LITMIR.BIZ

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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 few inches between them.

      She thought he was going to put his hand on her—touch her 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.

       CHAPTER TWO

      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

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