garage and stalked into the building, only to find himself standing stock-still in his own empty reception area, his head filled with those damned eyes of hers, turned a dreamy slate green after he’d kissed her, and that sulky mouth—
Luca muttered a chain of curses. He raked both his hands through his hair as he headed into the offices that sprawled across the first two levels of this lovingly maintained building in Rome’s Tridente neighborhood, a mere stone’s throw from the Spanish Steps and Piazza del Popolo.
His office. His one true love. The only thing he’d ever loved, in point of fact. The only thing that had ever come close to loving him back, with one success after the next.
He lived in the penthouse that rambled over the top two levels, and that was where he headed now, taking his private lift up into the rooms he’d furnished with steel and chrome, wide-open spaces and minimalist art, the better to play off the history in every bit of stone and craftsmanship in the walls and the high, frescoed ceilings and every view of gorgeous, sleepless, frenetic Rome out of his windows. He tore off his clothes in his rooftop bedroom of glass and steel before making his way out to the pool on the wraparound terrace that surrounded the master suite and offered a three-hundred-sixty-degree perspective on the Eternal City.
If Rome could stand for more than two and a half thousand years, surely Luca could survive the onslaught of Kathryn. She had no idea what she was setting herself up for. Luca was a tough boss at the best of times, demanding and fierce, and that was what the loyal employees he’d handpicked said about him to his face. What could a former trophy wife know of the corporate world? She might have some fantasy of herself as a businesswoman, but it was unlikely she’d last the week.
Of course she won’t be able to handle it, he thought with something a great deal like relief—how had he failed to realize that earlier? He was called upon to indulge her whim, not alter the whole of his carefully controlled existence. The sooner she understood how ill suited she was to a life that involved more work than play, the sooner she’d drift off to find her next conquest. The problem would take care of itself.
Luca still felt edgy and entirely too messed up, despite the chill of the winter evening and the kick of the wind. Out of control. Jittery and appalled with himself. He told himself it must be grief, though he hadn’t been close with his father. He might have wished, from time to very rare and sentimental time, that he’d had a better understanding of the man whose shadow had fallen over him all these years—but he never had.
Perhaps the funeral had hit him harder than he’d realized.
Because he could not understand why he’d kissed Kathryn. What the hell was the matter with him?
How could he—a man who prided himself on always, always keeping his life clean and trimmed down and free from anything even resembling this kind of emotional clutter—have no idea?
He dived into the pool then, cutting into the heated water and then pulling hard as he began to swim. He lost himself in the rhythm of his strokes, the weight and rush of the water against him and the growing heat in his body as he kept going, kept pushing.
Lap after lap. Then again.
He swam and he swam, he pushed himself hard, and it was no good. She was still right there, cluttering up his head, reminding him how empty he was everywhere else.
Wide gray eyes. All that dark hair and that fringe that made her seem more mysterious somehow. All of her, wedged in him like a jagged splinter he could never remove, that he’d never managed to do anything but shove in that much farther. She worried at him and worried at him and he had no idea anymore who he was when he was near her. What he might do.
Luca stopped swimming, slamming his hands down on the lip of the pool, sending water splashing everywhere.
He did not dip his quill in his company’s ink, ever. He knew better than to throw grenades like that into the middle of his life. He did not touch his employees, and he certainly did not avail himself of his father’s leftovers. He had been a loud, angry child often abandoned by his single living parent for months at a time in the old manor house because of the trouble he’d caused. He’d gotten over that kind of behavior while he’d still been a child. This kind of mess was precisely what he’d spent his adult life avoiding.
This was a nonissue.
Luca climbed out of the pool and wrapped himself in one of the towels his staff kept at the ready, and then made his way back inside, hardly noticing the way the sun had turned the rambling old city orange and pink as it sank toward the horizon. Not even when he stood at one of the high windows that looked out over the winding, cobbled streets that led toward Piazza di Spagna and the famous Spanish Steps, where it seemed half of Rome congregated some evenings.
He saw nothing but Kathryn, dressed in her funeral clothes like some waifish fairy tale of a widow, and it had to stop. She’d already had two black marks against her before today. Her marriage to his father in the first place. And the unpalatable fact of her tabloid presence, the endless canonization of Saint Kate, nauseatingly described as the plucky English lass who’d bearded any number of dragons in his twisted old-Italian family.
It repulsed him. He told himself she did, too.
That kiss today was the third black mark. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t started it, hauling her to him with the kind of heedless passion he’d been so certain he’d completely excised from his life. How many times had he seen this or that foolish longing lay his father low? How often had he rolled his eyes at his brother’s enduring anguish over Lily? How many times had his own pointless emotions bit him in the ass as a child? He’d promised himself a long time ago that he would stay clear of such quagmires, and the truth was, it had never been particularly difficult.
Until Kathryn. And the truth remained: he’d been the one to kiss her. He accepted that failing, even if he couldn’t quite understand it.
The problem was the way she’d kissed him back.
The way she’d melted against him. The way she’d opened her mouth and met him. The way she’d poured herself into him, against him, until he’d very nearly forgotten who and where they were. That she was his stepmother, his father’s widow, and that they’d been standing much too near the family mausoleum where the old man had only just been interred.
Luca was sick, there was no doubt about that—and the fact he was hard even now, at the mere memory of her taste, proved it.
But what game had she been playing?
She was good, he could admit it. She’d tasted like innocence. He still had the flavor of her on his tongue.
That was the most infuriating thing by far.
And Luca vowed, as the last bit of winter sun fell down behind Rome’s enduring skyline, that he would not only make this little corporate adventure for his father’s child bride of a widow as unpleasant as possible—he would also do much worse than that.
He would take Saint Kate’s halo and tarnish it. And her.
Irredeemably.
* * *
By the time Kathryn made it to the ornate Castelli Wine offices in one of the most charming neighborhoods in Rome that Monday morning at exactly nine o’clock sharp, she’d prepared herself.
This was a war. A drawn-out siege. She might have lost a battle in that library far to the north in all those forbidding,
