Page 104 of How to Bang a Billionaire

Coming toward me down the overgrown garden path.

I damn near fell off the swing. Managing, instead, to jerk myself to a bone-juddering halt, hands wrapped tight around the suspension chains.

For a moment, I half believed I’d hallucinated him, but even my wildest fantasies couldn’t have done him justice. I’d never seen or thought to imagine him out of a suit before, yet here he was, slightly wind-tousled, in dark wash jeans, a cashmere V-neck, and a charcoal gray peacoat, its collar turned up to stylishly frame his infuriating gorgeousness.

Power dressing set him like a diamond. Turned his loveliness into this dazzling thing: hard and cold and beautiful and beyond you. This was better. It didn’t precisely soften him—nothing could—but there was something undeniably sensuous in the way the fabric clung to him. Oh those long, lean thighs of his. The gentle slope of his pectorals. The suggestive contours of his abdomen. I’d always known he had a body dreamed up by horny angels. But having it showcased for me made my palms ache to touch him, stroke him, warm and worship him.

And the fucknuckle had treated me like shit.

“What are you doing here?” I was a little bit proud that I sounded pissed off. Instead of incoherent with lust or just…confused.

I couldn’t tell if it was the cold, but he was a little flushed. Just this edge of pink along his cheekbones to entice the sweep of a thumb. If the thumb wasn’t fucking furious that is. “I missed you.”

Rage ripped me through me, so hard and fast I thought it was going to burst out of my chest like something from the Alien movies. Next thing I knew I was off the swing, right in his face and yelling at him. “You mean you missed having an available body at your beck and call.”

I think he’d got used to me being hopeful and conciliatory and therefore wasn’t expecting me to suddenly acquire a spine and start beating him about the head with it. His eyes widened. And, the worst of it was, some part of me couldn’t help appreciating how very bright they were just then. As if all their blues were finally free. He opened his mouth, presumably to respond, but I was in such a state that I actually plowed straight on before he got the chance.

“I tried to give you what you needed. To understand who you were. And heaven forfend I be logistically inconvenient.” I had to pause a moment to breathe. Stop my voice shaking with the weight of everything I was finally saying. “But all the time…all the time I was thinking about you and desperate for you and begging for scraps of you…there was someone else.”

I felt hot and undignified and undone. But Caspian didn’t react. Just stood there, calm and cool, a perfect English gentleman before the firing squad of my feels. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said at last.

“I saw you.” I blinked rapidly. There would be no crying. None. “In Milieu. You were at a-a hospital thing. A fund-raiser. With another man.”

His face didn’t change.

“Tall? Blond? Looked good on your arm and in tuxedo?” Unlike me.

At last. A flash of recognition. “Oh, you mean Nathaniel. We broke up a long time ago.”

“But apparently you still swan off to benefit events with him.”

“On the contrary, he simply happened to be there.”

Okay…maybe I’d jumped to a conclusion or two, and Nathaniel wasn’t a major part of Caspian’s life anymore. But, in some ways, that only made it worse.

“Then why didn’t you come?” I cried. “I bought you sushi for God’s sake. I mean, well, I guess technically you bought the sushi for yourself since I sure as hell couldn’t afford it. But I acquired the sushi. And I waited and waited. And you didn’t come.”

Instead of answering me like a normal person, he stepped back and turned away. Stood for a while staring out toward the sea.

While I fumed helplessly.

And then, so softly I barely heard him. “You ask too much of me, Arden.”

If this had been a movie, I’d have come at him, flying, flailing, trying to strike him and scratch him and make him hurt. Except obviously I couldn’t do that in real life because it would be, well, it’d be abuse.

Instead, I just kept shouting. Words flying about like wasps.

“Oh my God, I ask fuck all of you. I do exactly what you say exactly when you want. And I know so little about your life outside the bits of it you spend with your dick in my arse that I wasn’t even sure if you were dating some other guy.”

He flinched and I was glad for that too. He deserved to flinch. He deserved to flinch lots. Motherfucker.

“You just had to come to dinner. Or not. You could have said no. That’s what I don’t get. Why build my hopes up if you knew you were going to smoosh them? Was it a game to you? Or did it turn you on? Making me wait for you and ache for you and rip my heart to shreds for you?”

That was as far as I got.

He was on me with all the ferocity of a storm breaking, a hand covering my mouth, his arm curving round me pulling me tight against him. And, fuck me for a blazing idiot, my body wanted to be there. Powerless against his strength. Silenced by his touch.

I tried to bite him. But he must have had lots of experience in gagging and restraining people because my teeth just glanced off his palm. I think if he’d fought me, I’d have struggled. Except he just held me. An embrace with the threat of violence. Or an assault with the threat of tenderness. I couldn’t tell anymore.

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