Page 26 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

“What I want from you, little red, is a wedding night.”

That was another brand, another scar. And far more dangerous than before.

Lauren’s throat was almost too dry to work. She wasn’t sure it would. “You mean...?”

“I mean in the traditional sense, yes. With all that entails.”

He shifted, and she had never felt smaller. In the sense of being delicate. Precious, something in her whispered, though she knew that was fanciful. And worse, foolish.

Dominik smoothed his free hand over her hair, and let it rest at the nape of her neck. And the way he held her face made something in her do more than melt.

She thought maybe it sobbed.

Or she did.

“Find a threshold, and I will carry you over it,” he told her, his voice low and intent. And the look in his gray eyes so male, very nearly possessive, it made her ache. “I will lay you down on a bed and I will kiss you awhile, to see where it goes. And all I need from you is a promise that you will not tell me what you do and do not like until you try it. That’s all, Lauren. What do you have to lose?”

And she couldn’t have named the things she had to lose, because they were all the one thing—they were all her—and she was sure he would take them, anyway.

He would take everything.

Maybe she’d known that from the moment she’d seen the shadows become a man, there in that clearing so far from the rest of the world. There in those woods that had taunted her from the first, whispering of darkness and mystery in a thousand ways she hadn’t wanted to hear.

Maybe it had always been leading straight here.

But between the heat of his hands and that shivering deep inside her, she couldn’t seem to mind it as much as she should have.

As much as she suspected she would, once she survived this. If she survived this.

She should get up right this minute. She should move herself out of danger—out of arm’s reach. She should tell Dominik she didn’t care what he did with his newfound name and fortune, just as she should ring Matteo back and tell him she had no intention of marrying a stranger on command.

She knew she should do all those things. She wanted to do all those things.

But instead, she shivered. And in that moment, there at his feet with all his focus and intent settled on her, she surrendered.

If surrender was a cliff, Lauren leaped straight off it, out into nothing. She hadn’t done anything so profoundly foolish since she was nine years old and had thought she could convince her parents to pay more attention to her by acting out. She’d earned herself instead an unpleasant summer in boarding school.

But surrendering here, to Dominik, didn’t feel like that. It didn’t feel like plummeting down into sharp rocks.

It felt far more like flying.

“I will give you a wedding night,” she heard herself agree, her voice very stern and matter-of-fact, as if that could mask the fact that she was capitulating. As if she could divert his attention from the great cliff she’d just flung herself over. “But that’s all.”

“Perhaps we will leave these intimate negotiations until after the night in question,” Dominik said, that undercurrent of laughter in his voice. “You may find you very much want a honeymoon, little red. Who knows? Perhaps even an extended one. This may come as a surprise to you, but there are some women who would clamor for the opportunity to while away some time in my bed.”

Wedding nights. Honeymoons. Time in bed. This was all a farce. It had to be.

But Lauren was on her knees in the offices of Combe Industries, and she had just proposed marriage to a man she’d only met this morning.

So perhaps farce wasn’t quite the right word to describe what was happening.

Something traitorous inside her wanted to lean in closer, and that terrified her, so she took it as an opportunity to pull away. Cliff or no cliff.

Except he didn’t let her.

That hand at her nape held her fast, and something about that...lit her up. It was as if she didn’t know what she was doing any longer. Or at all. But maybe he did.

And suddenly she was kneeling up higher, her hands flat on his thighs, her face tilted toward his in a manner she could have called all kinds of names.