CAITLIN CREWS – Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride (страница 6)
“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
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.
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
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.”
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.
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.