And she had no time to recover from that.
Because that was when the self-satisfied newscaster on the television screen started talking about who Dominik James really was.
“We’ve just been made aware that Dominik James is not merely the long-lost heir to two of Europe’s most prominent families,” the man said. “Our sources tell us he is also a self-made billionaire who ran his own security company until he sold it recently for what is believed to be a small fortune in its own right. Dominik himself has been widely sought after by celebrities and kings alike, and a number of governments besides.”
Then they flashed pictures of him, in case Lauren had somehow missed the implications. There were shots of Dominik in three-piece suits, his hair cropped close to his head, shaking hands with powerful, recognizable men. In and out of formal balls, charity events and boardrooms.
Nothing like a feral hermit at all.
“Oh, dear,” Dominik said when the newscast cut to some inane commercial, too much darkness in his voice. “Your table settings will not save you now, Lauren. It has all been a lie. I am not at all who you thought I was. Why don’t you tell me more about how happy you are?”
And Lauren remembered exactly why she’d decided emotion wasn’t for her. She had been nine years old and sent off to a terrifying stone building filled with strangers. She’d stayed awake the whole of that first night, sobbing into her pillow so her roommate didn’t hear her.
Since then, she’d forgotten that these terrible emotions could sit on a person like this. Crushing her with their weight. Suffocating her, yet never quite killing her.
Making her own heartbeat feel like an attack.
“You didn’t need me at all,” she managed to say, parts of her breaking apart on the inside like so many earthquakes, stitched together into a single catastrophe she wasn’t sure she would survive. No matter what he’d said about damage.
But she didn’t want to let him see it.
“No,” Dominik said, and there was something terrible there in his gray eyes that made her want to reach out to him. Soothe him somehow. But his voice was so cold. Something like cruel, and she didn’t dare. “I never needed you.”
“This was a game, then.” She didn’t know how she was speaking when she couldn’t feel her own face. Her outsides had gone numb, but that paralysis did not extend inside, where she was desperately trying to figure out what to do with all that raw upheaval before it broke her into actual pieces. “You were just playing a game. I can understand that you wanted to find out who your family really was. But you were playing the game with me.”
And maybe later she would think about how he stood there, so straight and tall and bruised somehow, that it made her ache. With that look on his face that made her want to cry.
But all she could do at the moment was fight to stay on her feet, without showing him how much he was hurting her. It was crucial that she swallow that down, hide it away, even as it threatened to cut her down.
“Life is damage, Lauren,” he said in that same dark, cold way. “Not hope. Not happiness. Those are stories fools tell to trick themselves into imagining otherwise. The true opiate of the masses. The reality is that people lie. They deceive you. They abandon you whenever possible, and may use you to serve their own ends. I never needed you to polish me. But you’re welcome all the same. Someday you’ll thank me for disabusing you of all these damaging notions.”
Her mobile rang again, Matteo’s name flashing on her screen.
And for the first time in as long as she could remember, Lauren didn’t want to answer. She wanted to fling her mobile across the room and watch it shatter against the wall. Part of her wanted very much to throw it at Dominik, and see if it would shatter that wall.
But she did neither.
She looked down at the mobile, let her thoughts turn violent, and when she looked up again Dominik was gone.
And she sat where she was for a very long time, there on a Combe family sofa before a television screen that repeated lie after lie about who she was until she was tempted to believe it herself.
Her mobile rang. It rang and rang, and she let it.
Outside, the endless summer day edged into night, and still Lauren sat where she was.
She felt hollowed out. And yet swollen somehow. As if all those unwieldy, overwhelming emotions she’d successfully locked away since she was a child had swept back into her, all at once, until she thought they might break her wide open.
It was the first time in almost as long that she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. How to fix this. Or even if she wanted to.
All she knew was that even now, even though Dominik had looked at her the way he had, and said those things to her, he was still the one she wanted to go to. It was his arms she longed for. His heat, his strength.
How could she want him to comfort her when he was the one who had hurt her?
But she wasn’t going to get an answer to that question.
Because when she went looking for him, determined to figure at least some part of this out, she discovered that Dominik hadn’t simply disappeared while he’d stood there before her.
He’d actually gone.
He’d packed up his things, clearly, as there was nothing to suggest he’d been here at all. And then he must have let himself out while she’d been sitting there in the library where he’d left her, trying her best not to fall apart.
And she didn’t have to chase after him to know he had no intention of coming back.
Because she had fallen for him, head over heels. But he had only ever been playing a game.
And Lauren would have to learn to live with that, too.
* * *
Lauren launched herself back into her life.
Her real life, which did not include mysterious men with hidden fortunes who lived off in the Hungarian woods. The life she had built all by herself, with no support from anyone.
The life that she was sure she remembered loving, or at least finding only a few months ago.
“You still love it,” she snapped at herself one morning, bustling around her flat on her way to work. “You love every last part of it.”
“You know when you start talking to yourself,” Mary said serenely, splashing the last of the milk into her tea, “that’s when the stress has really won.”
Lauren eyed her roommate and the empty jug of milk. “Is that your mobile ringing?”
And as Mary hurried out of the room, she told herself that she was fine. Good.
Happy and hopeful, as a matter of fact, because neither one of those things had anything to do with the surly, angry man who’d done exactly what she’d asked him to do and then left after staying much longer than she’d expected he would.
She had what she wanted. She knew what other people felt. She understood why they went to such great lengths to have sex whenever possible. And she was now free to go out on the pull whenever she pleased. She could do as Dominik had once suggested and take herself off to a local pub, where she could continue conducting the glorious experiment in her own sexual awakening. On her own.
He didn’t need her. And she certainly didn’t need him.
Lauren decided she’d get stuck into it, no pun intended, that very night.
She thought about it all day long. She made her usual assenting, supportive sounds during the video conference from wherever Matteo was in the world today, but what she was really thinking about was the debauchery that awaited her. Because Dominik had been no more than a means to an end, she told herself. Merely a stepping-stone to a glorious sensual feast.
She left work early—which was to say, on time for once—and charged into the first pub she saw.
Where she remained for the five minutes it took to look around, see all the men who weren’t Dominik and want to cry.
Because it turned out that
the only kind of awakening she wanted was with him.
Only and ever with him, something in her said with a kind of finality that she felt knit itself inside her like bone.
And maybe that was why, some six weeks after the tabloids had discovered Dominik—when all that bone had grown and gotten strong—she reacted to what ought to have been a perfectly simple request from Matteo the way she did.
“I’ll be landing in San Francisco shortly,” he told her from his jet.
“And then headed home, presumably,” she interjected. “To attend to your empire.”
“Yes, yes,” he said in a way that she knew meant, or perhaps not. “But what I need you to do is work on that marriage.”
Lauren had him on the computer monitor at her desk so she could work more easily on her laptop as he fired his usual instructions at her.
But she stopped what she was doing at that and swiveled in her chair, so she could gaze at him directly.
“Which marriage would that be?” she asked. Tartly, she could admit. “Your sister’s? You must know that she and her prince are playing a very specific cat and mouse game—”
Matteo was rifling through papers, frowning at something off screen, and she knew that his sister’s romantic life was a sore point for him. Was that why she’d brought it up? When she knew that wasn’t the marriage he meant?
“I mean your marriage, Lauren,” he said in that distracted way of his. She knew what that meant, too. That her boss had other, more important things on his mind. Something she had always accepted as his assistant, because that was her job—to fade into his background and make certain he could focus on anything he wished. But he was talking about her. And the marriage he’d suggested, and she’d actually gone ahead and done on his command. “There’s a gala in Rome next week. Do you think your husband is sufficiently tamed? Can he handle a public appearance?”
“Well, he’s not actually a trained bear,” she found herself replying with more snap in her voice than necessary. “And he was handling public appearances just fine before he condescended to come to Combe Manor. So no need to fear he might snap his chain and devour the guests, I think.”
“You can field the inevitable questions from paparazzi,” Matteo said, frowning down at the phone in his hand. The way he often did—so there was no reason for it to prick at Lauren the way it did. Maybe it is time you ask yourself what you wouldn’t do if your Mr. Combe asked it, Dominik had said. You may find the answers illuminating. But what about what Matteo wouldn’t do for her? Like pay attention to the fact she was an actual person, not a bit of machinery? “You know the drill.”
“Indeed I do. I know all the drills.”
She’d created the drills, for that matter. And she wasn’t sure why she wanted to remind Matteo of that.
“Just make sure it looks good,” Matteo said, and he looked at her then. “You know what I mean. I want a quiet, calm appearance that makes it clear to all that the San Giacomo scandal is fully handled. I want to keep the board happy.”
“And whether the brother you have yet to meet is happy with all these revelations about the family he never knew is of secondary interest, of course. Or perhaps of no interest at all.”
She was sure she’d meant to say that. But there it was, out there between them as surely as if she’d hauled off and slapped her boss in the face.
Matteo blinked, and it seemed to Lauren as if it took a thousand years for him to focus on her.
“Is my brother unhappy?” he asked. Eventually.
“You will have to ask him yourself,” she replied. And then, because she couldn’t seem to stop herself, “He’s your brother, not mine.”
“He is your husband, Lauren.”
“Do you think it is the role of a wife to report on her husband to her boss? One begins to understand why you remain unmarried.”
Something flashed over his face then, and she didn’t understand why she wasn’t already apologizing. Why she wasn’t hurrying to set things right.
“You knew the role when you took it.” Matteo frowned. “Forgive me, but am I missing something?”
And just like that, something in Lauren snapped.
“I am your personal assistant, Mr. Combe,” she shot at him. “That can and has included such things as sorting out your wardrobe. Making your travel arrangements. Involving myself more than I’d like in your personal life. But it should never have included you asking me to marry someone on your behalf.”
“If you had objections you should have raised them before you went ahead and married him, then. It’s a bit late now, don’t you think?”
“When have I ever been permitted to have objections in this job?” She shook her head, that cold look on Dominik’s face flashing through her head. And the way he’d said your master. “When have I ever said no to you?”
Matteo’s frown deepened, but not because he was having any kind of emotional response. She knew that. She could see that he was baffled.
“I value you, Lauren, if that’s what this is about. You know that.”
But Lauren wasn’t the same person she had been. It wasn’t the value Matteo assigned to her ability to do her job that mattered to her. Not anymore.
She could look back and see how all of this had happened. How she, who had never been wanted by anyone, threw herself into being needed instead. She’d known she was doing it. She’d given it her all. And she’d been hired by Matteo straight out of university, so it had felt like some kind of cure of all the things that ailed her to make sure she not only met his needs, but anticipated them, too.
She had thought they were a team. They had been, all these years. While he’d had to work around his father and now he was in charge.
But Dominik had taught her something vastly different than how to make herself indispensable to the person who paid her.
He had taught her how to value herself.
He’d taught her how to want. How to be wanted.
And in return, he’d taught her how to want more.
Because that was the trouble with allowing herself to want anything at all when she’d done without for so long. She wasn’t satisfied with half measures, or a life spent giving everything she had to a man who not only couldn’t return it, but whom she didn’t want anything from.
She didn’t want to sacrifice herself. It turned out that despite her choice of profession, she wasn’t a martyr. Or she didn’t want to be one.
Not anymore.
She knew what she wanted. Because she knew what it felt like now to be wanted desperately in return—no matter that Dominik might not have admitted that. She still knew.
He had stayed so long at Combe Manor. He had showed her things that she’d never dared dream about before. And he had taken her, over and over again, like a man possessed.
Like a man who feared losing her the same way she’d feared losing him.
If he hadn’t cared, he wouldn’t have snuck away. She knew that, too.
Lauren looked around the office that was more her home than her flat had ever been. The couch where she’d slept so many nights—including the night before her wedding. The windows that looked out over the city she’d loved so desperately not because she required its concrete and buildings, she understood now, but because it had been her constant. The one kind of parent that wouldn’t turn its back on her.
But she didn’t need any of these things any longer.
Lauren already had everything she needed. Maybe she always had, but she knew it now. And it was time instead to focus on what she wanted.
“And I have valued these years, Mr. Combe,” she said now, lifting her head and looking Matteo in the eye. “More than you know. But it’s time for me to move on.” She smiled when he started to protest. “Please consider this my notice. I will train my replacement. I’ll find her myself and make certain she is up to your standards
. Never fear.”
“Lauren.” His voice was kind then.
But it wasn’t his kindness she wanted.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But I can’t do this anymore.”
And that night she lay in her bed in the flat she paid for but hardly knew. She stared at her ceiling, and when that grew old, she moved to look out the window instead.
There was concrete everywhere. London rooftops, telephone wires and the sound of traffic in the distance. The home she’d made. The parent she’d needed. London had been all things to her, but in the end, it was only a city. Her favorite city, true. But if it was any more than that, she’d made it that way.
And she didn’t want that any longer. She didn’t need it. She craved...something else. Something different.
Something wild, a voice in her whispered.
Lauren thought about want. About need. About the crucial distinction between the two, and why it had taken her so long to see it.
And the next morning she set off for Hungary again.
By the time she made it to the mountain village nestled there at the edge of the forest it was well into the afternoon.
But she didn’t let that stop her. She left the hired car near the inn she’d stayed in on the last night of her life before she’d met Dominik and everything changed, and she began to walk.
She didn’t mind the growing dark, down there on the forest floor. The temperature dropped as she walked, but she had her red wrap and she pulled it closer around her.
The path was just as she remembered it, clear and easy to follow, if hard going against the high, delicate heels she wore. Because of course she wore them.
Lauren might have felt like a new woman. But that didn’t mean she intended to betray herself with sensible shoes.
On she walked.
And she thought about fairy tales. About girls who found their way into forests and thought they were lost, but found their way out no matter what rose up to stop them. Especially if what tried to stop them was themselves.
It was only a deep, dark forest if she didn’t know where she was going, she told herself. But she did. And all around her were pretty trees, fresh air and a path to walk upon.
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