Page 35 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

The sort of massive, theatrical staircase that had never made sense to him dominated the front hall, and he took the left side, heading upstairs.

“Oh, the guest suites are actually—” she began, shifting in his arms and showing him that frown of hers he liked far too much.

“Is anyone else here?”

He already knew the answer. She had told him the house was empty when they’d landed in Yorkshire. She’d told him a lot of information about the house, the grounds, the village, the distant moors and mountains—as if she’d believed what he truly wanted today was a travelogue and a lecture on the Combe family.

“You know that Mr. Combe is in Australia, and his sister, Pia—” She cut herself off, her gaze locking to his. “Well. She’s your sister, too, of course. And she is currently in the kingdom of Atilia.”

“The island.”

“Yes, it’s actually several islands in the Ionian Sea—”

“I don’t care.” He didn’t. Not about Matteo Combe or Pia Combe or anything at all but the woman in his arms. “How many beds are there in a house like this?”

“Fifteen,” she replied, her gaze searching his. Then widening as he smiled.

“Never fear, Lauren. I intend to christen them all.”

He took the first door he found, carrying her into a sprawling sitting room that led, eventually, into an actual bedroom. The bed itself was a massive thing, as if they’d chopped down trees that could have been the masts of ships to make all four posters, but Dominik found his normal disgust about class issues faded in the face of all the lovely possibilities.

There were just so many things an imaginative man could do with bedposts and a willing woman.

He set her down at the side of the bed and smiled wider when she had to reach out to steady herself. “Those shoes may well be the death of you. It is the shoes, is it not? And not something else entirely that leaves you so...unbalanced?”

She shot him a look, but she didn’t say anything. She reached down, fiddled with the buckle around one delicate ankle, then kicked her shoe off. She repeated it on the other side, and when she was done she was nearly a foot shorter.

And then she smiled up at him, her gaze as full of challenge as it was of wariness.

“I didn’t realize all the witty banter came as part of the package. I thought it would just be, you know, straight to it. No discussion.”

“You could have gotten that in any pub you’ve ever set foot in with precious little effort on your part.”

He shrugged out of the formal suit jacket he’d been wearing all day, like the trained monkey he’d allowed himself to become. And he was well aware of the convulsive way she swallowed, her gaze following his shoulders as if she couldn’t bring herself to look away from him.

Dominik liked that a little too much. “Why didn’t you?”

He started on his buttons then, one after the next, unable to keep his lips from quirking as she followed his fingers as they moved down his chest. And took much too long to raise her gaze back to his.

“Pardon?”

“If you were curious about experimenting with your nonsexual nature, Lauren, why not get off with a stranger after a few drinks? I think you’ll find it’s a tried and true method employed by people everywhere.”

“As appealing as that sounds, I was never curious before. I was never curious before—”

She looked stricken the moment the words were out. And the word she’d been about to say hung between them as surely as if she’d shouted it. You.

I was never curious before you.

And Dominik felt...hushed. Something like humbled.

“Don’t worry,” he found himself saying, though his voice was gruff and he’d planned to be so much more smooth, more in control, hadn’t he? “I promise you will enjoy this far more than a drunken fumble in the toilets after too much liquid courage and a pair of beer goggles.”

She blinked as if she was imagining that, and Dominik didn’t want a single thing in her head but him.

He tossed his shirt aside, then nodded at her. “Your dress, wife. Take it off.”

Her breath shuddered out of her, and her hands trembled when she reached down to grip the hem of the shift dress she wore. She had to wiggle as she lifted it, peeling it up and off and displaying herself to him as she went.