Page 25 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

CHAPTER SEVEN

LAURENDIDN’TUNDERSTAND anything that was happening.

She had been astounded when Matteo had suggested marriage, so offhandedly as if it was perfectly normal to run around marrying strangers on a whim because he thought that would look better in some theoretical tabloid.

“Marry him,” he’d said, so casually, from the far side of the world. “You are a decent, hardworking sort and you’ve been connected to the family without incident for years.”

“I think you mean employed by the family and therefore professional.”

“You can take him in hand. Make sure he’s up to the task. And by the time the shock fades over my mother’s scandalous past, you’ll have made him everything he needs to be to take his place as a San Giacomo.”

“Will this new role come with combat pay?” she’d asked, with more heat than she normally used with her boss, no matter what was going on. But then, she wasn’t normally dispatched into the hinterland, made to hike, and then kissed thoroughly and repeatedly. She was...not herself. “Or do you expect me to give up my actual life for the foreseeable future for my existing salary, no questions asked?”

She never spoke to Matteo that way. But he didn’t normally react the way he had then, either, with nothing but silence and what looked very much like sadness on his face. It made Lauren wish she hadn’t said anything.

Not for the first time, she wondered exactly what had gone on between Matteo and the anger management consultant the Combe Industries board of directors had hired in a transparent attempt to take Matteo down. He’d gone off with her to Yorkshire, been unusually unreachable and then had set off on a round-the-world tour of all the Combe Industries holdings.

A less charitable person might wonder if he was attempting to take the geographic tour.

“You can name your price, Lauren,” he said after what felt like a very long while, fraught with all the evidence she’d ever needed that though they might work very closely together, they had no personal relationship. Not like that. “All I ask is that you tame this brother of mine before we unleash him on the world. The board will not be pleased to have more scandal attached to the Combe name. And the least we can do is placate them a little.”

And she’d agreed to ask Dominik, because what else could she do? For all Dominik’s snide commentary, the truth was that she admired Matteo. He was not his father, who had always been willing to take the low road—and usually had. Matteo had integrity, something she knew because no matter how she might have longed for him to see her, he never had. He treated her as his personal assistant, not as a woman. It was why she felt safe while she wore her outrageously feminine heels. It was why she felt perfectly happy dedicating herself to him.

If he had looked at her the way Dominik did, even once, she would never have been able to work for him at all. She would never have been able to sort out what was an appropriate request and what wasn’t, and would have lost herself somewhere in the process.

She’d been reeling from that revelation when she’d walked out to pitch the marriage idea, fully expecting that Dominik would laugh at the very notion.

But he hadn’t.

And she’d meant to present the whole thing as a very dry and dusty sort of business proposition, anyway. Just a different manner of merger, that was all. But instead of a board meeting of sorts, she was knelt down between his legs, gazing up at him from a position that made her whole body quiver.

And unless she was very much mistaken, he had actually agreed to marry her.

For a price.

Because with this man, there was always a price.

How lucky you want so badly to pay it,an insinuating, treacherous voice from deep inside her whispered. Whatever it is.

“What kind of price?” Lauren frowned at him as if that could make them both forget that she was kneeling before him like a supplicant. Or a lover. And that he was touching her as if at least one of those things was a foregone conclusion. “I have already promised to kiss you whenever you like. What more could you want?”

His palm was so hard and hot against the side of her face. She felt it everywhere, and she knew that seemingly easy touch was responsible for the flames she could feel licking at her. All over her skin, then deeper still, sweet and hot in her core.

Until she throbbed with it. With him.

“Do you think there are limits to what a man might want?” he asked quietly, and his voice was so low it set her to shattering, like a seismic event. Deep inside, where she was already molten and more than a little afraid that she might shake herself apart.

“You’re talking about sex again,” she said, and thought she sounded something like solemn. Or despairing. And neither helped with all that unbearable heat. “I don’t know how many ways I can tell you—”

“That you are not sexual, yes, I am aware.” He moved his thumb, dragging it gently across her lower lip, and his mouth crooked when she hissed in a breath. His eyes blazed when goose bumps rose along her neck and ran down her arms, and his voice was little more than a growl when he spoke again. “Not sexual at all.”

Something in the way he said that made her frown harder, though she already knew it was futile. And it only seemed to make that terrible, knowing blaze in his gray eyes more pronounced.

And much, much hotter. Inside her, where she still couldn’t tell if she hated it—or loved it.

“What do you want from me?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

And she thought that whatever happened, she would always remember the way he smiled at her then, half wolf and all man. That it was tattooed inside her, branded into her flesh, forever a part of her. Whether she liked it or not.