Page 20 of Untamed Billionaire's Innocent Bride

CHAPTER SIX

THEREWASNO doubt at all that the man on the video screen was Dominik’s brother. It was obvious from the shape of his jaw to the gray of his eyes. His hair was shorter, and every detail about him proclaimed his wealth and high opinion of himself. The watch he wore that he wasn’t even bothering to try to flash. The cut of his suit. The way he sat as if the mere presence of his posterior made wherever he rested it a throne.

This was the first blood relative Dominik had ever met, assuming a screen counted as a meeting. This...aristocrat.

He couldn’t think of a creature more diametrically opposed to him. He, who had suffered and fought for every scrap he’d ever had, and a man who looked as if he’d never blinked without the full support of a trained staff.

They stared at each other for what seemed like another lifetime or two.

Dominik stood in Lauren’s office, which was sprawling and modern and furnished in such a way to make certain everyone who entered it knew that she was very important in her own right—and even more so, presumably, as the gatekeeper to the even more massive and dramatically appointed office beyond.

Matteo Combe’s office, Dominik did not have to be told.

His only brother, so far as he knew. The man who had received all the benefit of the blood they shared, while Dominik had been accorded all the shame.

Matteo Combe, the man whose bidding Lauren did without question.

Dominik decided he disliked the man on the screen before him. Intensely.

“I would have known you anywhere,” Matteo said after they’d eyed each other a good long while.

It would have pained Dominik to admit that he would have known Matteo, too—it was the eyes they shared, first and foremost, and a certain similarity in the way they held themselves—so he chose not to admit it.

“Brother,” Dominik replied instead, practically drawling out the word. Making it something closer to an insult. “What a pleasure to almost meet you.”

And when Lauren showed him out of the office shortly after that tender reunion, Dominik took a seat in the waiting area that was done up like the nicest and most expensive doctor’s office he’d ever seen, and reflected on how little he’d thought about this part. The actually having family, suddenly, part.

Because all he’d thought about since she’d walked into his clearing was Lauren.

When he’d searched for his parents, he’d quickly discovered that the young man who’d had the temerity to impregnate an heiress so far above his own station had died in an offshore oil rig accident when he was barely twenty. An oil rig he’d gone to work on because he couldn’t remain in Europe, pursuing his studies, after his relationship with Alexandrina had been discovered.

And when Dominik had found all the Combes and San Giacomos with precious little effort—which, of course, meant they could have done the same—he’d had wanted nothing to do with them. Because he wanted nothing from them—look what they’d done to the boy who’d fathered him. They had gotten rid of both of them, in one way or another, and Dominik had risen from the trash heap where they’d discarded him despite that abandonment. His mother’s new boy and girl, who had been pampered and coddled and cooed over all this time in his stead, were nothing to him. What was the point of meeting with them to discuss Alexandrina’s sins?

He’d been perfectly content to excel on his own terms, without any connection to the great families who could have helped him out of the gutter, but hadn’t. Likely because they’d been the ones to put him there.

But it hadn’t occurred to him to prepare himself to look into another man’s face and see...his own.

It was disconcerting, to put it mildly.

That they had different fathers was evident, but there was no getting around the fact that he and Matteo Combe shared blood. Dominik scowled at the notion, because it sat heavily. Too heavily.

And then he transferred that scowl back to the screen inside Lauren’s office, where Matteo was still larger than life and Lauren stood before him, arguing.

He didn’t have to be able to hear a word she said to know she was arguing. He knew some of her secrets now. He knew the different shapes she made with that mouth of hers and the crease between her brows that broadcast her irritation. He certainly knew what she looked like when she was agitated.

And he found he didn’t much care for the notion that whatever she called it or didn’t call it, she had a thing for her boss.

Her boss. His brother.

“Is he one of the ones you’ve experimented with?” he asked her when she came out of the office, the screen finally blank behind her.

She was frowning even more fiercely than before, which he really shouldn’t have found entertaining, especially when he hadn’t had the pleasure of causing it. He lounged back in his seat as if it had been crafted specifically for him and regarded her steadily until she blinked. In what looked like incomprehension.

“I already declined to dignify that question with a response.”

“Because dignity is the foremost concern here. With your boss.” He refused to call the man Mr. Combe the way she did. And calling him by his Christian name seemed to suggest that they had more of a personal relationship—or any personal relationship, for that matter—than Dominik was comfortable having with anyone who shared his blood. “I want to know if he was one of your kissing experiments.”

Lauren maintained her blank expression for a moment.

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