Page 27 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

All of them not the least bit her. Not the person she was or had ever been.

But maybe she was tired of Lauren Isadora Clarke. And everything she’d made herself become while she was so busy not feeling things.

Like this. Like him.

“It’s not a real proposal until there’s a kiss, Lauren,” Dominik told her. Gruffly, she thought. “Even you must know this.”

“Isn’t it enough that I promised you a wedding night?” she asked, and she might have been horrified at the way her voice cracked at that, but there were so many horrors to sift through. Too many.

And all of them seemed to catch fire and burn brighter as she knelt there between his legs, not sure if she felt helpless or far more alarming, alive.

Alive straight through, which only made it clear that she never had been before. Not really.

“Kiss me, little red,” he ordered her, almost idly. But there was no mistaking the command in his voice all the same. “Keep your promise.”

His voice might have been soft, but it was ruthless. And his gray eyes were pitiless.

And he didn’t seem to mind in the least when she scowled at him, because it was the only thing she knew how to do.

“Now, please,” he murmured in that same demanding way. “Before you hurt my feelings.”

She doubted very much that his feelings had anything to do with this, but she didn’t say that. She didn’t want to give him more opportunity to comment on hers. Or call her a robot again.

“I don’t understand why you would want to kiss someone who doesn’t wish to kiss you,” she threw at him in desperation.

“I wouldn’t.” Those gray eyes laughed at her. “But that description doesn’t apply to either one of us, does it?”

“One of us is under duress.”

“One of us, Lauren, is a liar.”

She could feel the heat that told her that her cheeks were red, and she had the terrible notion that meant he was right. And worse, that he could see it all over her face.

She had no idea.

In a panic, she mimicked him, hooking one hand around the hard column of his neck and pulling his mouth to hers.

This man who had agreed to marry her. To pretend, anyway, and there was no reason that should work in her the way it did, like a powder keg on the verge of exploding. Like need and loss and yearning, tangled all together in an angry knot inside her.

And she was almost used to this now. The delirious slide, the glorious fire, of their mouths together.

He let her kiss him, let her control the angle and the depth, and she made herself shiver as she licked her way into his mouth. All the while telling herself that she didn’t like this. That she didn’t want this.

And knowing with every drugging slide of his tongue against hers that he’d been right all along.

She was a liar.

Maybe that was why, when his hands moved to trace their way down her back, she moaned at the sensation instead of fighting it. And when he pulled her blouse from the waistband of her formal trousers, she only made a deeper noise, consumed with the glory of his mouth.

And the way he kissed her and kissed her, endless and intoxicating.

But then his bare hand was on her skin, moving around to the front of her and then finally—finally, as if she’d never wanted anything more when she’d never wanted it in the first place, when it had never occurred to her to imagine such a thing—closing over the swell of one breast.

And everything went white around the edges.

Her breast seemed to swell, filling his palm, with her nipple high and hard.

And every time he moved his palm, she felt it like another deep lick—