CHAPTER TWO

      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.”

      “You know,” Kathryn said, because she was still entirely too light-headed and not managing her tongue the way she should, “if you decided not to be horrible to me for five minutes the world wouldn’t actually screech to a halt. We’d all survive. I promise.”

      His face was like stone, his full lips thin with displeasure, and he was closing the distance between them much too fast for Kathryn’s peace of mind.

      “I have no idea why you feel you need to bring this particular performance of yours into an office setting,” he said as he drew closer. “Much less mine. I’m certain there are any number of hotel bars across Europe that cater to your brand of desperation and craven greed. You should have no trouble finding your next mark within the week.”

      That he could still hate her so much should not have surprised her, Kathryn knew, because Luca had been remarkably consistent in that since the day she’d arrived in Italy with Gianni two years ago. And yet, like that cold winter morning when he’d charged at her across this very same floor, dark and furious and terrifying in a way she hadn’t entirely understood, it did.

      Though surprise wasn’t really the right word to describe the thing that rolled inside her, flattening everything it touched.

      “I suppose the world really would end if you accepted the possibility that I might not be who you think I am,” she said now, straightening her spine against the familiar rush of pointless grief that was her absurd response to the fact this angry, hateful man had never liked her. Kathryn channeled that odd, scraped-raw feeling into temper instead. “You’d have to reexamine your prejudices, and who knows what might happen then?