her.
He pushed back, levering himself off the bed and letting the chill of the winter night, even here inside her bedroom, sink into him from his bare feet up. He hadn’t been able to sleep. No surprise, given the direction of his thoughts and his knowledge that she’d slept just there on the other side of his wall.
He’d tortured himself with the temperature, bathing himself in the winter moon as if it had been a form of cold shower. He had no idea how long he’d been out there, fighting a pitched battle with an enemy that he knew wasn’t Kathryn at all. It was him. It was this need in him, gripping him hard and mercilessly even now, making him want to forget all over again and lose himself in that sweet, dangerous oblivion between her thighs.
You are the worst kind of idiot, he told himself harshly.
He watched her come back to herself, flushed and satisfied and more beautiful than any woman should be. And far more dangerously compelling than this woman should be, especially to him.
He hated himself.
He told himself he hated her more.
“Is this how you do it?” he asked, and his voice was as cold as the night outside. “Stepmother?”
Kathryn jerked against the pillows as if he’d thrown a bucket of cold water on her. She looked stunned for a moment, and Luca felt something snake through him, hot and low and much too black to bear. It felt a good deal like shame—but he refused to let that stop him.
His breath sawed out of his chest, and Kathryn didn’t help things. She sat up slowly, as if she ached. As if she didn’t understand what he’d done to her—what he was doing—and he hated that she could keep the act going even now. When he was still so hard it hurt, and worse, he knew how she tasted now. And she was rumpled and flushed from his hands and his mouth—yet looked at him with her gray eyes dark as if she couldn’t comprehend how that had happened.
He gritted his teeth as she swallowed, so hard he heard it, and then tugged her clothing back into place. And his curse was that howling thing inside him that wanted to strip her down and worship her, glut himself in her, until this madness in him subsided. Until he could think.
“I’m touched by this performance,” he told her, his voice a dark thing in the moonlit room. “Truly I am. You look nothing less than ravished and yet innocent besides, as if I didn’t just make you come. Twice.”
He watched the way she shivered. The way she pulled her longer sweater tighter around her as if it was made of chain mail and could fend him off. The way she didn’t quite meet his gaze.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, carefully, as if she wasn’t sure of her own voice, “I’d prefer not to have this postmortem just now.”
“I imagine you don’t.”
She swallowed again, and there was nothing but shadows in her eyes when she finally looked at him.
“You were sleepwalking,” she said softly. “I was dreaming. This never happened.”
“Yet it did,” he gritted out at her. “I can still taste you.”
She pulled her knees up beneath her and hugged them close, and he loathed himself. He did. She looked like a lost little girl, and he was still hard and furious, and beyond all of that, she was still his father’s widow.
His father’s widow.
“Why did you marry him?”
He didn’t mean to ask that again. He didn’t know why he had.
But this time, when she gazed back at him, her gray eyes were like storms.
“To torture you,” she told him, her voice still hoarse, but something hard beneath it. “Is that what you want to hear?”
“I suspect that’s not far from the truth, if likely not so personal.”
She made a frustrated sort of noise and rolled off the bed—but kept her distance, he noticed, as she skirted around to its foot.
“I’m taking a bath,” she said in a low tone. “I want to wipe this entire night off me.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “Torture yourself all you want, Luca. But I’ll thank you to do it somewhere else.”
And this time when she walked away from him, Luca told himself he was glad of it. That it was better.
No matter that his body still wanted her.
But that was all the information he needed, surely. The things he wanted were always the things that destroyed him—his family being a case in point. That was why, so long ago now he could hardly remember anything else, he’d stopped allowing himself to want anything.
He would conquer this, too.
* * *
Kathryn decided to treat the entire situation as if it really had been a dream. Everyone had unfortunately detailed and potentially steamy dreams about coworkers sometimes, surely. The trick was acting as if it had only ever happened inside her head.
She told herself she could do that. Why not? Luca was the master at playing whatever role worked best for his purposes. She could do the same.
Though it was harder than she’d anticipated to walk into that breakfast room the way she’d done every other morning in California and act as if her body didn’t flush into shivering awareness at the sight of him.
It was so unfair.
He was gorgeous and terrible, commanding his side of the table with that lazy authority of his that she felt as if his mouth against her center again, bold and insistent. He was dressed in one of his devastatingly perfect suits today, crisp and lethally masculine as if he hadn’t been up half the night, and Kathryn forced herself to stand there with her usual serene smile on her face. She was determined to do her best to look as calm and unruffled as he did.
But there was no controlling that low, wild lick of pure fire that swept through her, curling itself into dark knots deep inside, then blooming into something greedy and consuming in her sex.
You are in so much trouble, a small voice whispered inside her.
Worse, she was sure he knew it. That he could see every last thing she tried to hide from him. When all she could see in him was that harsh light in his dark eyes and that dangerous look on his face.
“Don’t loom there,” he said, all silken threat and a kind of menace that made her pulse pick up. “Sit down. This is meant to be a breakfast meeting to outline my plans for the day, Kathryn.” He waited for her to look at him. To meet that awful gaze of his that tore straight through her. “Not agony.”
There was absolutely no reason that should make her feel as if she might swallow her tongue. Kathryn ordered herself to pull it together. She pulled out her graceful, high-backed chair and sat down, the same way she had every other morning on this endless trip that she worried would leave her a mere shell of herself before it was done.
Maybe it already had, she thought with a shiver she fought to repress when he did nothing more shocking than fill her cup with coffee, a rich, dark brew that she thought
