Page 34 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

She held his gaze, folded her hands in front of her and inclined her head.

Giving him what he wanted.

And the same demon that had spurred him on from the start—pushing him to walk out onto that porch and start all of this in the first place—sat up inside him, clearly not as intimidated by a stately library and a grand old house the way he was.

“What’s this?” he asked quietly. “Is that all it took to tame you, little red? A ring on your finger and a few vows in front of the vicar? That’s all that was required to make you soft? Yielding? Obedient?”

She made a sound that could as easily have been a cough as a laugh. “I am not certain I would call myself any of those things, no matter what jewelry I wear on my fingers. But I agreed to the wedding night. And...whatever else. I have every intention of going through with it.”

“You make it sound so appealing.” He eyed her, not sure if he was looking for her weaknesses or better yet, the places she was likely to be most sensitive. “You could do worse than a little softness. Yielding will make it sweeter for the both of us. And obedience, well...”

He grinned at that, as one image after the next chased through his head.

“I’ve never been much good at that, either, I’m afraid.” She said it with such confidence, tipping her chin up to go with it. And more than that, pride. “If you’re looking for obedience, I’m afraid you’re in for some disappointment.”

“You cannot truly believe you are not obedient.” He moved toward her, leaving the window—and its view of the ruins of the mills that had built this place—behind him. “You obey one man because he pays you. What will it take, I wonder, for you to obey your husband with even a portion of that dedication?”

And he had the distinct pleasure of watching her shiver, goose bumps telling him her secrets as they rippled to life on her skin.

He was so hard he thought it might hurt him.

Dominik crossed the vast expanse of the library floor until he was in front of her, and then he kept moving, wandering in a lazy circle around her as if she was on an auction block and he was the buyer.

Another image that pulsed in him like need.

“I asked you to teach me.” And he could hear all the nerves crackling in her voice. As obvious as the goose bumps down the length of her arms. “Does that come with extra doses of humiliation or is that merely an add-on extra?”

“It’s my lesson to teach, Lauren. Why don’t you stop trying to top from the bottom?”

He’d made a full circle around her then, and faced her once more. And he reveled in the look on her face. Wariness and expectation. That sweet pink flush.

And a certain hectic awareness in her caramel-colored eyes.

She was without doubt the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. And she was his.

She had made herself his.

“What do you want me to do?” Lauren asked, her voice the softest he’d ever heard it.

He reached out to smooth his hand over all her gleaming blond hair, still pulled back in that sleek, professional ponytail. He considered that tidy ponytail part of her armor.

And he wanted none of that armor between them. Not tonight.

“It’s time to play Rapunzel,” he told her. When she only stared back at him, he tugged on the ponytail, just sharp enough to make her hitch in a breath. “Let down your hair, little red.”

He watched the pulse in her throat kick into high gear. Her flush deepened, and he was fairly certain she’d moved into holding her breath.

But she obeyed him all the same, reaching back to tug the elastic out of her hair. When it was loose she ran her free hand through the mass of it, letting it fall where it would, thick and gold and smelling of apples.

She kept saying she didn’t believe in fairy tales, but Dominik was sure he’d ended up in the midst of one all the same. And he knew the price of taking a bite out of a sweet morsel like Lauren, a golden-haired princess as innocent as she was sweet to look upon, but he didn’t care. Bake him into a pie, turn him into stone—he meant to have this woman.

He made a low, rumbling sound of approval, because with her hair down she looked different. Less sharp. Less sleek. More accessible. The hair tumbled over her shoulders and made her seem...very nearly romantic.

Dominik remembered the things he’d promised her, and that ache in him grew sharper and more insistent by the second, so he simply bent and scooped her up into his arms.

She let out the breath she’d been holding in a kind of gasp, but he was already moving. He held her high against his chest, a soft, sweet weight in his arms, and after a startled moment she snuck her arms around his neck.

And that very nearly undid him.