Page 13 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

CHAPTER FOUR

LAURENWASBAFFLED.

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.