Page 85 of How to Belong with a Billionaire

“I don’t need photographs to remember you, Arden.”

My head whirled. “I…I don’t want to hear this.” That was a total lie, for the record. I’d been wanting to hear this for months. “It’s not fair.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll…I’ll give you the pictures. You can do whatever you like with them.”

“What the fuck am I going to do with a bunch of sexy photos of myself?”

“I don’t know.” His grip on me slackened, but he still didn’t release me, and I still wasn’t stepping away. “I’m afraid I’m not making sensible decisions right now.”

“You mean because the sight of your ex-boyfriend’s o-face has completely overthrown your reason?”

He gazed down at me for a long moment, my hands still trapped against his chest, his heart thundering beneath them. “You used to look at me like that.”

I opened my mouth—but all that came out of it was a dry sob.

“How can you believe I’d stopped wanting you?” He drew me in closer, until we were pressed together. “How can you believe I ever could? God, Arden, the things you give me. The way you surrender to me. You’ve crawled for me and taken pain for me. And sometimes, I think you might have ruined me.”

“And that’s what you think is in those photos?” I asked shakily.

“A…shadow of it, maybe.”

“You still don’t fucking get it, do you?” I moved restlessly in his arms, not sure whether I wanted to struggle free, or beat myself against him until we both broke. “I’m like that in those photos because that’s how I like being. But how I was with you is because I love you.”

“Arden…”

Staring up at him sullenly, I sniffed back fresh tears. “You dick.”

And then his fingers were gliding across my damp cheeks, holding me in place as he lowered his head and pressed his lips to mine. My mouth was sticky from my crying, and salty from my tears, and I shouldn’t have let him, I know I shouldn’t, but it was Caspian. The man I yearned and hurt for. Who had been so kind to me, shown me such strength and such suffering, laughed with me and believed in me, and let me see who he was. Until he couldn’t bear to anymore. And here he was, my Caspian at last, confused and lost and in pain, just like I was. I melted into him, twining my arms around his neck, kissing him back—yielding and eager and desperately willing, smothering the last traces of smoke with the taste of us.

It was a shattered thing, this kiss of ours, both of us perpetually on the brink of pulling back, but never quite able to do it, falling back into each other with the inevitability of sailors caught in the depths of Charybdis. Normally I liked being helpless, found it sweet and bright, but it tugged at me now like a fishhook in my flesh. Made me worry and fret, even though the possibility of resistance barely entered my mind before it was discarded. I couldn’t. I wanted him too much, and his wanting of me was its own drug.

My back hit the wall of the fire escape hard enough to grind the edges of the bricks into my spine, knocking our mouths apart. Words collided in the harsh mingling of our breaths, my “Caspian please” and his “Arden, I need,” and then—terrified this would stop, that I would lose him all over again—I flung my legs around his waist and dragged him, groaning, into another kiss. It wasn’t enough, though. No matter how tightly I held him, how frantically we joined our lips and entwined our tongues, it felt like we were slipping away—scrabbling against a cliff face of unappeasable desire, tearing ourselves open as we went tumbling down it.

The fabric of his suit beneath my palms gave me nothing. Barely an impression of the heat of him. So I curled my fingers through his hair, twisting sharply enough to make him growl and drag his mouth to my neck. More kisses there. Then hot, heavy bites that blossomed redly in the dark behind my eyes. I felt the sting of tears on my cheeks. And my cock ached, drenched with need.

“Fuck me,” I gasped out.

The universe teetered like a spinning top, Caspian its centre. He raised his head to look at me, his face a shadow-broken patchwork of passion and pain.

I let my brow fall against his. “You want it too. Say it, Caspian. Say you want me.”

“More than anything in the world.”

“Then take me. Fuck me.”Love me.“You know I’m yours.”

He brushed the back of his hand against my swollen lips. “I…I’ll hurt you.”

“Lube in my wallet.”

It wasn’t what he’d meant, but it was easier for both of us to pretend it was. His hands dropped to my belt, the clack and clatter of the buckle way loud in the fire escape, and then he was…well, it started as peeling but quickly became dragging followed by out-and-out tugging until he’d got my jeans down as far as they’d go—which was just below my arse. He made a sound that might have been a laugh, if not so full of other things, and pressed his cheek to mine.

It was absurd, everything was absurd, my partially exposed legs pale and blotched green from the exit sign above us, and I might have laughed too, but I was too scared of crying. If I’d known someone was going to be trying to get me out of them, I’d have worn less tight-fitting jeans. I mean, apart from the fact I wasn’t sure I owned any.

“We should,” I began. Maybe about to say,We shouldn’t.Because this was fucked up. We knew it was fucked up.

But Caspian pressed his palm tenderly to my mouth and I closed my eyes and let him take the choice from me. He kissed across my cheeks, then the tip of my nose, and I trembled with the terrible sweetness of it. And when he put his lip to my ear, the heat of his breath curled around me, licked into my corners, like Prufrock’s yellow fog.

“Turn around,” he told me. A low rasp that could almost have been the voice of a stranger.

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