Page 24 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

And he was only a man. Not a very good one, as he’d acknowledged earlier. There was no possibility of issuing such an order without imagining all the other things she could do once she was there.

So he did. And had to shift slightly where he sat to accommodate the hungriest part of him.

“You agreed that any marriage between us will be a sham,” she was saying, her voice a touch too husky for someone so dedicated to appearing unmoved. “You used that very word. It will be a publicity stunt, and only a publicity stunt, as I said.”

“Whatever the marriage is or isn’t, it begins right here.” He ignored the demands that clamored inside him, greedy and still drunk on his last taste of her. “Where there is no public. No paparazzi. No overbearing employer who cannot stir himself to greet his long-lost brother in person.”

She started to argue that but subsided when he shook his head.

“There are only two people who ever need to know how this marriage began, Lauren. And we are both right here, all alone, tucked away on an abandoned office floor where no one need ever be the wiser.”

She rolled her eyes. “We can tell them there was kneeling all around, if that’s really what you need.”

“We can tell them anything you like, but I want to see a little effort. A little care, here between the two of us. A pretty, heartfelt proposal. Come now, Lauren.” And he smiled at her then, daring her. “A man likes to be seduced.”

Her cheeks had gone pale while he spoke, and as he watched, they flooded with bright new color.

“You don’t want to be seduced. You want to humiliate me.”

“Six of one, half dozen of another.” He jutted his chin toward the floor again. “You need to demonstrate your commitment. Or how else will I know that my heart is safe in your hands?”

The color on her cheeks darkened, and her eyes flashed with temper. And he liked that a hell of a lot more than her robot impression.

“No one is talking about hearts, Mr. James,” she snapped at him. “We’re talking about damage control. Optics. PR.”

“You and your Mr. Combe may be talking about all of those things,” he said and shrugged. “But I am merely a hermit from a Hungarian hovel, too long-haired to make sense of your complicated corporate world. What do I know of such things? I’m a simple man, with simple needs.” He reached up and dramatically clasped his chest, never shifting his gaze from hers. “If you want me, you must convince me. On your knees, little red.”

She made a noise of sheer, undiluted frustration that nearly made him laugh. Especially when it seemed to make her face that much brighter.

He watched as she forced her knees to unlock. She took a breath in, then let it out. Slowly, as if it hurt, she took a step toward him. Then another.

And by the time she moved past his feet, then insinuated herself right where he wanted her, there between his outstretched legs, he didn’t have the slightest urge to laugh any longer. Much less when she sank down on her knees before him, just as he’d imagined in all that glorious detail.

She knelt as prettily as she did everything else, and she filled his head as surely as his favorite Hungarian palinka. He couldn’t seem to look away from her, gold and pink and that wide caramel gaze, peering up at him from between his own legs.

The sight of her very nearly unmanned him.

And he would never know, later, how he managed to keep his hands to himself.

“Dominik James,” she said softly, looking up at him with eyes wide, filled with all those emotions she claimed she didn’t feel—but he did, as if she was tossing them straight into the deepest part of him, “will you do me the honor of becoming my husband? For a while?”

He didn’t understand why something in him kicked against that qualification. But he ignored it.

He indulged himself by reaching forward and fitting his palm to the curve of her cheek. He waited until her lips parted because he knew she felt it, too, that same heat that roared in him. That wildfire that was eating him alive.

“But of course,” he said, and he had meant to sound sardonic. Darkly amused. But that wasn’t how it came out, and he couldn’t think of a way to stop it. “I can think of nothing I would like to do more than marry a woman I hardly know to serve the needs of a brother I have never met in the flesh, to save the reputation of a family that tossed me aside like so much trash.”

There was a sheen in her gaze that he wanted to believe was connected to that strangely serious thing in him, not laughing at all. And the way her lips trembled, just slightly.

Just enough to make the taste of her haunt him all over again.

“I...I can’t tell if that’s a yes or no.”

“It’s a yes, little red,” he said, though there was no earthly reason that he should agree to any of this.

There was no reason that he should even be here, so far away from the life he’d carved out to his specifications. The life he had fought so hard to win for himself.

But Lauren had walked into his cabin, fit too neatly into the chair that shouldn’t have been sitting there, waiting for her, and now he couldn’t seem to keep himself from finding out if she fit everywhere else, too.

A thought that was so antithetical to everything he was and everything he believed to be true about himself that Dominik wasn’t sure why he didn’t trust her away from him and leave. Right now.

But he didn’t.

Worse, he didn’t want to.

“It’s a yes,” he said, his voice grave as he betrayed himself, and for no reason, “but I’m afraid, as in most things, there will be a price. And you will be the one to pay it.”