Page 109 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

It might have been delivered Ellery-style but it was still more consideration than Caspian had shown me all evening. And the fact I’d been waiting for something like it, just a fucking goddamn hint that he cared I was there, and it was Ellery—sulky, thoughtless, self-absorbed Ellery—who wanted to make sure I was okay, had me blinking back tears. “Thanks, but I’m going to look for Caspian.”

Look for him. Find him. Shout at him.

Her only answer was a theatrical eye roll.

I spent the next ten minutes or so wandering through gilt rooms, past all the beautiful people, in hopeless pursuit of the questing beast that was Caspian Hart.

Only to discover he was nowhere.

Typical.

Ellery, however, in her red dress was as easy to spot as a flame in a forest. Remembering the theme of the ball, it was a little bit macabre of her. But I wouldn’t have expected anything less and she was so clearly reveling in it. Several of her guests had even obligingly pretended to drop dead at the sight of her. It was one of the few times I’d heard her laugh without wariness.

I eventually ran out of places to look. Unless I started peering under chaises and behind curtains. Was he still dealing with the caterers? After five hours? If there’d even been something that needed dealing with in the first place. And it wasn’t an excuse to fuck Nathaniel in the pantry.

Oh God, I didn’t want to think about that.

Besides, I knew with the certainty of sunrise that Caspian wouldn’t cheat on me.

And, actually, now the notion had sidled stickily across the threshold of my mind, I couldn’t really imagine them together. They’d look beautiful—like a slightly risqué, designer underwear advert—but Nathaniel didn’t strike me as someone to readily abandon his dignity.

And, in my experience, dignity was pretty much the opposite of sex.

Trying to rid myself of an image that almost epitomized my understanding of the tragicomic (though not one, thankfully, that had found its way into my apparently rubbish finals essay on the subject), I stared out at the gardens. There wasn’t much to see—just the shadowy wash of a perfectly maintained lawn and the pale gleam of what was probably a gazebo or a folly, half lost amid a haze of distant willows.

Aaaaaand that was when I knew exactly where Caspian was.

I tried the handle on one of the French windows and, sure enough, it was open. A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed that nobody was paying any attention as I slipped outside.

I’d never entirely worked out what a folly actually was—or how it differed from, say, a building—but I found Caspian in this miniature classical temple type affair of slender marble pillars supporting a domed iron roof. Swept in dusty starlight and overlooking a tiny silver lake, it was an absurdly romantic spot. It looked like the sort of place where you’d sit in a crinoline, waiting to be ruined and then jilted by your no-good suitor.

Caspian was smoking.

He turned as I approached and cast the cigarette aside. I’d prepared a casual hey you type greeting but I never got the chance to utter it.

I was too busy being slammed up against the nearest pillar and kissed—holy fuck kissed—like he’d never kissed me before. The aggression I was used to, the will to dominate, to control, to claim. The ruthless determination simply to have me and wring a yielding from me that left me shaking and breathless and undone. But, this time, he was rough because he was clumsy, and he was clumsy because he was desperate.

Desperate for me.

He tasted of tobacco and the salt of unshed tears, and the sound he made against my lips, oh God, the sound. So helpless and naked and frantic.

And, of course, I forgot everything. I forgot my frustration and disappointment and hurt. The words I’d been going to say. All that mattered right then was that he needed me.

I reached for him, wanting to draw him close—to show him how safe he was, and how absolutely I was his. For a moment, he allowed it, shuddering against me, wrapped in my arms. But then he caught my wrists and pulled me away and I let him. Because whatever I could give, whatever he wanted to take with his cruel hands and his harsh mouth, was his.

He drew back a little, eyes wild in the uncertain light. And ran a single finger down the line of my throat, bringing with it a sharp, bright bliss. I tilted back my head and pressed into his palm. He could have that too. All my pleasure and all my pain, my heart and soul, my very breath.

“What do you want, Arden?” He sounded ragged and feral and dangerous: a beast about to snap and make me bleed.

I leaned into him as much as I dared, so he could feel the word gather in my throat before I gave it to him. “You.”

It was the truth. The only answer I could give. But it made his eyes darken, the curve of his mouth turn cruel. The pressure of his hand eased. His fingertips skated over my leaping pulse. “Even like this?”

“Yes. Like this.” I was trembling a little beneath his touch, but if it was fear it was indistinguishable from excitement. From love. “Like everything.”

For a moment, he said nothing. Just stared at me, searching my eyes as if he wanted to crack me open like a coconut. And then, so softly, “You really want to hurt for me?”

I could have told him I already do. “Yes.”

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