Page 44 of How to Bang a Billionaire

It was his stern voice but I was too sleepy, too content to heed it. “Don’t Arden me. You totally will.”

“Yes,” he said at last. His own small surrender. “I will.”

“And then I’ll think of that. It really is the gift that keeps on giving.”

He sighed in this put-upon way that—even over the phone—I could tell he didn’t mean.

I wish you were here so you could cuddle me.

“I…ah…I’m not very good at cuddling.”

Shit. I’d said that aloud? Sex had clearly blown up my brain. “There’s nothing to it. You’d just hold out your arms and I’d find some little nook to—” Okay, Arden. Stop. Reality check. “I’m never going to see you again, am I? Again.”

“No.” It was bewildering the way something you expected and understood could be still be fucking painful. “I can’t. What we did tonight was—”

“Amazing.”

“You…” His voice wavered and then steadied. “You make me want things I shouldn’t want.”

Sex? A relationship? “Why shouldn’t you want them? Everybody else does.”

“I’m not like everybody else.”

I yawned. I’d picked a bad moment to try and make a convincing or coherent case for keeping me. “Your tutor was right. You really do have a serious case of hubris.”

He laughed at that. Amused but also…not. Sad again. “You need to sleep. I think you can now.”

I let the reality of finals rise up from wherever Caspian Hart had banished it. Still scary, for definite, but the raw panic, the frantic, lonely distress: all gone. “Yeah I can,” I told him.

“You’re going to live a wonderful life.” I wasn’t quite sure how to answer that, but he went on. “And thank you for tonight. You gave me something very special. I will treasure it always.”

And then he hung up.

I was already half unconscious, but I did try to imagine him: his perfect hand on his perfect cock, his mind all full of me. Where would he be? In the shower? In his bed? What did his bed even look like? Probably some kind of handcrafted designer fantasy with a gazillion thread count Egyptian cotton sheets.

Except I couldn’t quite picture it. Picture him.

I wanted to. Wanted to imagine him relaxed, debauched, and dreaming of me. But I kept coming back to the balcony. The shadows curling around him as he smoked his solitary cigarette.

My hand was still clutched around my phone as I drifted into the most effortless, welcoming sleep ever.

Chapter 12

I probably hadn’t failed my exams.

I’d written the required number of essays, and while they weren’t likely to be first quality, they weren’t I am a fish either.

It had been an epically unfun experience—a grim ritual of formal wear and frantic scribbling enacted beneath vaulted ceilings—but I’d survived. And it was a relief to realize I’d never have to do anything like it ever again as long as I lived.

My final final was the worst final. It crawled by. Such a vast room and it was still stifling. Full of identi-kit people in black and white, heads bowed over papers, hands moving in jerky lines. Silence broken only by the occasional rustle. The scratchscratch of nearby pens. A long, deep sigh.

Oh. Wait. That was me.

As I scrawled out a few more desultory sentences.

My concentration wasn’t so much flagging as flagged. Post-flagged. Beyond the reach of even the most determined flags.

I shifted in my chair. I was sweating through my shirt. And even my carnation—the red one Nik had given me that morning to mark my last exam—was wilting.

---