That took the wind out of her as surely as if she’d fallen hard and landed worse.
“What does it matter if I’m terrified or not?” She only realized after she’d said it that it was as good as an admission. “Would it change your mind?”
“It might change my approach,” he said, that gleaming, dark thing in his gaze again, and she didn’t understand how or why it connected to all that breathlessness inside her. Almost as if it wasn’t fury at all. “Then again, it might not.”
“In any case, congratulations are in order,” she managed to say, feeling battered for no good reason at all. “In short order you will have a wife. And shortly after that, a wedding night sacrifice, like something out of the history books.”
He laughed, rich and deep, and deeper when she scowled at him. “Do you think to shame me, Lauren? There are any number of men who might stand before you and thunder this way and that about how they dislike the taste of martyrdom in their beds, but not me.”
“I am somehow unsurprised.”
Dominik didn’t move and yet, again, Lauren felt as if he surrounded her. As if those hands of his might as well have been all over her. She felt as if they were.
“You’re not terrified of me,” he said with a quiet certainty that made her shake. “You’re terrified of yourself. And all those things you told yourself you don’t know how to feel.” That laughter was still all over his face, but his gray gaze made her feel pinned to the floor where she stood. “You’re terrified that you’ll wake up tomorrow so alive with feeling you won’t know who you are.”
“Either that or even more bored than I am right now,” she said, though her throat felt scraped raw with all the things she didn’t say. Or scream.
“Yes, so deeply bored,” he said, and laughed again. Then he leaned forward until he rested his elbows on the countertop between them, making it impossible to pretend she didn’t see the play of his muscles beneath the acres and acres of smooth male skin that he’d clearly shared with the sun in that Hungarian clearing. “But tell me this, Lauren. Does your boredom make you wet?”
For a moment she couldn’t process the question. She couldn’t understand it.
Then she did, and a tide of red washed over her, igniting her from the very top of her head to the tender spaces between her toes. No one had ever asked her a question like that. She hadn’t known, until right now, that people really discussed such things in the course of an otherwise more or less regular day. She told herself she was horrified. Disgusted. She told herself she didn’t even know what he meant, only that it was vile. That he was.
But she did know what he meant.
And she was molten straight through, red hot and flush with it, and decidedly not bored.
“You have twenty minutes,” she told him when she could be sure her voice was clipped and cold again. “I trust you will be ready?”
“I will take that as a yes,” he rumbled at her, entirely too male and much too sure of himself. “You are so wet you can hardly stand still. Don’t worry, little red. You might not know what to do about that. But I do.”
He straightened, then rounded the counter. Lauren pulled herself taut and rigid as if he was launching an attack—then told herself it was sheer relief that wound its way through her when he made no move toward her at all. He headed toward the flat’s bedroom instead.
“You’re welcome to join me in the shower,” he said over his shoulder, and she didn’t have to see his face to know he was laughing at her. “If you dare.”
And she was still standing right where he’d left her when she heard the water go on. Frozen solid at the edge of the counter with her hands in fists, curled up so tight her nails were digging into her palms.
She made herself uncurl her fingers, one at a time. She made herself breathe, shoving back the temper and the fury until she could see what was beneath it.
And see that once again, he was right. It was fear.
Not of him. But of herself.
And how very much she wanted to see, at last, what it was she’d been missing all this time.
That was the thought that had kept sneaking into her head over the course of the long night.
She’d hardly slept, there on that couch in her office where she spent more time than she ever had in the flat she shared with Mary. And Lauren had always prided herself on not feeling the things that others did. She’d congratulated herself on not being dragged into the same emotional quagmires they always were. It made her better at doing her job. It made it easier to navigate the corporate world.
But Dominik had forced her to face the fact that she could feel all kinds of things, she just...hadn’t.
Lauren had spent so long assuring herself she didn’t want the things she couldn’t feel. Or couldn’t have. Her parents’ love, the happy families they made without her, the sorts of romantic and sexual relationships all her friends and colleagues were forever falling in and out of with such abandon. She’d told anyone who asked that she wasn’t built for those sorts of entanglements.
Secretly, she’d always believed she was above them. That she was better than all that mess and regret.
But one day of kissing Dominik James on demand and she was forced to wonder—if it wasn’t about better or worse, but about meeting someone who made her feel things she hadn’t thought she could, where did that leave her except woefully inexperienced? And frozen in amber on a shelf of her own making?
Lauren didn’t like that thought at all. She ran her hands over her sensible shift dress, her usual office wear, and tried to pretend that she wasn’t shaking.
But what if you melted? whispered a voice deep inside her that she’d never heard before, layered with insinuation and something she was terribly afraid might be grief. What if you let Dominik melt you as he pleased?
She let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. And she swayed on her feet, yet knew full well it wasn’t because of the skyscraper height of her shoes.
And she entertained a revolutionary thought. If she had to do this, anyway—if she was going to marry this man, and stay married to him for as long as it took to ride out the public’s interest in yet another family scandal—shouldn’t she take it as an opportunity?
She already knew that Dominik could make her feel things that she never had before. And yes, that was overwhelming. A mad, wild whirl that she hardly knew how to process. Especially when she’d been certain, all her life, that she wasn’t capable of such things.
Maybe she didn’t know how to want. But it had never occurred to her before now that she hadn’t been born that way. That maybe, just maybe, that was because no one had ever wanted her—especially the people who should have wanted her the most.
She didn’t know why Dominik wanted to play these games with her, but he did. He clearly did, or he wouldn’t be here. Lauren was persuasive, but she knew full well she couldn’t have forced that man to do a single thing he didn’t want to do.
So why shouldn’t she benefit, too?
She had spent a lot of time and energy telling herself that she didn’t care that she was so clearly different from everyone else she met. That she was somehow set apart from the rest of the human race, unmoved by their passions and their baser needs. But what if she wasn’t?
What if she wasn’t an alien, after all?
That was what one of her kissing experiments had called her when she had declined his offer to take their experiment in a more horizontal direction. Among other, less savory names and accusations.
Just as Dominik had called her a robot.
What if she...wasn’t?
What if she melted, after all?
Lauren waited until he reemerged from his bedchamber, dressed in a crisp, dark suit that confused her, it was so well-made. His hair was tamed, pushed back from his face, and he’d even shaved, showing off the cut line of his ruthlessly mascu
line jaw. He looked like what he was—the eldest son of the current generation of San Giacomos. But she couldn’t concentrate on any of the surprisingly sophisticated male beauty he threw around him like light, because she knew that if she didn’t say what she wanted right here and now, she never would.
“I will give you a wedding night,” she told him.
“So we have already agreed,” he said in that silky way of his that made her whole body turn to jelly. And her stomach doing flips inside her didn’t exactly help. “Is this a renegotiation of terms?”
“If it takes more than one night, that’s all right,” she forced herself to tell him, though it made her feel queasy. And light-headed. Especially when he stopped tugging at his shirt cuffs and transferred all his considerable attention to her. “I want to learn.”
“Learn what?”
And maybe his voice wasn’t particularly, dangerously quiet. Maybe it just sounded like that in her head, next to all that roaring.
“Everyone has all this sex,” she said, the words crashing through her and out of her. She couldn’t control them. She couldn’t do anything but throw them across the room like bombs. “People walk around consumed by it, and I want to know why. I don’t just mean I want you to take my virginity, though you will. And that’s fine.”
“I’m delighted to hear you’re on board,” he said drily, though it was the arrested sort of gleam in his eyes that she couldn’t seem to look away from. Because it made her feel as if a great wind was blowing, directly at her, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “No one likes an unenthusiastic deflowering. Gardening metaphors aside, it’s really not all that much fun. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never had the pleasure. Or any pleasure, I can only assume.”
“I have no idea what you’re on about.” He looked even more taken aback by that, and she moved toward him—then thought better of it, as putting herself in arm’s reach of this man had yet to end well for her. Even if that was her current goal. “I want to understand why people yearn. I want to understand what all the fuss is about. Why people—you among them—look at me like something’s wrong with me if I say I’m not interested in it. Can you do that, Dominik?”
Maybe it was the first time she’d called him by his name. She wasn’t sure, but she felt as if it was. And he looked at her as if she’d struck him.
“I’ve spent my whole life never quite understanding the people around me.” And Lauren knew she would be horrified—later—that her voice broke then, showing her hand. Telling him even more than she’d wanted. “Never really getting the joke. Or the small, underlying assumptions that people make about the world because of these feelings they cart about with them wherever they go. I never got those, either. Just once I want to know what the big secret is. I want to know what all the songs are about. I want to know what so many parents feel they need to protect their children from. I want to know.”
“Lauren...”
And she didn’t recognize that look on his face then. Gone was the mocking, sardonic gleam in his eyes. The theatrics, the danger. The challenge.
She was terribly afraid that what she was seeing was pity, and she thought that might kill her.
“I know this is all a game to you,” she said hurriedly, before he could crush her, and had that out-of-body feeling again. As if she was watching herself from far away, and couldn’t do a single thing to stop the words that kept pouring out of her mouth. “Maybe you have your own dark reasons for wanting to do what Mr. Combe wants, and I don’t blame you. Family dynamics are difficult enough when you’ve known the players all your life. But you said that there could be certain things that were between the two of us. That are only ours. And I want this to be one of them.” Her heart was in her throat and she couldn’t swallow it down. She could only hope she didn’t choke on it. “I want to know why.”
He straightened then, and she couldn’t read the expression he wore. Arrested, still. But there was a different light in those near-silver eyes of his. He held out his hand, that gray gaze steady on hers, as if that alone could hold her up.
She believed it.
Lauren was tempted to call the way he was looking at her kind. And she had absolutely no idea why that should make her want to cry. Or how she managed to keep from doing just that when her sight blurred.
“Come,” Dominik said, his voice gruff and sure as if he was already reciting his vows before the vicar. And more shocking by far, as if those vows meant something to him. “Marry me, little red, and I will teach you.”
CHAPTER NINE
WHEN HE LOOKED back on this episode and cataloged his mistakes—something Dominik knew he would get to as surely as night followed day—he would trace it all back to the fatal decision to step outside his cabin and wait for the Englishwoman the innkeeper had called from town to tell him was headed his way.
It had seemed so innocuous at the time. No one ever visited his cabin, with or without an invitation, and he hadn’t known what would come of entertaining the whims of the one woman who had dared come find him. He’d been curious. Especially when he’d seen her, gold hair gleaming and that red cloak flowing around her like a premonition.
How could he have known?
And now Dominik found himself in exactly the sort of stuffy, sprawling, stately home he most despised, with no one to blame but himself. Combe Manor sat high on a ridge overlooking the Yorkshire village that had once housed the mills that had provided the men who’d lived in this house a one-way ticket out of their humble beginnings.
They had built Combe Manor and started Combe Industries. Dominik had also fought his way out of a rocky, unpleasant start...but he’d chosen to hoard his wealth and live off by himself in the middle of the woods.
Dominik felt like an imposter. Because he was an imposter.
He might have shared blood with the distant aristocrat he’d seen on the screen in a London office, but he didn’t share...this. Ancient houses filled with the kind of art and antiques that spoke of wealth that went far beyond the bank. It was nearly two centuries of having more. Of having everything, for that matter. It was generations of men who had stood where he did now, staring out the windows in a library filled with books only exquisitely educated men read, staring down at the village where, once upon a time, other men scurried about adding to the Combe coffers.
And he knew that the Combe family was brand-spanking-new in terms of wealth when stood next to the might and historic reach of the San Giacomos.
Dominik might share that blood, but he was an orphan. A street kid who’d lived rough for years and had done what was necessary to feed himself, keep himself clothed and find shelter. A soldier who had done his duty and followed his orders, and had found himself in situations he never mentioned when civilians were near.
Blood was nothing next to the life he’d lived. And he was surprised this fancy, up-itself house didn’t fall down around his ears.
But when he heard the soft click of much too high heels against the floor behind him, he turned.
Almost as if he couldn’t help himself.
Because the house still stood despite the fact he was here, polluting it. And more astonishing still, the woman who walked toward him, her blond hair shining and a wary look on her pretty face, was his wife.
His wife.
The ceremony, such as it was, had gone smoothly. The vicar had arrived right on time, and they had recited their vows in a pretty sort of boardroom high on top of the London building that housed his half brother’s multinational business. Lauren had produced rings, proving that she did indeed think of everything, they had exchanged them and that was that.
Dominik was not an impulsive man. Yet, he had gone ahead and married a woman for the hell of it.
And he was having trouble remembering what the hell of it was, because all he could seem to think about was Lauren. And more specific, helping Lauren out of those imposs
ible heels she wore. Peeling that sweet little dress off her curves, and then finally—finally—doing something about this intense, unreasonable hunger for her that had been dogging him since the moment he’d laid eyes on her.
The moment he’d stepped out of the shadows of his own porch and had put all of this into motion.
There had been no reception. Lauren had taken a detour to her office that had turned into several hours of work. Afterward she had herded him into another sleek, black car, then back to the same plane, which they’d flown for a brief little hop to the north of England. Another car ride from the airfield and here they were in an echoing old mausoleum that had been erected to celebrate and flatter the kinds of men Dominik had always hated.
It had never crossed his mind that he was one of them. He’d never wanted to be one of them.
And the fact he’d found out he was the very thing he loathed didn’t change a thing. He couldn’t erase the life he’d led up to this point. He couldn’t pretend he’d had a different life now that he was being offered his rich mother’s guilt in the form of an identity that meant nothing to him.
But it was difficult to remember the hard line he planned to take when this woman—his wife, to add another impossibility to the pile—stood before him.
“I have just spoken to Mr. Combe,” she began, because, of course, she’d been off the moment they’d set foot in this house. Dominik had welcomed the opportunity to ask himself what on earth he was doing here while she’d busied herself with more calls and emails and tasks that apparently needed doing at once.
And Dominik had made any number of mistakes already. There was the speaking to her in the first place that he would have to unpack at some later date, when all of this was behind him. Besides, he’d compounded that error, time and again. He should never have touched her. He should certainly never have kissed her. He should have let her fly off back to London on her own, and he certainly, without any doubt, should never have married her.
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