obvious manipulation of the press to be in the same realm as the stories Rafael and his wife, Lily—who also happened to be their former stepsister, because the Castelli family tree was nothing if not tangled and bent back on itself—had told to explain the fact she’d been thought dead for five years.
But he thought better of saying anything.
After a moment, Rafael continued, “The reality is this. Even though you and I have been running things for years now, the perception from the outside is very different. Father’s death gives anyone and everyone the opportunity to make grand claims about how his upstart, ungrateful sons will ruin what he built. If we are seen to shun Kathryn, to treat her badly, that can only reflect negatively on us and add fuel to that fire.” He set his glass down without drinking from it. “I want no fuel, no fire. Nothing the tabloids can sink their dirty little claws into. You understand. This is necessary.”
What Luca understood was that this was a directive. From the chief executive officer of Castelli Wine and the new official head of his family to one among his many underlings. The fact that Luca owned half of the company did not change the fact he answered to Rafael. And that none of this sat well with him didn’t alter the fact that Rafael wasn’t asking his opinion on the matter.
He was delivering an order.
Luca stood abruptly, before he said things he wasn’t sure he meant in an effort to sway his brother’s opinion. Rafael stayed where he was.
“I don’t like this,” Luca said quietly. “It can’t end well.”
“It must end well,” Rafael countered. “That’s the whole point.”
“I’ll remind you that this was entirely your idea when it becomes a vast and unconquerable disaster, sinking the whole of Castelli Wine in the wake of this woman’s incompetence,” Luca said, and started for the door. He needed to do something. Run for miles and miles. Swim even farther. Lift very heavy weights or find a willing and eager woman. Anything but stay here and brood about this terrible new reality. “We can discuss it as we plummet to the bottom of the sea. In pieces.”
Rafael laughed.
“Kathryn is not our Titanic, Luca,” he said, and there was a note Luca did not like at all in his voice. Rafael tilted his head slightly to one side. “But perhaps you think she’s yours?”
What Luca thought was that he could do without his brother’s observations today—and on any day, should those observations involve Kathryn, who was without doubt the bane of his existence.
Damn that woman. And damn his father for foisting her upon his sons in the first place.
He left Rafael behind in 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.”
