“I spent my entire childhood waiting for people to come,” he said softly, after a moment that stretched out between them and made her...edgy. “They never did. You will forgive me if I somehow find it difficult to believe that now, suddenly, I will become of interest to anyone.”
“When you were a child you were an illegitimate mistake,” Lauren said, making her voice cold to hide that odd yearning inside her that made her wish she could go back in time and save the little boy he’d been from his fate. “That’s what Alexandrina San Giacomo’s father wrote about you. That’s not my description.” She hurried to say that last part, something in the still way he watched her making her stomach clench. “Now you are the San Giacomo heir you always should have been. You are a very wealthy man, Mr. James. More than that, you are part of a long and illustrious family line, stretching back generations.”
“You could not be more mistaken,” he said in the same soft way that Lauren didn’t dare mistake for any kind of weakness. Not when she could see that expression on his face, ruthless and lethal in turn. “I am an orphan. An ex-soldier. And a man who prefers his own company. If I were you, I would hurry back to the man who keeps you on his leash and tell him so.” There was a dangerous gleam in his eyes then. “Now, like a good pet. Before I forget how you taste and indulge my temper instead.”
Lauren wanted nothing more. If being a pet on Matteo’s leash could keep her safe from this man, she wanted it. But that wasn’t the task that had been set before her. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“There is no alternative, little red. I have given you my answer.”
Lauren could see he meant that. He had every intention of walking back into this ridiculous cottage in the middle of nowhere, washing his hands of his birthright and pretending no one had found him. She felt a surge of a different kind of emotion at that, and it wasn’t one that spoke well of her.
Because she wouldn’t turn up her nose at the San Giacomo fortune and everything that went along with it. She wouldn’t scoff at the notion that maybe she’d been a long-lost heiress all this time. Far better that than the boring reality, which was that both her mother and father had remarried and had sparkly new families they’d always seemed to like a whole lot more than her, the emblem of the bad decisions they’d made together.
They’d 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