Page 1 of How to Belong with a Billionaire

Prologue

In the room where Lancaster Steyne trained me, he kept a bonsai tree. He taught me how to tend it—how to offer care without mercy—and I am not insensible of the irony. I wonder if he still has it, though me, of course, he gave to Caspian. Who, in turn, gave me to counsellors, therapists, psychoanalysts. And finally, he gave me a job.

I would have done anything for him. Tended to his every desire. Surrendered my body for his use. Taken pain for his pleasure, both being equally meaningless to me. The truth is, I still would. So I serve, in the capacities he allows. In the ways his conscience will permit. And I let him pay me for it because he needs to. Because he also needs to believe I am not Lancaster’s creature. So he can believe it of himself. Even this, I will do for Caspian. I will lie for him.

The differences between us run deep. I have lost what little sense I ever possessed of who I was before Lancaster found me, and I have no interest in who I could have been without him. There is some part of me that misses still the serenity of those days: dark rooms and light and the comfort of routine. My world was a simpler place with him at its centre. Not necessarily a kinder one, but none of my experiences have taught me to expect kindness, and I certainly value simplicity.

“I will make you perfect,” he used to tell me as I knelt at his feet. And I welcomed his making. Until then, I had been nothing. I had been dank places and money changing hands, the course of my life as inevitable as the path of the veins down my forearm. But Caspian is not like me. He has never been as low or as lost. He has always had choices. Whereas I am shaped, either by nature or because of Lancaster, to find solace in constraint, in service, in the abnegation of the self, he suffers. He struggles. Of course, Lancaster has never expected of Caspian what is now an instinct in me. But he was not made to subordinate his will to that of another. He is not to be tamed. Or if he is, neither Lancaster Steyne nor Nathaniel Priest has the heart for it.

And I, what can I do but watch? As I have always watched. My care for him is in everything I do—in his diary, meticulously kept, the reports I prepare, the meetings I schedule and minute, the tasks I perform without question or hesitation—but it is not my care he needs. I have no resentment for that. It is never reciprocation I have sought, only use and, from that, purpose. Though it is far from anything Lancaster intended for me, Caspian has given me both. His generosity leaves me abashed and his gentleness has never been necessary. And this summer I saw him happy for the first time.

It didn’t last. And now—also for the first time—I begin to question. Not to him. Never to him. But my hands sometimes shake beneath my desk. Mistakes creep into my work, a double booking, a forgotten duty, not many. But I have never made mistakes before. All Caspian says is that I must be more careful next time, though I can barely bring myself to meet his eyes. The pain is too stark in him.

I have no interest in power. It is a messy thing, unlike the quiet order of submission. But I don’t know how to serve a man when his actions are hurtful to himself. I don’t know how to obey when my mind is already in open mutiny. I don’t know how to help him. Silence is betrayal of his happiness. Action is betrayal of his trust. And it is all a betrayal of me. Or perhaps of Lancaster. He was supposed to make me perfect. Yet here I am in turmoil. And what disturbs me most is that I can see what Caspian cannot. Which is simply this:

Arden St. Ives changed us both.

Chapter 1

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Boy meets billionaire. Billionaire offers boy short-term prearranged sex contract. Boy runs away from billionaire. Billionaire comes after boy. Boy and billionaire get back together. Billionaire sends boy to America on account of boy’s best friend having been in horrendous car accident. Boy comes home again. Billionaire freaks out because of abusive history he never fucking told boy about. Boy blows it with billionaire.

Boy gets on with life.

And you know something? Boy’s life wasn’t too bad.

I’d moved in with Caspian’s sister, Ellery—into what I’d thought was going to be a converted warehouse for Spratt’s Patent pet foods but turned out to be just a warehouse she blatantly had no intention of converting into anything. Looking back, I wasn’t sure why I’d expected otherwise. But I had the loft, and we mostly had electricity and running water, so it was actually semi romantic in awriting poetry and fucking Kerouackind of way. Well, except when I stumbled home drunk and collided with a girder, and Ellery had to take me to A&E. But that was one time.

As for Ellery, she came and went at all hours, shamelessly ate my food, and sometimes crawled into my bed to sleep curled up next to me. It was like having a cat, if the cat also took a lot of drugs and threw wild parties. Not that I think Ellery meant to throw wild parties—they just happened around her, especially now that her band, Murder Ballad, was taking off, or at any rate accruing a devoted cult following. I had no ideahow, because they didn’t seem to advertise their gigs or hold them at, y’know, venues (the last one had been in a derelict church), but somehow, the word got out.

Because apparently songs about child murder, sororicide, and accidentally cheating on your husband with the devil performed in abandoned buildings were less nichey than the elevator pitch suggested. Or maybe it was just Ellery. She was electric on stage. As far as I knew, she arranged most of the music herself and she was in every swoop of the soprano, every cry of the violin, every beat of the drums: savage and mournful and free.

I was still atMilieu, though it would have been pretty damning if I hadn’t been. An ouchie in the heart region made time drag itself along like a dying cowboy in a western, but it had been a mere handful of months since Caspian had left me. The longest autumn of my life. The coldest winter.

Or else that was nonmetaphorical cold because the heating had gone off again. I pushed my sleep mask onto my forehead and poked my nose out from under the quilt Mum had made. Immediately regretted it and vanished back under my pile of blankets. This was a major disadvantage of being a proper grown-up: You had to get out of bed. Not that Ihada bed. I couldn’t afford a bed. I had a mattress on the ground. But it was probably really good for my back. And at least I wasn’t living on Coco Pops in a hovel by myself, which was all I could have managed on my salary without Ellery.

I would have done it, though. Because deep down I knew that no matter how sharp and real and inescapable my pain felt right now, it would fade. My life was more than Caspian Hart. Weird as it seemed, he’d shown me that.

Shown me how to fly, then pushed me through a window.

Some days, I was fucking pissed about it. Others I was just sad. But occasionally, I’d wake up in the rose and silver haze of a London dawn. Sit there on my mattress, wrapped in the quilt that still smelled of home, watching the light gleaming on the mist that coiled off the canal and…feel the shape of something like okayness at the tips of my fingers.

This morning, however, okayness was definitely not within touching distance. In fact, I was all for sticking my head under the pillow and pretending I didn’t exist.

Except then I’d be late for work.

I got out of bed and, whimpering softly, peeled off the two pairs of socks I was wearing. The floor was hideously cold against my bare feet, but it was better than slipping on twisty little stairs that led to the main level and ending up in A&E again.

The bathroom was basically a long corridor that had been partitioned off, with a shower over a drain at the far end. Ellery, with the air of someone defiantly uninterested in interior decor, described it as Shawshank chic. And truth be told, it was a bit of a shock to the system after the pristine marble palace that was One Hyde Park. But I adapted, reminding myself I’d washed in way worse places when I was a student.

Morning ablutions complete, I spent some time picking out clothes and making my hair super cute. Life as a junior editor wasn’t actually that glamorous—mainly I made tea, wrote boring copy, proofed other people’s more interesting copy, and did what was called “gathering assets,” which boiled down to Googling shit—but you still had to turn it out. You had to look like the sort of person who worked at a high society lifestyle magazine. Not posh, exactly, but as if you knew what you were doing fashion-wise.

Thankfully, I’d emerged from the womb serving manic pixie dream queer. I went for some skinny leg, windows check trousers, a chunky cable knit jumper, also courtesy of Mum, and my very pointiest shoes. Then hurried downstairs to see if Ellery had eaten all the Coco Pops.

Which, apparently, she had. Or rather was just about to, as she tipped the last of the packet directly into her mouth. She was wearing an oversized T-shirt, which simply saidBASTARDS, and some stripy thigh-highs, and was curled in the corner of the vast L-shaped sofa that was our only item of furniture. I mean, unless you counted the table I’d made out of wine crates. And the taxidermy walrus that…actually, I still had no idea about the walrus. Ellery said he was called Broderick.

The rest of the band, who didn’t actually live with us but might as well have, were scattered about in various states of consciousness. The drummer—Osian Ap Glyn—was facedown in the middle of the floor in a tumble of red hair. For a moment, I thought he might be legitimately dead, but then he twitched and I heaved a sigh of relief. Innisfree, who did keyboard and soulful vocals, and was essentially the anti-Ellery, was sitting in the lotus position with her face turned ecstatically towards the sunrise. And Dave, the guitarist, was, as ever, justthere, looking as if he’d blundered into Ellery’s life by mistake and couldn’t think of a way to politely excuse himself.

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