Page 80 of How to Bang a Billionaire

“I don’t want this to happen again,” I said finally. “I get you’re amused. But I feel really bad about it.”

“You didn’t enjoy yourselves?”

“Well, of course we did. It was the most amazing champagne I’ve ever tasted. But I can’t in all honesty say I derived sufficient pleasure for the likely cost.”

“My little puritan.” His fingers traced the line of my jaw before gently turning my face up to receive an unexpected kiss. “No pleasure is worth the cost. Some things are beyond price.”

Unfortunately, I’d gone weak-kneed and wobbly and wasn’t really up for a discussion of the transience of material wealth and the transcendental nature of the superficial. Because mouths and hands and bodies and—“Nrgble.”

“I want you to be happy, Arden. You know, you can have whatever you want.”

I made a sort of lunging nuzzle into his palm. This was sweet of him. And confusing. But not quite what I needed to hear. Basically it was emotional umami. And I didn’t know how to answer. Except then I blurted out, “But I don’t want things. I want you.”

Caspian froze. It was like lights going out. Security doors coming down. Then he leaned in and kissed me again, and it was all teeth, all savagery. He spun me round, driving me back against the fridge, his mouth still on mine, one hand trapping my wrists and the other sliding down to rest against my throat. It was a pretty threatening way to be pinned, with my pulse beating under his palm and the heat of him surrounding me.

So, obviously, I was super into it.

He finally broke the kiss, leaving me breathless and dizzy and full of the taste of him. Pressed in even closer, his eyes a flare of ice blue—sun glare across glaciers—and his lips a little red from mine. “No, you don’t.”

“How do you know? Don’t you trust me?”

His thumb circled a shivery spot below my ear. “It’s me I don’t trust.”

“What do you mean?” Swoony with sex feels, I swayed into his touch. Maybe I should have been more concerned about the whole hand-around-my-neck thing but…I wasn’t. It was intimate—intimately scary—and I liked it.

“Oh, Arden. I want so much I shouldn’t.” Abruptly he let me go, but it was only to gather me close for a moment, his breath shaky against my skin. “But most of all I want to be good for you. Please, let me be good.”

He didn’t often let me get my hands on him. I took major advantage and wrapped him up tight tight tight. “You are. You’re amazing. And I want to be amazing for you too.”

“I can’t seem to control myself very well around you.”

“Why do you have to?” I threaded my fingers through his hair. And this time it was me, gently urging him to lift his head. To look at me. “Unless you’re trying to tell me you’re going to eat me with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?”

He gave me a startled look. The man paid so little heed to popular culture he might as well have been an inadvertent time traveler: one of Georgette Heyer’s exquisitely sophisticated Corinthians adrift in the twenty-first century without his matched grays and his gentleman’s personal gentleman. (Though, let’s face it, the whip was transferable.) Once, it might have made me laugh, but now it was just another weird gulf between us. Another way we couldn’t communicate or understand each other.

“I mean,” I explained hastily, “unless you’re trying to tell me you’re a serial killer or something.”

“I’m not a serial killer. But you should still be wary of me. I’m just…I’m not good at caring for people. I try. But it becomes such a twisted thing.”

This was starting to scare me. Not because I expected him to chop me up and put me in the freezer, but because he sounded so completely fucking desolate. “I don’t believe this for a second. You’ve been extraordinarily nice. And, frankly, ridiculously generous.”

“You deserve nothing less.”

“Call me easily pleased, but that seems a pretty decent level of caring to me.”

He made a soft, frustrated noise. “You don’t understand. Yes, I care for you. Yes, I want to make you happy. Yes, I would lay the whole damn world at your feet if you would let me. But I also want to hurt you. I want you on your knees. I want you in chains. I want to have you crying and screaming and begging for me.”

“Would,” I squeaked, “would I get a safeword?”

He tore out of my arms and slammed his hand hard enough against a cabinet to make me jump. “Arden, this isn’t a fantasy or a game.”

“You think I don’t know that?” I tried not to get shouty. But it happened anyway. “You’re the one who acts like it’s a game. Like you can keep me in a pretty box and only ever show me this…I don’t know…perfect benefactor you’ve decided I need.”

“I’m trying to protect you.”

“I can protect myself.”

“Which I suppose is why,” he snapped, “when I found you in Oxford, you were about to be raped in an alley.”

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