Книга - Untamed Billionaire’s Innocent Bride

Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride
CAITLIN CREWS


A long-lost billionaire… A virgin to tame him! Dedicated personal assistant Lauren Clarke always does as she’s asked. Her latest task? To prevent a media scandal, she needs to find reclusive Dominik James—her boss’s estranged brother—and convince him to marry her! But in Hungary’s darkest forests she discovers more than just an untamed billionaire… Dominik’s brooding masculinity awakens Lauren’s long-dormant desire. Once they’ve exchanged their convenient ‘I do’s’, will innocent Lauren accept that their hunger can’t be denied…?







A long-lost billionaire...

A virgin to tame him!

Dedicated personal assistant Lauren Clarke always does as she’s asked. Her latest task? To prevent a media scandal, she needs to find reclusive Dominik James—her boss’s estranged brother—and convince him to marry her! But in Hungary’s darkest forests she discovers more than just an untamed billionaire... Dominik’s brooding masculinity awakens Lauren’s long-dormant desire. Once they’ve exchanged their convenient “I do’s,” will innocent Lauren accept that their hunger can’t be denied?

Read on...as the billionaire and his convenient bride tie the knot!


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’ Programme, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature that she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://www.caitlincrews.com).


Also by Caitlin Crews (#u698af3e3-343f-5dc6-8406-b0bc7e92f3b3)

Bride by Royal Decree

Undone by the Billionaire Duke

A Baby to Bind His Bride

Imprisoned by the Greek’s Ring

My Bought Virgin Wife

Bound to the Desert King collection

Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child

Scandalous Royal Brides miniseries

The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal

The Billionaire’s Secret Princess

Stolen Brides collection

The Bride’s Baby of Shame

The Combe Family Scandals miniseries

The Italian’s Twin Consequences

Untamed Billionaire’s Innocent Bride

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk).


Untamed Billionaire’s Innocent Bride

Caitlin Crews






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


ISBN: 978-1-474-08783-4

UNTAMED BILLIONAIRE’S INNOCENT BRIDE

© 2019 Caitlin Crews

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 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.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


I can’t believe that this is my 50th book for Mills & Boon! What a delightful ride it’s been so far!

I want to thank Jane Porter, whose novels inspired me to try to write my first Modern Romance and whose friendship, mentorship and stalwart sisterhood have changed my life in a million glorious ways.

I want to thank my two marvelous editors, Megan Haslam and Flo Nicoll, who I simply couldn’t do without. What would these stories be without your guidance, encouragement, excitement, fantastic editing and endless help? I shudder to think! And I want to thank the wonderful Jo Grant as well, for always being such a shining light for category romance and those of us who write it.

But most of all I want to thank you, my readers, for letting me tell you my stories.

Here’s to fifty more!

xoxox


Contents

Cover (#uf9945e1c-d2dc-515e-8c19-5dc5898b7f5f)

Back Cover Text (#uf6eb77d8-c384-52b6-ab68-eb2d1620da58)

About the Author (#u0786ff8e-6d1d-549e-98c6-bf5107f154af)

Booklist (#u356dbe15-2381-58f7-9f70-04aba09f146f)

Title Page (#uc66af57f-6596-5765-9f7c-e29eac48b4bb)

Copyright (#u0472a241-0e34-584b-9179-1a37b13aad02)

Dedication (#u4873e099-60e4-5928-bdd0-caf21dfca9f5)

CHAPTER ONE (#u31d9501f-4697-5707-a972-97b6d0f2a2b2)

CHAPTER TWO (#uc14d2459-2795-53ce-83ee-ca7ace04f957)

CHAPTER THREE (#u2d2901fa-36cb-5cb5-8e9f-29f03d2d6f9c)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




CHAPTER ONE (#u698af3e3-343f-5dc6-8406-b0bc7e92f3b3)


LAUREN ISADORA CLARKE was a Londoner, born and bred.

She did not care for the bucolic British countryside, all that monotonous green with hedges this way and that, making it impossible to get anywhere. She preferred the city, with all its transportation options endlessly available—and if all else failed, the ability to walk briskly from one point to the next. Lauren prized punctuality. And she could do without stiff, uncomfortable footwear with soles outfitted to look like tire tread.

She was not a hiker or a rambler or whatever those alarmingly red-cheeked, jolly hockey-sticks sorts called themselves as they brayed about in fleece and clunky, sensible shoes. She found nothing at all entertaining in huffing up inclines only to slide right back down them, usually covered in the mud that accompanied all the rain that made England’s greenest hills that color in the first place. Miles and miles of tramping about for the dubious pleasure of “taking in air” did not appeal to her and never had.

Lauren liked concrete, bricks, the glorious Tube and abundant takeaways on every corner, thank you. The very notion of the deep, dark woods made her break out in hives.

Yet, here she was, marching along what the local innkeeper had optimistically called a road—it was little better than a footpath, if that—in the middle of the resolutely thick forests of Hungary.

Hive-free thus far, should she wish to count her blessings.

But Lauren was rather more focused on her grievances today.

First and foremost, her shoes were not now and never had been sensible. Lauren did not believe in the cult of sensible shoes. Her life was eminently sensible. She kept her finances in order, paid her bills on time, if not early, and dedicated herself to performing her duties as personal assistant to the very wealthy and powerful president and CEO of Combe Industries at a level of consistent excellence she liked to think made her indispensable.

Her shoes were impractical, fanciful creations that reminded her that she was a woman—which came in handy on the days her boss treated her as rather more of an uppity appliance. One that he liked to have function all on its own, apparently, and without any oversight or aid.

“My mother gave away a child before she married my father,” Matteo Combe, her boss, had told her one fine day several weeks back in his usual grave tone.

Lauren, like everyone else who had been in the vicinity of a tabloid in a checkout line over the past forty years, knew all about her boss’s parents. And she knew more than most, having spent the bulk of her career working for Matteo. Beautiful, beloved Alexandrina San Giacomo, aristocratic and indulged, had defied reason and her snooty Venetian heritage when she’d married rich but decidedly unpolished Eddie Combe, whose ancestors had carved their way out of the mills of Northern England—often with their fists. Their love story had caused scandals, their turbulent marriage had been the subject of endless speculation and their deaths within weeks of each other had caused even more commotion.

But there had never been the faintest whisper of an illegitimate son.

Lauren had not needed to be told that once this came out—and it would, because things like this always came out eventually—it wouldn’t be whispers they’d have to be worried about. It would be the all-out baying of the tabloid wolves.

“I want you to find him,” Matteo had told her, as if he was asking her to fetch him a coffee. “I cannot begin to imagine what his situation is, but I need him media-ready and, if at all possible, compliant.”

“Your long-lost brother. Whom you have never met. Who may, for all you know, loathe you and your mother and all other things San Giacomo on principle alone. This is who you think might decide to comply with your wishes.”

“I have faith in you,” Matteo had replied.

And Lauren had excused that insanity almost in that same instant, because the man had so much on his plate. His parents had died, one after the next. His fluffy-headed younger sister had gone and gotten herself pregnant, a state of affairs that had caused Matteo to take a swing at the father of her baby. A perfectly reasonable reaction, to Lauren’s mind—but unfortunately, Matteo had taken said swing at his father’s funeral.

The punch he’d landed on Prince Ares of Atilia had been endlessly photographed and videoed by the assorted paparazzi and not a few of the guests, and the company’s board of directors had taken it as an opportunity to move against him. Matteo had been forced to subject himself to an anger management specialist who was no ally, and it was entirely possible the board would succeed in removing him should the specialist’s report be unflattering.

Of course, Lauren excused him.

“Do you ever not excuse him?” her flatmate Mary had asked idly without looking up from her mobile while Lauren had dashed about on her way out the morning she’d left London.

“He’s an important and very busy man, Mary.”

“As you are always on hand to remind us.”

The only reason Lauren hadn’t leaped into that fray, she told herself now as she stormed along the dirt path toward God knew where, was because good flatmates were hard to find, and Mary’s obsession with keeping in touch with her thirty thousand best friends in all corners of the globe on all forms of social media at all times meant she spent most of her time locked in her room obsessing over photo filters and silly voices. Which left the flat to Lauren on the odd occasions she was actually there to enjoy it.

Besides, a small voice inside her that she would have listed as a grievance if she allowed herself to acknowledge it, she wasn’t wrong, was she?

But Lauren was here to carry out Matteo’s wishes, not question her allegiance to him.

Today her pair of typically frothy heels—with studs and spikes and a dash of whimsy because she didn’t own a pair of sensible shoes appropriate for mud and woods and never would—were making this unplanned trek through the Hungarian woods even more unpleasant than she’d imagined it would be, and Lauren’s imagination was quite vivid. She glared down at her feet, pulled her red wrap tighter around her, thought a few unkind thoughts about her boss she would never utter out loud and kept to the path.

The correct Dominik James had not been easy to find.

There had been almost no information to go on aside from what few details Matteo’s mother had provided in her will. Lauren had started with the solicitor who had put Alexandrina’s last will and testament together, a canny old man better used to handling the affairs of aristocrats than entertaining the questions of staff. He had peered at her over glasses she wasn’t entirely convinced he needed, straight down his nose as he’d assured her that had there been any more pertinent information, he would have included it.

Lauren somehow doubted it.

While Matteo was off tending to his anger management sessions with the future of Combe Industries hanging in the balance, Lauren had launched herself into a research frenzy. The facts were distressingly simple. Alexandrina, heiress to the great San Giacomo fortune, known throughout the world as yet another poor little rich girl, had become pregnant when she was barely fifteen, thanks to a decidedly unsuitable older boy she shouldn’t have met in the first place. The family had discovered her pregnancy when she’d been unable to keep hiding it and had transferred her from the convent school she had been attending to one significantly more draconian.

The baby had been born in the summer when Alexandrina was sixteen, spirited away by the church, and Alexandrina had returned to her society life come fall as if nothing had happened. As far as Lauren could tell, she had never mentioned her first son again until she’d made provisions for him in her will.

To my firstborn son, Dominik James, taken from me when I was little more than a child myself, I leave one third of my fortune and worldly goods.

The name itself was a clue. James, it turned out, was an Anglicized version of Giacomo. Lauren tracked all the Dominik Jameses of a certain age she could find, eventually settling on two possibilities. The first she’d dismissed after she found his notably non–San Giacomo DNA profile on one of those ancestry websites. Which left only the other.

The remaining Dominik James had been raised in a series of Catholic orphanages in Italy before running off to Spain. There he’d spent his adolescence, moving from village to village in a manner Lauren could only describe as itinerant. He had joined the Italian Army in his twenties, then disappeared after his discharge. He’d emerged recently to do a stint at university, but had thereafter receded from public view once more.

It had taken some doing, but Lauren had laboriously tracked him down into this gnarled, remote stretch of Hungarian forest—which Matteo had informed her, after all her work, was the single notation made in the paper version of Alexandrina’s will found among Matteo’s father’s possessions.

“That was what my father wrote on his copy of my mother’s will,” Matteo had said cheerfully. Cheerfully,as if it didn’t occur to him that knowing the correct Dominik James was in Hungary might have been information Lauren could have used earlier.

She didn’t say that, of course. She’d thanked him.

Matteo’s father might have made notes on Alexandrina’s will, but he’d clearly had no intention of finding the illegitimate child his wife had given away long before he’d met her. Which meant it was left to Lauren to not only make this trek to locate Dominik James in the first place, but also potentially to break the news of his parentage to him. Here.

In these woods that loomed all about her, foreign and imposing, and more properly belonged in a fairy tale.

Good thing Lauren didn’t believe in fairy tales.

She adjusted her red wrap again, pulling it tighter around her to ward off the chill.

It was spring, though there was no way of telling down here on the forest floor. The trees were thick and tall and blocked out the daylight. The shadows were intense, creeping this way and that and making her feel...restless.

Or possibly it wasn’t shadows cast by tree branches that were making her feel one way or another, she told herself tartly as she willed her ankles not to roll or her sharp heels to snap off. Perhaps it was the fact that she was here in the first place. Or the fact that when she’d told the innkeeper in this remote mountain town that she was looking for Dominik James, he’d laughed.

“Good luck with that,” he had told her, which she had found remarkably unhelpful. “Some men do not want to be found, miss, and nothing good comes of ignoring their issues.”

Out here in these woods, where there were nothing but trees all around and the uneasy sensation that she was both entirely alone and not alone at all, that unhelpful statement felt significantly more ominous.

On and on she walked. She had left the village behind a solid thirty minutes ago, and that was the last she’d seen of anything resembling civilization. She tried to tell herself it was lucky this path didn’t go directly up the side of the brooding mountains, but it was hard to think in terms of luck when there was nothing around but dirt. Thick trees. Birds causing commotions in the branches over her head. And the kind of crackling sounds that assured her that just because she couldn’t see any wildlife, it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Watching. Waiting.

Lauren shuddered. Then told herself she was being ridiculous as she rounded another curve in her path, and that was when she saw it.

At first, she wasn’t sure if this was the wooded, leafy version of a desert mirage—not that she’d experienced such a thing, as there were no deserts in London. But the closer she got, the more she could see that her eyes were not deceiving her, after all. There was a rustic sort of structure peeking through the trees, tucked away in a clearing.

Lauren drew closer, slowing her steps as the path led her directly toward the edge of the clearing. All she’d wanted this whole walk was a break from the encroaching forest, but now that there was a clearing, she found it made her nervous.

But Lauren didn’t believe in nerves, so she ignored the sensation and frowned at the structure before her. It was a cottage. Hewn from wood, logs interlocking and tidy. There was smoke curling up from its chimney, and there was absolutely no reason that a dedicated city dweller like Lauren should feel something clutch inside her at the sight. As if she’d spent her entire life wandering around without knowing it, half-lost in forests of wood and concrete alike, looking for a cozy little home exactly like this one.

That was ridiculous, of course. Lauren rubbed at her chest without entirely meaning to, as if she could do something about the ache there. She didn’t believe in fairy tales, but she’d read them. And if any good had ever come from seemingly perfect cottages slapped down in the middle of dangerous forests, well. She couldn’t remember that story. Usually, an enchanted cottage led straight to witches and curses and wolves baring their teeth—

But that was when she noticed that the porch in front of the cottage wasn’t empty as she’d thought at first glance. That one of the shadows there was a man.

And he was staring straight at her.

Her heart did something acrobatic and astonishing inside her chest, and she had the strangest notion that if she surrendered to it, it could topple her straight to the ground. Right there on that edge where the forest fought to take back the clearing.

But Lauren had no intention of crumpling.

No matter who was lurking about, staring at her.

“Mr. Dominik James?” she asked briskly, making her voice as crisp and clear as possible and projecting it across the clearing as if she wasn’t the slightest bit unnerved, because she shouldn’t have been.

Though she was standing stock-still, she couldn’t help but notice. As if her legs were not necessarily as convinced as she was that she could continue to remain upright. Especially while her heart kept up its racket and ache.

The man moved, stepping out from the shadow of the porch into the sunlight that filled the clearing but somehow did nothing to push back the inky darkness of the forest.

It only made her heart carry on even worse.

He was tall. Much too tall, with the kind of broad shoulders that made her palms itch to...do things she refused to let herself imagine. His hair was dark and thick, worn carelessly and much too long for her tastes, but it seemed to make his strong, bold jaw more prominent somehow. His mouth was flat and unsmiling, yet was lush enough to make her stomach flip around inside her. He was dressed simply, in a long-sleeved shirt that clung to the hard planes of his chest, dark trousers that made her far too aware of his powerful thighs, and boots that looked as if they’d been chosen for their utility rather than their aesthetics.

But it was his eyes that made everything inside Lauren ring with alarm. Or maybe it was awareness.

Because they were gray. Gray like storms, just like Matteo’s.

San Giacomo gray, Lauren thought, just like Alexandrina’s had been. Famously.

She didn’t need him to identify himself. She had no doubt whatsoever that she was looking at the lost San Giacomo heir. And she couldn’t have said why all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood up straight as if in foreboding.

She willed herself to forge on.

“My name is Lauren Clarke,” she informed him, trying to remember that she was meant to be efficient. Not...whatever she was right now, with all these strange sensations swishing around inside her. “I work for Matteo Combe, president and CEO of Combe Industries. If you are somehow unfamiliar with Mr. Combe, he is, among other things, the eldest son of the late Alexandrina San Giacomo Combe. I have reason to believe that Alexandrina was also your mother.”

She had practiced that. She had turned the words over and over in her head, then gone so far as to practice them in the mirror this morning in her little room at the inn. Because there was no point hemming and hawing and beating around the bush. Best to rip the plaster off and dive straight in, so they could get to the point as quickly as possible.

She’d expected any number of responses to her little speech. Maybe he would deny the claim. Maybe he would launch into bluster, or order her away. She’d worked out contingency plans for all possible scenarios—

But the man in front of her didn’t say a word.

He roamed toward her, forcing her to notice the way he moved. It was more liquid than it ought to have been. A kind of lethal grace, given how big he was, and she found herself holding her breath.

The closer he came, the more she could see the expression on his face, in his eyes, that struck her as a kind of sardonic amusement.

She hadn’t made any contingency plan for that.

“When Mrs. Combe passed recently, she made provisions for you in her will,” Lauren forced herself to continue. “My employer intends to honor his mother’s wishes, Mr. James. He has sent me here to start that process.”

The man still didn’t speak. He slowed when he was face-to-face with Lauren, but all he did was study her. His gaze moved all over her in a way that struck her as almost unbearably intimate, and she could feel the flush that overtook her in reaction.

As if he had his hands all over her body. As if he was testing the smoothness of the hair she’d swept back into a low ponytail. Or the thickness of the bright red wool wrap she wore to ward off the chill of flights and Hungarian forests alike. Down her legs to her pretty, impractical shoes, then back up again.

“Mr. Combe is a man of wealth and consequence.” Lauren found it was difficult to maintain her preferred crisp, authoritative tone when this man was so...close. And when he was looking at her as if she were a meal, not a messenger. “I mention this not to suggest that he doesn’t wish to honor his commitments to you, because he does. But his stature requires that we proceed with a certain sensitivity. You understand.”

She was aware of too many things, all at once. The man—Dominik, she snapped at herself, because it had to be him—had recently showered. She could see the suggestion of dampness in his hair as it went this way and that, indicating it had a mind of its own. Worse still, she could smell him. The combination of soap and warm, clean, decidedly healthy male.

It made her feel the slightest bit dizzy, and she was sure that was why her heart was careening about inside her chest like a manic drum.

All around them, the forest waited. Not precisely silent, but there was no comforting noise of city life—conversations and traffic and the inevitable sounds of so many humans going about their lives, pretending they were alone—to distract her from this man’s curious, penetrating, unequivocally gray glare.

If she believed in nerves, she’d have said hers were going haywire.

“I beg your pardon,” Lauren said when it was that or leap away from him and run for it, so unsettled and unsteady did she feel. “Do you speak English? I didn’t think to ask.”

His stern mouth curled the faintest bit in one corner. As Lauren watched, stricken and frozen for reasons she couldn’t begin to explain to herself, he reached across the scant few inches between them.

She thought he was going to put his hand on her—touch her face, or smooth it over her hair, or run one of those bluntly elegant fingers along the length of her neck the way she’d seen in a fanciful romantic movie she refused to admit she’d watched—but he didn’t. And she felt the sharpest sense of disappointment in that same instant he found one edge of her wrap, and held it between his fingers.

As if he was testing the wool.

“What are you doing?” Lauren asked, and any hope she’d had of maintaining her businesslike demeanor fled. Her knees were traitorously weak. And her voice didn’t sound like her at all. It was much too breathy. Embarrassingly insubstantial.

He was closer than he ought to have been, because she was sure there was no possible way she had moved. And there was something about the way he angled his head that made everything inside her shift.

Then go dangerously still.

“A beautiful blonde girl walks into the woods, dressed in little more than a bright, red cloak.” His voice was an insinuation. A spell. It made her think of fairy tales again, giving no quarter to her disbelief. It was too smoky, too deep and much too rich, and faintly accented in ways that kicked up terrible wildfires in her blood. And everywhere else. “What did you think would happen?”

Then he dropped his shockingly masculine head to hers, and kissed her.




CHAPTER TWO (#u698af3e3-343f-5dc6-8406-b0bc7e92f3b3)


HE WAS KISSING HER.

Kissing her,for the love of all that was holy.

Lauren understood it on an intellectual level, but it didn’t make sense.

Mostly because what he did with his mouth bore no resemblance to any kiss she had ever heard of or let herself imagine.

He licked his way along her lips, a temptation and a seduction in one, encouraging her to open. To him.

Which of course she wasn’t going to do.

Until she did, with a small sound in the back of her throat that made her shudder everywhere else.

And then that wicked temptation of a tongue was inside her mouth—inside her—and everything went a little mad.

It was the angle, maybe. His taste, rich and wild. It was the impossible, lazy mastery of the way he kissed her, deepening it, changing it.

When he pulled away, his mouth was still curved.

And Lauren was the one who was shaking.

She assured herself it was temper. Outrage. “You can’t just...go about kissing people!”

That curve in his mouth deepened. “I will keep that in mind, should any more storybook creatures emerge from my woods.”

Lauren was flustered. Her cheeks were too hot and that same heat seemed to slide and melt its way all over her body, making her nipples pinch while between her legs, a kind of slippery need bloomed.

And shamed her. Deeply.

“I am not a storybook creature.” The moment she said it, she regretted it. Why was she participating in whatever bizarre delusion this was? But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Fairy tales aren’t real, and even if they were, I would want nothing to do with them.”

“That is a terrible shame. What are fairy tales if not a shorthand for all of mankind’s temptations? Fantasies. Dark imaginings.”

There was no reason that her throat should feel so tight. She didn’t need to swallow like that, and she certainly didn’t need to be so aware of it.

“I’m sure that some people’s jobs—or lack thereof—allow them to spend time considering the merit of children’s stories,” she said in a tone she was well aware was a touch too prissy. But that was the least of her concerns just then, with the brand of his mouth on hers. “But I’m afraid my job is rather more adult.”

“Because nothing is more grown-up than doing the bidding of another, of course.”

Lauren felt off-kilter, when she never did. Her lips felt swollen, but she refused to lift her fingers to test them. She was afraid it would give him far too much advantage. It would show him her vulnerability, and that was unconscionable.

The fact she had any vulnerability to show in the first place was an outrage.

“Not everyone can live by their wits in a forest hut,” she said. Perhaps a bit acerbically.

But if she expected him to glower at that, she was disappointed. Because all he did was stare back at her, that curve in the corner of his mouth, and his eyes gleaming a shade of silver that she felt in all those melting places inside her.

“Your innkeeper told me you were coming.” He shifted back only slightly, and she was hyperaware of him in ways that humiliated her further. There was something about the way his body moved. There was something about him. He made her want to lean in closer. He made her want to reach out her hands and—

But of course she didn’t do that. She folded her arms across her chest, to hold him off and hold herself together at the same time, and trained her fiercest glare upon him as if that could make all the uncomfortable feelings go away.

“You could have saved yourself the trouble and the walk,” he was saying. “I don’t want your rich boss and yes, I know who he is. You can rest easy. I’m not interested in him. Or his mother. Or whatever ‘provisions’ appeared in the wills of overly wealthy people I would likely hate if I’d known them personally.”

That felt like a betrayal when it shouldn’t have felt like anything. It wasn’t personal. She had nothing to do with the Combe and San Giacomo families. She had never been anything but staff, for which she often felt grateful, as there was nothing like exposure to the very wealthy and known to make a person grateful for the things she had—all of which came without the scrutiny and weight of all those legacies.

But the fact this man didn’t want his own birthright...rankled. Lauren’s lips tingled. They felt burned, almost, and she could remember the way his mouth had moved on hers so vividly that she could taste him all over again. Bold and unapologetic. Ruthlessly male.

And somehow that all wrapped around itself, became a knot and pulled tight inside her.

“My rich boss is your brother,” she pointed out, her voice sharper than it should have been. “This isn’t about money. It’s about family.”

“A very rich family,” Dominik agreed. And his gaze was more steel than silver then. “Who didn’t want me in the first place. I will pass, I think, on a tender reunion brought about by the caprice of a dead woman.”

Her heart lurched when he reached out and took her chin in his hand. She should have slapped him away. She meant to, surely.

But everything was syrupy, thick and slow. And all she could feel was the way he gripped her. The way he held her chin with a kind of certainty that made everything inside her quiver in direct contrast to that firm hold. She’d gone soft straight through. Melting hot. Impossibly...changed.

“I appreciate the taste,” he rumbled at her, sardonic and lethal and more than she could bear—but she still didn’t pull away from him. “I had no idea such a sharp blonde could taste so sweet.”

And he had already turned and started back toward his cabin by the time those words fully penetrated all that odd, internal shaking.

Lauren thought she would hate herself forever for the moisture she could feel in her own eyes, when she hadn’t permitted herself furious tears in as long as she could remember.

“Let me make certain I’m getting this straight,” she threw at his back, and she certainly did not notice how muscled he was, everywhere, or how easy it was to imagine her own hands running down the length of his spine, purely to marvel in the way he was put together. Certainly not. “The innkeeper called ahead, which means you knew I was coming. Did he tell you what I was wearing, too? So you could prepare this Red Riding Hood story to tell yourself?”

“If the cloak fits,” he said over his shoulder.

“That would make you the Big Bad Wolf, would it not?”

She found herself following him, which couldn’t possibly be wise. Marching across that clearing as if he hadn’t made her feel so adrift. So shaky.

As if he hadn’t kissed her within an inch of her life, but she wasn’t thinking about that.

Because she couldn’t think about that, or she would think of nothing else.

“There are all kinds of wolves in the forests of Europe.” And his voice seemed darker then. Especially when he turned, training that gray gaze of his on her all over again. It had the same effect as before. Looking at him was like staring into a storm. “Big and bad is as good a description as any.”

She noticed he didn’t answer the question.

“Why?”

Lauren stopped a foot or so in front of him. She found her hands on her hips, the wrap falling open. And she hated the part of her that thrilled at the way his gaze tracked over the delicate gold chain at her throat. The silk blouse beneath.

Her breasts that felt heavy and achy, and the nipples that were surely responding to the sudden exposure to colder air. Not him.

She had spent years wearing gloriously girly shoes to remind herself she was a woman, desperately hoping that each day was the day that Matteo would see her as one for a change. He never had. He never would.

And this man made her feel outrageously feminine without even trying.

She told herself what she felt about that was sheer, undiluted outrage, but it was a little too giddy, skidding around and around inside her, for her to believe it.

“Why did I kiss you?” She saw the flash of his teeth, like a smile he thought better of at the last moment, and that didn’t make anything happening inside her better. “Because I wanted to, little red. What other reason could there be?”

“Perhaps you kissed me because you’re a pig,” she replied coolly. “A common affliction in men who feel out of control, I think you’ll find.”

A kind of dark delight moved over his face.

“I believe you have your fairy tales confused. And in any case, where there are pigs, there is usually also huffing and puffing and, if I am not mistaken, blowing.” He tilted that head of his to one side, reminding her in an instant how untamed he was. How outside her experience. “Are you propositioning me?”

She felt a kind of red bonfire ignite inside her, all over her, but she didn’t give in to it. She didn’t distract herself with images of exactly what he might mean by blowing. And how best she could accommodate him like the fairy tale of his choice, right here in this clearing, sinking down on her knees and—

“Very droll,” she said instead, before she shamed herself even further. “I’m not at all surprised that a man who lives in a shack in the woods has ample time to sit around, perverting fairy tales to his own ends. But I’m not here for you, Mr. James.”

“Call me Dominik.” He smiled at her then, but she didn’t make the mistake of believing him the least bit affable. Not when that smile made her think of a knife, sharp and deadly. “I would say that Mr. James was my father, but I’ve never met the man.”

“I appreciate this power play of yours,” Lauren said, trying a new tactic before she could get off track again, thinking of knives and blowing and that kiss. “I feel very much put in my place, thank you. I would love nothing more than to turn tail and run back to my employer, with tales of the uncivilized hermit in the woods that he’d be better off never recognizing as his long-lost brother. But I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t matter why you’re here in the woods. Whether you’re a hermit, a barbarian, an uncivilized lout unfit for human company.” She waved one hand, airily, as if she couldn’t possibly choose among those things. “If I could track you down, that means others will, as well, and they won’t be nearly as pleasant as I am. They will be reporters. Paparazzi. And once they start coming, they will always come. They will surround this cabin and make your life a living hell. That’s what they do.” She smiled. Sunnily. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“I spent my entire childhood waiting for people to come,” he said softly, after a moment that stretched out between them and made her...edgy. “They never did. You will forgive me if I somehow find it difficult to believe that now, suddenly, I will become of interest to anyone.”

“When you were a child you were an illegitimate mistake,” Lauren said, making her voice cold to hide that odd yearning inside her that made her wish she could go back in time and save the little boy he’d been from his fate. “That’s what Alexandrina San Giacomo’s father wrote about you. That’s not my description.” She hurried to say that last part, something in the still way he watched her making her stomach clench. “Now you are the San Giacomo heir you always should have been. You are a very wealthy man, Mr. James. More than that, you are part of a long and illustrious family line, stretching back generations.”

“You could not be more mistaken,” he said in the same soft way that Lauren didn’t dare mistake for any kind of weakness. Not when she could see that expression on his face, ruthless and lethal in turn. “I am an orphan. An ex-soldier. And a man who prefers his own company. If I were you, I would hurry back to the man who keeps you on his leash and tell him so.” There was a dangerous gleam in his eyes then. “Now, like a good pet. Before I forget how you taste and indulge my temper instead.”

Lauren wanted nothing more. If being a pet on Matteo’s leash could keep her safe from this man, she wanted it. But that wasn’t the task that had been set before her. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“There is no alternative, little red. I have given you my answer.”

Lauren could see he meant that. He had every intention of walking back into this ridiculous cottage in the middle of nowhere, washing his hands of his birthright and pretending no one had found him. She felt a surge of a different kind of emotion at that, and it wasn’t one that spoke well of her.

Because she wouldn’t turn up her nose at the San Giacomo fortune and everything that went along with it. She wouldn’t scoff at the notion that maybe she’d been a long-lost heiress all this time. Far better that than the boring reality, which was that both her mother and father had remarried and had sparkly new families they’d always seemed to like a whole lot more than her, the emblem of the bad decisions they’d made together.

They’d tossed her back and forth between them with bad grace and precious little affection, until she’d finally come of age and announced it could stop. The sad truth was that Lauren had expected one of them to argue. Or at least pretend to argue. But neither one of them had bothered.

And she doubted she would mind that quite so much if she had aristocratic blood and a sudden fortune to ease the blow.

“Most people would be overjoyed to this news,” she managed to say without tripping over her own emotions. “It’s a bit like winning the lottery, isn’t it? You go along living your life only to discover that all of a sudden, you’re a completely different person than the one you thought you were.”

“I am exactly who I think I am.” And there was something infinitely dangerous beneath his light tone. She could see it in his gaze. “I worked hard to become him. I have no intention of casting him aside because of some dead woman’s guilt.”

“But I don’t—”

“I know who the San Giacomos are,” Dominik said shortly. “How could I not? I grew up in Italy in their shadow and I want no part of it. Or them. You can tell your boss that.”

“He will only send me back here. Eventually, if you keep refusing me, he will come himself. Is that what you want? The opportunity to tell him to his face how little you want the gift he is giving you?”

Dominik studied her. “Is it a gift? Or is it what I was owed from my birth, yet prevented from claiming?”

“Either way, it’s nothing if you lock yourself up in your wood cabin and pretend it isn’t happening.”

He laughed at that. He didn’t fling back his head and let out a belly laugh. He only smiled. A quick sort of smile on an exhale, which only seemed to whet Lauren’s appetite for real laughter.

What on earth was happening to her?

“What I don’t understand is your zeal,” he said, his voice like a dark lick down the length of her spine. And it did her no favors to imagine him doing exactly that, that tongue of his against her flesh, following the flare of her hips with his hands while he... She had to shake herself slightly, hopefully imperceptibly, and frown to focus on him. “I know you have been searching for me. It has taken you weeks, but you have been dogged in your pursuit. If it occurred to you at any point that I did not wish to be found, you did not let that give you the slightest bit of pause. And now you have come here. Uninvited.”

“If you knew I was searching for you—” and she would have to think about what that meant, because that suggested a level of sophistication the wood cabin far out in these trees did not “—why didn’t you reach out yourself?”

“Nobody sets himself apart from the world in a tiny cottage in a forest in Hungary if they wish to have visitors. Much less unannounced visitors.” His smile was that knife again, a sharp, dangerous blade. “But here you are.”

“I’m very good at my job.” Lauren lifted her chin. “Remarkably good, in fact. When I’m given a task to complete, I complete it.”

“He says jump and you aim for the moon,” Dominik said softly. And she could hear the insult in it. It sent another flush of something like shame, splashing all over her, and she didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand any of this.

“I’m a personal assistant, Mr. James. That means I assist my employer in whatever it is he needs. It is the nature of the position. Not a character flaw.”

“Let me tell you what I know of your employer,” Dominik said, and his voice went lazy as if he was playing. But she couldn’t quite believe he was. Or that he ever did, come to that. “He is a disgrace, is he not? A man so enamored of this family you have come all this way to make me a part of that he punched his sister’s lover in the face at their father’s funeral. What a paragon! I cannot imagine why I have no interest involving myself with such people.”

Lauren really was good at her job. She had to remind herself of that at the moment, but it didn’t make it any less true. She pulled in a breath, then let it out slowly, trying to understand what was actually happening here.

That this man had a grudge against the people who had given him to an orphanage was clear. Understandable, even. She supposed it was possible that he wasn’t turning his nose up at what Matteo was offering so much as the very idea that an offer was being made at all, all these years too late to matter. She could understand that, too, having spent far more hours than she cared to admit imagining scenarios in which her parents begged for her time—so she could refuse them and sweep off somewhere.

And if she had been a man sent to find him, she supposed Dominik would have found a different way to get under her skin the same way he would any emissary sent from those who had abandoned him. All his talk of kissing and fairy tales was just more misdirection. Game-playing. Like all the scenarios she’d played out in her head about her parents.

She had to assume that his refusal to involve himself with the San Giacomos was motivated by hurt feelings. But if she knew one thing about men—no matter how powerful, wealthy or seemingly impervious—it was that all of them responded to hurt feelings as if the feelings themselves were an attack. And anyone in the vicinity was a collaborator.

“I appreciate your position, Dominik,” she said, trying to sound conciliatory. Sweet, even, since he was the first person alive who’d ever called her that. “I really do. But I still want to restore you to your family. What do I have to do to make that happen?”

“First, you go wandering around the forbidding woods in a red cloak.” Dominik shook his head, making a faint tsk-ing sound. “Then you let the Big Bad Wolf find out how you taste. Now an open-ended offer? My, my. What big eyes you have, little red.”

There was no reason she should shiver at that, as if he was making predictions instead of taking part in this same extended game that she had already given too much of her time and attention.

But the woods were all around them. The breeze whispered through the trees, and the village with all its people was far, far away from here.

And he’d already kissed her.

What, exactly, are you offering him? she asked herself.

But she had no answer.

Looking at Dominik James made Lauren feel as if she didn’t know herself at all. It made her feel like her body belonged to someone else, shivery and nervous. It made her tongue feel as if it no longer worked the way it should. She didn’t like it at all. She didn’t like him, she told herself.

But she didn’t turn on her heel and leave, either.

“There must be something that could convince you to come back to London and take your rightful place as a member of the San Giacomo family,” she said, trying to sound reasonable. Calmly rational. “It’s clearly not money, or you would have jumped at the chance to access your own fortune.”

He shrugged. “You cannot tempt me with that kind of power.”

“Because, of course, you prefer to play power games like this. Where you pretend you have no interest in power, all the while using what power you do have to do the exact opposite of anything asked of you.”

It was possible she shouldn’t have said that, she reflected in some panic as his gaze narrowed on her in a way that made her...shake, deep inside.

But if she expected him to shout or issue threats, he didn’t. He only studied her in that way for another moment, then grinned. Slowly.

A sharp blade of a grin that made her stop breathing, even as it boded ill.

For her. For the heart careening around and battering her ribs.

For all the things she wanted to pretend she didn’t feel, like a thick, consuming heat inside her.

“By all means, little red,” he said, his voice low. “Come inside. Sit by my fire. Convince me, if you can.”




CHAPTER THREE (#u698af3e3-343f-5dc6-8406-b0bc7e92f3b3)


DOMINIK JAMES HAD spent his entire life looking for his place in the world.

They had told him his parents were dead. That he was an orphan in truth, and he had believed that. At first. It certainly explained his circumstances in life, and as a child, he’d liked explanations that made sense of the orphanage he called home.

But when he was ten, the meanest of the nuns had dropped a different truth on him when she’d caught him in some or other mischief.

Your mother didn’t want you, she had told him. And who could blame her with you such a dirty, nasty sneak of a boy. Who could want you?

Who indeed? Dominik had spent the next ten years proving to everyone’s satisfaction that his mother, whoever she was, had been perfectly justified in ridding herself of him. He had lived down to any and all expectations. He’d run away from the orphanage and found himself in Spain, roaming where he pleased and stealing what he needed to live. He’d considered that happiness compared to the nuns’ version of corporal punishment mixed in with vicious piety.

He had eventually gone back to Italy and joined the army, more to punish himself than as any display of latent patriotism. He’d hoped that he would be sent off to some terrible war where he could die in service to Italy rather than from his own nihilistic urges. He certainly hadn’t expected to find discipline instead. Respect. A place in the world, and the tools to make himself the kind of man who deserved that place.

He had given Italy his twenties. After he left the service, he’d spent years doing what the army had taught him on a private civilian level until he’d gotten restless. He’d then sold the security company he’d built for a tidy fortune.

Left to his own devices as a grown man with means, he had bettered himself significantly. He had gotten a degree to expand his thinking. His mind. And, not inconsiderably, to make sure he could manage his newfound fortune the way he wanted to do.

He didn’t need his long-lost family’s money. He had his own. The computer security company he had built up almost by accident had made him a very wealthy man. Selling it had made him a billionaire. And he’d enjoyed building on that foundation ever since, expanding his financial reach as he pleased.

He just happened to enjoy pretending he was a hermit in the Hungarian woods, because he could. And because, in truth, he liked to keep a wall or a forest between him and whatever else was out there. He liked to stay arm’s length, at the very least, from the world that had always treated him with such indifference. The world that had made him nothing but bright with rage and sharp with fury, even when he was making it his.

Dominik preferred cool shadows and quiet trees these days. The comfort of his own company. Nothing brighter than the sun as it filtered down through the trees, and no fury at all.

Sharp-edged blondes with eyes like caramel who tasted like magic made him...greedy and hot. It made him feel like a long-lost version of himself that he had never meant to see resurrected.

He should have sent her away at once.

Instead, he’d invited her in.

She walked in front of him, those absurd and absurdly loud shoes of hers making it clear that she was not the sort of woman who ever expected to sneak up on a person, especially when they hit the wood of his porch. And he regretted letting her precede him almost at once, because while the cloak she wore—so bright and red it was almost as if she was having a joke at his expense—hid most of that lush and lean body from his view, it couldn’t conceal the way her hips swung back and forth like a metronome.

Dominik had never been so interested in keeping the beat before in his life. He couldn’t look away. Then again, he didn’t try that hard.

When she got to his front door, a heavy wood that he’d fashioned himself with iron accents because perhaps he really had always thought of himself as the Big Bad Wolf, he reached past her. He pushed the door open with the flat of one hand, inviting her in.

But that was a mistake, too.

Because he had already tasted her, and leaning in close made him...needy. He wanted his mouth right there on the nape of her neck. He wanted his hands on the full breasts he’d glimpsed beneath that sheer blouse she wore. He wanted to bury his face between her legs, then lose himself completely in all her sweet heat.

Instead, all he did was hold the door for her. Meekly, as if he was some other man. Someone tamed. Civilized.

A hermit in a hut, just as he pretended to be.

He watched her walk inside, noting how stiff and straight she held herself as if she was terrified that something might leap out at her. But this cabin had been made to Dominik’s precise specifications. It existed to be cozy. Homey.

It was the retreat he had never had as a boy, and he had absolutely no idea why he had allowed this particular woman to come inside. When no one else ever had.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about that too closely.

“This is a bit of a shock,” she said into the silence that stretched taut between them, her gaze moving from the thick rugs on the floor to the deep leather chairs before the fire. “I expected something more like a hovel, if I’m honest.”

“A hovel.”

“I mean no disrespect,” she said, which he thought was a lie. She did that thing with her hand again, waving at him in a manner he could only call dismissive. It was...new, at least. “No one really expects a long-haired hermit to live in any kind of splendor, do they?”

“I am already regretting my hospitality,” Dominik murmured.

He looked around at the cabin, trying to see it through the eyes of someone like Lauren, all urban chic and London snootiness. He knew the type, of course, though he’d gone to some lengths to distance himself from such people. The shoes were a dead giveaway. Expensive and pointless, because they were a statement. She wanted everyone who saw them to wonder how she walked in them, or wonder how much they cost, or drift away in a sea of their own jealousy.

Dominik merely wondered what it said about her that her primary form of expression was her shoes.

He also wondered what she was gleaning about him from this cabin that was his only real home. He didn’t know what she saw, only what he’d intended. The soaring high ceilings, because he had long since grown tired of stooping and making himself fit into spaces not meant for him. The warm rugs, because he was tired of being cold and uncomfortable. The sense of airiness that made the cottage feel as if it was twice its actual size, because he had done his time in huts and hovels and he wasn’t going back. The main room boasted a stone fireplace on one end and his efficient kitchen on the other, and he’d fashioned a bedchamber that matched it in size, outfitted with a bed that could fit two of him—because he never forgot those tiny cots he’d had to pretend to be grateful for in the orphanage.

“It’s actually quite lovely,” she said after a moment, a note of reluctant surprise in her voice. “Very...comfortable, yet male.”

Dominik jerked his chin toward one of the heavy chairs that sat before his fire. Why there were two, he would never know, since he never had guests. But when he’d imagined the perfect cabin and the fireplace that would dominate it, he had always envisioned two cozy leather chairs, just like these. So here they were.

And he had the strangest sensation, as Lauren went and settled herself into one of them, that he had anticipated this moment. It was almost as if the chair had been waiting for her all this time.

He shook that off, not sure where such a fanciful notion had come from. But very sure that he didn’t like it. At all.

He dropped into the chair opposite hers, and lounged there, doing absolutely nothing at all to accommodate her when he let his long legs take over the space between them. He watched her swallow, as if her throat was dry, and he could have offered her a drink.

But he didn’t.

“I thought you intended to convince me to do your bidding,” he said after a moment, when the air between them seemed to get thick. Fraught. Filled with premonition and meaning, when he wanted neither. “Perhaps things are different where you’re from, but I would not begin an attempt at persuasion by insulting the very person I most wanted to come around to my way of thinking. Your mileage may vary, of course.”

She blinked at him, and it was almost as if she’d forgotten why they were there. She shrugged out of that wrap at last, then folded her hands in her lap, and Dominik let his gaze fall all over her. Greedily. As if he’d never seen a woman before in all his days.

She was sweet and stacked, curvy in all the right places. Her hair gleamed like gold in the firelight, the sleek ponytail at her nape pulled forward over one shoulder. There was a hint of real gold at her throat, precisely where he wanted to use his teeth—gently, so gently, until she shuddered. Her breasts begged for a man’s hands and his face between them, and it would take so little. He could shift forward, onto his knees, and take her in hand that easily.

He entertained a few delicious images of himself doing just that.

And she didn’t exactly help matters when she pulled that plump lower lip of hers between her teeth, the way he’d like to do.

But Dominik merely sank deeper into his chair, propped his head up with his fist, and ignored the demands of the hardest, greediest part of him as he gazed at her.

“I would be delighted to persuade you,” she said, and did he imagine a certain huskiness in her voice? He didn’t think he did. “I expected to walk in here and find you living on a pallet on the floor. But you clearly like your creature comforts. That tells me that while you might like your solitude, you aren’t exactly hiding from the world. Or not completely. So what would it take to convince you to step back into it?”

“You have yet to explain to me why that is something I should want, much less consider doing.”

“You could buy a hundred cabins and litter them about all the forests of Europe, for a start.”

He lifted one shoulder, then let it fall. “I already have a cabin.”

And properties across the globe, but he didn’t mention that.

“You could outfit this cabin in style,” she suggested brightly. “Make it modern and accessible. Imagine the opportunities!”

“I never claimed to live off the grid, did I? I believe you are the one who seems to think this cabin belongs in the Stone Age. I assure you, I have as much access to the modern world as I require.”

Not to mention his other little shack that wasn’t a shack at all, set farther up the mountainside and outfitted with the very latest in satellite technology. But that was yet another thing that could remain his little secret.

“You could buy yourself anything you wanted.”

“All you have to offer me is money,” he said after a moment. “I already told you, I have my own. But the fact that you continue to focus on it tells me a great deal about you, I think. Does this brother of mine not pay you well?”

She stiffened at that, and a crease appeared between her brows. “Mr. Combe has always been remarkably generous to me.”

He found the color on her cheeks...interesting. “I cannot tell if that means he does or does not pay you what you deserve. What’s the going rate for the kind of loyalty that would lead a woman clearly uncomfortable with the outdoors to march off into the forest primeval, deep into the very lair of a dangerous stranger?”

Her chin tipped up at that, which he should not have found as fascinating as he did. “I fail to see how my salary is your business.”

“You have made anything and everything my business by delivering yourself to my door.” And if he was overly intrigued by her, to the point his fingers itched with the need to touch her all over that curvy body until she sounded significantly less cool, that was his burden to carry. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”

The color on her cheeks darkened. The crease between her brows deepened. And it shouldn’t have been possible to sit any straighter in that chair, but she managed it.

“I have already told you why I’m here, Mr. James.”

“I’m sure they told you in the village that I come in at least once a week for supplies. You could have waited for me there, surrounded by creature comforts and room service. There was no need at all to walk through the woods to find me, particularly not in those shoes.”

She looked almost smug then. As if he’d failed some kind of test.

“You don’t need to concern yourself with my shoes,” she said, and crossed her legs, which had the immediate effect of drawing his attention to the shoes in question. Just as she’d intended, he assumed. “I find them remarkably comfortable, actually.”

“That you find them comfortable, or want me to think you do, doesn’t mean they are. And it certainly doesn’t make them practical for a brisk hike on a dirt path.”

That gaze of hers was the color of a sweet, sticky dessert, and he wanted to indulge. Oh, how he wanted to indulge. Especially when her eyes flashed at him, once again letting him know that she felt superior to him.

Little did she know, he found that entertaining.

Even as it made him harder.

“In my experience, anyone who is concerned with the practicality of my footwear is casting about in desperation for some way to discount what I have to say,” she told him. “Focus on my shoes and we can make sweeping generalizations about what sort of person I am, correct? Here’s a little secret. I like pretty shoes. They don’t say anything about me except that.”

Dominik grinned, taking his time with it and enjoying it when she swallowed. Hard.

“Let me hasten to assure you that I’m in no way desperate. And I would love nothing more than to discount what you say, but you have said very little.” He held her gaze. “Make your case, if you can. Explain to me why I should leave the comfort of my home to embrace this family who have ignored me for a lifetime already. I’m assuming it would be convenient for them in some way. But you’ll understand that’s not a compelling argument for me.”

“I already told you. The paparazzi—”

He shook his head. “I think we both know that it is not I who would dislike it if your reporters found me here. I am perfectly content to deal with trespassers in my own way.” He could see by the way her lips pressed together that she was imagining exactly how he might handle trespassers, and grinned wider. “But this rich boss of yours would not care for the exposure, I imagine. Is that not why you have made your way here, after searching for me so diligently? To convince me that his sudden, surpassing concern for my privacy is a genuine display of heretofore unknown brotherly love rather than his own self-interest?”

“Mr. Combe was unaware that he had a brother until recently,” she replied, but her voice had gone cool. Careful, perhaps. “If anything should convince you about his intentions, it should be the fact that he reached out to find you as soon as he knew you existed.”

“I must remember to applaud.”

She didn’t sigh or roll her eyes at that, though the tightness of her smile suggested both nonetheless. “Mr. Combe—”

“Little red. Please. What did you imagine I meant when I asked you to convince me? I’ve already had my mouth on you. Do you really think I invited you in here for a lecture?”

He didn’t know what he expected. Outrage, perhaps. Righteous indignation, then a huffy flounce out of the cabin and out of his life. That was what he wanted, he assured himself.

Because her being here was an intrusion. He’d invited her in to make certain she’d never come back.

Of course you did, a sardonic voice inside him chimed in.

But Lauren wasn’t flouncing away in high dudgeon. Instead, she stared back at him with a dumbfounded expression on her face. Not as if she was offended by his suggestion. But more as if...such a thing had never occurred to her.

“I beg your pardon. Is this some kind of cultural divide I’m unfamiliar with? Or do you simply inject sex into conversations whenever you get bored?”

“Whenever possible.”

She laughed, and what surprised him was that it sounded real. Not part of this game at all.

“You’re wasting your time with me.” Her smile was bland. But there was a challenge in her gaze, he thought. “I regret to tell you, as I have told every man before you who imagined they could get to my boss through me, that I have no sexual impulses.”

If she had pulled a grenade out of her pocket and lobbed it onto the floor between them, Dominik could not have been more surprised.

He could not possibly have heard her correctly. “What did you just say?”

There before him, his very own Little Red Riding Hood...relaxed back against the leather of her armchair. Something he also would have thought impossible moments before. And when she smiled, she looked like nothing so much as an oversatisfied cat.

“I’m not a sexual person,” she told him, and Dominik was sure he wasn’t mistaking the relish in her voice. It was at odds with the sheen of something a whole lot like vulnerability in her gaze, reminding him of how she’d melted into his kiss. “It’s a spectrum, isn’t it? Some people’s whole lives are completely taken over by the endless drive for sex, but not me. I’ve never understood all the fuss, to be honest.”

He was half convinced he’d gone slack-jawed in astonishment, but he couldn’t seem to snap out of it long enough to check. Not when she was sitting there talking such absolute nonsense with an expression that suggested to him that she, at least, believed every word she was saying.

Or, if he looked closer, wanted to believe it, anyway.

“You are aware that a kiss is a sexual act, are you not?”

“I’ve kissed before,” Lauren said, and even shook her head at him, wrinkling up her nose as if he was...silly. Him. Silly.





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