LITMIR.BIZ

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ignored in meetings. She smiled when she was called on to answer questions about past projects she couldn’t possibly know anything about. She smiled when Luca berated her for allowing unrestricted access to him and she smiled brighter when he let his people in and out the side door of his office himself, so he could do it all over again.

      She smiled and she smiled. The benefit of having been splashed across a thousand tabloids and held to be so good and so self-sacrificing was that she found she could use Saint Kate as a guide through each and every one of her chilly office interactions. Especially because she was well aware that the less she reacted, the more it annoyed her coworkers.

      Luca, of course, was a different issue altogether.

      She ducked into the plane and made her way into the upgraded living room space, smiling serenely as she took her seat on the curved leather sofa that commanded the center of the room. Luca was already sprawled out at one of the tables to the side that seated three apiece in luxurious leather armchairs, one hand in his hair as usual and the other clamping his mobile to his ear.

      He eyed her as he finished his conversation in low Italian, and didn’t stop when it was done.

      “You’re still here,” he said. Eventually.

      She smiled brighter. “Of course. I told you I wouldn’t leave.”

      “You can’t possibly have enjoyed these past few weeks, Kathryn.”

      “You certainly went out of your way to make sure of that,” she agreed. She showed him her teeth. “Much appreciated.”

      He frowned, and she smiled, and that went on for so long, she was tempted to turn on the big-screen television and ignore him—but that was not how an employee would behave, she imagined.

      “You were at the office when I arrived this morning,” he said gruffly.

      “Every morning.”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “I’m at the office when you arrive every morning,” Kathryn said mildly. “Your assistant can’t be late the way I was that first day, can she? It sends the wrong message.”

      She didn’t expect him to admit that he’d deliberately kept her waiting that day, simply so he could chastise her for tardiness. He didn’t disappoint her, though there was a gleam she didn’t quite understand in his dark eyes as they remained level on hers.

      “Surely you have other things to do with your time.” He waved a hand at her, as if she was displaying herself in a tiny string bikini rather than wearing another perfectly unobjectionable blouse and skirt, chosen specifically to blend in with everyone else and be unworthy of comment. “Trips to the places rich men frequent, the better to identify your next target, for example.”

      “I had that all planned for this weekend, of course,” she said in her sweetest, most professional tone, “but then you scheduled this trip to California. I guess the gold digging will have to wait.”

      He didn’t speak to her again until the plane reached its cruising altitude and the single, deferential air steward had set out trays of food for their dinner on the dark wood coffee table that sprawled in the center of the jet’s deeply comfortable and faintly decadent living room. Kathryn’s stomach rumbled at her, reminding her that she’d worked through lunch. And breakfast, for that matter, not that her dedication ever seemed to make a difference in Luca’s slippery slope of an office, where she literally could do no right.

      You’re used to that, aren’t you? a voice inside her asked—but she shoved it away. Her mother’s disappointment in her hurt, yes, but it wasn’t invalid. Kathryn was well aware of her own deficiencies, and not only because she’d heard about them so often.

      If she hadn’t been so deficient, she reminded herself, she wouldn’t have found marrying Gianni to be such a perfect option for her. She’d have excelled at her MBA the way she’d been supposed to do.

      “Tell me the story,” Luca said after they’d eaten in silence for a while, surprising her.

      He had a plate on the table before him and was lounging in his leather armchair as he picked languidly at it, but his seeming nonchalance didn’t make her heart beat any slower. Nor did it help matters that they were trapped in a plane together, and Kathryn couldn’t seem to make herself think about anything but that. All the gilt edges and wood accents and noncommercial setup and decor in the world couldn’t change the fact that she and Luca were suspended above the Atlantic Ocean in the dark, with no buffer between them.

      Alone.

      That hit her like a punch then slid down deep into her belly and pulsed there, as worrying as it was entirely too hot.

      She had never actually been alone with Luca before.

      There had always been someone else around. Always. Gianni. Some other member of the Castelli family. Staff. All the people in his office, especially because they all lived to catch her out in a misstep as she muddled her way through her first weeks on the job. Rafael and his family the week of the funeral, never more than a room or two away, liable to walk in at any moment.

      This was the first time in over two years that it had ever been just the two of them.

      There’s a pilot, she told herself as her heart slowed, then beat too hard against her ribs. You’re not really alone.

      But she knew even as she thought it that it didn’t mean anything. Neither the pilot nor the air steward would disturb Luca unless he summoned them himself. She might as well have stranded herself on a desert island with the man.

      That, she reflected helplessly, her mind suddenly full of images of a half-naked Luca gleaming beneath some far-off tropical sun, is not a helpful line of thought.

      And there was a certain hunger in that dark gaze of his that made her think he was entertaining the same rush of images that she was.

      “What story?” she asked, and hated how insubstantial her voice was. And the way his dark gaze sharpened at the sound, as if he knew why.

      “The lovely and touching fairy tale of how an obviously virtuous young woman like yourself fell passionately in love with a man who could easily have fathered your parents, of course. What else?”

      That was meant to insult her, Kathryn knew. But he’d never asked her that before. No one had. The entire world thought they knew exactly why a younger woman had married a much older man—and that wasn’t entirely untrue, of course. There were reasons, and some of those reasons were financial. But that didn’t mean it had been as cold or as calculated as Luca was determined to believe.

      “It wasn’t a fairy tale,” she told him, tucking her feet up beneath her on the butter-soft leather sofa and smoothing the edges of her skirt down farther toward her knees. She frowned at him. “It was just...nice. I met him very much by accident at a facility that caters to seniors and people with degenerative health challenges.”

      He didn’t quite snort at that. “How touching.”

      “Surely you know that your father wasn’t well, Luca.” She shrugged. “He was visiting a specialist. I was in the waiting area and we got to talking.”

      “You were there, one assumes, to gather some extra polish for your halo and crow about it to the tabloids?”

      Kathryn thought of her mother, and the way her body had betrayed her, growing so old and knotted before her time. She thought of the gnarled hands that had scrubbed floors to give Kathryn every possible chance—I had plans for my life, Kathryn, Rose had always said in that sharp way of hers, but I put them aside for you.

      How could Kathryn do anything less than the same in return for her?

      “Something like that,” she said now, to this man who didn’t deserve to know anything about her mother or her struggles, or the choices Kathryn had made to honor the sacrifices that had been made for her, no matter how badly she’d done at that sometimes. “I do so prefer it when my halo shines, you know.”

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