No bread crumbs. No sharp teeth and wolves. No witches masquerading as friends, tucked up in enchanted cottages with monstrous roses and questionable pies.
No foreboding, no wicked spells.
There was only Lauren.
And she knew exactly what she wanted.
When she reached the clearing this time, she marched straight through it. There was no one lurking in the shadows on the front porch, but she hadn’t really expected there would be. She walked up, anyway, went straight to the front door and let herself in.
The cabin was just as she remembered it. Shockingly cozy and inviting, and entirely too nice. It was a clue, had she bothered to pay attention to it, that the man she’d come to find—her husband—wasn’t the mountain man she’d expected he would be.
Best of all, that same man sat before the fire now, watching her with eyes like rain.
“Turn around, Lauren,” he said, his voice like gravel. “If you leave now, you’ll make it back to the village before full dark. I wouldn’t want to be wandering around the woods at night. Not in those shoes. You have no idea what you might encounter.”
“I know exactly what I’ll find in these woods,” she replied. And she let her gaze go where it liked, from that too-long inky-black hair he’d never gotten around to cutting to her specifications to that stern mouth of his she’d felt on every inch of her body. “And look. There you are.”
He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“And yet I did. Without your permission. Much as you ran off from Combe Manor without so much as a hastily penned note.”
“I’m sure whatever mission you’re on now is just as important as the last one that brought you here to storm about in my forest,” he said, and something like temper flashed over his face—though it was darker. Much, much darker. “But I don’t care what your Mr. Combe—”
“He didn’t send me. I don’t work for him anymore, as a matter of fact.” She held his gaze and let the storm in it wash over her, too. “This is between you and me, Dominik.”
The air between them shifted. Tightened, somehow.
“There is no you and me.”
“You may have married me as a joke,” she said softly, “but you did marry me. That makes me your wife.”
“I need a wife about as much as I need a brother. I don’t do family, Lauren. Or jokes. I want nothing to do with any of it.”
“That is a shame.” She crossed her arms over her chest and she stared him down as if he didn’t intimidate her at all. “But I didn’t ask you if you needed a wife. I reminded you that you already have one.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
She smiled at him, and enjoyed it when he blinked at that as if it was a weapon she’d had tucked away in her arsenal all this time.
God, she hoped it was a weapon. Because she needed all of those she could find.
And she had no qualms about using each and every one she put her hands on.
“Here’s the thing, Dominik,” she said, and she wanted to touch him. She wanted to bury her face in the crook of his neck. She wanted to wake up with him tangled all around her. She wanted him, however she could get him. She wanted whatever a life with him looked like. “You taught me how to want. And don’t you see? What I want is you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“YOU CAN’T HAVE ME,” Dominik growled at her, because that was what he’d decided. It was what made sense. “I never was a toy for you to pick up and put down at will, Lauren. I assumed that was finally clear.”
And yet all he wanted to do was get his hands on her.
He knew he couldn’t allow that. Even if he was having trouble remembering the why of that at the moment, now that she was here. Right here, in front of him, where he’d imagined her no less than a thousand times a night since he’d left England.
But he didn’t. Because touching her—losing himself in all that pink and gold sweetness of hers—was where all of this had gone wrong from the start.
“I introduced you to sex, that’s all,” he said through gritted teeth, because he didn’t want to think about that introduction. The way she’d yielded completely, innocent and eager and so hot he could still feel it. As if he carried her inside him. “This is the way of things. You think it means more than it does. But I don’t.”
“I tested that theory,” she told him, and it landed on him like a punch, directly into his gut. “You told me I could walk into any pub in England and have whatever sex I wanted.”
“Lauren.” And he was surprised he didn’t snap a few teeth off, his jaw was so tight. “I would strongly advise you not to stand here in my cabin and brag to me about your sexual exploits.”
“Why would you care? If you don’t want me?” She smiled at him again, self-possessed and entirely too calm. “But no need to issue warnings or threats. I walked in, took a look around and left. I don’t want sexual exploits, Dominik. I told you. I want you.”
“No,” he growled, despite the way that ache in his chest intensified. “You don’t.”
“I assure you, I know my own mind.”
“Perhaps, but you don’t know me.”
And he didn’t wait for her to take that on board. He surged to his feet, prowling toward her, because she had to understand. She had to understand, and she had to leave, and he had to get on with spending the rest of his life trying to fit the pieces back together.
After she’d torn him up, crumpled him and left him in this mess in the first place.
Because you let her, the voice in him he’d tried to ignore since he’d met her—and certainly since he’d left her—chimed in.
“I thought at first it was the media attention that got to you, but you obviously don’t mind that. You’ve had it before. Why should this be any different?”
And she didn’t remind him of his lies of omission. They rose there between them like so much heat and smoke, and still, the only thing he could see was her.
“I don’t care about attention.” He wanted things he couldn’t have. He wanted to do something, but when he reached out his hand, all he did was fit it to her soft, warm cheek.
Just to remind himself.
And then he dropped his hand to his side, but that didn’t make it better, because she felt even better than he remembered.
“Dominik. I know that you feel—”
“You don’t know what I feel.” His voice was harsh, but his palm was on fire. As if touching her had branded him, and he was disfigured with it. And maybe it was the fact she couldn’t seem to see it that spurred him on. “You don’t have great parents, so you think you know, but you don’t. There’s no doubt that it’s your parents who are the problem, not you. You must know this.”
“They are limited people,” she said, looking taken aback. But she rallied. “I can’t deny that I still find it hurtful, but I’m not a little girl anymore. And to be honest, I think they’re the ones who are missing out.”
“That sounds very adult. Very mature. I commend you. But I’m not you. This is what I’m trying to tell you.” And then he said the thing he had always known, since he was a tiny child. The thing he’d never said out loud before. The thing he had never imagined he even needed to put into words, it was so obvious. “There’s something wrong with me, Lauren.”
Her eyes grew bright. And he saw her hands curl into fists at her sides.
“Oh, Dominik.” And he would remember the way she said his name. Long after she was gone, he would replay it again and again, something to warm him when the weather turned cold. It lodged inside him, hot and shining where his heart should have been. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing.”
“This is not opinion. This is fact.” He shook his head, harshly, when she made to reach for him. “I was six days old when I arrived in the orphanage. And brand-new babies never stay long in orphana
ges, because there are always those who want them. A clean slate. A new start. A child they can pretend they birthed themselves, if they want. But no one wanted me. Ever.”
She was still shaking her head, so fiercely it threatened the hair she’d put in that damned ponytail as if it was her mission to poke at him.
“Maybe the nuns are the ones who wanted you, Dominik. Did you ever think of that? Maybe they couldn’t bear to give you up.”
He laughed at that, though it was a hollow sound, and not only because her words had dislodged old memories he hadn’t looked at in years. The smiling face of the nun they’d called Sister Maria Ana, who had treated him kindly when he was little, until cancer stole her away when he was five. How had he forgotten that?
But he didn’t want to think about that now. The possibility that someone had been kind to him didn’t change the course of his life.
“Nobody wanted me. Ever. With one or two people in your life, even if they are your parents, this could be coincidence. Happenstance. But when I tell you that there is not one person on this earth who has ever truly wanted me, I am not exaggerating.” He shoved those strange old memories aside. “There’s something wrong with me inside, Lauren. And it doesn’t go anywhere. If you can’t see it, you will. In time. I see no point in putting us both through that.”
Because he knew that if he let her stay, if he let her do this, he would never, ever let her go. He knew it.
“Dominik,” she began.
“You showed me binders full of San Giacomos,” he growled at her. “Century upon century of people obsessed with themselves and their bloodlines. They cataloged every last San Giacomo ever born. But they threw me away. She threw me away.”
“She was sixteen,” Lauren said fiercely, her red cloak all around her and emotion he didn’t want to see wetting her cheeks. But he couldn’t look away. “She was a scared girl who did what her overbearing father ordered her to do, by all accounts. I’m not excusing her for not doing something later, when she could have. But you know that whatever else happened, she never forgot you. She knew your name and possibly even where you lived. I can’t speak for a dead woman, Dominik, but I think that proves she cared.”
“You cannot care for something you throw away like trash,” he threw at her.
And her face changed. It...crumpled, and he thought it broke his heart.
“You mean the way you did to me?” she asked.
“I left you before it was made perfectly obvious to you and the rest of the world that I don’t belong in a place like that. I’m an orphan. I was a street kid. I joined the army because I wanted to die for a purpose, Lauren. I never meant for it to save me.”
“All of that is who you were, perhaps,” she said with more of that same ferocity that worked in him like a shudder. “But now you are a San Giacomo. You are a self-made man of no little power in your own right. And you are my husband.”
And he didn’t understand why he moved closer to her when he wanted to step away. When he wanted—needed—to put distance between them.
Instead, his hands found their way to her upper arms and held her there.
He noticed the way she fit him, in those absurd shoes she wore just as well as when she was barefoot. The way her caramel-colored eyes locked to his, seeing far too much.
“I don’t have the slightest idea how to be a husband.”
“Whereas my experience with being a wife is so extensive?” she shot right back.
“I don’t—”
“Dominik.” And she seemed to flow against him until she was there against his chest, her head tipped back so there was nothing else in the whole of the world but this. Her. “You either love me or you don’t.”
He knew what he should say. If he could spit out the words he could break her heart, and his, and free her from this.
He could go back to his quiet life, here in the forest where no one could disappoint him and he couldn’t prove, yet again, how little he was wanted.
Dominik knew exactly what he should say.
But he didn’t say it.
Because she was so warm, and he had never understood how cold he was before she’d found him here. She was like light and sunshine, even here in the darkest part of the forest.
And he hadn’t gone with her to England because she was an emissary from his past. He certainly hadn’t married her because she could tell him things he could have found out on his own about the family that wanted to claim him all of a sudden.
The last time Dominik had done something he didn’t want to do, simply because someone else told him to do it, he’d been in the army.
He could tell himself any lie at all, if he liked—and Lord knew he was better at that by the day—but he hadn’t married this woman for any reason at all save one.
He’d wanted to.
“What if I do?” he demanded, his fingers gripping her—but whether to hold her close or keep her that crucial few inches away, he didn’t know. “What do either one of us know about love, of all things?”
“You don’t have to know a thing about love.” And she was right there before him, wrapping her arms around his neck as if she belonged there. And fitting into place as if they’d been puzzle pieces, all this time, meant to interlock just like this. “Think about fairy tales. Happy-ever-after is guaranteed by one thing and one thing only.”
“Magic?” he supplied. But his hands were moving. He tugged the elastic from her gleaming blond hair and tossed it aside. “Terrible spells, angry witches and monsters beneath the bed?”
“What big worries you have,” she murmured, and she was smiling again. And he found he was, too.
“All the better to save you with, little red,” he said. “If you’ll let me.”
“I won’t.” She brushed his mouth with hers. “Why don’t we save each other?”
“I don’t know how.”
“You do.” And when he frowned at her, she held him even closer, until that ache in his chest shifted over to something sweeter. Hotter. And felt a lot like forever. “Happy-ever-after is saving each other, Dominik. All it takes is a kiss.”
And this was what she’d been talking about in that sprawling house in Yorkshire.
Hope. The possibility of happiness.
Things he’d never believed in before. But it was different, with her.
Everything was different with her.
So he gathered her in his arms, and he swept her back into the grandest kiss he could give her, right there in their enchanted cottage in the deep, dark woods.
And sure enough, they lived happily ever after.
Just like a fairy tale.
* * *
Twelve years later Dominik stood on a balcony that overlooked the Grand Canal in Venice as night fell on a late summer evening. The San Giacomo villa was quiet behind him, though he knew it was a peace that wouldn’t last.
His mouth curved as he imagined the chaos his ten-year-old son could unleash at any moment, wholly unconcerned about the disapproving glares of the ancient San Giacomos who lurked in every dour portrait that graced the walls of this place.
To say nothing of his five-year-old baby girls, a set of the twins that apparently ran in the family, that neither he nor Lauren had anticipated when she’d fallen pregnant the second time.
But now he couldn’t imagine living without them. All of them—and well did he remember that he was the man who had planned to live out his days as a hermit, all alone in his forest.
The truth was, he had liked his own company. But he exulted in the family he and Lauren had made together.
The chaos and the glory. The mad rush of family life, mixed in with that enduring fairy tale he hadn’t believed in at first—but he’d wanted to. Oh, how he’d wanted to. And so he’d jumped into, feet first, willing to do anything as long as she was with him.
Because sh
e was the only one who had ever wanted him, and she wanted him still.
And he wanted her right back.
Every damned day.
They had built their happy-ever-after, brick by brick and stone by stone, with their own hands.
He had met his sister shortly after Lauren had come and found him in the forest. Pia had burst into that hotel suite in Athens, greeted him as if she’d imagined him into being herself—or had known of him, somehow, in her heart of hearts all this time—until he very nearly believed it himself.
And he’d finally met his brother—in the flesh—sometime after that.
After a perfectly pleasant dinner in one of the Combe family residences—this one in New York City—he and Matteo had stood out on one of the wraparound terraces that offered a sweeping view of all that Manhattan sparkle and shine.
“I don’t know how to be a brother,” Dominik had told him.
“My sister would tell you that I don’t, either,” Matteo had replied.
And they’d smiled at each other, and that was when Dominik had started to believe that it might work. This strange new family he would have said he didn’t want. But that he had, anyway.
His feelings about Matteo had been complicated, but he’d realized quickly that most of that had to do with the fact Lauren had admired him so much and for so long. Something Matteo put to rest quickly, first by marrying the psychiatrist who had been tasked with his anger management counseling, who also happened to be pregnant with his twin boys. But then he’d redeemed himself entirely in Dominik’s eyes by telling Lauren that Combe Industries couldn’t function without her.
And then hiring her back, not as his assistant, but as a vice president.
Dominik couldn’t have been prouder. And as Lauren grew into her new role in the company she’d given so much of her time and energy, he entertained himself by taking on the duties of the eldest San Giacomo. He found that his brother and sister welcomed the opportunity to allow him to be the face of their ancient family. A role he hadn’t realized anyone needed to play, but one it shocked him to realize he was...actually very good at.
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