“Lily,” he whispered.
Then he was moving. Rafael closed the distance between them in a moment, and there was nothing but noise inside him. A great din, pounding at him and tearing at him and ripping him apart, and his hands shook when he reached to take her by the shoulders.
“What are you doing?”
He saw her lips form the words, read them from her mouth, but he couldn’t make sense of them. He only knew that was her voice—her voice—the voice he’d never expected to hear again, faintly husky and indisputably Lily’s. It was like a sledgehammer through him, inside him. Wrecking him and remaking him at once.
And the scent of her … that indefinable fragrance that was some combination of hand lotion and moisturizer, shampoo and perfume, all rolled together and mixed with the simple truth of her beneath it all. All Lily. His Lily.
She was alive. Or this was a psychotic break. And Rafael didn’t give much of a damn which.
He simply hauled her toward him and took her mouth with his.
There are some things money can’t buy …
Living life at lightning pace, these magnates are no strangers to stakes at their highest. It seems they’ve got it all … That is until they find out that there’s an unplanned item to add to their list of accomplishments!
Achieved:
1. Successful business empire
2. Beautiful women in their bed
3. An heir to bear their name …?
Though every billionaire needs to leave his legacy in safe hands, discovering a secret heir shakes up his carefully orchestrated plan in more ways than one!
Uncover their secrets in:
Unwrapping the Castelli Secret by Caitlin Crews
and, coming December 2015
Brunetti’s Secret Son by Maya Blake
Look out for more stories in
The Secret Heirs of Billionaires series in 2016!
millsandboon.co.uk
Unwrapping the
Castelli Secret
Caitlin Crews
USA TODAY bestseller 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’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.
Contents
RAFAEL CASTELLI WAS entirely too familiar with ghosts.
He’d seen them everywhere in those first dark months following the accident. Every woman with anything resembling strawberry blond hair was his Lily in a certain light. A hint of her scent in a passing crowd, the suggestion of her delicate features across a busy train car, a low, faintly hoarse bit of feminine laughter in a packed restaurant. All Lily for a heart-stopping instant of wild recognition—and hope.
Always that delirious scrap of hope, as desperate as it was doomed.
He’d once chased a woman halfway across London before he’d realized that she wasn’t Lily. That she couldn’t have been Lily. His stepsister had died in that terrible crash on the rugged California coast north of San Francisco. And despite the fact that her body had never been recovered from the treacherous waters below that rocky cliff, despite the fact no one had ever found any proof that she’d died in the fire that had burned her car to ash, nothing, not tricks of light or three a.m. conspiracy theories or his own despairing heart playing games with him, could change that.
It had been five years. Lily was gone.
He understood, finally, that they weren’t ghosts at all, these flashing glimpses of what might have been. They were his bitter, consuming regret mapped onto a hundred strangers, and none of them the woman he wanted.
But this ghost was different.
And the last, Rafael vowed as a deep, black fury surged through him. Five years was long enough to grieve what had never been, thanks to his own selfishness. More than long enough. It was time to move on.
It was a December late afternoon in Charlottesville, Virginia, a picturesque American university town nestled at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, some three hours by car from Washington, DC, and a world away from his native Italy. Rafael had made