Page 31 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

And she was still standing right where he’d left her when she heard the water go on. Frozen solid at the edge of the counter with her hands in fists, curled up so tight her nails were digging into her palms.

She made herself uncurl her fingers, one at a time. She made herself breathe, shoving back the temper and the fury until she could see what was beneath it.

And see that once again, he was right. It was fear.

Not of him. But of herself.

And how very much she wanted to see, at last, what it was she’d been missing all this time.

That was the thought that had kept sneaking into her head over the course of the long night.

She’d hardly slept, there on that couch in her office where she spent more time than she ever had in the flat she shared with Mary. And Lauren had always prided herself on not feeling the things that others did. She’d congratulated herself on not being dragged into the same emotional quagmires they always were. It made her better at doing her job. It made it easier to navigate the corporate world.

But Dominik had forced her to face the fact that she could feel all kinds of things, she just...hadn’t.

Lauren had spent so long assuring herself she didn’t want the things she couldn’t feel. Or couldn’t have. Her parents’ love, the happy families they made without her, the sorts of romantic and sexual relationships all her friends and colleagues were forever falling in and out of with such abandon. She’d told anyone who asked that she wasn’t built for those sorts of entanglements.

Secretly, she’d always believed she was above them. That she was better than all that mess and regret.

But one day of kissing Dominik James on demand and she was forced to wonder—if it wasn’t about better or worse, but about meeting someone who made her feel things she hadn’t thought she could, where did that leave her except woefully inexperienced? And frozen in amber on a shelf of her own making?

Lauren didn’t like that thought at all. She ran her hands over her sensible shift dress, her usual office wear, and tried to pretend that she wasn’t shaking.

But what if you melted? whispered a voice deep inside her that she’d never heard before, layered with insinuation and something she was terribly afraid might be grief. What if you let Dominik melt you as he pleased?

She let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. And she swayed on her feet, yet knew full well it wasn’t because of the skyscraper height of her shoes.

And she entertained a revolutionary thought. If she had to do this, anyway—if she was going to marry this man, and stay married to him for as long as it took to ride out the public’s interest in yet another family scandal—shouldn’t she take it as an opportunity?

She already knew that Dominik could make her feel things that she never had before. And yes, that was overwhelming. A mad, wild whirl that she hardly knew how to process. Especially when she’d been certain, all her life, that she wasn’t capable of such things.

Maybe she didn’t know how to want. But it had never occurred to her before now that she hadn’t been born that way. That maybe, just maybe, that was because no one had ever wanted her—especially the people who should have wanted her the most.

She didn’t know why Dominik wanted to play these games with her, but he did. He clearly did, or he wouldn’t be here. Lauren was persuasive, but she knew full well she couldn’t have forced that man to do a single thing he didn’t want to do.

So why shouldn’t she benefit, too?

She had spent a lot of time and energy telling herself that she didn’t care that she was so clearly different from everyone else she met. That she was somehow set apart from the rest of the human race, unmoved by their passions and their baser needs. But what if she wasn’t?

What if she wasn’t an alien, after all?

That was what one of her kissing experiments had called her when she had declined his offer to take their experiment in a more horizontal direction. Among other, less savory names and accusations.

Just as Dominik had called her a robot.

What if she...wasn’t?

What if she melted, after all?

Lauren waited until he reemerged from his bedchamber, dressed in a crisp, dark suit that confused her, it was so well-made. His hair was tamed, pushed back from his face, and he’d even shaved, showing off the cut line of his ruthlessly masculine jaw. He looked like what he was—the eldest son of the current generation of San Giacomos. But she couldn’t concentrate on any of the surprisingly sophisticated male beauty he threw around him like light, because she knew that if she didn’t say what she wanted right here and now, she never would.

“I will give you a wedding night,” she told him.

“So we have already agreed,” he said in that silky way of his that made her whole body turn to jelly. And her stomach doing flips inside her didn’t exactly help. “Is this a renegotiation of terms?”

“If it takes more than one night, that’s all right,” she forced herself to tell him, though it made her feel queasy. And light-headed. Especially when he stopped tugging at his shirt cuffs and transferred all his considerable attention to her. “I want to learn.”

“Learn what?”