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.”
Dominik jerked his chin toward one of the heavy chairs that sat before his fire. Why there were two, he would never know, since he never had guests. But when he’d imagined the perfect cabin and the fireplace that would dominate it, he had always envisioned two cozy leather chairs, just like these. So here they were.
And he had the strangest sensation, as Lauren went and settled herself into one of them, that he had anticipated this moment. It was almost as if the chair had been waiting for her all this time.
He shook that off, not sure where such a fanciful notion had come from. But very sure that he didn’t like it. At all.
He
