LITMIR.BIZ

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THROUGH THE formal dinner laid out with luxurious attention to detail in one of the Napa winery’s private rooms up high on a hillside, every plate and glass and carefully arranged bit of food as choreographed as some refined ballet, Luca was so darkly furious he had no idea how he kept to his seat.

      He told himself it wasn’t fury. Or it shouldn’t have been. That Kathryn was simply doing what she did, what she had always done and always would, and there was no point reacting to it at all—

      But that didn’t help. Every time her musical little laugh floated across the table, he tensed. Every time that silver-haired jackass to her left with the wandering hands touched her, he thought smoke might pour from his ears.

      It was one thing to know that this was what she did. That she was no doubt lining up potential selections for her future wherever she went. He’d never expected anything less. Yet it turned out it was something else to witness her in action.

      Particularly when he could still feel her. Still hear those cries in his ears. Still taste her, the hard nub of her nipple and that creamy heat below.

      Damn her.

      He had no memory of the conversations he must have engaged in with the people sitting on either side of him. When the eternal dinner ground to an end at last and he could finally get the hell away, he escorted Kathryn to their waiting car with a hand that was, he could admit, perhaps a little too insistent against the small of her back.

      “Is this an attempt at chivalry or are you herding me?” she asked under her breath, that damned smile of hers still welded into place even outside, in the dark, where there was no one to see her but him.

      He wanted to mess her up, Luca acknowledged. He wanted to dig his fingers beneath that facade of hers and see what she hid away underneath. He wanted far too much, and all of it wrong. And dangerous, besides.

      He was not a man who had ever been interested in entanglements. But tangled was the very least of the things he felt around this woman.

      Luca held the passenger door of the sleek limousine open as she climbed inside, nodding brusquely at their driver. Then he swung into the limo’s hushed interior himself, making no particular attempt to keep to his own side of the wide backseat as he slammed the door shut behind him.

      Kathryn was digging in her evening bag. She glanced at him as he came close, then froze.

      “What’s the matter?” she asked. The faintest frown etched itself between her eyes, where that fringe of hers nearly touched her eyes and drove him utterly crazy with that same sharp longing he was finding it harder and harder—impossible—to control. Just as he could no longer seem to control himself. “What happened?”

      “You tell me.”

      He felt outsized and more than a little maddened. He sprawled there next to her, too close but not quite touching her. Not quite. His blood was pumping through him much too fast. His heart was trying to kick its way out of his chest. He was holding himself back by the smallest thread.

      He wasn’t sure how he was holding himself back at all.

      Her frown deepened, which was at least better than that damned smile.

      “I don’t know, Luca. I thought that went well enough. I’m not sure what you wanted out of it, but it seems as if every vintner in two valleys is deeply impressed with your varietals. What more can you ask?”

      For the first time in his life, Luca did not care the slightest bit about wine or the wine business or anything having to do with his damned vines or vintages or barrels or whatever else.

      “I could ask that when we are conducting business, you manage to keep your mind on that,” he seethed at her. He didn’t even try to contain that tone of his or the simmering outrage in it. “And not on laying your trap for your next victim.”

      Her gray eyes chilled. “What are you talking about?”

      “You weren’t particularly subtle,” he gritted at her as the car began to move, sweeping them out toward the main road and the mountains to the west. “Everyone at the table got to watch you hang all over that poor man and play your little games with him.”

      “And by little games, I assume you mean the work you and I were there to do? That I was doing while you sulked?”

      “You spent a long time off in the bathroom before dessert,” he continued, not caring that he could see the effect of his harsh tone in the way she shivered slightly. “What were you doing, I wonder? Your target also disappeared for a similar span of time. And God only knows what you were doing beneath the table where no one could see.”

      He’d thought of little else. He knew the meal he’d been served had been the finest Californian cuisine, a fusion of the state’s rich bounty presented to perfection, and yet it had all been tasteless and pointless to him.

      Kathryn shook her head, her lips pressing together. “This is ridiculous. Not to mention offensive in the extreme.” Her gray eyes flashed. “Of course, that’s your thing, isn’t it? The more horrible, the better.”

      “And here’s what I wonder.” He shifted so he was closer to her, looming over her, his whole body humming with that darkness, that tension, that driving need he could neither understand nor control. This was what she did to him. She made him lose the tight control he’d always maintained over himself, his world, his life. Always. He found that the most unforgivable. Maybe that was what made him move his face that much closer to hers—so she could feel his fury in every word he spoke. “How does a noted whore for hire seal the deal? On your knees or on your back? Does it vary with each mark or do you stick to a set routine?”

      He didn’t see her move, and that told him more about the blind single-mindedness of that darkness in him than anything else. He felt her palm against his jaw, heard the crack of it fill the car’s interior with the bright burst of the slap she delivered and he saw the fire and the fury in her dark gray eyes.

      The pain came a moment later, sharp and swift.

      “You’re a vile little man,” she threw at him, and he didn’t disagree with her. But that was neither here nor there. “The only thing more disgusting than your imagination is the fact you think you can dump it out on me whenever you feel like it, like a toxic spill.”

      Luca laughed, a darker sound than the night outside the car or the way her breath came out in angry pants, and tested his jaw with his hand.

      “That actually hurt.” He shifted his gaze to hers, and eyed the way she sat there, clearly trembling with rage. “Is this where you play the outraged and offended virgin? I must tell you, Kathryn. You’re not that accomplished an actress.”

      She paled. He thought she might keel over, or explode, but she pressed her lips together again instead. She lifted a hand, and he thought she might try to hit him once more—and the operative word was try—but she only put her palm to her neck. As if she wanted to control her own pulse. Or her own breath.

      Or herself.

      And he didn’t know what to do with that notion that swept over him like heat, that she might find herself as out of control in the middle of this mess as he clearly was.

      “If you hit me again,” he told her softly, “I’ll return the favor.”

      “You’ll hit me?” Her eyes were grim in the dark. “I’m glad your father is dead, Luca. He would have been horrified by you.”

      He ignored the little flare of something a good deal like shame deep inside him then, even as it knotted itself in his gut.

      “Let’s be very clear about this,” he said, and he was aware on a distant level that the fury that had been riding him all through dinner had eased. Not disappeared, but loosened its hold. He didn’t ask himself why. “It will be a very cold day in hell before I worry myself over what my father, of all people, might have thought about anything I do. Much less what you think. That’s the moral equivalent of taking lectures on good behavior from the

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