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 dropped into the chair opposite hers, and lounged there, doing absolutely nothing at all to accommodate her when he let his long legs take over the space between them. He watched her swallow, as if her throat was dry, and he could have offered her a drink.
But he didn’t.
“I thought you intended to convince me to do your bidding,” he said after a moment, when the air between them seemed to get thick. Fraught. Filled with premonition and meaning, when he wanted neither. “Perhaps things are different where you’re from, but I would not begin an attempt at persuasion by insulting the very person I most wanted to come around to my way of thinking. Your mileage may vary, of course.”
She blinked at him, and it was almost as if she’d forgotten why they were there. She shrugged out of that wrap at last, then folded her hands in her lap, and Dominik let his gaze fall all over her. Greedily. As if he’d never seen a woman before in all his days.
She was sweet and stacked, curvy in all the right places. Her hair gleamed like gold in the firelight, the sleek ponytail at her nape pulled forward over one shoulder. There was a hint of real gold at her throat, precisely where he wanted to use his teeth—gently, so gently, until she shuddered. Her breasts begged for a man’s hands and his face between them, and it would take so little. He could shift forward, onto his knees, and take her in hand that easily.
He entertained a few delicious images of himself doing just that.
And she didn’t exactly help matters when she pulled that plump lower lip of hers between her teeth, the way he’d like to do.
But Dominik merely sank deeper into his chair, propped his head up with his fist, and ignored the demands of the hardest, greediest part of him as he gazed at her.
“I would be delighted to persuade you,” she said, and did he imagine a certain huskiness in her voice? He didn’t think he did. “I expected to walk in here and find you living on a pallet on the floor. But you clearly like your creature comforts. That tells me that while you might like your solitude, you aren’t exactly hiding from the world. Or not completely. So what would it take to convince you to step back into it?”
“You have yet to explain to me why that is something I should want, much less consider doing.”
“You could buy a hundred cabins and litter them about all the forests of Europe, for a start.”
He lifted one shoulder, then let it fall. “I already have a cabin.”
And properties across the globe, but he didn’t mention that.
“You could outfit this cabin in style,” she suggested brightly. “Make it modern and accessible. Imagine the opportunities!”
“I never claimed to live off the grid, did I? I believe you are the one who seems to think this cabin belongs in the Stone Age. I assure you, I have as much access to the modern world as I require.”
Not to mention his other little shack that wasn’t a shack at all, set farther up the mountainside and outfitted with the very latest in satellite technology. But that was yet another thing that could remain his little secret.
“You could buy yourself anything you wanted.”
“All you have to offer me is money,” he said after a moment. “I already told you, I have my own. But the fact that you continue to focus on it tells me a great deal about you, I think. Does this brother of mine not pay you well?”
She stiffened at that, and a crease appeared between her brows. “Mr. Combe has always been remarkably generous to me.”
He found the color on her cheeks...interesting. “I cannot tell if that means he does or does not pay you what you deserve. What’s the going rate for the kind of loyalty that would lead a woman clearly uncomfortable with the outdoors to march off into the forest primeval, deep into the very lair of a dangerous stranger?”
Her chin tipped up at that, which he should not have found as fascinating as he did. “I fail to see how my salary is your business.”
“You have made anything and everything my business by delivering yourself to my door.” And if he was overly intrigued by her, to the point his fingers itched with the need to touch her all over that curvy body until she sounded significantly less cool, that was his burden to carry. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”
The color on her cheeks darkened. The crease between her brows deepened. And it shouldn’t have been possible to sit any straighter in that chair, but she managed it.
“I have already told you why I’m here, Mr. James.”
“I’m sure they told you in the village that I come in at least once a week for supplies. You could have waited for me there, surrounded by creature comforts and room service. There was no need at all to walk through the woods to find me, particularly not in those shoes.”
She looked almost smug then. As if he’d failed some kind of test.
“You don’t need to concern yourself with my shoes,” she said, and crossed her legs, which had the immediate effect of drawing his attention to the shoes in question. Just as she’d intended, he assumed. “I find them remarkably comfortable, actually.”
“That you find them comfortable, or want me to think you do, doesn’t mean they are. And it certainly doesn’t make them practical for a brisk hike on a dirt path.”
That gaze of hers was the color of a sweet, sticky dessert, and he wanted to indulge. Oh, how he wanted to indulge. Especially when her eyes flashed at him, once again letting him know that she felt superior to him.
Little did she know, he found that entertaining.
Even as it made him harder.
“In my experience, anyone who is concerned with the practicality of my footwear is casting about in desperation for some way to discount what I have to say,” she told