Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride (Conveniently Wed!)

by Caitlin Crews

  Less like a fist this time, and more like a wave. Over and over, until it wore itself out against the shore.

  And when she opened her eyes again, she could see Dominik’s jaw clenched tight and something harder in his gaze. Determination, perhaps.

  “You’re killing me,” he gritted out.

  She tried to catch her breath. “Am I doing it wrong?”

  And he let out a kind of sigh, or maybe it was a groan, and he dropped down to gather her even more firmly beneath him.

  “No, little red, you’re not doing it wrong.”

  But she thought he sounded tortured as he said it.

  Then Lauren couldn’t care about that, either, because he began to move.

  And it was everything she’d never known she wanted. She had never known she could want at all. It was the difference between a dark, cloudy sky, and a canopy of stars.

  And she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She could only feel.

  She was all sensation. All greed and passion, longing and desire, and all of it focused on the man who moved within her, teaching her with every thrust.

  About need. About want.

  About everything she had been missing, all these lonely years.

  He taught her about hope, and he taught her about wonder, and still he kept on.

  Lesson after lesson, as each thrust made it worse. Better.

  As he made her undeniably human, flesh and passion made real, as surely as any kiss in a fairy tale story.

  Until there was nothing between them but fire.

  The glory of flames that danced and consumed them, made them one, and changed everything.

  And when she exploded that time, he went with her.

  * * *

  He shouldn’t have gone out on that porch, Dominik thought grimly a long while later as the sky outside darkened to a mysterious deep blue, and Lauren lay sprawled against his chest, her breathing even and her eyes closed.

  He should have stayed in Hungary. He should have laughed off the notion that he was an heir to anything.

  And he never, ever should have suggested that they make this marriage real.

  He felt...wrecked.

  And yet he couldn’t seem to bring himself to shift her off him. It would be easy enough to do. A little roll, and he could leave her here. He could leave behind this great house and all its obnoxious history. He could pretend he truly didn’t care about the woman who’d rid herself of him, then later chosen this.

  But he had promised to take part in this whole charade, hadn’t he? He’d promised not only to marry Lauren, but to subject himself to the rest of it, too. Hadn’t she mentioned comportment? The press?

  It was his own fault that he’d ended up here. He accepted that.

  But he could honestly say that it had never occurred to him that sex with Lauren could possibly be this...ruinous.

  Devastating, something in him whispered.

  He hadn’t imagined that anything could get to him. Nothing had in years. And no woman had ever come close.

  Dominik had never experienced the overwhelming sensation that he wasn’t only naked in the sense of having no clothes on—he was naked in every sense. Transparent with it, so anyone who happened by could see all the things in him he’d learned to pack away, out of view. First, as an orphan who had to try his best to act perfect for prospective parents. Then as a kid on the street who had to act tough enough to be left alone. Then as a soldier who had to act as if nothing he was ordered to do stayed with him.

  And he couldn’t say he much cared for the sensation now.

  He needed to get up and leave this bed. He needed to go for a long, punishing run to clear his head. He needed to do something physical until he took the edge off all the odd things swirling around inside him, showing too much as if she’d knocked down every last boundary he had, and Dominik certainly couldn’t allow that—

  But she stirred then, shifting all that smooth, soft heat against him, and a new wave of intense heat washed over him.

  She let out a sigh that sounded like his name, and what was he supposed to do with that?

  Despite himself, he held on to her.

  Especially when she lifted her head, piled her hands beneath her chin and blinked up at him.

  And the things he wanted to say appalled him.

  He cleared his throat. “Do you feel sufficiently indoctrinated into the sport?”

  He hardly recognized his own voice. Or that note in it that he was fairly certain was...playfulness? And his hands were on her curves as if he needed to assure himself that they were real. That she was.

  “Is it a sport? I thought of it more as a pastime. A habit, perhaps.” She considered it, and what was wrong with him that he enjoyed watching a woman think? “Or for some, I suppose, an addiction.”

  “There are always hobbyists and amateurs, little red,” he found himself saying, a certain...warmth in his voice that he wanted to rip out with his own fingers. But he didn’t know where to start. “But I have never counted myself among them.”

  He meant to leave, and yet his hands were on her, smoothing their way down her back, then cupping her bottom. He knew he needed to let her go and make sure this never happened again, but she was smiling.

  And he hardly knew her. Gone was all that sharpness, and in its place was a kind of soft, almost dreamy expression that made his chest hurt.

  As if she was the one teaching him a lesson here.

  “I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize I was addressing such a renowned star of the bedroom,” she said, and her lovely eyes danced with laughter.

  It only served to remind him that she didn’t laugh nearly enough.

  “I will excuse it,” he told her. “Once.”

  He needed to put distance between them. Now. Dominik knew that the way he knew every other fact of his existence. He knew it like every single memory he had of the nuns. The streets. The missions he’d been sent on.

  He wasn’t a man built for connection. He didn’t want to be the kind of man who could connect with people, because people were what was wrong with the world. People had built this house. A person had given him away. He wanted nothing to do with people, or he never would have taken himself off into the woods in the first place.

  But this pretty, impossible person was looking at him as if he was the whole world, her cheeks heating into red blazes he couldn’t keep from touching. He ran his knuckles over one, then the other, silky smooth and wildly hot.

  “It is still our wedding night,” she pointed out.

  “So it is.”

  Lauren lowered her lashes, then traced a small pattern against his chest with one fingertip.

  “I don’t know how this works. Or if you can. Physically, I mean. But I wondered... I mean, I hoped...” She blew out a breath. “Was that the whole of the lesson?”

  And Dominik was only a man, after all, no matter how he’d tried to make himself into a monster, out there in his forest. And the part of him that had been greedy for her since the moment he’d seen her could never be happy with so small a taste.

  Will you ever be satisfied? a voice in him asked. Or will you always want more?

  That should have sent him racing for the door. He needed to leave, right now, but he found himself lifting her against him instead. He drew her up on her knees so she straddled him, and watched as she looked down between them, blinked and then smiled.

  Wickedly, God help him.

  “By all means,” he encouraged her, his hands on her hips. “Allow me to teach you something else I feel certain you won’t feel, as shut off and uninterested in these things as you are.”

  She found him then, wrapping her hands around the hardest expression of his need and guiding him to the center of her heat.

  As if she’d been born for this. For him.

 
“No,” she murmured breathlessly. And then smiled as she took him inside her as if he’d been made to fit her so perfectly, just like that. “I don’t expect I’ll feel anything at all.”

  And there was nothing for it. There was no holding back.

  Dominik gave himself over to his doom.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE SITUATION DID not improve as the days slid by and turned inevitably into weeks.

  Dominik needed to put a stop to the madness. There was no debate on that topic. The pressing need to leave the mess he’d made here, get the hell out of England, and away from the woman he never should have married, beat in him like a drum. It was the first thing he thought of when he woke. It dogged him through the long summer days. It even wormed its way into his dreams.

  But one day led into the next, and he went nowhere. He didn’t even try to leave as if he was the one who’d wandered into the wrong forest and found himself under some kind of spell he couldn’t break.

  Meanwhile, they traded lesson for lesson.

  “I know how to use utensils, little red,” he told her darkly one morning after he’d come back from a punishing run—yet not punishing enough, clearly, as he’d returned to Combe Manor—and had showered and changed only to find the formal dining room set with acres of silver on either side of each plate. There was a mess of glasses and extra plates everywhere he looked.

  And Lauren sat there with her hair pulled back into the smooth ponytail he took personally and that prissy look on her face.

  The very same prissy look that made him hard and greedy for her, instantly.

  “This won’t be a lesson about basic competence with a fork, which I’ll go ahead and assume you mastered some time ago,” she told him tartly. Her gaze swept over him, making him feel as if he was still that grubby-faced orphan, never quite good enough. He gritted his teeth against it, because that was the last thing he needed. The present was complicated enough without dragging in the past. “This will be about formal manners for formal dinners.”

  “Alternatively, I could cook for myself, eat with own my fingers if I so desire and continue to have the exact same blood in my veins that I’ve always had with no one the least bit interested either way. None of this matters.”

  He expected her to come back at him, sharp and amusing, but she didn’t. She studied him for a moment instead, and he still didn’t know how to handle the way she looked at him these days. It was softer. Warmer.

  It was too dangerous. It scraped at him until he felt raw and he could never get enough of it, all the same.

  “It depends on your perspective, I suppose,” she said. “It’s not rocket science, of course. The fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance. History books won’t be written about what fork you use at a banquet. But the funny thing about manners is that they can often stand in for the things you lack.”

  “And what is it I lack, exactly? Be specific, please. I dare you.”

  “I’m talking about me, Dominik. Not you.”

  And when she smiled, the world stopped.

  He told himself it was one more sign he needed to get away from her. Instead, he took the seat opposite her at the table as if he really was under her spell.

  Why couldn’t he break it?

  “When I was nine my parents had been divorced for two years, which means each of them was married again. My stepmother was pregnant. I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother was, too. I still thought that they should all be spending a great deal more time with me. So one day I decided I’d run away, thereby forcing them to worry about me, and then act like parents.”

  She smiled as if at the memory, but it wasn’t a happy smile. And later Dominik would have to reflect on how and why he knew the difference between her smiles, God help him. As if he’d made a study against his will, when he wasn’t entirely paying attention.

  “I rode the buses around and around, well into the evening,” she said with that same smile. “And they came together, just as I’d hoped, but only so they could blame each other for what a disaster I was. Within an hour of my return they’d agreed to send me off to boarding school for the summer, so others could deal with me and they wouldn’t have to do it themselves.”

  “I understand that not all parents are good ones,” Dominik said, his voice low. “But I would caution you against complaining about your disengaged, yet present, parents while in the presence of a man who had none. Ever. Disengaged or otherwise.”

  “I’m not complaining about them,” Lauren replied quietly. “They are who they are. I’m telling you how I came to be at a very posh school for summer. It was entirely filled with children nobody wanted.”

  “Pampered children, then. I can assure you no orphanage is posh.”

  “Yes. Someone, somewhere, paid handsomely to send us all to that school. But it would have been hard to tell a lonely nine-year-old, who knew she was at that school because her parents didn’t want anything to do with her, that she was pampered. Mostly, I’m afraid, I was just scared.”

  Dominik stared back at her, telling himself he felt nothing. Because he ought to have felt nothing. He had taught her that sensation was real and that she could feel it, but he wanted none of it himself. No sensation. No emotion.

  None of this scraping, aching thing that lived in him now that he worried might crack his ribs open from the inside. Any minute now.

  “They taught us manners,” Lauren told him in the same soft, insistent tone. “Comportment. Dancing. And it all seemed as stupid to me as I’m sure it does to you right now, but I will tell you this. I have spent many an evening since that summer feeling out of place. Unlike everyone else my age at university, for example, with all their romantic intrigue. These days I’m often trotted off to a formal affair where I am expected to both act as an emblem for Combe Industries as well as blend into the background. All at once. And do you know what allows me to do that? The knowledge that no matter what, I can handle myself in any social situation. People agonize over which fork to choose and which plate is theirs while I sit there, listening to conversations I shouldn’t be hearing, ready and able to do my job.”

  “Heaven forbid anything prevent you from doing your job.”

  “I like my job.”

  “Do you? Or do you like imagining that your Mr. Combe cannot make it through a day without you?” He shrugged when she glared at him. “We are all of us dark creatures in our hearts, little red. Think of the story from the wolf’s point of view next time. Our Red Riding Hood doesn’t come off well, does she?”

  He thought she had quite a few things to say to that, but she nodded toward the silverware before them instead. “We’ll work from the outside in, and as we go we’ll work on appropriate dinner conversation at formal occasions, which does not include obsessive references to fairy tales.”

  Dominik couldn’t quite bring himself to tell her that he already knew how to handle a formal dinner, thank you. Not when she thought she was giving him a tool he could use to save himself, no less.

  Just as he couldn’t bring himself—allow himself—to tell her all those messy things that sloshed around inside him at the thought of her as a scared nine-year-old, abandoned by her parents and left to make manners her sword and shield.

  He showed her instead, pulling her onto his lap before one of the interminable courses and imparting his own lesson. Until they were both breathing too heavily to care that much whether they used the correct fork—especially when his fingers were so talented.

  He meant to leave the following day, but there was dancing, which meant he got to hold Lauren in his arms and then sweep her away upstairs to teach her what those bed posts were for. He meant to leave the day after that, but she’d had videos made of all the San Giacomo holdings.

  There was something every day. Presentations on all manner of topics. Lessons of every description, from comportment to conversation and b
ack again. Meetings with the unctuous, overly solicitous tailors, who he wanted to hate until they returned with beautiful clothes even he could tell made him look like the aristocrat he wasn’t.

  Which he should have hated—but couldn’t, not when Lauren looked at him as if he was some kind of king.

  He needed to get out of there, but he had spent an entire childhood making up stories about his imaginary family in his head. And he didn’t have it in him to walk away from the first person he’d ever met who could tell him new stories. Real stories, this time.

  Because Lauren also spent a significant part of every day teaching him the history of the San Giacomos, making sure he knew everything there was to know about their rise to power centuries ago. Their wealth and consequence across the ages.

  And how it had likely come to pass that a sixteen-year-old heiress had been forced to give up her illegitimate baby, whether she wanted to or not.

  He found that part the hardest to get his head around—likely because he so badly wanted to believe it.

  “You must have known her,” he said one day as summer rain danced against the windows where he stood.

  They were back in the library, surrounded by all those gleaming, gold-spined books that had never been put on their self-important shelves for a man like him, no matter what blood ran in his veins. Lauren sat with her tablet before her, stacks of photo albums arrayed on the table, and binders filled with articles on the San Giacomo family. All of them stories that were now his, she told him time and time again. And all those stories about a family that was now his, too.

  Dominik couldn’t quite believe in any of it.

  He’d spent his childhood thirsty for even a hint of a real story to tell about his family. About himself. Then he’d spent his adulthood resolved not to care about any of it, because he was making his own damned story.

  He couldn’t help thinking that this was all...too late. That the very thing that might have saved him as a child was little more than a bedtime story to him now, with about as much impact on his life.