Page 86 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

And he threw an arm across his face and smothered a groan. This lovely raw sound, too sweet for pain.

“You’re still okay with this, right?” I asked.

“I am.” His head moved restlessly against the pillow. “Though I’m at a loss to understand what you’re getting out of it.”

“Are you kidding me? I get to watch you and touch you and please you.” I shifted my grip, giving him long, sensuous strokes. Building pleasure like a fire in winter. “I am pleasing you, aren’t I?”

“Y-yes.” He swallowed a gasp. He was such a tantalizing collection of contrasts just then: the sharp lines of his drawn-tight muscles and his bliss-softened mouth half hidden by the shadow of his wrist. I hoped he felt beautiful because he was. He so was.

He made me want to be an octopus. I mean, not actually. Japanese wood carvings aside, he probably wouldn’t have been into me anymore. But I could seriously have used some extra arms. He was all ridges and grooves, sweat-gleam upon straining skin, and I yearned to stroke him everywhere. Smooth my palms over his trembling stomach. Press my fingers into the damp hollows behind his collarbones. Gentle his struggles as well as inspire them.

His fist clenched in the sheets. “Arden?”

“I’m right here. It’s all right.” It was an inane thing to say considering what was happening, but apparently it was what I had. “You’re doing so well. You’re wonderful.”

Honestly, I didn’t know what the fuck I was going on about. Except, with the same instinct that had once sent me to my knees on a balcony in Oxford, some part of me recognized it was what he needed.

“Look at me,” I whispered.

A tremor shook his whole body. “I can’t.”

“Please.”

“Don’t.”

“You need to. You need to see.” I worked him steadily, lavishing him with all the care my hands could give. “You need to see what I do when I look at you.”

He was right on the edge of orgasm. I could feel him there, a dancer not yet dancing, though I wasn’t the one holding him back. He stirred agitatedly, his spine bowing, hips bucking, one foot braced against the bed. Until, at last, he pulled his arm away. His face was flushed with hectic pleasure and damp with desperation, moisture matted into the hair at his brow, and glittering on his lashes. Even wrecked, he was lovely—one of those naughty seventeenth-century poems I hadn’t revised properly. Delight in disorder and all that.

His eyes found mine—wary enough to break my heart. But it was okay. I gazed at him, full of submission and hope and love and certainty. Because I knew that even if he caught only the reflected shadow of everything inside in me, it would still be enough. And he’d understand that I was his and he was mine, and could be everything that mattered.

“You’re perfect,” I told him. “I wish you knew. How beautiful you are. And how strong and kind. How good—”

He made a broken sound and came, trembling frantically, covering my fingers and his own stomach. And, for the briefest of moments, he let me see: his pleasure in all its nakedness, before he retreated behind his arm.

Grabbing my T-shirt from the floor, I cleaned us up and then went to retrieve the duvet. My preference would have been insta-snuggling, but I thought he might appreciate a minute or two to himself. And, sure enough, when I came back he seemed a lot more put together. Which was a shame because I liked him sex-rumpled. And a little bit unraveled.

I cast the duvet over the bed and bounced up beside him, hoping everything was still okay. The seesaw of equanimity had clearly decided it was my turn to get anxious because suddenly I was convinced he was going to resent what had just happened. Or have some terrible reaction to it he hadn’t seen fit to tell me about.

Instead, he turned my face to his and kissed me. It wasn’t rough, but it was bone-meltingly deep, and I surrendered to it gratefully. To the gentle dominion of lips and teeth and tongue.

When he finally let me go, I realized I was oddly wobbly. Happy-wobbly, like after he’d spanked me that time. The same sense of being stripped down somehow, as if he’d taken a pumice stone to my soul, and left me fresh and shiny and vulnerable. It made no sense because what we’d done had been so different…or, actually, maybe it hadn’t.

“Thank you,” I mumbled. “That was amazing. The best.”

“But what about you?”

“What about me? Oh, you mean…” It seemed a bit weird to be turning down sexual attention but I kind of felt like I’d had sexual attention. “I’m okay.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“You gave me what I needed, just like always. How isn’t it fair?”

He made an unconvinced noise.

“I’d rather cuddle and share your afterglow. Err, you do have afterglow, right? I gave you an afterglow?”

“Yes. I’m”—he blushed—“glowy.”

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