Mills & Boon Stars Collection: Shocking Scandals

About the Author

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English literature she received from the University of York. She currently lives in California with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com

Stars Collection: Shocking Scandals

Castelli’s Virgin Widow

Expecting a Royal Scandal

The Guardian’s Virgin Ward

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-09524-2

STARS COLLECTION: SHOCKING SCANDALS

Castelli’s Virgin Widow © 2016 Caitlin Crews Expecting a Royal Scandal © 2016 Caitlin Crews The Guardian’s Virgin Ward © 2016 Caitlin Crews

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Version: 2020-03-02

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Castelli’s Virgin Widow

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Expecting a Royal Scandal

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

The Guardian’s Virgin Ward

Back Cover Text

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

About the Publisher

Castelli’s Virgin Widow

Caitlin Crews

To my wonderful editor Flo Nicoll for our

fantastic year together! Thank you so much for

taking such great care of me—and my books!

CHAPTER ONE

“PLEASE TELL ME this is a bad attempt at levity, Rafael. A practical joke from the least likely clown in Italy.”

Luca Castelli made no attempt to temper his harsh tone or the scowl he could feel on his face as he glared across the private library at his older brother. Rafael was also his boss and the head of the family company, a state of affairs that usually did not trouble Luca at all.

But there was nothing usual about today.

“I wish that it was,” Rafael said from where he sat in an armchair in front of a bright and cheerful fire that did nothing at all to dispel Luca’s sense of gloom and fury. “Alas. When it comes to Kathryn, we have no choice.”

His brother looked like a monk carved from stone today, his features hewn from granite, which only added to Luca’s sense of betrayal and sheer wrongness. That was the old Rafael, that heavy, joyless creature made entirely of bitterness and regret. Not the Rafael of the past few years, the one Luca greatly preferred, who had married the love of his life he’d once thought dead and was even now expecting his third child with her.

Luca hated that grief had thrown them all so far back into unpleasant history. Luca hated grief, come to that. No matter its form.

Their father, the infamous Gianni Castelli, who had built an empire of wine and wealth and brusque personality that spanned at least two continents, but was better known around the world for his colorful marital life, was dead.

Outside, January rain lashed the windows of the old Castelli manor house that sprawled with such insouciance at the top of an alpine lake in Northern Italy’s Dolomite Mountains, as it had done for generations. The heavy clouds were low over the water, concealing the rest of the world from view, as if to pay tribute to the old man as he’d been interred in the Castelli mausoleum earlier this morning.

Ashes rendered ashes and dust forever dust.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

Rafael, who had been acting CEO of the family business for years now despite Gianni’s blustery refusal to formally step aside, was now indisputably in charge. That meant Luca was the newly minted chief operating officer, a title that did not come close to describing his pantheon of responsibilities as co-owner but was useful all the same. Luca had initially thought these finicky bits of official business were a good thing for the Castelli brothers as well as the company, not to mention long overdue, given they’d both been acting in those roles ever since the start of their father’s decline in health some years back.

Until now.

“I fail to understand why we cannot simply pay the damned woman off like all the rest of the horde of ex-wives,” Luca said, aware that his tone was clipped and bordering on unduly aggressive. He felt restless and edgy in his position on the low couch opposite Rafael, but he knew if he moved, it would end badly. A fist through a wall. An upended bookshelf. A broken pane of glass. All highly charged reactions he did not care to explore, much less explain to his brother—given they smacked of a loss of control, which Luca did not allow. Ever. “Settle some of Father’s fortune on her, send her on her way and be done with it.”

“Father’s will is very clear in regard to Kathryn,” Rafael replied, and he sounded no happier about it than Luca felt. Luca told himself that was something anyway. “And she is his widow, Luca. Not his ex-wife. A crucial distinction.”

Luca nearly growled but checked it at the last moment. “That’s nothing but semantics.”

“Sadly not.” Rafael shook his head, but his gaze never left Luca’s. “The choice is hers. She can either accept a lump settlement now, or a position in the company. She chose the latter.”

“This is ridiculous.”

It was something far worse than merely ridiculous, but Luca didn’t have a word to describe that gnawing, hollow thing inside him that always yawned open at any mention of his father’s sixth and final wife. Kathryn.

The one who was even now in the larger, more formal library downstairs, crying what appeared to be real tears over the death of a husband three times her age she could only have married for the most cynical of reasons. Luca had seen them trickle silently down her cheeks, one after the next, as they’d all stood about in the frigid air earlier, giving the impression she could not manage to contain her grief.

He didn’t believe it. Not for a second.

If Luca knew anything, it was this: the kind of love that might lead to such grieving was rare, exceedingly unlikely and had never made a great many appearances in the Castelli family. He thought Rafael’s current happiness was perhaps the only evidence of it in generations.

“For all we know, Father found her hawking her wares on the streets of London,” he muttered now. Then glared at his brother. “What the hell will I do with her in the office? Do we even know if she can read?”

Rafael shifted, the dark eyes that were so much like Luca’s own narrow and shrewd. “You will find something to keep her busy, because the will assures her three years of employment. Ample time to introduce her to the joys of the written word, I’d think. And whether you like her or not is irrelevant.”

Like was not at all the word Luca would have used to describe what happened inside him at the mention of that woman. It wasn’t even close.

“I have no feelings about her whatsoever.” Luca let out a laugh that sounded hollow to his own ears. “What is one more child bride—acquired solely to cater to the old man’s ego—to me?”

His brother only gazed at him for a moment that seemed to stretch on for far too long. The old windows rattled. The fire crackled and spat. And Luca found he had no desire whatsoever to hear whatever his older brother might say next. He’d preferred Rafael when he’d been lost in a prison of fury and regret, he told himself, and unable to concentrate on anything outside his own pain. At least then he’d been a known quantity. This new Rafael was entirely too insightful.

“If you are determined to do this,” he said before Rafael could open his mouth and say things Luca would have to fend off, “why not set her up with something in Sonoma? She can get a hands-on experience at the vineyards in California, just as we did when we were boys. It can be a delightful holiday for her, far, far away.”

From me, he did not say. Far, far away from me.

Rafael shrugged. “She chose Rome.”

Rome. Luca’s city. Luca’s side of their highly competitive wine business. The marketing power and global reach of the Castelli Wine brand were, he flattered himself, all his doing—and possible in large part because he’d been left to his own devices for years. He had certainly not been required to play babysitter for one of his father’s legion of mistakes.

His father’s very worst mistake, to his way of thinking. In a lifetime of so very many—including Luca himself, he’d long thought. He knew his father would have agreed.

“There’s no room,” he said now. “The team is lean, focused and entirely handpicked. There’s no place for a bit of fluff on sabbatical from her true vocation as an old man’s trophy.”

Rafael was his boss then, he could see. Not his brother.

And entirely pitiless. “You’ll have to make room.”

Luca shook his head. “It may set us back months, if not years, and cause incalculable damage in the process as we try to arrange the team around such a creature and what are sure to be her many, many mistakes.”

“I trust you’ll ensure that none of that happens,” Rafael said drily. “Or do you doubt your own abilities?”

“This sort of vulgar nepotism will likely cause a riot—”

“Luca.” Rafael’s voice was not loud, but it silenced Luca all the same. “Your objections are noted. But you are not seeing the big picture.”

Luca tried to contain the seething thing within that pushed out from the darkest part of him and threatened to take him over. He thrust his legs out in front of him and raked a hand through his hair as if he was languid. Indolent. Unbothered by all of this, despite his arguments.