathryn could bear a lot of things. She’d had no choice, given what a failure she’d turned out to be in her mother’s eyes. She simply didn’t have it in her to make it that much worse. There was that part of her that was convinced, after all this time, that if she tried hard enough she could make her mother love her. If she could just do the right thing, for once.
“I’m so glad we had this talk,” she called after him, directing her not-quite-sweet tone straight toward the center of his tall, broad back. He wanted to play target practice? She could do that. “It will make Monday so much better for everyone.”
He didn’t turn back to face her, though he slowed. “Monday?”
If she was the good person she’d always believed herself to be, Kathryn thought then, surely she wouldn’t take quite so much pleasure in this tiny little moment, this almost pointless victory.
“Oh, yes,” she said, with deliberate calm and that triumph right there in her voice. “That’s when I start.”
* * *
He should never have touched her.
He should certainly not have tasted her.
But he had always been a fool where that woman was concerned, and in case he’d been tempted to doubt that, she haunted him all the way back to Rome.
Luca drove himself into the city from the family’s private airfield, risking death in an appropriately sleek and low-slung car that made Rome’s famously chaotic traffic a game of wits and daring and delicious speed. And he regretted it when he arrived at the Renaissance-era villa that housed both his business and his home, because playing games with his life at high speeds through the streets of the ancient city he loved was far preferable—and much less dangerous—than letting himself think about Kathryn.
Though he supposed both edged into that same dark place inside him, as if he was as much of a damned mess as every other Castelli in history down deep, beneath all the controls he’d spent his life putting into place to prevent exactly that.
He tossed his keys to the waiting attendant in his garage and stalked into the building, only to find himself standing stock-still in his own empty reception area, his head filled with those damned eyes of hers, turned a dreamy slate green after he’d kissed her, and that sulky mouth—
Luca muttered a chain of curses. He raked both his hands through his hair as he headed into the offices that sprawled across the first two levels of this lovingly maintained building in Rome’s Tridente neighborhood, a mere stone’s throw from the Spanish Steps and Piazza del Popolo.
His office. His one true love. The only thing he’d ever loved, in point of fact. The only thing that had ever come close to loving him back, with one success after the next.
He lived in the penthouse that rambled over the top two levels, and that was where he headed now, taking his private lift up into the rooms he’d furnished with steel and chrome, wide-open spaces and minimalist art, the better to play off the history in every bit of stone and craftsmanship