about her boss she would never utter out loud and kept to the path.
The correct Dominik James had not been easy to find.
There had been almost no information to go on aside from what few details Matteo’s mother had provided in her will. Lauren had started with the solicitor who had put Alexandrina’s last will and testament together, a canny old man better used to handling the affairs of aristocrats than entertaining the questions of staff. He had peered at her over glasses she wasn’t entirely convinced he needed, straight down his nose as he’d assured her that had there been any more pertinent information, he would have included it.
Lauren somehow doubted it.
While Matteo was off tending to his anger management sessions with the future of Combe Industries hanging in the balance, Lauren had launched herself into a research frenzy. The facts were distressingly simple. Alexandrina, heiress to the great San Giacomo fortune, known throughout the world as yet another poor little rich girl, had become pregnant when she was barely fifteen, thanks to a decidedly unsuitable older boy she shouldn’t have met in the first place. The family had discovered her pregnancy when she’d been unable to keep hiding it and had transferred her from the convent school she had been attending to one significantly more draconian.
The baby had been born in the summer when Alexandrina was sixteen, spirited away by the church, and Alexandrina had returned to her society life come fall as if nothing had happened. As far as Lauren could tell, she had never mentioned her first son again until she’d made provisions for him in her will.
To my firstborn son, Dominik James, taken from me when I was little more than a child myself, I leave one third of my fortune and worldly goods.
The name itself was a clue. James, it turned out, was an Anglicized version of Giacomo. Lauren tracked all the Dominik Jameses of a certain age she could find, eventually settling on two possibilities. The first she’d dismissed after she found his notably non–San Giacomo DNA profile on one of those ancestry websites. Which left only the other.
The remaining Dominik James had been raised in a series of Catholic orphanages in Italy before running off to Spain. There he’d spent his adolescence, moving from village to village in a manner Lauren could only describe as itinerant. He had joined the Italian Army in his twenties, then disappeared after his discharge. He’d emerged recently to do a stint at university, but had thereafter receded from public view once more.
It had taken some doing, but Lauren had laboriously tracked him down into this gnarled, remote stretch of Hungarian forest—which Matteo had informed her, after all her work, was the single notation made in the paper version of Alexandrina’s will found among Matteo’s father’s possessions.
“That was what my father wrote on his copy of my mother’s will,” Matteo had said cheerfully. Cheerfully, as if it didn’t occur to him that knowing the correct Dominik James was in Hungary might have been information Lauren could have used earlier.
She didn’t say that, of course. She’d thanked him.
Matteo’s father might have made notes on Alexandrina’s will, but he’d clearly had no intention of finding the illegitimate child his wife had given away long before he’d met her. Which meant it was left to Lauren to not only make this trek to locate Dominik James in the first place, but also potentially to break the news of his parentage to him. Here.
In these woods that loomed all about her, foreign and imposing, and more properly belonged in a fairy tale.
Good thing Lauren didn’t believe in fairy tales.
She adjusted her red wrap again, pulling it tighter around her to ward off the chill.
It was spring, though there was no way of telling down here on the forest floor. The trees were thick and tall and blocked out the daylight. The shadows were intense, creeping this way and that and making her feel...restless.
Or possibly it wasn’t shadows cast by tree branches that were making her feel one way or another, she told herself tartly as she willed her ankles not to roll or her sharp heels to snap off. Perhaps it was the fact that she was here in the first place. Or the fact that when she’d told the innkeeper in this remote mountain town that she was looking for Dominik James, he’d laughed.
“Good luck with that,” he had told her, which she had found remarkably unhelpful. “Some men do not want to be found, miss, and nothing good comes of ignoring their issues.”
Out here in these woods, where there were nothing but trees all around and the uneasy sensation that she was both entirely alone and not alone at all, that unhelpful statement felt significantly more ominous.
On and on she walked. She had left the village behind a solid thirty minutes ago, and that was the last she’d seen of anything resembling civilization. She tried to tell herself it was lucky this path didn’t go directly up the side of the brooding mountains, but it was hard to think in terms of luck when there was nothing around but dirt. Thick trees. Birds causing commotions in the branches over her head. And the kind of crackling sounds that assured her that just because she couldn’t see any wildlife, it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Watching. Waiting.
Lauren shuddered. Then told herself she was being ridiculous as she rounded another curve in her path, and that was when she saw it.
At first, she wasn’t sure if this was the wooded, leafy version of a desert mirage—not that she’d experienced such a thing, as there were no deserts in London. But the closer she got, the more she could see that her eyes were not deceiving her, after all. There was a rustic sort of structure peeking through the trees, tucked away in a clearing.
Lauren drew closer, slowing her steps as the path led her directly toward the edge of the clearing. All she’d wanted this whole walk was a break from the encroaching forest, but now that there was a clearing, she found it made her nervous.
But Lauren didn’t believe in nerves, so she ignored the sensation and frowned at the structure before her. It was a cottage. Hewn from wood, logs interlocking and tidy. There was smoke curling up from its chimney, and there was absolutely no reason that a dedicated city dweller like Lauren should feel something clutch inside her at the sight. As if she’d spent her entire life wandering around without knowing it, half-lost in forests of wood and concrete alike, looking for a cozy little home exactly like this one.
That was ridiculous, of course. Lauren rubbed at her chest without entirely meaning to, as if she could do something about the ache there. She didn’t believe in fairy tales, but she’d read them. And if any good had ever come from seemingly perfect cottages slapped down in the middle of dangerous forests, well. She couldn’t remember that story. Usually, an enchanted cottage led straight to witches and curses and wolves baring their teeth—
But that was when she noticed that the porch in front of the cottage wasn’t empty as she’d thought at first glance. That one of the shadows there was a man.
And he was staring straight at her.
Her heart did something acrobatic and astonishing inside her chest, and she had the strangest notion that if she surrendered to it, it could topple her straight to the ground. Right there on that edge where the forest fought to take back the clearing.
But Lauren had no intention of crumpling.
No matter who was lurking about, staring at her.
“Mr. Dominik James?” she asked briskly, making her voice as crisp and clear as possible and projecting it across the clearing as if she wasn’t the slightest bit unnerved, because she shouldn’t have been.
Though she was standing stock-still, she couldn’t help but notice. As if her legs were not necessarily as convinced as she was that she could continue to remain upright. Especially while her heart kept up its racket and ache.
The man moved, stepping out from the shadow of the porch into the sunlight that filled the clearing but somehow did nothing to push back the inky darkness of the forest.
It