“Me,” she retorted at once. And with something like triumph in her voice.
“Of course not, because you are devoid of feelings entirely, as you have taken such pains to remind me.”
“I’m not sentimental.” Except she looked so deeply pleased with herself just then it looked a whole lot like an emotion, whether she wanted to admit such things or not. “I apologize if you find that difficult to accept.”
“You have no feelings about marriage. Sex. Even kissing, no matter how you react while doing it. You’re an empty void, capable only of doing the bidding of your chosen master. I understand completely, Lauren.”
That she didn’t like that description was obvious by the way she narrowed her eyes, and the way she flattened her lips. Dominik smiled wider. Blander.
“How lucky your Mr. Combe is to have found such devotion, divorced of any inconvenient sentiment on your part. You might as well be a robot, cobbled together from spare parts for the singular purpose of serving his needs.”
If her glare could have actually reached across the space between them and struck him then, Dominik was sure he would have sustained mortal blows. What he was less certain of was why everything in him objected to thinking of her as another man’s. In any capacity.
“What I remember of my parents’ marriage is best not discussed in polite company,” she said, her voice tight. He wondered if she knew how the sound betrayed her. How it broadcast the very feelings she pretended not to possess. “They divorced when I was seven. And they were both remarried within the year, which I didn’t understand until later meant that they had already moved on long before the ink was dry on their divorce decree. The truth is that they only stayed as long as they did because neither one wanted to take responsibility for me.” She shook her head, but more as if she was shaking something off than negating it. “Believe me, I know better than anyone that most marriages are nothing but a sham. No matter how much tulle and expense there might be. That doesn’t make me a robot. It makes me realistic.”
Something in the way she said that clawed at him, though he couldn’t have said why. Or didn’t want to know why, more accurately, and accordingly shoved it aside.
“Wonderful,” he said instead. “Then you will enjoy our sham of a marriage all the more, in all its shabby realism.”
“Does that mean you’ll do it, then?”
And he didn’t understand why he wanted so badly to erase that brittleness in her tone. Why he wanted to reach out and touch her in ways that had nothing to do with the fire in him, but everything to do with that hint of vulnerability he doubted she knew was so visible. In the stark softness of her mouth. In the shadows in her eyes.
“I will do it,” he heard himself say. “For you.”
And every alarm he’d ever wired there inside him screeched an alert then, at full volume.
Because Dominik did not do things for other people. No one was close enough to him to ask for or expect that kind of favor. No one got close to him. And in return for what he’d always considered peace, he kept himself at a distance from everyone else. No obligations. No expectations.
But there was something about Lauren, and how hard she was clearly fighting to look unfazed in the face of her boss’s latest outrageous suggestion. As if an order to marry the man’s unknown half brother was at all reasonable.
You just agreed to it, a voice in him pointed out. So does it matter if it’s reasonable?
One moment dragged on into another, and then it was too late to take the words back. To qualify his acceptance. To make it clear that no matter what he might have said, he hadn’t meant it to stand as any form of obligation to this woman he barely knew.
Much less that boss of hers who shared his blood.
“For me?” she asked, and it was as if she, too, had suddenly tumbled into this strange, hushed space Dominik couldn’t seem to snap out of.
He didn’t want to call it sacred. But he wasn’t sure what other word there was for it, when her caramel eyes gleamed like gold and his chest felt tight.
“For you,” he said, and he had the sense that he was digging his own grave, shovelful by shovelful, whether he wanted it or not. But even that didn’t stop him. He settled farther back against his chair, thrust his legs out another lazy inch and let one corner of his mouth crook. “But if you want me to marry you, little red, I’m afraid I will require a full, romantic proposal.”
She blinked. Then swallowed.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t intend to make a habit of marrying. This will have to be perfect, the better to live on all my days.” He nodded toward the polished wood at his feet. “Go on, then. On your knees, please.”
And he was only a man. Not a very good one, as he’d acknowledged earlier. There was no possibility of issuing such an order without imagining all the other things she could do once she was there.
So he did. And had to shift slightly where he sat to accommodate the hungriest part of him.
“You agreed that any marriage between us will be a sham,” she was saying, her voice a touch too husky for someone so dedicated to appearing unmoved. “You used that very word. It will be a publicity stunt, and only a publicity stunt, as I said.”
“Whatever the marriage is or isn’t, it begins right here.” He ignored the demands that clamored inside him, greedy and still drunk on his last taste of her. “Where there is no public. No paparazzi. No overbearing employer who cannot stir himself to greet his long-lost brother in person.”
She started to argue that but subsided when he shook his head.
“There are only two people who ever need to know how this marriage began, Lauren. And we are both right here, all alone, tucked away on an abandoned office floor where no one need ever be the wiser.”
She rolled her eyes. “We can tell them there was kneeling all around, if that’s really what you need.”
“We can tell them anything you like, but I want to see a little effort. A little care, here between the two of us. A pretty, heartfelt proposal. Come now, Lauren.” And he smiled at her then, daring her. “A man likes to be seduced.”
Her cheeks had gone pale while he spoke, and as he watched, they flooded with bright new color.
“You don’t want to be seduced. You want to humiliate me.”
“Six of one, half dozen of another.” He jutted his chin toward the floor again. “You need to demonstrate your commitment. Or how else will I know that my heart is safe in your hands?”
The color on her cheeks darkened, and her eyes flashed with temper. And he liked that a hell of a lot more than her robot impression.
“No one is talking about hearts, Mr. James,” she snapped at him. “We’re talking about damage control. Optics. PR.”
“You and your Mr. Combe may be talking about all of those things,” he said and shrugged. “But I am merely a hermit from a Hungarian hovel, too long-haired to make sense of your complicated corporate world. What do I know of such things? I’m a simple man, with simple needs.” He reached up and dramatically clasped his chest, never shifting his gaze from hers. “If you want me, you must convince me. On your knees, little red.”
She made a noise of sheer, undiluted frustration that nearly made him laugh. Especially when it seemed to make her face that much brighter.
He watched as she forced her knees to unlock. She took a breath in, then let it out. Slowly, as if it hurt, she took a step toward him. Then another.
And by the time she moved past his feet, then insinuated herself right where he wanted her, there between his outstretched legs, he didn’t have the slightest urge to laugh any longer. Much less when she sank down on her knees before him, just as he’d imagined in all that glorious detail.
She knelt as prettily as she did everything else, and she filled his head as surely as his favorite Hungarian palinka. He couldn’t seem to look away
from her, gold and pink and that wide caramel gaze, peering up at him from between his own legs.
The sight of her very nearly unmanned him.
And he would never know, later, how he managed to keep his hands to himself.
“Dominik James,” she said softly, looking up at him with eyes wide, filled with all those emotions she claimed she didn’t feel—but he did, as if she was tossing them straight into the deepest part of him, “will you do me the honor of becoming my husband? For a while?”
He didn’t understand why something in him kicked against that qualification. But he ignored it.
He indulged himself by reaching forward and fitting his palm to the curve of her cheek. He waited until her lips parted because he knew she felt it, too, that same heat that roared in him. That wildfire that was eating him alive.
“But of course,” he said, and he had meant to sound sardonic. Darkly amused. But that wasn’t how it came out, and he couldn’t think of a way to stop it. “I can think of nothing I would like to do more than marry a woman I hardly know to serve the needs of a brother I have never met in the flesh, to save the reputation of a family that tossed me aside like so much trash.”
There was a sheen in her gaze that he wanted to believe was connected to that strangely serious thing in him, not laughing at all. And the way her lips trembled, just slightly.
Just enough to make the taste of her haunt him all over again.
“I...I can’t tell if that’s a yes or no.”
“It’s a yes, little red,” he said, though there was no earthly reason that he should agree to any of this.
There was no reason that he should even be here, so far away from the life he’d carved out to his specifications. The life he had fought so hard to win for himself.
But Lauren had walked into his cabin, fit too neatly into the chair that shouldn’t have been sitting there, waiting for her, and now he couldn’t seem to keep himself from finding out if she fit everywhere else, too.
A thought that was so antithetical to everything he was and everything he believed to be true about himself that Dominik wasn’t sure why he didn’t trust her away from him and leave. Right now.
But he didn’t.
Worse, he didn’t want to.
“It’s a yes,” he said, his voice grave as he betrayed himself, and for no reason, “but I’m afraid, as in most things, there will be a price. And you will be the one to pay it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
LAUREN DIDN’T UNDERSTAND anything that was happening.
She had been astounded when Matteo had suggested marriage, so offhandedly as if it was perfectly normal to run around marrying strangers on a whim because he thought that would look better in some theoretical tabloid.
“Marry him,” he’d said, so casually, from the far side of the world. “You are a decent, hardworking sort and you’ve been connected to the family without incident for years.”
“I think you mean employed by the family and therefore professional.”
“You can take him in hand. Make sure he’s up to the task. And by the time the shock fades over my mother’s scandalous past, you’ll have made him everything he needs to be to take his place as a San Giacomo.”
“Will this new role come with combat pay?” she’d asked, with more heat than she normally used with her boss, no matter what was going on. But then, she wasn’t normally dispatched into the hinterland, made to hike, and then kissed thoroughly and repeatedly. She was...not herself. “Or do you expect me to give up my actual life for the foreseeable future for my existing salary, no questions asked?”
She never spoke to Matteo that way. But he didn’t normally react the way he had then, either, with nothing but silence and what looked very much like sadness on his face. It made Lauren wish she hadn’t said anything.
Not for the first time, she wondered exactly what had gone on between Matteo and the anger management consultant the Combe Industries board of directors had hired in a transparent attempt to take Matteo down. He’d gone off with her to Yorkshire, been unusually unreachable and then had set off on a round-the-world tour of all the Combe Industries holdings.
A less charitable person might wonder if he was attempting to take the geographic tour.
“You can name your price, Lauren,” he said after what felt like a very long while, fraught with all the evidence she’d ever needed that though they might work very closely together, they had no personal relationship. Not like that. “All I ask is that you tame this brother of mine before we unleash him on the world. The board will not be pleased to have more scandal attached to the Combe name. And the least we can do is placate them a little.”
And she’d agreed to ask Dominik, because what else could she do? For all Dominik’s snide commentary, the truth was that she admired Matteo. He was not his father, who had always been willing to take the low road—and usually had. Matteo had integrity, something she knew because no matter how she might have longed for him to see her, he never had. He treated her as his personal assistant, not as a woman. It was why she felt safe while she wore her outrageously feminine heels. It was why she felt perfectly happy dedicating herself to him.
If he had looked at her the way Dominik did, even once, she would never have been able to work for him at all. She would never have been able to sort out what was an appropriate request and what wasn’t, and would have lost herself somewhere in the process.
She’d been reeling from that revelation when she’d walked out to pitch the marriage idea, fully expecting that Dominik would laugh at the very notion.
But he hadn’t.
And she’d meant to present the whole thing as a very dry and dusty sort of business proposition, anyway. Just a different manner of merger, that was all. But instead of a board meeting of sorts, she was knelt down between his legs, gazing up at him from a position that made her whole body quiver.
And unless she was very much mistaken, he had actually agreed to marry her.
For a price.
Because with this man, there was always a price.
How lucky you want so badly to pay it, an insinuating, treacherous voice from deep inside her whispered. Whatever it is.
“What kind of price?” Lauren frowned at him as if that could make them both forget that she was kneeling before him like a supplicant. Or a lover. And that he was touching her as if at least one of those things was a foregone conclusion. “I have already promised to kiss you whenever you like. What more could you want?”
His palm was so hard and hot against the side of her face. She felt it everywhere, and she knew that seemingly easy touch was responsible for the flames she could feel licking at her. All over her skin, then deeper still, sweet and hot in her core.
Until she throbbed with it. With him.
“Do you think there are limits to what a man might want?” he asked quietly, and his voice was so low it set her to shattering, like a seismic event. Deep inside, where she was already molten and more than a little afraid that she might shake herself apart.
“You’re talking about sex again,” she said, and thought she sounded something like solemn. Or despairing. And neither helped with all that unbearable heat. “I don’t know how many ways I can tell you—”
“That you are not sexual, yes, I am aware.” He moved his thumb, dragging it gently across her lower lip, and his mouth crooked when she hissed in a breath. His eyes blazed when goose bumps rose along her neck and ran down her arms, and his voice was little more than a growl when he spoke again. “Not sexual at all.”
Something in the way he said that made her frown harder, though she already knew it was futile. And it only seemed to make that terrible, knowing blaze in his gray eyes more pronounced.
And much, much hotter. Inside her, where she still couldn’t tell if she hated it—or loved it.
“What do you want from me?” she a
sked, her voice barely above a whisper.
And she thought that whatever happened, she would always remember the way he smiled at her then, half wolf and all man. That it was tattooed inside her, branded into her flesh, forever a part of her. Whether she liked it or not.
“What I want from you, little red, is a wedding night.”
That was another brand, another scar. And far more dangerous than before.
Lauren’s throat was almost too dry to work. She wasn’t sure it would. “You mean...?”
“I mean in the traditional sense, yes. With all that entails.”
He shifted, and she had never felt smaller. In the sense of being delicate. Precious, something in her whispered, though she knew that was fanciful. And worse, foolish.
Dominik smoothed his free hand over her hair, and let it rest at the nape of her neck. And the way he held her face made something in her do more than melt.
She thought maybe it sobbed.
Or she did.
“Find a threshold, and I will carry you over it,” he told her, his voice low and intent. And the look in his gray eyes so male, very nearly possessive, it made her ache. “I will lay you down on a bed and I will kiss you awhile, to see where it goes. And all I need from you is a promise that you will not tell me what you do and do not like until you try it. That’s all, Lauren. What do you have to lose?”
And she couldn’t have named the things she had to lose, because they were all the one thing—they were all her—and she was sure he would take them, anyway.
He would take everything.
Maybe she’d known that from the moment she’d seen the shadows become a man, there in that clearing so far from the rest of the world. There in those woods that had taunted her from the first, whispering of darkness and mystery in a thousand ways she hadn’t wanted to hear.
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