Page 46 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

“Dominik. Please. This is just damage control. That’s the only reason Mr. Combe didn’t proclaim your existence far and wide the moment he knew of you.”

That gaze of his swung to her and held. Hard, like another blow. It made her want to cry—but she knew, somehow, that would only make it worse.

“You cannot control damage, Lauren. I would think you, of all people, would know this. You can only do your best to survive it.”

And she had no time to recover from that.

Because that was when the self-satisfied newscaster on the television screen started talking about who Dominik James really was.

“We’ve just been made aware that Dominik James is not merely the long-lost heir to two of Europe’s most prominent families,” the man said. “Our sources tell us he is also a self-made billionaire who ran his own security company until he sold it recently for what is believed to be a small fortune in its own right. Dominik himself has been widely sought after by celebrities and kings alike, and a number of governments besides.”

Then they flashed pictures of him, in case Lauren had somehow missed the implications. There were shots of Dominik in three-piece suits, his hair cropped close to his head, shaking hands with powerful, recognizable men. In and out of formal balls, charity events and boardrooms.

Nothing like a feral hermit at all.

“Oh, dear,” Dominik said when the newscast cut to some inane commercial, too much darkness in his voice. “Your table settings will not save you now, Lauren. It has all been a lie. I am not at all who you thought I was. Why don’t you tell me more about how happy you are?”

And Lauren remembered exactly why she’d decided emotion wasn’t for her. She had been nine years old and sent off to a terrifying stone building filled with strangers. She’d stayed awake the whole of that first night, sobbing into her pillow so her roommate didn’t hear her.

Since then, she’d forgotten that these terrible emotions could sit on a person like this. Crushing her with their weight. Suffocating her, yet never quite killing her.

Making her own heartbeat feel like an attack.

“You didn’t need me at all,” she managed to say, parts of her breaking apart on the inside like so many earthquakes, stitched together into a single catastrophe she wasn’t sure she would survive. No matter what he’d said about damage.

But she didn’t want to let him see it.

“No,” Dominik said, and there was something terrible there in his gray eyes that made her want to reach out to him. Soothe him somehow. But his voice was so cold. Something like cruel, and she didn’t dare. “I never needed you.”

“This was a game, then.” She didn’t know how she was speaking when she couldn’t feel her own face. Her outsides had gone numb, but that paralysis did not extend inside, where she was desperately trying to figure out what to do with all that raw upheaval before it broke her into actual pieces. “You were just playing a game. I can understand that you wanted to find out who your family really was. But you were playing the game with me.”

And maybe later she would think about how he stood there, so straight and tall and bruised somehow, that it made her ache. With that look on his face that made her want to cry.

But all she could do at the moment was fight to stay on her feet, without showing him how much he was hurting her. It was crucial that she swallow that down, hide it away, even as it threatened to cut her down.

“Life is damage, Lauren,” he said in that same dark, cold way. “Not hope. Not happiness. Those are stories fools tell to trick themselves into imagining otherwise. The true opiate of the masses. The reality is that people lie. They deceive you. They abandon you whenever possible, and may use you to serve their own ends. I never needed you to polish me. But you’re welcome all the same. Someday you’ll thank me for disabusing you of all these damaging notions.”

Her mobile rang again, Matteo’s name flashing on her screen.

And for the first time in as long as she could remember, Lauren didn’t want to answer. She wanted to fling her mobile across the room and watch it shatter against the wall. Part of her wanted very much to throw it at Dominik, and see if it would shatter that wall.

But she did neither.

She looked down at the mobile, let her thoughts turn violent, and when she looked up again Dominik was gone.

And she sat where she was for a very long time, there on a Combe family sofa before a television screen that repeated lie after lie about who she was until she was tempted to believe it herself.

Her mobile rang. It rang and rang, and she let it.

Outside, the endless summer day edged into night, and still Lauren sat where she was.

She felt hollowed out. And yet swollen somehow. As if all those unwieldy, overwhelming emotions she’d successfully locked away since she was a child had swept back into her, all at once, until she thought they might break her wide open.

It was the first time in almost as long that she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. How to fix this. Or even if she wanted to.

All she knew was that even now, even though Dominik had looked at her the way he had, and said those things to her, he was still the one she wanted to go to. It was his arms she longed for. His heat, his strength.

How could she want him to comfort her when he was the one who had hurt her?