Page 32 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

And maybe his voice wasn’t particularly, dangerously quiet. Maybe it just sounded like that in her head, next to all that roaring.

“Everyone has all this sex,” she said, the words crashing through her and out of her. She couldn’t control them. She couldn’t do anything but throw them across the room like bombs. “People walk around consumed by it, and I want to know why. I don’t just mean I want you to take my virginity, though you will. And that’s fine.”

“I’m delighted to hear you’re on board,” he said drily, though it was the arrested sort of gleam in his eyes that she couldn’t seem to look away from. Because it made her feel as if a great wind was blowing, directly at her, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “No one likes an unenthusiastic deflowering. Gardening metaphors aside, it’s really not all that much fun. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never had the pleasure. Or any pleasure, I can only assume.”

“I have no idea what you’re on about.” He looked even more taken aback by that, and she moved toward him—then thought better of it, as putting herself in arm’s reach of this man had yet to end well for her. Even if that was her current goal. “I want to understand why people yearn. I want to understand what all the fuss is about. Why people—you among them—look at me like something’s wrong with me if I say I’m not interested in it. Can you do that, Dominik?”

Maybe it was the first time she’d called him by his name. She wasn’t sure, but she felt as if it was. And he looked at her as if she’d struck him.

“I’ve spent my whole life never quite understanding the people around me.” And Lauren knew she would be horrified—later—that her voice broke then, showing her hand. Telling him even more than she’d wanted. “Never really getting the joke. Or the small, underlying assumptions that people make about the world because of these feelings they cart about with them wherever they go. I never got those, either. Just once I want to know what the big secret is. I want to know what all the songs are about. I want to know what so many parents feel they need to protect their children from. I want to know.”

“Lauren...”

And she didn’t recognize that look on his face then. Gone was the mocking, sardonic gleam in his eyes. The theatrics, the danger. The challenge.

She was terribly afraid that what she was seeing was pity, and she thought that might kill her.

“I know this is all a game to you,” she said hurriedly, before he could crush her, and had that out-of-body feeling again. As if she was watching herself from far away, and couldn’t do a single thing to stop the words that kept pouring out of her mouth. “Maybe you have your own dark reasons for wanting to do what Mr. Combe wants, and I don’t blame you. Family dynamics are difficult enough when you’ve known the players all your life. But you said that there could be certain things that were between the two of us. That are only ours. And I want this to be one of them.” Her heart was in her throat and she couldn’t swallow it down. She could only hope she didn’t choke on it. “I want to know why.”

He straightened then, and she couldn’t read the expression he wore. Arrested, still. But there was a different light in those near-silver eyes of his. He held out his hand, that gray gaze steady on hers, as if that alone could hold her up.

She believed it.

Lauren was tempted to call the way he was looking at her kind. And she had absolutely no idea why that should make her want to cry. Or how she managed to keep from doing just that when her sight blurred.

“Come,” Dominik said, his voice gruff and sure as if he was already reciting his vows before the vicar. And more shocking by far, as if those vows meant something to him. “Marry me, little red, and I will teach you.”