Page 18 of How to Bang a Billionaire

The Alumni and Development officer was going on and on about the St. Sebastian’s campaign. And my eyes were stingy with tears because I was sad over the loss of a man who had never been mine anyway.

What an idiot.

I slipped onto the forbidden balcony to wallow in aforementioned idiocy in private.

And there he was.

Chapter 5

It was as though he’d been waiting for me all along…except, well, he hadn’t.

He was standing by the crenellations, looking out at the city, which was all shadows and spires and streams of golden traffic in the distance. Cliché or not, he looked good by moonlight. Sculpted in silver and steel, a man so coldly perfect he was barely real at all.

Maybe it was some essential contrariness but his very untouchability made me want to…touch. To spark his beauty to life with passion and surrender.

He lifted a hand, bringing a cigarette to his mouth. He was briefly illuminated by a flare of amber and then he tilted his head back, eyes falling closed as he exhaled a sinuous plume of smoke into the darkness.

And God, his face like that. Open in pleasure. The suddenly undeniable sensuality of his parted lips.

I must have been staring at him like a cartoon American cop at a doughnut because, at that moment, his eyes snapped open and I’d never seen anyone shut down that fast, his expression becoming a mask again: smooth, composed, impenetrable.

I tried to think of something nonawkward to say but instead blurted out, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I allow myself one.”

“A day?”

“A month.”

I didn’t dare tell him that was kind of completely…adorable. “Why?”

“I like smoking. But I believe in controlling one’s vices.”

“Really?” I strolled across the balcony as casually as I could. Pretending I just wanted to admire the view, rather than be close to him. “Because I believe in letting them run riot.”

He gave a soft laugh and passed me the cigarette. “Then indulge yourself for me.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

As it happened, I hadn’t smoked much tobacco. I’d done a bit of weed, because it was available at student parties. Well, at the dull ones anyway, where you sat around talking about Kant instead of getting laid. But when I was fourteen, my mother had given me a cigarette in order to teach me how deeply uncool smoking was.

And, honestly, it had worked.

It was hard to find things rebellious or subversive when your mum introduced them to you.

But there was no way I was passing up an opportunity to share something with Caspian Hart. To put my lips and fingers where his own had lingered. Perhaps leave the taste of me for him. And I could just imagine us, monochrome in the moonlight, so elegant and sophisticated as we passed the cigarette between us like lovers in the movie I kept inventing. He would be played by Gregory Peck and I would be Lauren Bacall and at some point I’d be terribly willful and he’d be obliged to seize my wrists and kiss me cruelly until I’d learned my lesson.

“Arden?”

“Yes?”

“Do you want this or not?”

Oh God. “Sorry, yes. Thank you.”

Our hands brushed as I took the cigarette, that small touch of skin to skin crackling through me, electric-neon, lighting me up. I’d expected to look effortlessly sexy, with my cancerous accessory, but I wasn’t sure how to hold it. It was different to a joint, and I felt self-conscious. Like the pretender I was.

And if I didn’t act quickly, he was going to notice.

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