closer, slowing her steps as the path led her directly toward the edge of the clearing. All she’d wanted this whole walk was a break from the encroaching forest, but now that there was a clearing, she found it made her nervous.
But Lauren didn’t believe in nerves, so she ignored the sensation and frowned at the structure before her. It was a cottage. Hewn from wood, logs interlocking and tidy. There was smoke curling up from its chimney, and there was absolutely no reason that a dedicated city dweller like Lauren should feel something clutch inside her at the sight. As if she’d spent her entire life wandering around without knowing it, half-lost in forests of wood and concrete alike, looking for a cozy little home exactly like this one.
That was ridiculous, of course. Lauren rubbed at her chest without entirely meaning to, as if she could do something about the ache there. She didn’t believe in fairy tales, but she’d read them. And if any good had ever come from seemingly perfect cottages slapped down in the middle of dangerous forests, well. She couldn’t remember that story. Usually, an enchanted cottage led straight to witches and curses and wolves baring their teeth—
But that was when she noticed that the porch in front of the cottage wasn’t empty as she’d thought at first glance. That one of the shadows there was a man.
And he was staring straight at her.
Her heart did something acrobatic and astonishing inside her chest, and she had the strangest notion that if she surrendered to it, it could topple her straight to the ground. Right there on that edge where the forest fought to take back the clearing.
But Lauren had no intention of crumpling.
No matter who was lurking about, staring at her.
“Mr. Dominik James?” she asked briskly, making her voice as crisp and clear as possible and projecting it across the clearing as if she wasn’t the slightest bit unnerved, because she shouldn’t have been.
Though she was standing stock-still, she couldn’t help but notice. As if her legs were not necessarily as convinced as she was that she could continue to remain upright. Especially while her heart kept up its racket and ache.
The man moved, stepping out from the shadow of the porch into the sunlight that filled the clearing but somehow did nothing to push back the inky darkness of the forest.
It only made her heart carry on even worse.
He was tall. Much too tall, with the kind of broad shoulders that made her palms itch to...do things she refused to let herself imagine. His hair was dark and thick, worn carelessly and much too long for her tastes, but it seemed to make his strong, bold jaw more prominent somehow. His mouth was flat and unsmiling, yet was lush enough to make her stomach flip around inside her. He was dressed simply, in a long-sleeved shirt that clung to the hard planes of his chest, dark trousers that made her far too aware of his powerful thighs, and boots that looked as if they’d been chosen for their utility rather than their aesthetics.
But it was his eyes that made everything inside Lauren ring with alarm. Or maybe it was awareness.
Because they were gray. Gray like storms, just like Matteo’s.
San Giacomo gray, Lauren thought, just like Alexandrina’s had been. Famously.
She didn’t need him to identify himself. She had no doubt whatsoever that she was looking at the lost San Giacomo heir. And she couldn’t have said why all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood up straight as if in foreboding.
She willed herself to forge on.
“My name is Lauren Clarke,” she informed him, trying to remember that she was meant to be efficient. Not...whatever she was right now, with all these strange sensations swishing around inside her. “I work for Matteo Combe, president and CEO of Combe Industries. If you are somehow unfamiliar with Mr. Combe, he is, among other things, the eldest son of the late Alexandrina San Giacomo Combe. I have reason to believe that Alexandrina was also your mother.”
She had practiced that. She had turned the words over and over in her head, then gone so far as to practice them in the mirror this morning in her little room at the inn. Because there was no point hemming and hawing and beating around the bush. Best to rip the plaster off and dive straight in, so they could get to the point as quickly as possible.
She’d expected any number of responses to her little speech. Maybe he would deny the claim. Maybe he would launch into bluster, or order her away. She’d worked out contingency plans for all possible scenarios—
But the man in front of her didn’t say a word.
He roamed toward her, forcing her to notice the way he moved. It was more liquid than it ought to have been. A kind of lethal grace, given how big he was, and she found herself holding her breath.
The closer he came, the more she could see the expression on his face, in his eyes, that struck her as a kind of sardonic amusement.
She hadn’t made any contingency plan for that.
“When Mrs. Combe passed recently, she made provisions for you in her will,” Lauren forced herself to continue. “My employer intends to honor his mother’s wishes, Mr. James. He has sent me here to start that process.”
The man still didn’t speak. He slowed when he was face-to-face with Lauren, but all he did was study her. His gaze moved all over her in a way that struck her as almost unbearably intimate, and she could feel the flush that overtook her in reaction.
As if he had his hands all over her body. As if he was testing the smoothness of the hair she’d swept back into a low ponytail. Or the thickness of the bright red wool wrap she wore to ward off the chill of flights and Hungarian forests alike. Down her legs to her pretty, impractical shoes, then back up again.
“Mr. Combe is a man of wealth and consequence.” Lauren found it was difficult to maintain her preferred crisp, authoritative tone when this man was so...close. And when he was looking at her as if she were a meal, not a messenger. “I mention this not to suggest that he doesn’t wish to honor his commitments to you, because he does. But his stature requires that we proceed with a certain sensitivity. You understand.”
She was aware of too many things, all at once. The man—Dominik, she snapped at herself, because it had to be him—had recently showered. She could see the suggestion of dampness in his hair as it went this way and that, indicating it had a mind of its own. Worse still, she could smell him. The combination of soap and warm, clean, decidedly healthy male.
It made her feel the slightest bit dizzy, and she was sure that was why her heart was careening about inside her chest like a manic drum.
All around them, the forest waited. Not precisely silent, but there was no comforting noise of city life—conversations and traffic and the inevitable sounds of so many humans going about their lives, pretending they were alone—to distract her from this man’s curious, penetrating, unequivocally gray glare.
If she believed in nerves, she’d have said hers were going haywire.
“I beg your pardon,” Lauren said when it was that or leap away from him and run for it, so unsettled and unsteady did she feel. “Do you speak English? I didn’t think to ask.”
His stern mouth curled the faintest bit in one corner. As Lauren watched, stricken and frozen for reasons she couldn’t begin to explain to herself, he reached across the scant
