Page 62 of How to Bang a Billionaire

When I eventually got there, the pool was pristine, its water still and silver-green. It was beautiful but also slightly eerie—like if I was in the wrong movie and tried to swim here, I’d get knifed to death by a masked man for my lax sexual morals. But I splashed around for a while and wasn’t horribly murdered. Which was nice. Afterward, I went back to the apartment for a shower and some, ahem, personal grooming because I wanted to look my best for Caspian. The prospect of seeing him again was giving me stomach flutters. This sense of mingled hope and anxiety. What if he took one look at me and decided he’d made a terrible mistake? Although, let’s be fair, if I managed to be in his presence without either falling over, throwing up, or having a nervous breakdown, I’d be substantially more appealing than on pretty much every other occasion he’d interacted with me.

Comforting.

Or not.

It took him long enough to arrive that I’d passed through various cycles of waiting for him and had somehow lost track of time. Determined to be dazzling, I’d initially slithered into my tightest, sexiest, sparkliest jeans, but since I couldn’t sit down in them, I’d had to take them off after an hour. Which meant that, when Caspian did finally turn up at about ten o’clock—in dark blue pinstripes, a white shirt, and a plain blue tie, looking classically austere and so Business Insider gorgeous, it made my hands tremble—I was curled up in the sitting area, creepily Google-stalking him for information about the ex Bellerose had mentioned and wearing leopard-print lounge trousers and a pink I’M A PANSEXUAL ELF T-shirt.

Was I ever going to catch a break?

I guiltily slammed the lid closed on my laptop. “Um, hi.”

“Hello, Arden. How are you?”

Honestly, I was giddy and dazed and so desperately thrilled to see him that I wanted to jump into his arms. Except I got suddenly self-conscious because…well, I was staying in his apartment, and the reason I was staying in his apartment was to facilitate a prearranged sexual encounter, and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to behave.

“I’m happy to see you,” I managed finally.

“Likewise.”

OMG. Likewise? His cheat word?

I gazed at him, speechless, mortifyingly wounded by a social tic. And then I felt like an idiot because what the fuck was I expecting? He’d made his terms super clear and I’d agreed to them. It was hardly a scenario that was going to involve him romancing my face off.

“Are you settled in?” he asked.

“Um. Yeah. Thank you. It’s quite a place.”

He glanced around as if his own apartment was totally unfamiliar to him. “When I heard of the development, it seemed like it would be a valuable investment.”

“Y’know”—I snapped my fingers—“that’s the first thing I thought about it too.”

I’d made him laugh and my heart unknotted itself a little. He leaned over me, his hand brushing my cheek. “Do you want to…?”

I did want to. I really wanted to. But suddenly I panicked.

I’d given him a blow job on a balcony, crawled drunkenly over him, trying to make him spank me, and got myself off to his commands down the phone. It shouldn’t have been a big deal to have sex with him in a bed in a multimillion-pound investment property. But it did.

It felt different. And I didn’t know why.

“Um, actually”—I did my best to muster an appealing smile—“I was wondering if we could maybe…talk first.”

“Of course. Anything you want.”

Well, that was easy. My smile still felt like it had died on my face but I could breathe again.

He unbuttoned his jacket and perched on the arm of the frighteningly designer sofa. I was still a bit overwhelmed by the opulence of the apartment, so it was disconcerting to see someone treat it like it was just another place. But then he possessed his own kind of splendor, sitting there in his perfectly tailored Savile Row suit and his Vacheron Constantin watch, all that poise and beauty and wealth.

It was no more unlikely that I’d be living somewhere like One Hyde Park than I’d be dating someone like Caspian. Yet both were true.

Sort of anyway.

I was just wondering what the fuck I was going to do, having demanded we have a conversation, when he added, “But I don’t have very much time tonight,” in this tone of polite indifference.

Which threw me straight back into flail mode.

Nothing seemed more likely to inspire the failure of our short-term, prearranged shagging type relationship than not doing any shagging.

“Oh no.” My attempt to sound insouciant was mildly diminished by a frantic hand flap. “It’s fine. It’s cool. We can do…do the other thing.”

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