The situation would almost be funny if it wasn’t so...preposterous.
But one thing Dominik knew beyond a shadow of any doubt. He did not want to hear about his damned brother again. Not tonight.
“Do me this one favor, please,” he said in a voice that came out as more of a growl than he’d intended. Or maybe it was exactly the growl that was called for, he thought, when her eyes widened. “This is our wedding night. We have a great many things to accomplish, you and I. Why don’t we leave your Mr. Combe where he belongs—across the planet, doing whatever it is he does that requires you to do five times as much in support.”
He expected her to argue. He was sure he could see the start of it kicking up all over her lovely face and in the way she held her shoulders so tight and high.
But she surprised him.
She held his gaze, folded her hands in front of her and inclined her head.
Giving him what he wanted.
And the same demon that had spurred him on from the start—pushing him to walk out onto that porch and start all of this in the first place—sat up inside him, clearly not as intimidated by a stately library and a grand old house the way he was.
“What’s this?” he asked quietly. “Is that all it took to tame you, little red? A ring on your finger and a few vows in front of the vicar? That’s all that was required to make you soft? Yielding? Obedient?”
She made a sound that could as easily have been a cough as a laugh. “I am not certain I would call myself any of those things, no matter what jewelry I wear on my fingers. But I agreed to the wedding night. And...whatever else. I have every intention of going through with it.”
“You make it sound so appealing.” He eyed her, not sure if he was looking for her weaknesses or better yet, the places she was likely to be most sensitive. “You could do worse than a little softness. Yielding will make it sweeter for the both of us. And obedience, well...”
He grinned at that, as one image after the next chased through his head.
“I’ve never been much good at that, either, I’m afraid.” She said it with such confidence, tipping her chin up to go with it. And more than that, pride. “If you’re looking for obedience, I’m afraid you’re in for some disappointment.”
“You cannot truly believe you are not obedient.” He moved toward her, leaving the window—and its view of the ruins of the mills that had built this place—behind him. “You obey one man because he pays you. What will it take, I wonder, for you to obey your husband with even a portion of that dedication?”
And he had the distinct pleasure of watching her shiver, goose bumps telling him her secrets as they rippled to life on her skin.
He was so hard he thought it might hurt him.
Dominik crossed the vast expanse of the library floor until he was in front of her, and then he kept moving, wandering in a lazy circle around her as if she was on an auction block and he was the buyer.
Another image that pulsed in him like need.
“I asked you to teach me.” And he could hear all the nerves crackling in her voice. As obvious as the goose bumps down the length of her arms. “Does that come with extra doses of humiliation or is that merely an add-on extra?”
“It’s my lesson to teach, Lauren. Why don’t you stop trying to top from the bottom?”
He’d made a full circle around her then, and faced her once more. And he reveled in the look on her face. Wariness and expectation. That sweet pink flush.
And a certain hectic awareness in her caramel-colored eyes.
She was without doubt the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And she was his.
She had made herself his.
“What do you want me to do?” Lauren asked, her voice the softest he’d ever heard it.
He reached out to smooth his hand over all her gleaming blond hair, still pulled back in that sleek, professional ponytail. He considered that tidy ponytail part of her armor.
And he wanted none of that armor between them. Not tonight.
“It’s time to play Rapunzel,” he told her. When she only stared back at him, he tugged on the ponytail, just sharp enough to make her hitch in a breath. “Let down your hair, little red.”
He watched the pulse in her throat kick into high gear. Her flush deepened, and he was fairly certain she’d moved into holding her breath.
But she obeyed him all the same, reaching back to tug the elastic out of her hair. When it was loose she ran her free hand through the mass of it, letting it fall where it would, thick and gold and smelling of apples.
She kept saying she didn’t believe in fairy tales, but Dominik was sure he’d ended up in the midst of one all the same. And he knew the price of taking a bite out of a sweet morsel like Lauren, a golden-haired princess as innocent as she was sweet to look upon, but he didn’t care. Bake him into a pie, turn him into stone—he meant to have this woman.
He made a low, rumbling sound of approval, because with her hair down she looked different. Less sharp. Less sleek. More accessible. The hair tumbled over her shoulders and made her seem...very nearly romantic.
Dominik remembered the things he’d promised her, and that ache in him grew sharper and more insistent by the second, so he simply bent and scooped her up into his arms.
She let out the breath she’d been holding in a kind of gasp, but he was already moving. He held her high against his chest, a soft, sweet weight in his arms, and after a startled moment she snuck her arms around his neck.
And that very nearly undid him.
The sort of massive, theatrical staircase that had never made sense to him dominated the front hall, and he took the left side, heading upstairs.
“Oh, the guest suites are actually—” she began, shifting in his arms and showing him that frown of hers he liked far too much.
“Is anyone else here?”
He already knew the answer. She had told him the house was empty when they’d landed in Yorkshire. She’d told him a lot of information about the house, the grounds, the village, the distant moors and mountains—as if she’d believed what he truly wanted today was a travelogue and a lecture on the Combe family.
“You know that Mr. Combe is in Australia, and his sister, Pia—” She cut herself off, her gaze locking to his. “Well. She’s your sister, too, of course. And she is currently in the kingdom of Atilia.”
“The island.”
“Yes, it’s actually several islands in the Ionian Sea—”
“I don’t care.” He didn’t. Not about Matteo Combe or Pia Combe or anything at all but the woman in his arms. “How many beds are there in a house like this?”
“Fifteen,” she replied, her gaze searching his. Then widening as he smiled.
“Never fear, Lauren. I intend to christen them all.”
He took the first door he found, carrying her into a sprawling sitting room that led, eventually, into an actual bedroom. The bed itself was a massive thing, as if they’d chopped down trees that could have been the masts of ships to make all four posters, but Dominik found his normal disgust about class issues faded in the face of all the lovely possibilities.
There were just so many things an imaginative man could do with bedposts and a willing woman.
He set her down at the side of the bed and smiled wider when she had to reach out to steady herself. “Those shoes may well be the death of you. It is the shoes, is it not? And not something else entirely that leaves you so...unbalanced?”
She shot him a look, but she didn’t say anything. She reached down, fiddled with the buckle around one delicate ankle, then kicked her shoe off. She repeated it on the other side, and when she was done she was nearly a foot shorter.
And then she smiled up at him, her gaze as full of challenge as it was of wariness.
“I didn’t realize all the witty banter came as part of the package. I though
t it would just be, you know, straight to it. No discussion.”
“You could have gotten that in any pub you’ve ever set foot in with precious little effort on your part.”
He shrugged out of the formal suit jacket he’d been wearing all day, like the trained monkey he’d allowed himself to become. And he was well aware of the convulsive way she swallowed, her gaze following his shoulders as if she couldn’t bring herself to look away from him.
Dominik liked that a little too much. “Why didn’t you?”
He started on his buttons then, one after the next, unable to keep his lips from quirking as she followed his fingers as they moved down his chest. And took much too long to raise her gaze back to his.
“Pardon?”
“If you were curious about experimenting with your nonsexual nature, Lauren, why not get off with a stranger after a few drinks? I think you’ll find it’s a tried and true method employed by people everywhere.”
“As appealing as that sounds, I was never curious before. I was never curious before—”
She looked stricken the moment the words were out. And the word she’d been about to say hung between them as surely as if she’d shouted it. You.
I was never curious before you.
And Dominik felt...hushed. Something like humbled.
“Don’t worry,” he found himself saying, though his voice was gruff and he’d planned to be so much more smooth, more in control, hadn’t he? “I promise you will enjoy this far more than a drunken fumble in the toilets after too much liquid courage and a pair of beer goggles.”
She blinked as if she was imagining that, and Dominik didn’t want a single thing in her head but him.
He tossed his shirt aside, then nodded at her. “Your dress, wife. Take it off.”
Her breath shuddered out of her, and her hands trembled when she reached down to grip the hem of the shift dress she wore. She had to wiggle as she lifted it, peeling it up and off and displaying herself to him as she went.
Inch by luscious inch.
At last, he thought as she tossed the dress aside and stood there before him wearing nothing but a delicate lace bra that cupped her perfect breasts, and a pair of pale pink panties that gleamed a bit in the last of the light of the waning summer afternoon.
She made his mouth water.
And God, how she made him ache.
He reached over and put his hands on her, finally. He drew her hair over her shoulders, then followed the line of each arm. Down to find her fingers, particularly the one that wore his ring, then back up again. He found the throat where her pulse pounded out a rhythm he could feel in the hardest part of him, and each soft swell of her breast above the fabric that covered them and held them aloft.
She was like poured cream, sweet and rich, and so soft to the touch he had to bite back a groan. He traced his way over the tempting curve of her belly, her hips made for his hands, and then behind to her pert bottom.
She was warm already, but she became hot beneath his palms.
And he was delighted to find that when she flushed, she turned bright red all the way down to her navel. Better by far than he’d imagined.
He dropped to his knees, wrapped his arms around her and dropped his mouth to a spot just below her navel, smiling when she jolted against him.
Because touching her wasn’t enough. He wanted to taste her.
First, he retraced his steps, putting his mouth everywhere he could reach, relishing each shocked and greedy little noise she made. The way she widened her stance, then sagged back against the high bed as if her knees could no longer hold her. She buried her hands in his hair, but either she didn’t know how to guide him, or didn’t want to, so he made his own path.
And when her eyes looked blind with need, he reached up and unhooked her bra, carefully removing it so he could expose her breasts to his view.
Perfect. She was perfect, and he leaned in close so he could take his fill of her. He pulled one nipple deep into his mouth, sucking until she cried out.
And Dominik thought it was the most glorious sound he had ever heard.
When he was finished with both nipples, they stood harder and more proud. And she was gripping the bed sheets behind her, her head tipped back so all of her golden hair spread around her like a halo.
He shifted forward, lifting her up and setting her back on the bed so he could peel the panties from her hips.
As he pulled them down her satiny legs, she panted. And was making the slightest high-pitched sounds in the back of her throat, if he wasn’t mistaken.
She only got louder when he lifted up her legs and set them on his shoulders so they dangled down his back, and then he lost himself in the fact he had full, unfettered access to all that molten sweetness between her legs.
The scent of her arousal roared in him, making him crazy.
Making him as close to desperate as he’d ever been.
He looked up and let his lips curve when he found her gazing back at him, a look of wonder on her face.
And something like disbelief in her eyes.
“You... My legs...” She hardly sounded like herself.
“All the better to eat you with, my dear,” he said, dark and greedy.
And then he set his mouth to the core of her, and showed her exactly how real the fairy tales were, after all.
CHAPTER TEN
IT HIT HER like a punch, thick and deep, setting Lauren alight from the inside out.
It made her go rigid, then shake.
But that didn’t stop Dominik.
Her husband.
He was licking into her as if he planned to go on forever. He was using the edge of his teeth, his wicked tongue and the scrape of his jaw. His shoulders kept her thighs apart, and he didn’t seem to care that her hands were buried in his hair. And tugging.
And after the first punch, there was a different, deeper fire. A kind of dancing flame she hardly knew how to name, and then there was more.
A shattering.
As if there were new ways to burn, and Dominik was intent on showing her each and every one of them.
The third time she exploded, he pulled his mouth away from her, pressing his lips against her inner thigh so she could feel him smile.
He stood, hauling her with him as he went, and then somehow they were both in the middle of a giant bed in one of the family’s suites she had never dared enter on her previous trips to Combe Manor.
He rolled over her, and Lauren realized she must have lost time somewhere, because he was naked, too. She had no memory of him stripping off his trousers.
Not that she cared.
Because she could feel him everywhere, muscled legs between her, and the heat of his skin. All that lean weight of his. The crispness of the hair that dusted his decidedly male body. His eyes were like silver, hot and indulgent at once, and he braced himself over her as she ran her hands down all the planes and ridges of his beautiful chest, the way she’d wanted to since he’d opened the door this morning.
It was finally her turn to touch him. And she was determined to touch all of him, with all the fascination she hadn’t know she held inside her. But there was no denying it as she followed her fingers wherever they wanted to go. There was no pretending it didn’t swell and dance inside her.
“I don’t understand how a man can be so beautiful,” she whispered, and if that was betraying herself the way she feared it was, she couldn’t bring herself to care about that.
Because he took her mouth then, a hard, mad claiming, and it thrilled her.
She surged against him, unable to get close enough. Unable to process each and every sensation that rolled over her, spiraled around inside her and made her want nothing more than to press every part of her against every part of him.
And she could feel it then. The hardest part of him, there bet
ween them. Velvet and steel, insistent against the soft skin of her belly.
It made her shudder all over again.
He slanted his mouth over hers, and then his hands were working magic between them. She heard the faint sound of foil, and then he settled himself between her legs as if all this time, her whole life, she had been made to hold him just like this.
Dominik had asked her if she was wet before. And now she knew what he meant in an entirely different way.
But he growled his approval as his fingers found the neediest part of her, playing with her until she bucked against him, her head thrashing back against the mattress.
He lifted her knees, then settled himself even more completely between them, so he was flush against her.
“Tell me if you don’t feel anything,” he said, his voice nearly unrecognizable, there at her ear.
“If I don’t...” she began.
But then she could feel him, there at her center.
He pressed against the resistance he found; her body protested enough to make her wince, and then it was over.
Or just beginning, really.
Because he kept pressing. In and in, and there was too much. She couldn’t name the things she felt; she could barely experience them as they happened—
“Remember,” and his voice was a growl again. “You are nonsexual, little red. You do not feel what others do. Is that how this feels?”
But she couldn’t answer him.
She couldn’t do anything but dig her fingers into his shoulders as he opened her, pressed deeper and stretched her farther still.
Then finally, and yet too soon, he stopped.
And for a moment he only gazed down at her, propped up on his elbows with nothing but silver in his gaze and that very nearly stern set to his mouth.
While he was buried completely within her body.
And the knowledge of that, mixed with the exquisite sensation, so full and so deep, made her break apart all over again.
Less like a fist this time, and more like a wave. Over and over, until it wore itself out against the shore.
Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride Page 11