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
