Page 47 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

But she wasn’t going to get an answer to that question.

Because when she went looking for him, determined to figure at least some part of this out, she discovered that Dominik hadn’t simply disappeared while he’d stood there before her.

He’d actually gone.

He’d packed up his things, clearly, as there was nothing to suggest he’d been here at all. And then he must have let himself out while she’d been sitting there in the library where he’d left her, trying her best not to fall apart.

And she didn’t have to chase after him to know he had no intention of coming back.

Because she had fallen for him, head over heels. But he had only ever been playing a game.

And Lauren would have to learn to live with that, too.

* * *

Lauren launched herself back into her life.

Her real life, which did not include mysterious men with hidden fortunes who lived off in the Hungarian woods. The life she had built all by herself, with no support from anyone.

The life that she was sure she remembered loving, or at least finding only a few months ago.

“You still love it,” she snapped at herself one morning, bustling around her flat on her way to work. “You love every last part of it.”

“You know when you start talking to yourself,” Mary said serenely, splashing the last of the milk into her tea, “that’s when the stress has really won.”

Lauren eyed her roommate and the empty jug of milk. “Is that your mobile ringing?”

And as Mary hurried out of the room, she told herself that she was fine. Good.

Happy and hopeful, as a matter of fact, because neither one of those things had anything to do with the surly, angry man who’d done exactly what she’d asked him to do and then left after staying much longer than she’d expected he would.

She had what she wanted. She knew what other people felt. She understood why they went to such great lengths to have sex whenever possible. And she was now free to go out on the pull whenever she pleased. She could do as Dominik had once suggested and take herself off to a local pub, where she could continue conducting the glorious experiment in her own sexual awakening. On her own.

He didn’t need her. And she certainly didn’t need him.

Lauren decided she’d get stuck into it, no pun intended, that very night.

She thought about it all day long. She made her usual assenting, supportive sounds during the video conference from wherever Matteo was in the world today, but what she was really thinking about was the debauchery that awaited her. Because Dominik had been no more than a means to an end, she told herself. Merely a stepping-stone to a glorious sensual feast.

She left work early—which was to say, on time for once—and charged into the first pub she saw.

Where she remained for the five minutes it took to look around, see all the men who weren’t Dominik and want to cry.

Because it turned out that the only kind of awakening she wanted was with him.

Only and ever with him, something in her said with a kind of finality that she felt knit itself inside her like bone.

And maybe that was why, some six weeks after the tabloids had discovered Dominik—when all that bone had grown and gotten strong—she reacted to what ought to have been a perfectly simple request from Matteo the way she did.

“I’ll be landing in San Francisco shortly,” he told her from his jet.

“And then headed home, presumably,” she interjected. “To attend to your empire.”

“Yes, yes,” he said in a way that she knew meant, or perhaps not. “But what I need you to do is work on that marriage.”

Lauren had him on the computer monitor at her desk so she could work more easily on her laptop as he fired his usual instructions at her.

But she stopped what she was doing at that and swiveled in her chair, so she could gaze at him directly.