face, or smooth it over her hair, or run one of those bluntly elegant fingers along the length of her neck the way she’d seen in a fanciful romantic movie she refused to admit she’d watched—but he didn’t. And she felt the sharpest sense of disappointment in that same instant he found one edge of her wrap, and held it between his fingers.
As if he was testing the wool.
“What are you doing?” Lauren asked, and any hope she’d had of maintaining her businesslike demeanor fled. Her knees were traitorously weak. And her voice didn’t sound like her at all. It was much too breathy. Embarrassingly insubstantial.
He was closer than he ought to have been, because she was sure there was no possible way she had moved. And there was something about the way he angled his head that made everything inside her shift.
Then go dangerously still.
“A beautiful blonde girl walks into the woods, dressed in little more than a bright, red cloak.” His voice was an insinuation. A spell. It made her think of fairy tales again, giving no quarter to her disbelief. It was too smoky, too deep and much too rich, and faintly accented in ways that kicked up terrible wildfires in her blood. And everywhere else. “What did you think would happen?”
Then he dropped his shockingly masculine head to hers, and kissed her.
HE WAS KISSING HER.
Kissing her, for the love of all that was holy.
Lauren understood it on an intellectual level, but it didn’t make sense.
Mostly because what he did with his mouth bore no resemblance to any kiss she had ever heard of or let herself imagine.
He licked his way along her lips, a temptation and a seduction in one, encouraging her to open. To him.
Which of course she wasn’t going to do.
Until she did, with a small sound in the back of her throat that made her shudder everywhere else.
And then that wicked temptation of a tongue was inside her mouth—inside her—and everything went a little mad.
It was the angle, maybe. His taste, rich and wild. It was the impossible, lazy mastery of the way he kissed her, deepening it, changing it.
When he pulled away, his mouth was still curved.
And Lauren was the one who was shaking.
She assured herself it was temper. Outrage. “You can’t just...go about kissing people!”
That curve in his mouth deepened. “I will keep that in mind, should any more storybook creatures emerge from my woods.”
Lauren was flustered. Her cheeks were too hot and that same heat seemed to slide and melt its way all over her body, making her nipples pinch while between her legs, a kind of slippery need bloomed.
And shamed her. Deeply.
“I am not a storybook creature.” The moment she said it, she regretted it. Why was she participating in whatever bizarre delusion this was? But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Fairy tales aren’t real, and even if they were, I would want nothing to do with them.”
“That is a terrible shame. What are fairy tales if not a shorthand for all of mankind’s temptations? Fantasies. Dark imaginings.”
There was no reason that her throat should feel so tight. She didn’t need to swallow like that, and she certainly didn’t need to be so aware of it.
“I’m sure that some people’s jobs—or lack thereof—allow them to spend time considering the merit of children’s stories,” she said in a tone she was well aware was a touch too prissy. But that was the least of her concerns just then, with the brand of his mouth on hers. “But I’m afraid my job is rather more adult.”
“Because nothing is more grown-up than doing the bidding of another, of course.”
Lauren felt off-kilter, when she never did. Her lips felt swollen, but she refused to lift her fingers to test them. She was afraid it would give him far too much advantage. It would show him her vulnerability, and that was unconscionable.
The fact she had any vulnerability to show in the first place was an outrage.
“Not everyone can live by their wits in a forest hut,” she said. Perhaps a bit acerbically.
But if she expected him to glower at that, she was disappointed. Because all he did was stare back at her, that curve in the corner of his mouth, and his eyes gleaming a shade of silver that she felt in all those melting places inside her.
“Your innkeeper told me you were coming.” He shifted back only slightly, and she was hyperaware of him in ways that humiliated her further. There was something about the way his body moved. There was something about him. He made her want to lean in closer. He made her want to reach out her hands and—
But of course she didn’t do that. She folded her arms across her chest, to hold him off and hold herself together at the same time, and trained her fiercest glare upon him as if that could make all the uncomfortable feelings go away.
“You could have saved yourself the trouble and the walk,” he was saying. “I don’t want your rich boss and yes, I know who he is. You can rest easy. I’m not interested in him. Or his mother. Or whatever ‘provisions’ appeared in the wills of overly wealthy people I would likely hate if I’d known them personally.”
That felt like a betrayal when it shouldn’t have felt like anything. It wasn’t personal. She had nothing to do with the Combe and San Giacomo families. She had never been anything but staff, for which she often felt grateful, as there was nothing like exposure to the very wealthy and known to make a person grateful for the things she had—all of which came without the scrutiny and weight of all those legacies.
But the fact this man didn’t want his own birthright...rankled. Lauren’s lips tingled. They felt burned, almost, and she could remember the way his mouth had moved on hers so vividly that she could taste him all over again. Bold and unapologetic. Ruthlessly male.
And somehow that all wrapped around itself, became a knot and pulled tight inside her.
“My rich boss is your brother,” she pointed out, her voice sharper than it should have been. “This isn’t about money. It’s about family.”
“A very rich family,” Dominik agreed. And his gaze was more steel than silver then. “Who didn’t want me in the first place. I will pass, I think, on a tender reunion brought about by the caprice of a dead woman.”
Her heart lurched when he reached out and took her chin in his hand. She should have slapped him away. She meant to, surely.
But everything was syrupy, thick and slow. And all she could feel was the way he gripped her. The way he held her chin with a kind of certainty that made everything inside her quiver in direct contrast to that firm hold. She’d gone soft straight through. Melting hot. Impossibly...changed.
