Page 112 of How to Bang a Billionaire

They broke him in gently, at least. I wouldn’t have put it past Rabbie to pull down Twilight Imperium or something, but we kicked things off with Ex Libris, which I’d bought for Mum a couple of birthdays back. It was more of a party game, really, but it worked like a literary version of Call My Bluff, and had become one of her favorite games. Maybe because she was scarily good at it.

I was pretty interested to see what Caspian would do or if I’d be able to identify his answers. At first, not so much, but once we’d stumbled over a couple of plausibly obscure openings, and they’d turned out to be him, I reckoned I had him sussed. He liked to write things that had nothing to do with the characters or plot summary at all—trying to lure people in with calculated unpredictability. He smirked at me across the table, knowing I was onto him. It felt wickedly good, somehow, like sharing a secret.

Mum still won though—just like always—and I managed to come in a respectable second, mainly by figuring out what other people were likely to do rather than being particularly creative on my own account.

After that, we moved on to Carcassonne, which was this tile-placing strategy game that I theoretically enjoyed but never, ever did well at. I tended to get distracted by building things and making them look pretty, when the point of the game was to score points. But if I thought I’d played poorly before, it was nothing to playing with Caspian.

The man was completely brutal.

I’d never seen anything like it.

It wasn’t just the terrifying efficiency with which he built up his own resources; it was the precise way he fucked everyone else over, claiming cities and roads and cloisters and hemming us into corners. It wasn’t even particularly vicious, just hideously effective.

We were done in under an hour. It wasn’t even worth calculating the score.

“Holy fuck.” Rabbie let out a long breath.

“Forgive me.” Caspian looked up with the bewildered air of someone emerging from the red mist. “I think I’ve just been antisocially competitive.”

I gave a splutter of laughter. “That’s like Genghis Khan apologizing for being antisocially expansionist.”

“Oh God.” He actually put a hand to his brow, hiding his eyes beneath its shadow.

Hazel whacked me in the arm. “Ardy. Leave him alone.”

I’d intended to tease but it seemed like I’d made him feel genuinely self-conscious. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I hope I haven’t ruined games night?”

“Hell no.” Rabbie was hastily boxing up the Carcassonne demon. “That was…well it was something. All I can say is, I hope I never get on the wrong side of you.”

Caspian made an abashed sound.

I didn’t actually want him to be embarrassed but, God, it was adorable. It made me want to crawl all over him and curl up tight around him. My poor beautiful man, too aggressive for his own good, a monster at the mercy of his own savagery.

The Carcassonne killer.

“Arden,” he growled, “are you laughing at me?”

“Who me? Never.” I bit my lip unconvincingly and hoped for later retribution.

“You know,” Hazel said, “we should harness Caspian’s power for good and play something cooperative.”

We settled on Forbidden Desert—a surprisingly hard-core game for eight-year-olds about repairing a dirigible before dying of thirst or getting buried in sand. Humiliatingly, we tended to get our arses handed to us a lot when we played.

But not with Caspian.

Hazel had been totally right: it was awesome when he was on your side. A little bit intense, since he clearly had absolutely no intention of losing and would coolly rattle off the probabilities of particular cards showing up at particular times. Which felt…not like cheating exactly, but it made you very aware that you were playing a game. Engaging in a battle of mechanics. Rather than, say, escaping a desert in a dirigible.

On the other hand, we won. A scarily close run thing, but we did.

And I heaved out a massive sigh of shocked relief and cheered along with everyone else. Because there was no denying winning was fun and we’d probably never have managed without Caspian.

Rabbie said he was a very brilliant, very frightening man.

And I agreed with him. Though I also found it sexy as hell.

It was getting pretty late by the time we’d put away Forbidden Desert, which led to an intense succession of negotiations around sleeping arrangements. Caspian volunteered to take the sofa but was immediately overruled and my room was out because I only had a single bed. In the end, they packed us off to the third bedroom, which was sort of Mum’s room, and sort of Mum and Hazel’s room, and sometimes the guest room.

So not weird at all.

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