Page 39 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

He felt...wrecked.

And yet he couldn’t seem to bring himself to shift her off him. It would be easy enough to do. A little roll, and he could leave her here. He could leave behind this great house and all its obnoxious history. He could pretend he truly didn’t care about the woman who’d rid herself of him, then later chosen this.

But he had promised to take part in this whole charade, hadn’t he? He’d promised not only to marry Lauren, but to subject himself to the rest of it, too. Hadn’t she mentioned comportment? The press?

It was his own fault that he’d ended up here. He accepted that.

But he could honestly say that it had never occurred to him that sex with Lauren could possibly be this...ruinous.

Devastating, something in him whispered.

He hadn’t imagined that anything could get to him. Nothing had in years. And no woman had ever come close.

Dominik had never experienced the overwhelming sensation that he wasn’t only naked in the sense of having no clothes on—he was naked in every sense. Transparent with it, so anyone who happened by could see all the things in him he’d learned to pack away, out of view. First, as an orphan who had to try his best to act perfect for prospective parents. Then as a kid on the street who had to act tough enough to be left alone. Then as a soldier who had to act as if nothing he was ordered to do stayed with him.

And he couldn’t say he much cared for the sensation now.

He needed to get up and leave this bed. He needed to go for a long, punishing run to clear his head. He needed to do something physical until he took the edge off all the odd things swirling around inside him, showing too much as if she’d knocked down every last boundary he had, and Dominik certainly couldn’t allow that—

But she stirred then, shifting all that smooth, soft heat against him, and a new wave of intense heat washed over him.

She let out a sigh that sounded like his name, and what was he supposed to do with that?

Despite himself, he held on to her.

Especially when she lifted her head, piled her hands beneath her chin and blinked up at him.

And the things he wanted to say appalled him.

He cleared his throat. “Do you feel sufficiently indoctrinated into the sport?”

He hardly recognized his own voice. Or that note in it that he was fairly certain was...playfulness? And his hands were on her curves as if he needed to assure himself that they were real. That she was.

“Is it a sport? I thought of it more as a pastime. A habit, perhaps.” She considered it, and what was wrong with him that he enjoyed watching a woman think? “Or for some, I suppose, an addiction.”

“There are always hobbyists and amateurs, little red,” he found himself saying, a certain...warmth in his voice that he wanted to rip out with his own fingers. But he didn’t know where to start. “But I have never counted myself among them.”

He meant to leave, and yet his hands were on her, smoothing their way down her back, then cupping her bottom. He knew he needed to let her go and make sure this never happened again, but she was smiling.

And he hardly knew her. Gone was all that sharpness, and in its place was a kind of soft, almost dreamy expression that made his chest hurt.

As if she was the one teaching him a lesson here.

“I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize I was addressing such a renowned star of the bedroom,” she said, and her lovely eyes danced with laughter.

It only served to remind him that she didn’t laugh nearly enough.

“I will excuse it,” he told her. “Once.”

He needed to put distance between them. Now. Dominik knew that the way he knew every other fact of his existence. He knew it like every single memory he had of the nuns. The streets. The missions he’d been sent on.

He wasn’t a man built for connection. He didn’t want to be the kind of man who could connect with people, because people were what was wrong with the world. People had built this house. A person had given him away. He wanted nothing to do with people,or he never would have taken himself off into the woods in the first place.

But this pretty, impossible person was looking at him as if he was the whole world, her cheeks heating into red blazes he couldn’t keep from touching. He ran his knuckles over one, then the other, silky smooth and wildly hot.

“It is still our wedding night,” she pointed out.

“So it is.”