was astoundingly unfair at best, but Kathryn didn’t have to look to the smug receptionist to understand that there was no point arguing. Besides, Luca had warned her not to complain. She wouldn’t. Kathryn stood, smoothing out her skirt as she rose.
“I apologize. It won’t happen again.”
“Somehow,” Luca replied, sounding very nearly merry—which was alarming, “I doubt that.”
Kathryn didn’t bother to reply. She walked toward him, telling herself with every click of her heels against the hard floor that she remembered nothing from last week in that old library up north. Not his taste. Not that thrilling, masterful way he’d simply taken her mouth with his. Not the searing, impossible heat of his hand against the side of her face and that deep stroke of his clever tongue—
She hadn’t dreamed those things. They hadn’t kept her wide-awake and gasping at the ceiling, not sure how to handle the riot all those searing images and memories had caused inside her. Certainly not.
Luca’s expression was unreadable as she drew close to him, and she hated that she had no idea what was going on behind his gleaming dark eyes as he ushered her deep into the heart of the Castelli Wine offices. She thought she felt him glance over her outfit, a pencil skirt and a conservative silk blouse that could offend no one, she was sure, but when she sneaked a look at him, his attention was focused straight ahead.
He stopped at the door to a large glassed-in conference room and waved a hand at the group of people sitting around the table inside. My coworkers, Kathryn thought—with what she realized was an utterly naive surge of pleasure when she realized not a single one of them was looking out at her with anything approaching a smile on their faces.
She froze beside Luca, who already had his hand on the door.
“What did you tell them?” she asked.
“My people?” He sounded far too triumphant, mixed in with that usual hint of laziness that she was beginning to suspect was all for show. “The truth, of course.”
“And which truth is that?”
“There is only the one,” Luca said. Happily, she thought. Again. “My father’s petulant trophy wife has insisted she be given a job she does not deserve. We do not have jobs hanging about without anyone to fill them, so there was some reshuffling required.”
“I assumed you’d be giving me janitorial duties.” She arched a brow at him. “Wasn’t the idea to make sure this was as unpleasant for me as possible?”
“I made you my executive assistant,” Luca replied smoothly, his dark eyes glittering. “It is the most coveted position in this branch of the company.” He shifted back slightly. Relaxing, she realized. Because he was obviously enjoying himself. That sent a shiver of ice straight down her spine. So did his smile—which she was close enough to see did not reach his eyes. “It is second only to me, you see. That’s quite a bit of power to wield.”
She frowned at him. “Why would you do that? Why not make me file things in some basement?”
“Because, Stepmother,” Luca said in that slow, dark way of his that should not have gotten tangled up in all her breathless memories of that kiss, not when it was clearly meant to be a blow, “that would only delay the inevitable. I am quite certain you won’t make it the allocated three years. But if you leave after three days? Three weeks? All the better.”
She stiffened. “I won’t leave.”
He nodded toward the group of people inside, all eyeing her with ill-disguised hostility.
“Each and every person in that room was handpicked by me. They earned their positions here. They function together as a tight and usually congenial team. But I have informed them that all of that is a thing of the past, as you must be shoehorned in whether we like it or not.” He turned his gaze on her. “As you can see, they’re thrilled.”
Kathryn’s stomach sank to her feet, because she understood what he’d done. Her pathetic little fantasies of distinguishing herself somehow through hard work in some forgotten corner of the office where she could quietly shine crumbled all around her.
Her mother would be furious. She’d claim that this was exactly what had happened when Kathryn tried to defy her and strike out on her own. Kathryn felt a sinking feeling in her gut, as if maybe Rose was right.
And maybe it was hideously disloyal, maybe it made her a terrible person and an ungrateful child, but Kathryn really, really didn’t want that to be true.
“You painted a target on my back,” she said now, her lips feeling numb. “You did it deliberately.”
This time, Luca’s smile reached his eyes, but that didn’t make it any warmer. Or this situation any better. “I did.”
Then he pushed open the conference room door and fed her straight to the wolves.
THREE HARD WEEKS and two days later, Kathryn boarded the Castelli family private jet on the airfield outside Rome, this time in her capacity as the most hated employee in Luca’s office. She marched up the folded-down stairs with her back straight and her head high—because that title, of course, was an upgrade compared to her previous role as the most hated stepmother in Castelli family history.
She thought she had this being-loathed thing under control.
It was all about the smile.
Kathryn smiled every time conversation halted abruptly when she entered a room. She smiled when her coworkers pretended they didn’t understand her and made her repeat her question once, then twice, so she’d feel foolish as her words hung there in the air between them. She smiled when she was ignored in meetings. She smiled when she was called on to answer questions about past projects she couldn’t possibly know anything about. She smiled when Luca berated her for allowing unrestricted access to him and she smiled brighter when he let his people in and out the side door of his office himself, so he could do it all over again.
She smiled and she smiled. The benefit of having been splashed across a thousand tabloids and held to be so good and so self-sacrificing was that she found she could use Saint Kate as a guide through each and every one of her chilly office interactions. Especially because she was well aware that the less she reacted, the more it annoyed her coworkers.
Luca, of course, was a different issue altogether.
She ducked into the plane and made her way into the upgraded living room space, smiling serenely as she took her seat on the curved leather sofa that commanded the center of the room. Luca was already sprawled out at one of the tables to the side that seated three apiece in luxurious leather armchairs, one hand in his hair as usual and the other clamping his mobile to his ear.
He eyed her as he finished his conversation in low Italian, and didn’t stop when it was done.
“You’re still here,” he said. Eventually.
She smiled brighter. “Of course. I told you I wouldn’t leave.”
“You can’t possibly have enjoyed these past few weeks, Kathryn.”
