Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride (Conveniently Wed!)

by Caitlin Crews

  She blinked at him, then frowned all the more. “I don’t think...”

  “We can make rules, if you like.” It was his turn to smile, and so he did, all the better to beguile her with. “Rule number one, as discussed, you must allow me to kiss you at my whim. Rule number two, when you no longer wish me to kiss you, you will tell me to stop. That’s it. That’s all I want.”

  “But...” Her voice was faint. He counted that as a victory.

  “And in return for this, little red, I will trot back to England on your boss’s leash and perform the role of long-lost brother to his satisfaction. What will that entail, do you think? Will it be acts of fealty in public view? Or will it simply be an appropriate haircut, the better to blend with the stodgy aristocracy?”

  She looked bewildered for a moment, and if Dominik had ever had the slightest inkling to imagine himself a good man—which he hadn’t—he knew better then. Because he liked it. He liked her off balance, those soft lips parting and her eyes dazed as if she hardly knew what to do with herself.

  Oh, yes, he liked it a great deal.

  “I don’t understand why, when you could have anything in the world, you would ask for...a kiss.”

  He could feel the edge in his own smile then. “You cannot buy me, Lauren. But you can kiss me.”

  She looked dubious, but then, after a moment or two, she appeared to be considering it.

  Which Dominik felt like her hands all over his body, skin to skin.

  “How long do you imagine this arrangement will go on?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “As long as your Mr. Combe requires I remain in his spotlight, I suppose.”

  “And you give me your word that you will stop when I tell you to.”

  “I would not be much of a man if I did not,” he said, evenly. “There are words to describe those who disregard such clear instructions, but man is not among them.”

  “All you want from the news that you’re one of the richest men alive is a kiss,” she said after another moment, as if she was selecting each word with care. “And I suppose you can’t get much kissing out here in the middle of nowhere, so fair enough, if that’s what you like. But why would you choose me?”

  Dominik restrained himself—barely—from allowing his very healthy male ego to tell her that he had no trouble finding women, thank you very much. That this cabin was a voluntary retreat, not an involuntary sentence handed down from on high. But he didn’t say that.

  “What can I say? I’ve always had a weakness for Little Red Riding Hood.”

  She sighed, and at the end, it turned into a little laugh. “Very well. If that’s what you want, I’ll kiss you. But we leave for England as soon as possible.”

  “As you wish,” Dominik murmured, everything in him hot and ready, laced through with triumph and something far darker and more intense he didn’t want to name. Not when he could indulge it instead. “But first, that kiss. As promised.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LAUREN WAS BAFFLED.

  Why would anyone want a kiss—or, she supposed, a number of kisses—when there were so many other things he could have asked for? When the world was at his feet with the combined Combe and San Giacomo fortunes at his service?

  She had met a great many men in her time, most of them through work, so she considered herself something of an expert in the behavior of males who considered themselves powerful. But she’d never met anyone like Dominik James. He had no power at all that she could see, but acted like he was the king of the world. It didn’t make sense.

  But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to understand the man. All she had to do was bring him back to London, and no matter that she felt a good deal less steady than she was pretending.

  “Now?” she asked. She looked around the cabin as if sense was another rug tossed over the wood floor that could rise up and assert itself if she could only locate it. “You want me to kiss you now?”

  Dominik lounged there before her, something glittering in the depths of his gray eyes, though the rest of his face was perfectly serious. He patted his knee with his free hand while what she thought was a smile almost changed the stern line of his mouth.

  She pushed herself to her feet, still feeling that odd, liquid sensation all throughout her body. It was the way she felt when she slipped on a new pair of the shoes she loved. It made her feel...dangerous, almost. She’d always loved the feeling, because surely that was what a woman was meant to feel.

  She’d long thought that if Matteo ever looked at her the way she looked at her shoes, she’d feel it. But he never had.

  Lauren didn’t understand why she felt it now, in a cabin in the middle of the woods. Or why Dominik was so determined to ruin it with more kissing.

  Because the way he’d kissed her out there in the clearing had been different from her halfhearted youthful experiments, true. But Lauren knew it wouldn’t last, because it never did. She knew that sooner or later he would grow ever more keen while she became less and less interested.

  That was how it had always gone. She had discovered, time and again, that thinking about kissing was far preferable to the unfortunate reality of kissing.

  She preferred this moment, right now. The moment when a man looked at her and imagined she was a desirable woman. Feminine straight through and capable of feeling all those things that real women did.

  Capable of wanting and being wanted in return, when the truth was, want wasn’t something that Lauren was capable of.

  But he had already kissed her, and she told herself that was a good thing. She already knew what she’d agreed to. And it wasn’t as if kissing Dominik had been as unpleasant as it always had been in the past.

  Quite the opposite, a sly voice deep inside her very nearly purred.

  She brushed that aside. It was the unexpected hike, no doubt, that had made her feel so flushed. So undone. She was unaccustomed to feeling those sorts of sensations in her body—all over her body—that was all.

  “Perhaps you do not realize this, since you dislike kissing so much, but it is generally not done while standing across the room,” Dominik said with that thread of dark amusement woven into his voice that she couldn’t quite track. She could feel it, though. Deep inside all those places where the hike through the woods had made her sensitive.

  She didn’t understand that, either.

  “Do you expect me to perch on your knee?” she asked without trying all that hard to keep the bafflement out of her voice.

  “When and where I want,” he said softly, gray eyes alight. “How I want.”

  And Lauren was nothing if not efficient. She had never been wanted, it was true, and was lacking whatever that thing was that could make her want someone else the way others did so readily. So she had learned how to be needed instead.

  She had chosen to pursue a career as a personal assistant because there was no better way to be needed—constantly—than to take over the running of someone’s life. She liked the high stakes of the corporate world, but what she loved was that Matteo truly needed her. If she didn’t do her job he couldn’t do his.

  He needed her to do this, too, she assured herself. He wanted his brother in the fold, media-ready and compliant, and she could make it happen.

  And if there was something inside her, some prickle of foreboding or something much sweeter and more dangerous, she ignored it.

  The fire crackling beside them seemed hotter all of a sudden. It seemed to lick all over the side of her body, and wash across her face. She had never sat on a man’s lap before, or had the slightest desire to do such a thing, and Dominik did nothing to help her along. He only watched her, no longer even the hint of a smile anywhere on his face, save the suggestion of one like silver in the endless gray of his gaze.

  She stepped between his legs, thrust out before him in a way that encouraged her to marvel at both their length
and strength, and then she eased herself down, putting out a hand to awkwardly prop herself against him as she sat.

  “Do you plan to kiss me from this position?” She could swear he was laughing at her, though his face remained stern. “You are aware that kissing requires that lips meet, are you not?”

  He had kissed her so smoothly out there at the edge of the woods. So easily. And now that Lauren thought about it, she had never been the one to initiate a kiss. She had always been a recipient. But there was something deep inside her that refused to tell him that.

  It was the same something that bloomed with shame—because it had to be shame, surely—there between her legs.

  She shouldn’t have thought about that just then. Because she was sitting there on his hard, muscled thighs, so disastrously and intriguingly hot beneath her, and she couldn’t seem to help herself from squirming against him.

  And as she did she could feel something tense and electric hum to life in the space between them.

  The fire was so hot. The air seemed to thicken with it as if there were flames dancing up and down the length of her arms, and the strangest part was that it didn’t hurt. Burning should hurt, surely, but in this case it only seemed to make her breathless.

  She eased closer to the wall of his chest, twisting herself so she was level with his face, and close enough to kiss him. Or she thought it was the correct distance, having never experimented with this position before.

  He moved, but only a little, sliding his hands to grip her lightly at her waist.

  Lauren couldn’t think of a single reason why that should make her shudder.

  Everywhere.

  She gulped in a breath, aware of too many things at once. Those broad, blunt fingers of his like brands through the thin shell of her blouse. The iron forge of him beneath her, making her pulse and melt in places she’d never felt much of anything before.

  This close, and knowing that a kiss was about to happen, she noticed things she hadn’t before. The astonishing lines of his face, from his high cheekbones to the blade of his nose. The supremely male jut of his chin. And that thick, careless hair of his, that for some reason, she longed to sink her fingers into.

  Her heartbeat slowed, but got louder. And harder, somehow, as if it was trying to escape from her chest.

  She searched that implacable gray gaze of his, though she couldn’t have said what she was looking for. She burned still, inside and out, and the fire seemed to come at her from all sides, not just from the fireplace.

  Slowly, carefully, she lowered her mouth.

  Then she pressed her lips against his.

  For one long beat, there was only that. The trembling inside her, the feel of his firm lips beneath hers.

  There, she thought, with a burst of satisfaction. This is even easier than I expected—

  But that was when he angled his head.

  And he didn’t kiss the way she had, halting and unsure.

  He smiled against her mouth, then licked his way inside, and Lauren...ignited.

  It was as if the cabin caught fire and she was lost in the blaze.

  She couldn’t seem to get close enough. Dominik’s big hands moved from her waist, snaking around her back to hold her even more fiercely. And she moved closer to him, letting her own hands go where they liked. His wide, hard shoulders. His deliciously scratchy jaw. And all that gloriously dark hair of his, thick and wild, like rough silk against her palms.

  And still he kissed her, lazy and thorough at once, until she found herself meeting each thrust of his wicked tongue. Until she was the one angling her head, seeking that deliriously sweet fit.

  As if they were interlocking parts, made of flame, intoxicating and dangerous at once.

  Lauren was the one meant to be kissing him, and this was nothing but a bargain—but she forgot that. She forgot everything but the taste of him. His strength and all that fire, burning in her and around her until she thought she might have become her own blaze.

  And she felt a different kind of need swell in her then, poignant and pointed all at once. It swept her from head to toe, then pooled in the place between her legs where she felt that fire most keenly and pulsed with a need too sharp to be shame—

  She wrenched her lips from his, startled and shamed and something else that keened inside her, like grief.

  For a moment there was nothing but that near-unbearable fire hanging in the air between them. His eyes were silver and bright, and locked to hers. That mouth of his was a temptation and a terror, and she didn’t understand how any of this was happening.

  She didn’t understand much of anything, least of all herself.

  “You promised,” Lauren managed to say.

  And would likely spend the rest of her life reliving how lost and small she sounded, and how little she thought she had it in her to fix it. Or fight her way back to her efficient and capable self.

  “I did,” he agreed.

  His voice was a dark rasp that made her quiver all over again, deep inside.

  “You promised and you’ve already broken that promise. It didn’t even take you—”

  Her voice cut off abruptly when he ran his palm down the length of her ponytail and tugged it. Gently enough, so there was no reason she felt...scalded straight through.

  “What promise did I break?” he asked mildly. So mildly she found herself frowning at him, because she didn’t believe it.

  “One kiss,” she said severely.

  And the way his mouth curved then, there below the knowing silver of his gaze, made her shiver.

  “You’re the one who has to say stop, little red. I don’t remember you saying anything of the kind. Do you?”

  And for another beat she was...stupefied.

  Unable to breathe, much less react. Unable to do anything but gape at him.

  Because he was quite right. She hadn’t said anything at all.

  In the next second she launched herself off him, leaping back in a way that she might have found comical, had she not been so desperate to put space between her and this man she’d made a devil’s bargain with.

  “This was our agreement, was it not?” Dominik asked, in that same mild voice. He only watched her—looking amused, she couldn’t help but notice—as she scrambled around to the back of the chair facing him. “I hope you do not plan to tell me that you are already regretting the deal we made.”

  And Lauren did not believe in fairy tales. But it occurred to her, as she stared back at this man who had taken her over, made her a stranger to herself, and made her imagine that she could control something she very much feared was far more likely to burn her alive—she realized that she’d been thinking about the wrong kind of fairy tale.

  Because there were the pretty ones, sweeping gowns and singing mice. Everything was princesses and musical numbers, neat and sweet and happy-ever-afters all around.

  But those weren’t the original fairy tales. There were darker ones. Older versions of the same stories, rich with the undercurrent of blood and sacrifice and grim consequences.

  There were woods that swallowed you whole. Thorn bushes that stole a hundred years from your life. There were steep prices paid to devious witches, locked rooms that should have stayed closed, and children sent off to pay their fathers’ debts in a variety of upsetting ways.

  And there were men like Dominik, whose eyes gleamed with knowledge and certainty, and made her remember that there were some residents of hidden cottages who a wise girl never tried to find in the first place.

  But Lauren hadn’t heeded all the warnings. The man so difficult to find. The innkeeper’s surprise that anyone would seek him out. That damned uninviting path through the woods.

  She’d been so determined to prove her loyalty and capabilities to Matteo during this tough period in his life. If he wanted his long-lost older brother, she, by God, wou
ld deliver said older brother—once again making it clear that she alone could always, always give her boss what he needed.

  Because she did so like to be needed.

  She understood that then, with a lurch deep inside her, that once Matteo had mentioned Dominik this had always been where she would end up. This had always been her destination, which she had raced headlong toward with no sense of self-preservation at all.

  This deal she’d made. And what it would do to her.

  And she knew, with that same lurch and a kind of spinning sensation that threatened to take her knees out from under her, that it was already much too late to save herself from this thing she’d set in motion.

  “I don’t regret anything,” she lied through lips that no longer felt like hers. And though it was hard to meet that too-bright, too-knowing gray gaze of his, she forced herself to do it. And to hold it. “But we need to head back to England now. As agreed.”

  His lips didn’t move, but she could see that smile of his, anyway. All wolf. All fangs.

  As if he’d already taken his first bite.

  “But of course,” he said quietly. “I keep my promises, Lauren. Always. You would do well to remember that.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BY THE TIME they made it down out of the mountains in the hardy SUV Dominik kept back behind the cabin, then onto the private plane Lauren had waiting for them at the nearest airfield, she’d convinced herself that she’d simply...gotten carried away.

  Once out of the woods, the idea that she’d let trees get into her head and so deep beneath her skin struck her as the very height of foolishness.

  She was a practical person, after all. She wasn’t excitable. It was simply the combination of hiking around in heels and a man who considered kissing currency.

  It was the oddness that had gotten to her, she told herself stoutly. And repeatedly.

  By the time they boarded the plane, she had regained her composure. She was comfortable on the Combe Industries jet. In her element. She bustled into her usual seat, responded to her email and informed Matteo that she had not only found his brother, but would also shortly be delivering him to England. As requested.