“He hates surprises?” Kathryn laughed lightly. Very lightly, which was at odds with how her heart punched at her, as if this information about Luca was the most important detail of all she might have collected here tonight. “Here I thought the only thing he hated was me.”
It was Lily’s turn to laugh, though hers seemed far less for show.
“He hates messes,” she said. “He always has. If he hates you? It’s because you’re messing things up for him, and he doesn’t know how to handle something he can’t sanitize and shelve somewhere. And between you and me, that’s probably a good thing.”
Then she smiled her goodbyes and went back out into the crush, leaving Kathryn to mull that over.
But not for long. Her mobile buzzed in her clutch and she knew it was Luca, which got her moving out of the bathroom lounge and back into the party before she even looked at the display.
“Are you taking a holiday?” he growled into the phone when she answered, all spleen and fury. “If not, you’d better be right here when I turn around. I’m not paying you to gallivant around the château like one of the guests.”
“Are you paying me at all?” she asked mildly, spotting him several groups away and moving around them as she spoke. “I thought your father set up a trust for me so you couldn’t hold a paycheck over my head. Or maybe for other reasons, and that’s just a happy accident?”
“I’m turning around now,” he said, and she came to a stop before him as he did.
Their eyes met. Held.
It was harder than it should have been to pull herself away. To concentrate on tucking her mobile back in her clutch. To tell herself there was nothing at all in his dark eyes but what there always was: some or other form of fury, brightened up with dislike.
She didn’t understand why no one could see the truth about him but her. She told herself she was making it up. That it wouldn’t be there when she looked up at him again—that he’d be that half lazy, half obnoxious man he should have been and nothing more.
But it was still there. That fury, that need. That hunger that terrified her and intrigued her in equal measure. A whole world in that gaze of his, and she had no earthly idea what to do about it.
“I think you’re being paged,” she told him, nodding toward a bejeweled woman in a slinky dress made entirely of sequins, who was bearing down on Luca from afar. “You wouldn’t want to disappoint your fans with this show of seriousness, would you?”
“It’s not a show. It’s business. Not a concept I expect you to comprehend.”
“I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself,” she said unwisely. So very unwisely. “But it’s interesting that you’re so determined to hide part of yourself away wherever you go, don’t you think?”
She had no idea why she’d said that. Luca looked frozen into place for a long, taut moment, an arrested expression on his darkly gorgeous face. Then he blinked, and there was nothing but his usual darkness again, leaving Kathryn faintly dizzy.
“Careful, Stepmother,” he said softly. Lethally. “Or I might be tempted to truly give them something to talk about tonight.”
She didn’t believe he’d do anything of the kind—of course she didn’t—but she still had to fight to restrain a shiver at the thought. And she was sure that Luca knew it, that the unholy gleam of something like gold in his dark eyes was that pure male knowledge Kathryn was very much afraid would be her undoing.
But then he turned away, his public smile at the ready, that intensity gone as if it had never been.
And Kathryn reminded herself that it didn’t matter what this man’s sister-in-law, who had once been his stepsister, had said in the bathroom lounge. It didn’t matter what happened in remote hallways in the château. The only truth that mattered was that she was his assistant now, and if she couldn’t do that job as well as she should, everything else he’d ever said about her was true. And not just him.
You’ve had more opportunities than I could have dreamed of having! her mother had said the last time she’d seen her, at Christmas, with that look on her face that had told Kathryn that once again she’d failed Rose terribly, as she’d always managed to do. “And look what you’ve done with them.”
Kathryn hadn’t known what to say or how to defend herself. Because Rose had been the one to encourage Kathryn into marrying Gianni in the first place.
“The world is filled with people who marry for far less reason than this,” she’d said. “But of course, Kathryn, it’s your life. You should do what you think is best for you, no matter who else might benefit.”
And Kathryn hadn’t been able to think of a good reason why not to marry the kindly old man when her mother had put it like that—especially given what she knew she would gain from it. It would cost her so very little. All she had to sacrifice was a couple of years. Not her whole life, as her mother had done, and for far less in return. Though Rose certainly hadn’t objected when Gianni’s money had allowed Kathryn to buy her a cottage in the sweet Yorkshire village of her choice, and then provide her with live-in care.
She never thanked you, either, a little voice pointed out, deep inside her.
But she felt ungrateful and small even thinking such things. Many women wouldn’t have had a baby on their own, with the father adamantly out of the picture. Rose had never faltered.
Which meant Kathryn could do no less—no matter the provocation.
It was time she stopped worrying about Luca Castelli and what he thought about her, and got to work.
* * *
One blue-and-gold California day rolled into the next, filled with meetings and vineyard tours and endless business dinners, and Luca found himself more disgruntled than he should have been by the fact Kathryn was...good at the job. More than good, in fact, in the odd role she had to play. Far better at it than the assistant she’d displaced, though he hated to admit it. Marco had been an excellent administrative assistant, but had always been a little too conspicuously himself when out in the field trying to charm potential clients.
Kathryn, on the other hand—who Luca would have asserted could no more blend than the sun could rise in the west and was anything but charming besides—did it beautifully.
“No,” he barked out one morning, when she’d walked into their shared breakfast room dressed in one of her usual work outfits, a skirt and heels and one of those soft blouses that made him unable to think of anything at all but the breasts pressed just there behind the silk.
Kathryn paused, her hand on the back of the nearest chair, her bearing that of slightly offended royalty. It put his teeth on edge.
“You can’t wear that,” he growled at her, feeling like some kind of sulky child, which was insupportable. He was not one of his nephews, having a tantrum. Why couldn’t he control himself around this woman? “We are walking through the vines with one of the accounts today. They find the Castelli family on the verge of being too European for their tastes as is, so we must be certain to impress them with our homespun, regular-person charm.”
“I don’t think even you can convince someone you are
