Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

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

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

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?