Page 64 of How to Bang a Billionaire

His fingers skated up my quivering stomach and tugged at the jeweled cherries dangling from the bar through my left nipple, and whatever I had been about to say vanished into tingling, sharp-edged bliss.

“What am I?”

“Cruel,” I whispered approvingly.

“I did warn you.”

He had. And I’d signed right up for it. I let my head fall back against his shoulder, wishing he was naked like me. Turned out I liked my cruelty as intimate as possible. But, as it was, I was probably just covering his shirt with sweat.

“I could keep you like this.” His touch became a caress—a taunting one, traveling across my body, seeking the places where I felt vulnerable and sensitive: my flanks and collarbone, the arch of my ribs, my inner thighs, the pleasure both inseparable from the sense of being controlled and almost a side effect of it. He lingered over the lines of my tattoo. “I could make you wait. Or not let you come at all.”

I nearly broke my neck trying to see him. Worth it though. He’d sounded pretty composed, threatening me with erotic torments, but his face betrayed him. He was gorgeously flushed and wild-eyed and sweat-glittery. And his mouth, oh God, that stern, beautiful mouth of his was so…so soft. Full of kisses. I would have done anything for that look.

“Yeah,” I mumbled, squirming fruitlessly on his cock, “you could.”

If you’d have asked me an hour ago, I’d have told you I was pretty sure I wasn’t into orgasm denial. I was into the opposite of orgasm denial. All the orgasms. All the time. But now? For him? There was honestly something a little bit appealing about it. As if I was the hero from a myth or fairy tale committed to some impossible task: spin straw into gold, harness the man-eating mares of Diomedes, forgo my own gratification for Caspian’s. To melt the ice around my prince’s heart.

I twisted even farther, nuzzling clumsily into the side of his neck. “Are you going to? Leave me all tormented and desperate?”

“You’d do that for me?”

“If…if you wanted it.” I gave a shuddery laugh. “And as long as you were very, very merciful afterward.”

He didn’t reply. But I could feel a strange tension in him.

“I might even, y’know…enjoy it,” I offered. “It’d be like being with you even though you weren’t there. And you’d be thinking about me, too, wouldn’t you? Imagining me yearning and frantic and horny. All for you.”

He made a sound—but it was a good sound, a deep, rough groan, albeit reluctantly surrendered. I took it as encouragement.

“I guess you’d be at some meeting or something. But secretly planning all the terrible things you’d do to me later. And I’d be so hot for you, so needy, I wouldn’t know whether to beg you to stop or…to not.”

Caspian pressed his face against the curve of my shoulder. I caught the edge of his teeth, the thready rhythm of his breath.

I was—it was hard to describe—gently in pain, my wrists hot and achy in his hold, my shoulders forced back, my cock actually throbbing with urgency, my body feeling tight and thin and fragile where he entered me. But I was…I was okay. Better than okay. Floaty and light, sensations washing over me like waves over sand. And Caspian’s heart was thudding thunderously against my spine, his lips shaping my name with unexpected reverence. Just like on the balcony.

Wow, I’d been worrying for nothing. Because here was the man I’d done this for—intense, complicated, controlling as hell. Who somehow made very ordinary little me feel extraordinarily precious.

We were going to be just fine.

“Though in the best of all possible worlds you wouldn’t have to leave,” I said. “You’d use me and fuck me and stay with me. Watch me suffer. You like watching me suff—”

His free hand was suddenly tangled in my hair. And I found myself facedown, arse up on the bed, my startled squawk thankfully muffled by the covers. I barely had time to suck in a breath before he was fucking me ferociously, his every thrust striking my prostate like Big Ben sounding orgasm o’clock.

Which should have been a good thing but somehow wasn’t…in ways I couldn’t quite figure out. It was kind of relentless. Just on the wrong side of rough, as if he wanted to force me to all the pleasure he’d been tempted to withhold. Emotionally I balked, but my body was too far gone. Teased and denied and overstimulated and sore, I came all over the bed in less than a minute. And for some reason it felt like defeat. Hollowing me out. Leaving me breathless and empty and wet.

Caspian finished a moment or two later, with nothing more than a swallowed groan. He pulled out and away as soon as he was done. And I flipped over just in time to catch the last visible traces of his passion: the fading flush, the bitten lip, the lock of hair that had fallen damply over his eyes.

I was sprawled and sticky, bewildered and bruised in unexpected ways, but I still wanted him to stay. So I could smooth his hair and lick the salt and come from his skin. So I could kiss the still quickened breath from his mouth.

So we could be messy together.

“Um,” I said.

Caspian gazed down at me, blinking as if he was just waking up—and whatever he’d dreamed hadn’t been pleasant. He lifted a hand and then lowered it again. And finally sat down on the edge of the bed. Well. Sort of sat, anyway. In a less elegant man, it would have been a flump. It was secretly a little bit gratifying to have temporarily stripped him of his usual grace. That I could affect him at all still seemed its own private miracle.

We were silent for what seemed a longish time. What a weird fucking tableaux we must have made. Like a painting that would once have ended up on the Toast under the heading “Awkward Postcoital Moments in Western Art History.”

“So,” I tried again. “How was the prearranged sexual encounter?”

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