the private library with a rude hand gesture that made his brother laugh, and headed downstairs through the grand old hallways of the ancient house that he hardly noticed the details of anymore. The portraits cluttering the walls. The statuary by this or that notable Italian artist flung about on every flat surface. It was all the same as it had been before Luca had been born, and the same as it would be when Rafael’s eldest son, Arlo, was a grandfather. Castellis endured, no matter the messes they made.
He imagined that meant he would, too, despite this situation.
Somehow.
He heard Lily’s voice as he passed one of the reception rooms and glanced in, seeing his pregnant sister-in-law, some six months along, having one of her “discussions” with eight-year-old Arlo and two-year-old Renzo about appropriate behavior. Luca hid a grin as he passed, thinking the lecture sounded very similar to ones he’d received in the very same place when he’d been a child. Not from his mother, who had abdicated that position as quickly as possible following Luca’s birth, or from his father, who had been far too important to trouble himself with domestic arrangements or child rearing. He’d been raised by a parade of well-meaning staff and a series of stepmothers with infinitely more complicated motives.
Perhaps that was where he’d learned his lifelong aversion to complications.
And to stepmothers, for that matter.
Luca had grown up in the midst of a very messy family who’d broadcasted their assorted private dramas for all the world to see, no matter if the relentless publicity had made it all that much worse. He’d hated it. He preferred things clean and easy. Orderly. No fusses. No melodrama. No theatrics that ended up splashed across the papers, the way everything always did in the Castelli family, and were then presented in the most hideous light imaginable. He didn’t mind that he was seen as one of the world’s foremost playboys—hell, he’d cultivated that role so no one would ever take him seriously, an asset in business as well as in his personal life. He didn’t break hearts—he simply didn’t traffic in the kind of emotional upheavals that had marked every other member of his family, again and again and again. No, thank you.
But Kathryn was a different story, he thought as he made his way to the grand library on the ground floor and saw the slight figure standing all alone in the farthest corner, staring out at the rain and the fog as if she was competing with it for the title of Most Desolate. Kathryn was more than a mess.
Kathryn was a disaster.
He wasn’t the least bit surprised that Saint Kate, as she’d been dubbed around the world for her supposed martyrdom to the cause that was old Gianni Castelli and his considerable fortune, was all over the papers this week. Kathryn did convincingly innocent and easily wounded so well that Luca had always thought she’d have been much better off dedicating her life to the stage.
Though he supposed she had, really. Playing the understanding mistress and undemanding trophy wife to a man so much older than her twenty-five years was a performance all its own. What Luca couldn’t understand was why an obvious trollop like Kathryn made his skin feel too tight against his frame and his hands itch to test the smoothness of hers, even now. It didn’t make any sense, this stretched-taut, heavy thing in him that nothing—not time, not space, not the odious fact of her marriage to his own father, not even the prospect of her polluting the refuge of his office in Rome—ever eased or altered in any way.
He glared at her from the doorway, down the length of the great room with so many books lining the floor-to-ceiling shelves, as if he could make it disappear. Or barring that, make her disappear.
But he knew better.
It had always been like this.
Luca’s father had made a second career out of marrying a succession of unsuitable younger women who’d let him act the savior. He’d thrived on it. Gianni had never had much time for his sons or the first wife he’d shunted out of sight into a mental institution and mourned very briefly after her death, if at all. But for his parade of mistresses and wives with their endless needs and worries and crises and melodramas? He had been always and ever available to play the benevolent God, solver of all calamities, able to sort out all manner of troubles with a wave of his debit card.
When Gianni had arrived back in Italy a scant month after his fifth wife had divorced him with his sixth wife in tow, Luca hadn’t been particularly surprised.
“There is a new bride,” Rafael had told him darkly when Luca had arrived in the Dolomites as summoned that winter morning two years ago. “Already.”
Luca had rolled his eyes. What else was there to do?
“Is this one of legal age?”
Rafael had snorted. “Barely.”
“She’s twenty-three,” the very pregnant Lily had said reprovingly, her hands on the protruding belly that would shortly become Renzo. She’d glared at both of them. “That’s hardly a child. And she seems perfectly nice.”
“Of course she seems nice,” Rafael had retorted, and had only grinned at the look Lily had thrown at him, the connection between them as bright and shining as ever, as if Castellis could actually make something good from one of their grand messes after all. “That is her job, is it not?”
Luca had prepared himself for a stepmother much like the last occupant of the role, the sharp blonde creature whom Gianni had inexplicably adored despite the fact she’d spent more time on her mobile or propositioning his sons than she had with him. Corinna had been nineteen when she’d married Gianni and already a former swimsuit model. Luca hadn’t imagined his father had chosen her for her winning personality or depth of character.
But instead of another version of fake-breasted and otherwise entirely plastic Corinna, when he’d strode into the library where his father waited with Arlo, he’d found Kathryn.
Kathryn, who should not have been there.
That had been his first thought, like a searing blaze through his mind. He’d stopped, thunderstruck, halfway across the library floor and scowled at the woman who’d stood there smiling politely at him in that reserved British way of hers. Until his inability to do anything but glower at her had made that curve of her lips falter, then straighten into a flat line.
She doesn’t belong here, he’d thought again, harsher and more certain. Not standing next to his old, crotchety father tucked up in his armchair before the fire, all wrinkles and white hair and fingers made of knots, thanks to years of arthritis. Not wringing her hands together in front of her like some kind of awkward schoolgirl instead of resorting to the sultry, come-hither glances Luca’s stepmothers normally threw his way.
Not his stepmother.
That thought had been the loudest.
Not her.
Her hair was an inky dark brown that looked nearly black, yet showed hints of gold when the firelight played over it. It poured down past her shoulders, straight and thick, and was cut into a long fringe over smoky-gray eyes that edged toward green. She wore a simple pair of black trousers and a cleanly cut caramel-colored sweater open over a soft knit top that made no attempt whatsoever to showcase her cleavage. She looked elegantly efficient, not plastic or cheap in any way. She was small and fine boned, all big gray eyes and that dark hair and then, of course, there was her mouth.
Her mouth.
It was the mouth of a sulky courtesan, full and
