Page 50 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

There was only Lauren.

And she knew exactly what she wanted.

When she reached the clearing this time, she marched straight through it. There was no one lurking in the shadows on the front porch, but she hadn’t really expected there would be. She walked up, anyway, went straight to the front door and let herself in.

The cabin was just as she remembered it. Shockingly cozy and inviting, and entirely too nice. It was a clue, had she bothered to pay attention to it, that the man she’d come to find—her husband—wasn’t the mountain man she’d expected he would be.

Best of all, that same man sat before the fire now, watching her with eyes like rain.

“Turn around, Lauren,” he said, his voice like gravel. “If you leave now, you’ll make it back to the village before full dark. I wouldn’t want to be wandering around the woods at night. Not in those shoes. You have no idea what you might encounter.”

“I know exactly what I’ll find in these woods,” she replied. And she let her gaze go where it liked, from that too-long inky-black hair he’d never gotten around to cutting to her specifications to that stern mouth of his she’d felt on every inch of her body. “And look. There you are.”

He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

“And yet I did. Without your permission. Much as you ran off from Combe Manor without so much as a hastily penned note.”

“I’m sure whatever mission you’re on now is just as important as the last one that brought you here to storm about in my forest,” he said, and something like temper flashed over his face—though it was darker. Much, much darker. “But I don’t care what your Mr. Combe—”

“He didn’t send me. I don’t work for him anymore, as a matter of fact.” She held his gaze and let the storm in it wash over her, too. “This is between you and me, Dominik.”

The air between them shifted. Tightened, somehow.

“There is no you and me.”

“You may have married me as a joke,” she said softly, “but you did marry me. That makes me your wife.”

“I need a wife about as much as I need a brother. I don’t do family, Lauren. Or jokes. I want nothing to do with any of it.”

“That is a shame.” She crossed her arms over her chest and she stared him down as if he didn’t intimidate her at all. “But I didn’t ask you if you needed a wife. I reminded you that you already have one.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

She smiled at him, and enjoyed it when he blinked at that as if it was a weapon she’d had tucked away in her arsenal all this time.

God, she hoped it was a weapon. Because she needed all of those she could find.

And she had no qualms about using each and every one she put her hands on.

“Here’s the thing, Dominik,” she said, and she wanted to touch him. She wanted to bury her face in the crook of his neck. She wanted to wake up with him tangled all around her. She wanted him, however she could get him. She wanted whatever a life with him looked like. “You taught me how to want. And don’t you see? What I want is you.”