Page 52 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

But he didn’t want to think about that now. The possibility that someone had been kind to him didn’t change the course of his life.

“Nobody wanted me. Ever. With one or two people in your life, even if they are your parents, this could be coincidence. Happenstance. But when I tell you that there is not one person on this earth who has ever truly wanted me, I am not exaggerating.” He shoved those strange old memories aside. “There’s something wrong with me inside, Lauren. And it doesn’t go anywhere. If you can’t see it, you will. In time. I see no point in putting us both through that.”

Because he knew that if he let her stay, if he let her do this, he would never, ever let her go. He knew it.

“Dominik,” she began.

“You showed me binders full of San Giacomos,” he growled at her. “Century upon century of people obsessed with themselves and their bloodlines. They cataloged every last San Giacomo ever born. But they threw me away. She threw me away.”

“She was sixteen,” Lauren said fiercely, her red cloak all around her and emotion he didn’t want to see wetting her cheeks. But he couldn’t look away. “She was a scared girl who did what her overbearing father ordered her to do, by all accounts. I’m not excusing her for not doing something later, when she could have. But you know that whatever else happened, she never forgot you. She knew your name and possibly even where you lived. I can’t speak for a dead woman, Dominik, but I think that proves she cared.”

“You cannot care for something you throw away like trash,” he threw at her.

And her face changed. It...crumpled, and he thought it broke his heart.

“You mean the way you did to me?” she asked.

“I left you before it was made perfectly obvious to you and the rest of the world that I don’t belong in a place like that. I’m an orphan. I was a street kid. I joined the army because I wanted to die for a purpose, Lauren. I never meant for it to save me.”

“All of that is who you were, perhaps,” she said with more of that same ferocity that worked in him like a shudder. “But now you are a San Giacomo. You are a self-made man of no little power in your own right. And you are my husband.”

And he didn’t understand why he moved closer to her when he wanted to step away. When he wanted—needed—to put distance between them.

Instead, his hands found their way to her upper arms and held her there.

He noticed the way she fit him, in those absurd shoes she wore just as well as when she was barefoot. The way her caramel-colored eyes locked to his, seeing far too much.

“I don’t have the slightest idea how to be a husband.”

“Whereas my experience with being a wife is so extensive?” she shot right back.

“I don’t—”

“Dominik.” And she seemed to flow against him until she was there against his chest, her head tipped back so there was nothing else in the whole of the world but this. Her. “You either love me or you don’t.”

He knew what he should say. If he could spit out the words he could break her heart, and his, and free her from this.

He could go back to his quiet life, here in the forest where no one could disappoint him and he couldn’t prove, yet again, how little he was wanted.

Dominik knew exactly what he should say.

But he didn’t say it.

Because she was so warm, and he had never understood how cold he was before she’d found him here. She was like light and sunshine, even here in the darkest part of the forest.

And he hadn’t gone with her to England because she was an emissary from his past. He certainly hadn’t married her because she could tell him things he could have found out on his own about the family that wanted to claim him all of a sudden.

The last time Dominik had done something he didn’t want to do, simply because someone else told him to do it, he’d been in the army.

He could tell himself any lie at all, if he liked—and Lord knew he was better at that by the day—but he hadn’t married this woman for any reason at all save one.

He’d wanted to.

“What if I do?” he demanded, his fingers gripping her—but whether to hold her close or keep her that crucial few inches away, he didn’t know. “What do either one of us know about love, of all things?”

“You don’t have to know a thing about love.” And she was right there before him, wrapping her arms around his neck as if she belonged there. And fitting into place as if they’d been puzzle pieces, all this time, meant to interlock just like this. “Think about fairy tales. Happy-ever-after is guaranteed by one thing and one thing only.”

“Magic?” he supplied. But his hands were moving. He tugged the elastic from her gleaming blond hair and tossed it aside. “Terrible spells, angry witches and monsters beneath the bed?”