Page 53 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride
“What big worries you have,” she murmured, and she was smiling again. And he found he was, too.
“All the better to save you with, little red,” he said. “If you’ll let me.”
“I won’t.” She brushed his mouth with hers. “Why don’t we save each other?”
“I don’t know how.”
“You do.” And when he frowned at her, she held him even closer, until that ache in his chest shifted over to something sweeter. Hotter. And felt a lot like forever. “Happy-ever-after is saving each other, Dominik. All it takes is a kiss.”
And this was what she’d been talking about in that sprawling house in Yorkshire.
Hope. The possibility of happiness.
Things he’d never believed in before. But it was different, with her.
Everything was different with her.
So he gathered her in his arms, and he swept her back into the grandest kiss he could give her, right there in their enchanted cottage in the deep, dark woods.
And sure enough, they lived happily ever after.
Just like a fairy tale.
* * *
Twelve years later Dominik stood on a balcony that overlooked the Grand Canal in Venice as night fell on a late summer evening. The San Giacomo villa was quiet behind him, though he knew it was a peace that wouldn’t last.
His mouth curved as he imagined the chaos his ten-year-old son could unleash at any moment, wholly unconcerned about the disapproving glares of the ancient San Giacomos who lurked in every dour portrait that graced the walls of this place.
To say nothing of his five-year-old baby girls, a set of the twins that apparently ran in the family, that neither he nor Lauren had anticipated when she’d fallen pregnant the second time.
But now he couldn’t imagine living without them. All of them—and well did he remember that he was the man who had planned to live out his days as a hermit, all alone in his forest.
The truth was, he had liked his own company. But he exulted in the family he and Lauren had made together.
The chaos and the glory. The mad rush of family life, mixed in with that enduring fairy tale he hadn’t believed in at first—but he’d wanted to. Oh, how he’d wanted to. And so he’d jumped into, feet first, willing to do anything as long as she was with him.
Because she was the only one who had ever wanted him, and she wanted him still.
And he wanted her right back.
Every damned day.
They had built their happy-ever-after, brick by brick and stone by stone, with their own hands.
He had met his sister shortly after Lauren had come and found him in the forest. Pia had burst into that hotel suite in Athens, greeted him as if she’d imagined him into being herself—or had known of him, somehow, in her heart of hearts all this time—until he very nearly believed it himself.
And he’d finally met his brother—in the flesh—sometime after that.
After a perfectly pleasant dinner in one of the Combe family residences—this one in New York City—he and Matteo had stood out on one of the wraparound terraces that offered a sweeping view of all that Manhattan sparkle and shine.
“I don’t know how to be a brother,” Dominik had told him.
“My sister would tell you that I don’t, either,” Matteo had replied.
And they’d smiled at each other, and that was when Dominik had started to believe that it might work. This strange new family he would have said he didn’t want. But that he had, anyway.
His feelings about Matteo had been complicated, but he’d realized quickly that most of that had to do with the fact Lauren had admired him so much and for so long. Something Matteo put to rest quickly, first by marrying the psychiatrist who had been tasked with his anger management counseling, who also happened to be pregnant with his twin boys. But then he’d redeemed himself entirely in Dominik’s eyes by telling Lauren that Combe Industries couldn’t function without her.