Page 30 of How to Bang a Billionaire

It was so…ugly. So beyond anything I would have thought or expected that, for a moment, I was numb. It felt like the moment after you cut yourself on something really sharp and you see the blood on your skin before you feel the pain. And then it hit me, all this bewilderment and shame and anger and hurt, and I burst helplessly into tears.

Through a silvery blur, I saw him turn away from the window. “What are you doing?”

“I’m”—I hiccoughed snottily—“c-crying, you arsehole.”

“Then please stop.”

“It’s not a conscious choice.” I scrubbed my sleeve across my face. My eyes were sticky and swollen, the velvet of my jacket making my skin sting. “How can you think these horrible things about me?”

The carpet smothered his footsteps as he crossed to where I was sitting and I tried not to notice how good he looked in motion, silent and effortlessly graceful, some glorious hunting beast. Probably coming to rip me to shreds.

He crouched down in front of me, the fabric of his suit tightening across the sleek muscles of his thighs, outlining them for me in all their strength and elegance. Like the chalk sketch of a murder victim except the deceased was my pride. He was just so beautiful. It was unfair. His eyes held mine in a cool, gray-blue forever. And then he told me, “I don’t know you.”

I tried to laugh but it clogged in my throat. “You don’t know me and prostitute blackmailer is where you went straight out of the gate? Is your glass half empty or what?”

“Why else would you come here?”

“God, because”—the truth exploded out of me—“I liked you and…and you made me feel really cheap, okay?”

“I know.” He rose to his feet and then he was off again, toward the window. It was weird—compelling, in one way, painful in another—how much stillness there was in him. And how much restlessness at the same time. It made every room feel like a cage. “My behavior…it was inappropriate.” He was silent a moment. “It was wrong.”

Was that what passed for a sorry in Caspian Hart Land? Except he seemed to be almost-sorry for completely the wrong thing. The one bit of this whole hideously humiliating business I definitely didn’t regret. “Wait. Are you talking about the blow job?”

“It’s not my usual practice.”

Oh shit, no. This was turning into an ever-deepening well of fail. The only thing worse than having enthusiastically gone down on someone who thought he had to pay me after was going down on someone insistently straight. Enshrined forever as some guy’s sleazy little secret. A pit stop at Queertown. “You mean you’re not gay?”

“No, I’m gay. But I don’t know what…happened to me. I shouldn’t have lost control like that. I could have hurt you.”

“Caspian”—his name slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it, the words of a magic spell, a curse or a blessing—“you did hurt me. You hurt me when you tried to buy me off or whatever it was you thought you were doing.”

“I was trying to apologize,” he snapped.

“You didn’t need to apologize. The fact that you thought you did offends me. And, actually,” I added, on a roll now, “you know what else offends me? You thinking I can’t take a bit of deep throating. I did excellent deep throating. I only gagged because you’ve got a big dick.”

His shoulders shifted. I must have been getting good at back reading because I thought maybe I’d embarrassed him. Though probably not in a bad way. I’d never a met a man who didn’t like having his bits admired. But I’d noticed this in Caspian before—the oddest touch of something almost like shyness.

That was when something else occurred to me. I mean, while it was pretty grim to have someone think you’d sleep with them on behalf of your college’s endowment, how much worse would it be the other way around? If your first assumption when somebody touched you was that it wasn’t you they wanted. Maybe it was one of the perils of being way too rich, but he was also way too attractive. Surely people were falling all over themselves to put his cock in their mouth?

I slipped out of the chair and followed him to the window. Rested my hand lightly on his back, feeling the heat and tightness of him through stupidhigh superfine. And he shuddered under my palm like an unbroken stallion.

“You didn’t do anything I wasn’t up for,” I told him.

He sighed. “I am sorry, Arden. I thought the donation would compensate for the way I’d treated you.”

“Well you thought wrong. Shoving your dick down my throat is okay. Even shoving your dick down my throat and never speaking to me again is okay. Shoving your dick down my throat, never speaking to me again, and starting an ‘oops, I’m sorry I shoved my dick down your throat’ scholarship in my name is seriously doubleplus unkay.”

Now that I was closer, his reflection was clear enough to show me nuances of expression: the slight softening of his lips, the hint of amusement. And I remembered that making him laugh was almost as satisfying as making him come.

“I wasn’t expecting anything,” I added. “It’s pretty fucking miraculous you’d want me at all. It’s not every day a boy gets to wrap his mouth round a gorgeous billionaire.”

“Arden, Arden.”

I adored it when he said my name. My memory was bliss-hazy but I thought he’d whispered it to me that night as well. Arden, Arden, oh, Arden the same way some people called out for God.

“Stop.”

“I loved being on my knees for you, being breathless for you. I loved everything we did. I didn’t want or need anything else. And it makes me really fucking sick to think you might regret me.”

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