href="#u22a19881-7e33-541c-be96-246358f071ab">CHAPTER FIVE
THE PARTY WAS long and bright and painful.
Of course, it always had been. Kathryn told herself that, really, this was no different than the other times she’d had to parade around the Castelli château in this gorgeous little pocket of the Northern California wine country, acting as if she neither heard nor saw the whispers and the overlong, unpleasantly speculative looks.
This was merely part and parcel of being notorious, she told herself. Something every other member of the Castelli family had found a way to handle. Why couldn’t she do the same?
But, of course, she knew.
It was Luca. At every other party she’d ever been to with him, he’d kept as much distance between them as possible, as if he feared too much proximity to her would contaminate him. But this time she was his assistant, no longer his stepmother. That meant her place was at his elbow, no matter what had happened between them in that hallway.
And worse, what had almost happened. What she told herself she absolutely would not have allowed to happen—but she could feel the hollowness of that assertion tying her stomach into knots.
He’d caught up to her on the stairs that led down toward the ballroom and had slid a dark, fulminating look her way as he’d fallen into place beside her.
“I think you should leave me alone,” she’d told him. Through her teeth.
“With pleasure,” he’d replied silkily. “Does this mean you quit?”
She’d glared at him, and he’d caught her by the arm when she’d very nearly missed a step, and then held her fast when she would have yanked herself away from him.
“Careful,” he’d warned her. “We are no longer in private. And in public, you are my father’s widow and my current assistant.”
“That is, in fact, all I am anywhere.” She’d shaken her head at him. “Except for the sewer inside your head, of course.”
“One scandal at a time,” he’d told her, sounding something very much like grim. He’d let her go when they’d reached the ground floor. “Tonight I think the fact the Widow Castelli has joined the workforce will have to carry the gossip news cycle, don’t you? Unless you’d like to use this opportunity to update your global dating profile by announcing to the world that your hunt for a protector has begun anew.”
“And by hunt,” she’d retorted icily, “am I to understand you mean something like you manhandling me in a hallway? Was that your version of an audition?”
Luca’s mouth had curved in that lethal way that was nothing so palatable as a smile.
“It’s a tragedy for you that you can’t manipulate me, I’m sure,” he’d said, sounding anything but tragic. “Make sure you schedule time in my calendar for me to care about that. Maybe next month? In the meantime—” and he’d switched then, from the obnoxious Luca she’d come to expect into the COO version of Luca that she’d only ever seen in action over the past few weeks in his office “—you stay next to me. You do not speak unless spoken to directly. Just smile and look pretty and make sure you remember every detail of every conversation we have so we can compare notes later.”
She’d blinked. “Uh, what details am I looking for?”
He’d stared down at her, and it was getting harder and harder for her to imagine how anyone saw him as a lazy, lackadaisical playboy when the truth of him was stark and obvious and stamped right there on his intensely beautiful face.
“All of them, Kathryn,” he said, as if she was an idiot. She hated that he made her feel like one—and simultaneously feel as if she needed to prove him wrong. Then again, she’d had a great deal of experience with that feeling. “You never know which little detail will make all the difference.”
And then he’d strode ahead of her straight into the ballroom, and the moment he’d entered it, become that other Luca. As if he’d flipped a switch.
Affable and approachable. Quick to make everyone around him laugh. He always had a drink in his hand and appeared to be ever so slightly tipsy, though this close to him, Kathryn discovered that he didn’t actually drink much. He slapped backs and kissed cheeks. He flirted with everybody. He was delightful and about as unthreatening as a man who looked like him and moved like him and wore black tie as easily as he did ever could.
Kathryn didn’t have to ask him why he bothered to put on such an elaborate act. The why of it became clear almost instantly.
She’d spent a great deal of time smiling prettily next to Gianni, too, and no one had found him particularly delightful. They’d always been guarded. Distant and cagey. Especially if they were somehow involved in the business.
But it was as if no one could believe that this Luca Castelli, who commanded the attention of the whole party simply by entering it, was the same one who ran the Rome office with such a deft hand. This bright, gleaming, careless creature. Even though there was no other name on that door in Rome but his.
Kathryn had heard the rumors. That it was Gianni himself who’d propped up Luca’s office—except, of course, for the small problem that an old man with dementia could not possibly have run anything. Perhaps he simply had a particularly good team to support him, the rumor mill had countered. But no matter what people speculated about in private, when they were in Luca’s presence, they basked in it. In him. In that effortless sort of sunshine he spread about him so easily.
And they told him everything.
Secrets. Rumors. Things their supervisors—who were often standing across the room—would kill them for saying out loud.
Everyone succumbed to the golden myth of Luca Castelli, Kathryn saw. Everyone. Captains of industry, wine connoisseurs and college-age caterers alike lost in the perfection of his inviting smile.
Watching him in action told her a great many things, but most of all, it made her feel better about herself for falling so completely under his spell every time he got too close to her. It wasn’t something fatal in her own design, as she’d imagined. It wasn’t that weakness in her that her mother had always despaired of and had gone to such lengths to stamp out of her. It was him.
She ducked into the mostly hidden powder room off the main ballroom when Luca got into an intense discussion about a documentary Kathryn had never seen with a handful of very intellectual types who’d made it clear they both recognized her and thought her beneath them. Far beneath them. She was happy to let them think so.
Inside the luxurious bathroom suite, she sat down on the couch in the lounge area and took a little breather. Away from the crush of the crowd, most of whom looked at her with nothing but ugly supposition on their faces. Away from Luca, whom she really should hate.
Why didn’t she hate him the way she should? The way he unapologetically hated her?
“Being fascinated with him is only making everything worse,” she snapped at herself, out loud—and then jumped when the door to the lounge swung open.
“Oh,” Lily said. She looked around as if she expected there to be more people in the room—or as if she’d heard Kathryn talking to herself like a crazy person. Kathryn trotted out her smile automatically. “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
