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As if he hadn’t kissed her within an inch of her life, but she wasn’t thinking about that.
Because she couldn’t think about that, or she would think of nothing else.
“There are all kinds of wolves in the forests of Europe.” And his voice seemed darker then. Especially when he turned, training that gray gaze of his on her all over again. It had the same effect as before. Looking at him was like staring into a storm. “Big and bad is as good a description as any.”
She noticed he didn’t answer the question.
“Why?”
Lauren stopped a foot or so in front of him. She found her hands on her hips, the wrap falling open. And she hated the part of her that thrilled at the way his gaze tracked over the delicate gold chain at her throat. The silk blouse beneath.
Her breasts that felt heavy and achy, and the nipples that were surely responding to the sudden exposure to colder air. Not him.
She had spent years wearing gloriously girly shoes to remind herself she was a woman, desperately hoping that each day was the day that Matteo would see her as one for a change. He never had. He never would.
And this man made her feel outrageously feminine without even trying.
She told herself what she felt about that was sheer, undiluted outrage, but it was a little too giddy, skidding around and around inside her, for her to believe it.
“Why did I kiss you?” She saw the flash of his teeth, like a smile he thought better of at the last moment, and that didn’t make anything happening inside her better. “Because I wanted to, little red. What other reason could there be?”
“Perhaps you kissed me because you’re a pig,” she replied coolly. “A common affliction in men who feel out of control, I think you’ll find.”
A kind of dark delight moved over his face.
“I believe you have your fairy tales confused. And in any case, where there are pigs, there is usually also huffing and puffing and, if I am not mistaken, blowing.” He tilted that head of his to one side, reminding her in an instant how untamed he was. How outside her experience. “Are you propositioning me?”
She felt a kind of red bonfire ignite inside her, all over her, but she didn’t give in to it. She didn’t distract herself with images of exactly what he might mean by blowing. And how best she could accommodate him like the fairy tale of his choice, right here in this clearing, sinking down on her knees and—
“Very droll,” she said instead, before she shamed herself even further. “I’m not at all surprised that a man who lives in a shack in the woods has ample time to sit around, perverting fairy tales to his own ends. But I’m not here for you, Mr. James.”
“Call me Dominik.” He smiled at her then, but she didn’t make the mistake of believing him the least bit affable. Not when that smile made her think of a knife, sharp and deadly. “I would say that Mr. James was my father, but I’ve never met the man.”
“I appreciate this power play of yours,” Lauren said, trying a new tactic before she could get off track again, thinking of knives and blowing and that kiss. “I feel very much put in my place, thank you. I would love nothing more than to turn tail and run back to my employer, with tales of the uncivilized hermit in the woods that he’d be better off never recognizing as his long-lost brother. But I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it doesn’t matter why you’re here in the woods. Whether you’re a hermit, a barbarian, an uncivilized lout unfit for human company.” She waved one hand, airily, as if she couldn’t possibly choose among those things. “If I could track you down, that means others will, as well, and they won’t be nearly as pleasant as I am. They will be reporters. Paparazzi. And once they start coming, they will always come. They will surround this cabin and make your life a living hell. That’s what they do.” She smiled. Sunnily. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“I spent my entire childhood waiting for people to come,” he said softly, after a moment that stretched out between them and made her...edgy. “They never did. You will forgive me if I somehow find it difficult to believe that now, suddenly, I will become of interest to anyone.”
“When you were a child you were an illegitimate mistake,” Lauren said, making her voice cold to hide that odd yearning inside her that made her wish she could go back in time and save the little boy he’d been from his fate. “That’s what Alexandrina San Giacomo’s father wrote about you. That’s not my description.” She hurried to say that last part, something in the still way he watched her making her stomach clench. “Now you are the San Giacomo heir you always should have been. You are a very wealthy man, Mr. James. More than that, you are part of a long and illustrious family line, stretching back generations.”
“You could not be more mistaken,” he said in the same soft way that Lauren didn’t dare mistake for any kind of weakness. Not when she could see that expression on his face, ruthless and lethal in turn. “I am an orphan. An ex-soldier. And a man who prefers his own company. If I were you, I would hurry back to the man who keeps you on his leash and tell him so.” There was a dangerous gleam in his eyes then. “Now, like a good pet. Before I forget how you taste and indulge my temper instead.”
Lauren wanted nothing more. If being a pet on Matteo’s leash could keep her safe from this man, she wanted it. But that wasn’t the task that had been set before her. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“There is no alternative, little red. I have given you my answer.”
Lauren could see he meant that. He had every intention of walking back into this ridiculous cottage in the middle of nowhere, washing his hands of his birthright and pretending no one had found him. She felt a surge of a different kind of emotion at that, and it wasn’t one that spoke well of her.
Because she wouldn’t turn up her nose at the San Giacomo fortune and everything that went along with it. She wouldn’t scoff at the notion that maybe she’d been a long-lost heiress all this time. Far better that than the boring reality, which was that both her mother and father had remarried and had sparkly new families they’d always seemed to like a whole lot more than her, the emblem of the bad decisions they’d made together.
They’d tossed her back and forth between them with bad grace and precious little affection, until she’d finally come of age and announced it could stop. The sad truth was that Lauren had expected one of them to argue. Or at least pretend to argue. But neither one of them had bothered.
And she doubted she would mind that quite so much if she had aristocratic blood and a sudden fortune to ease the blow.
“Most people would be overjoyed to this news,” she managed to say without tripping over her own emotions. “It’s a bit like winning the lottery, isn’t it? You go along living your life only to discover that all of a sudden, you’re a completely different person than the one you thought you were.”
“I am exactly who I think I am.” And there was something infinitely dangerous beneath his light tone. She could see it in his gaze. “I worked hard to become him. I have no intention of casting him aside because of some dead woman’s guilt.”
“But I don’t—”
“I know who the San Giacomos are,” Dominik said shortly. “How could I not? I grew up in Italy in their shadow and I want no part of it. Or them. You can tell your boss that.”
“He will only send me back here. Eventually, if you keep refusing me, he will come himself. Is that what you want? The opportunity to tell him to his face how little you want the gift he is giving you?”
Dominik studied her. “Is it a gift? Or is it what I was owed from my birth, yet prevented from claiming?”
“Either way, it’s nothing if you lock yourself up in your wood cabin and pretend it isn’t happening.”
He laughed at that. He didn’t fling back his head and let out a belly laugh. He only smiled. A quick sort of smile on an exhale, which only seemed to whet Lauren’s appetite for real laughter.
What on earth was happening to her?
“What I don’t understand is your zeal,” he said, his voice like a dark lick down the length of her spine. And it did her no favors to imagine him doing exactly that, that tongue of his against her flesh, following the flare of her hips with his hands while he... She had to shake herself slightly, hopefully imperceptibly, and frown to focus on him. “I know you have been searching for me. It has taken you weeks, but you have been dogged in your pursuit. If it occurred to you at any point that I did not wish to be found, you did not let that give you the slightest bit of pause. And now you have come here. Uninvited.”
“If you knew I was searching for you—” and she would have to think about what that meant, because that suggested a level of sophistication the wood cabin far out in these trees did not “—why didn’t you reach out yourself?”
“Nobody sets himself apart from the world in a tiny cottage in a forest in Hungary if they wish to have visitors. Much less unannounced visitors.” His smile was that knife again, a sharp, dangerous blade. “But here you are.”
“I’m very good at my job.” Lauren lifted her chin. “Remarkably good, in fact. When I’m given a task to complete, I complete it.”
“He says jump and you aim for the moon,” Dominik said softly. And she could hear the insult in it. It sent another flush of something like shame, splashing all over her, and she didn’t understand it. She didn’t understand any of this.
“I’m a personal assistant, Mr. James. That means I assist my employer in whatever it is he needs. It is the nature of the position. Not a character flaw.”
“Let me tell you what I know of your employer,” Dominik said, and his voice went lazy as if he was playing. But she couldn’t quite believe he was. Or that he ever did, come to that. “He is a disgrace, is he not? A man so enamored of this family you have come all this way to make me a part of that he punched his sister’s lover in the face at their father’s funeral. What a paragon! I cannot imagine why I have no interest involving myself with such people.”
Lauren really was good at her job. She had to remind herself of that at the moment, but it didn’t make it any less true. She pulled in a breath, then let it out slowly, trying to understand what was actually happening here.
That this man had a grudge against the people who had given him to an orphanage was clear. Understandable, even. She supposed it was possible that he wasn’t turning his nose up at what Matteo was offering so much as the very idea that an offer was being made at all, all these years too late to matter. She could understand that, too, having spent far more hours than she cared to admit imagining scenarios in which her parents begged for her time—so she could refuse them and sweep off somewhere.
And if she had been a man sent to find him, she supposed Dominik would have found a different way to get under her skin the same way he would any emissary sent from those who had abandoned him. All his talk of kissing and fairy tales was just more misdirection. Game-playing. Like all the scenarios she’d played out in her head about her parents.
She had to assume that his refusal to involve himself with the San Giacomos was motivated by hurt feelings. But if she knew one thing about men—no matter how powerful, wealthy or seemingly impervious—it was that all of them responded to hurt feelings as if the feelings themselves were an attack. And anyone in the vicinity was a collaborator.
“I appreciate your position, Dominik,” she said, trying to sound conciliatory. Sweet, even, since he was the first person alive who’d ever called her that. “I really do. But I still want to restore you to your family. What do I have to do to make that happen?”
“First, you go wandering around the forbidding woods in a red cloak.” Dominik shook his head, making a faint tsk-ing sound. “Then you let the Big Bad Wolf find out how you taste. Now an open-ended offer? My, my. What big eyes you have, little red.”
There was no reason she should shiver at that, as if he was making predictions instead of taking part in this same extended game that she had already given too much of her time and attention.
But the woods were all around them. The breeze whispered through the trees, and the village with all its people was far, far away from here.
And he’d already kissed her.
What, exactly, are you offering him? she asked herself.
But she had no answer.
Looking at Dominik James made Lauren feel as if she didn’t know herself at all. It made her feel like her body belonged to someone else, shivery and nervous. It made her tongue feel as if it no longer worked the way it should. She didn’t like it at all. She didn’t like him, she told herself.
But she didn’t turn on her heel and leave, either.
“There must be something that could convince you to come back to London and take your rightful place as a member of the San Giacomo family,” she said, trying to sound reasonable. Calmly rational. “It’s clearly not money, or you would have jumped at the chance to access your own fortune.”
He shrugged. “You cannot tempt me with that kind of power.”
“Because, of course, you prefer to play power games like this. Where you pretend you have no interest in power, all the while using what power you do have to do the exact opposite of anything asked of you.”
It was possible she shouldn’t have said that, she reflected in some panic as his gaze narrowed on her in a way that made her...shake, deep inside.
But if she expected him to shout or issue threats, he didn’t. He only studied her in that way for another moment, then grinned. Slowly.
A sharp blade of a grin that made her stop breathing, even as it boded ill.
For her. For the heart careening around and battering her ribs.
For all the things she wanted to pretend she didn’t feel, like a thick, consuming heat inside her.
“By all means, little red,” he said, his voice low. “Come inside. Sit by my fire. Convince me, if you can.”
CHAPTER THREE (#u698af3e3-343f-5dc6-8406-b0bc7e92f3b3)
DOMINIK JAMES HAD spent his entire life looking for his place in the world.
They had told him his parents were dead. That he was an orphan in truth, and he had believed that. At first. It certainly explained his circumstances in life, and as a child, he’d liked explanations that made sense of the orphanage he called home.
But when he was ten, the meanest of the nuns had dropped a different truth on him when she’d caught him in some or other mischief.
Your mother didn’t want you, she had told him. And who could blame her with you such a dirty, nasty sneak of a boy. Who could want you?
Who indeed? Dominik had spent the next ten years proving to everyone’s satisfaction that his mother, whoever she was, had been perfectly justified in ridding herself of him. He had lived down to any and all expectations. He’d run away from the orphanage and found himself in Spain, roaming where he pleased and stealing what he needed to live. He’d considered that happiness compared to the nuns’ version of corporal punishment mixed in with vicious piety.
He had eventually gone back to Italy and joined the army, more to punish himself than as any display of latent patriotism. He’d hoped that he would be sent off to some terrible war where he could die in service to Italy rather than from his own nihilistic urges. He certainly hadn’t expected to find discipline instead. Respect. A place in the world, and the tools to make himself the kind of man who deserved that place.
He had given Italy his twenties. After he left the service, he’d spent years doing what the army had taught him on a private civilian level until he’d gotten restless. He’d then sold the security company he’d built for a tidy fortune.
Left to his own devices as a grown man with means, he had bettered himself significantly. He had gotten a degree to expand his thinking. His mind. And, not inconsiderably, to make sure he could manage his newfound fortune the way he wanted to do.
He didn’t need his long-lost family’s money. He had his own. The computer security company he had built up almost by accident had made him a very wealthy man. Selling it had made him a billionaire. And he’d enjoyed building on that foundation ever since, expanding his financial reach as he pleased.
He just happened to enjoy pretending he was a hermit in the Hungarian woods, because he could. And because, in truth, he liked to keep a wall or a forest between him and whatever else was out there. He liked to stay arm’s length, at the very least, from the world that had always treated him with such indifference. The world that had made him nothing but bright with rage and sharp with fury, even when he was making it his.
Dominik preferred cool shadows and quiet trees these days. The comfort of his own company. Nothing brighter than the sun as it filtered down through the trees, and no fury at all.
Sharp-edged blondes with eyes like caramel who tasted like magic made him...greedy and hot. It made him feel like a long-lost version of himself that he had never meant to see resurrected.
He should have sent her away at once.
Instead, he’d invited her in.
She walked in front of him, those absurd and absurdly loud shoes of hers making it clear that she was not the sort of woman who ever expected to sneak up on a person, especially when they hit the wood of his porch. And he regretted letting her precede him almost at once, because while the cloak she wore—so bright and red it was almost as if she was having a joke at his expense—hid most of that lush and lean body from his view, it couldn’t conceal the way her hips swung back and forth like a metronome.
Dominik had never been so interested in keeping the beat before in his life. He couldn’t look away. Then again, he didn’t try that hard.
When she got to his front door, a heavy wood that he’d fashioned himself with iron accents because perhaps he really had always thought of himself as the Big Bad Wolf, he reached past her. He pushed the door open with the flat of one hand, inviting her in.
But that was a mistake, too.
Because he had already tasted her, and leaning in close made him...needy. He wanted his mouth right there on the nape of her neck. He wanted his hands on the full breasts he’d glimpsed beneath that sheer blouse she wore. He wanted to bury his face between her legs, then lose himself completely in all her sweet heat.
Instead, all he did was hold the door for her. Meekly, as if he was some other man. Someone tamed. Civilized.
A hermit in a hut, just as he pretended to be.
He watched her walk inside, noting how stiff and straight she held herself as if she was terrified that something might leap out at her. But this cabin had been made to Dominik’s precise specifications. It existed to be cozy. Homey.
It was the retreat he had never had as a boy, and he had absolutely no idea why he had allowed this particular woman to come inside. When no one else ever had.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about that too closely.
“This is a bit of a shock,” she said into the silence that stretched taut between them, her gaze moving from the thick rugs on the floor to the deep leather chairs before the fire. “I expected something more like a hovel, if I’m honest.”
“A hovel.”
“I mean no disrespect,” she said, which he thought was a lie. She did that thing with her hand again, waving at him in a manner he could only call dismissive. It was...new, at least. “No one really expects a long-haired hermit to live in any kind of splendor, do they?”
“I am already regretting my hospitality,” Dominik murmured.
He looked around at the cabin, trying to see it through the eyes of someone like Lauren, all urban chic and London snootiness. He knew the type, of course, though he’d gone to some lengths to distance himself from such people. The shoes were a dead giveaway. Expensive and pointless, because they were a statement. She wanted everyone who saw them to wonder how she walked in them, or wonder how much they cost, or drift away in a sea of their own jealousy.
Dominik merely wondered what it said about her that her primary form of expression was her shoes.
He also wondered what she was gleaning about him from this cabin that was his only real home. He didn’t know what she saw, only what he’d intended. The soaring high ceilings, because he had long since grown tired of stooping and making himself fit into spaces not meant for him. The warm rugs, because he was tired of being cold and uncomfortable. The sense of airiness that made the cottage feel as if it was twice its actual size, because he had done his time in huts and hovels and he wasn’t going back. The main room boasted a stone fireplace on one end and his efficient kitchen on the other, and he’d fashioned a bedchamber that matched it in size, outfitted with a bed that could fit two of him—because he never forgot those tiny cots he’d had to pretend to be grateful for in the orphanage.
“It’s actually quite lovely,” she said after a moment, a note of reluctant surprise in her voice. “Very...comfortable, yet male.”
