Page 41 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THESITUATIONDID not improve as the days slid by and turned inevitably into weeks.
Dominik needed to put a stop to the madness. There was no debate on that topic. The pressing need to leave the mess he’d made here, get the hell out of England, and away from the woman he never should have married, beat in him like a drum. It was the first thing he thought of when he woke. It dogged him through the long summer days. It even wormed its way into his dreams.
But one day led into the next, and he went nowhere. He didn’t even try to leave as if he was the one who’d wandered into the wrong forest and found himself under some kind of spell he couldn’t break.
Meanwhile, they traded lesson for lesson.
“I know how to use utensils, little red,” he told her darkly one morning after he’d come back from a punishing run—yet not punishing enough, clearly, as he’d returned to Combe Manor—and had showered and changed only to find the formal dining room set with acres of silver on either side of each plate. There was a mess of glasses and extra plates everywhere he looked.
And Lauren sat there with her hair pulled back into the smooth ponytail he took personally and that prissy look on her face.
The very same prissy look that made him hard and greedy for her, instantly.
“This won’t be a lesson about basic competence with a fork, which I’ll go ahead and assume you mastered some time ago,” she told him tartly. Her gaze swept over him, making him feel as if he was still that grubby-faced orphan, never quite good enough. He gritted his teeth against it, because that was the last thing he needed. The present was complicated enough without dragging in the past. “This will be about formal manners for formal dinners.”
“Alternatively, I could cook for myself, eat with own my fingers if I so desire and continue to have the exact same blood in my veins that I’ve always had with no one the least bit interested either way. None of this matters.”
He expected her to come back at him, sharp and amusing, but she didn’t. She studied him for a moment instead, and he still didn’t know how to handle the way she looked at him these days. It was softer. Warmer.
It was too dangerous. It scraped at him until he felt raw and he could never get enough of it, all the same.
“It depends on your perspective, I suppose,” she said. “It’s not rocket science, of course. The fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance. History books won’t be written about what fork you use at a banquet. But the funny thing about manners is that they can often stand in for the things you lack.”
“And what is it I lack, exactly? Be specific, please. I dare you.”
“I’m talking about me, Dominik. Not you.”
And when she smiled, the world stopped.
He told himself it was one more sign he needed to get away from her. Instead, he took the seat opposite her at the table as if he really was under her spell.
Why couldn’t he break it?
“When I was nine my parents had been divorced for two years, which means each of them was married again. My stepmother was pregnant. I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother was, too. I still thought that they should all be spending a great deal more time with me. So one day I decided I’d run away, thereby forcing them to worry about me, and then act like parents.”
She smiled as if at the memory, but it wasn’t a happy smile. And later Dominik would have to reflect on how and why he knew the difference between her smiles,God help him. As if he’d made a study against his will, when he wasn’t entirely paying attention.
“I rode the buses around and around, well into the evening,” she said with that same smile. “And they came together, just as I’d hoped, but only so they could blame each other for what a disaster I was. Within an hour of my return they’d agreed to send me off to boarding school for the summer, so others could deal with me and they wouldn’t have to do it themselves.”
“I understand that not all parents are good ones,” Dominik said, his voice low. “But I would caution you against complaining about your disengaged, yet present, parents while in the presence of a man who had none. Ever. Disengaged or otherwise.”
“I’m not complaining about them,” Lauren replied quietly. “They are who they are. I’m telling you how I came to be at a very posh school for summer. It was entirely filled with children nobody wanted.”
“Pampered children, then. I can assure you no orphanage is posh.”
“Yes. Someone, somewhere, paid handsomely to send us all to that school. But it would have been hard to tell a lonely nine-year-old, who knew she was at that school because her parents didn’t want anything to do with her, that she was pampered. Mostly, I’m afraid, I was just scared.”
Dominik stared back at her, telling himself he felt nothing. Because he ought to have felt nothing. He had taught her that sensation was real and that she could feel it, but he wanted none of it himself. No sensation. No emotion.
None of this scraping, aching thing that lived in him now that he worried might crack his ribs open from the inside. Any minute now.
“They taught us manners,” Lauren told him in the same soft, insistent tone. “Comportment. Dancing. And it all seemed as stupid to me as I’m sure it does to you right now, but I will tell you this. I have spent many an evening since that summer feeling out of place. Unlike everyone else my age at university, for example, with all their romantic intrigue. These days I’m often trotted off to a formal affair where I am expected to both act as an emblem for Combe Industries as well as blend into the background. All at once. And do you know what allows me to do that? The knowledge that no matter what, I can handle myself in any social situation. People agonize over which fork to choose and which plate is theirs while I sit there, listening to conversations I shouldn’t be hearing, ready and able to do my job.”
“Heaven forbid anything prevent you from doing your job.”
“I like my job.”