Page 12 of How to Bang a Billionaire

“Likewise. I find it a useful word in such circumstances.”

“Oh right.” I smiled at him. I couldn’t help it. He was just so…so…He looked like he needed to be smiled at. “Likewise, Mr. Hart.”

I thought he might smile back but instead his eyes darkened, and then his attention flicked away from me. “Caspian is fine.”

“Okay.” I followed his gaze, but he didn’t seem to be looking anywhere in particular. Just away from me, which wasn’t exactly a good sign. “Um, thank you for coming. I didn’t think you would.”

“I wasn’t sure I would have time.”

“Yet here you are.”

“Yes.” Whatever had troubled him before had passed and he was perfectly composed as he met my eyes again. “Here I am.”

“Am I…I mean, is it what you were expecting?” Oh wow, classy, Arden. Not blatant at all.

But his mouth finally yielded up its smile. And, like his laugh, it was unexpectedly shy, as though he wasn’t used to doing it. It disordered the harmonies of his face, but I liked him better that way, a little bit messy, a little bit realer. God, the man was killing me. Actually killing me. “I’m not sorry I came.”

“How does it feel to be back?” I asked.

“I’m afraid I’m not given to sentiment.”

I peeped up at him from under my lashes. Yep, it was official: I was flirting. “What? No sudden rush of nostalgia for these dreaming spires?”

He shook his head.

“But Oxford’s beautiful, isn’t it? Like nowhere else.”

“Some might say,” he said, in the same quietly playful tone I’d heard him use on the phone, “it’s rather like Cambridge.”

I gasped. “You traitor.”

“That assumes loyalty in the first place.”

He had me there. “Um, I think I’m supposed to take you to this reception thing? It’s in Melmoth.”

“And you’re going like that?”

It wasn’t really an encouraging sentiment but the slide of his eyes down my body made me hot and cold and tingly. “Well, I was going to wear my bespoke Savile Row suit like you but then I remembered I don’t have one.”

If I’d been hoping to win another smile, I was disappointed because all I got in response was, “Turn around.”

It was a phrase that had come my way often enough and I was pretty fond of it. But the way he said it, oh God the way he said it, turned my insides to honey. Not bossy or rough but implacable.

A command.

If he did it in a voice like that—all steel and velvet and the promise of his approval—I would have done anything he told me.

No matter how slutty or degrading.

Actually.

Strike that.

Especially if it was slutty or degrading.

I turned around, trying to shut down the porno in my brain. We were in a public place, and I was fully dressed (in several layers of formal wear as it happened), but it felt vulnerable. Giving this man, this stranger, my back. My trust.

His arm came around me from behind. And the heat of it, the pressure. The tightening muscles of his forearm made me a bit delirious. I leaned back and his body was right there, all hard planes and angular curves for me to nestle into. I tilted my hips, wriggling my arse until I was tucked in against him, pinned and protected at the same time, at once safe and overwhelmed.

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