Page 107 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

I laughed. In a strange way, she reminded me a little bit of Caspian. The same conviction, the same merciless drive, although focused and expressed very differently.

I guess it was becoming pretty apparent I had a type.

But mainly I was grateful. Now, when I looked across the room, I met smiles. Flashes of recognition in other people’s eyes. I knew faces and names. I could have joined some of the conversations. Instead of drifting around pathetically.

Still no sign of Ellery, though. I was starting to wonder if she’d blown off her own birthday party. Which, admittedly, had a certain punkish panache. But since Caspian was still MIA with Nathaniel, if it hadn’t been for Trudy none of the family would have been present at all. My mum would have skinned me alive—well, no, she would have been disappointed and Hazel would have skinned me alive—if I’d invited people to my house and either not turned up or just fucked off. I guess the rules were different for the rich. As usual.

“Um, is Mrs. Hart with Lancaster Steyne?” I tried to sound casual, which was tricky considering I’d launched myself into a total non sequitur. But clearly Caspian was never going to tell me anything ever so if I wanted to be a useful partner to him, it was going to have to be by stealth and cunning. And if I had to speculate wildly about the sort of tensions that might exist between a mother, her son, and her deceased husband’s business partner, then the Hamlet Dynamic seemed a reasonable starting point.

George glanced across the room to where they were standing together. “I very much doubt it. She’s a sparrow and he’s no sparrow hawk.”

“What’s does that mean?”

“It means he’s a predator who only preys on predators.”

She said it matter-of-factly but I shuddered at the memory of his soft voice, slipping words into the conversation as precisely as the strokes of a razor. But before I could say anything else, we were suddenly dropped into darkness, and in the startled silence, a clock began to strike the hour.

Oxford had been full of bells, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard an actual clock do the donnnnng thing. It was such an old-fashioned sound. Eerie, and so Edgar Allan Poe–ish that I half expected there to come a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping…

Instead, when the twelfth chime had shed its bronzy echo, a pale light illuminated a figure at the top of the stairs. It took me a second or so to recognize Ellery, partly because of the drama of her entrance but mainly because I’d never seen her dressed like that before. She was wearing a scarlet, floor-length evening gown, lace over satin, with a mermaid train. Intricate trails of sequins and beads shattered any light that touched them into bloody fragments. Her arms were bare and her hair was down, her lips the same color as her dress.

She was monstrous. And glorious. The only red in the room.

And then she lifted the violin she was carrying to her shoulder and began to play.

The first note fell upon the air as tenderly as tears. Ellery’s eyes were half closed, the bow moving almost languorously upon the strings, while the fingers of her other hand flexed and flickered with what seemed like impossible dexterity.

My mouth had fallen open. Maybe just to get more music inside me because my ears couldn’t cope with the flood of loveliness trying to flow through them.

I had no idea what I was hearing but the intensity of it never let up, the beauty becoming savage, as sharp as teeth. And Ellery played without mercy, her expression as lost, as wild as the music. Sometimes she seemed almost at war with her instrument, her hand moving upon its neck like a lover seeking one last surrender.

She could have been playing for five minutes or five hours but, somewhere in the middle of that exquisite storm, I felt a body pressed to my back. Inhaled the familiar scent of Caspian’s cologne. And then his arms were around me and I was leaning into his embrace—almost drunk on the sheer relief of being his again. Safe from strangers and violins and a world I wasn’t used to.

From somewhere nearby I heard the click of George’s camera but I didn’t care. And, from the way he clung to me and kissed the side of my neck, neither did Caspian.

I could have stood there forever now, nestled into my lover, letting the music tear my heart open, but the piece was sufficiently demanding that I had no idea how Ellery hadn’t collapsed already. Pure will and ferocity, probably.

When she was done, the silence she left behind seemed to clamor. And then came an explosion of applause—which she ignored, vanishing upstairs, almost immediately after the final note was done.

Chapter 27

The lights came on slowly. And presumably we were expected to go back to do party things. Except I was good exactly where I was. I twisted my head so I could look up at Caspian. “What was that?”

“That,” he returned, in his driest tone, “was my sister, Eleanor. I thought you’d met.”

“Har har. I meant what was she playing.”

“Sibelius. The first movement of his only violin concerto.”

It didn’t mean much to me but at least I could google it later. “She was amazing.”

He nodded slowly. “She’s extremely talented. She had a place at the Royal Academy of Music but she turned it down. I’ve no idea why.”

“Did you actually ask her?”

“I…I can’t remember.” He frowned. “I presume I did.”

I swiveled in his embrace, wanting to ask…all the things. What had happened, where he’d been, if he was okay, what the fuck he thought he was doing—

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