Page 54 of How to Belong with a Billionaire

My grin was fossilizing on my face. “Yep yep. I’d love to be as brave and principled and badass as she is. Unfortunately, in practice, I just end up being a dick at dinner parties.”

“It’s all right,” Nathaniel told me graciously. Fuck’s sake, couldn’t he meet me halfway onanything?

“You weren’t a dick.” That was Caspian, whose gentleness I really didn’t need right now. “Just, as we have discussed, passionate. Which is a trait I’ve always admired in you.”

I closed my eyes in case I lost control and stuck a fork in one. Probably he was only trying to be nice, but I couldn’t shake the conviction his one-man Arden Pep Rally was more for his benefit than mine. Like he was trying to prove to Nathaniel he hadn’t just been slumming it with me for six months. Which I suspected was just going to make everyone in the room feel shitty. “Thanks,” I said, in a totally not-thankful voice. “But we’re not together anymore. You don’t have to look out for me or take care of me, and my self-esteem is definitely not your problem.”

For the first time that evening, Nathaniel looked happy.

Caspian just got frosty. “I apologise.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“Your point is well made. As was your previous.”

At this, Nathaniel prickled slightly—if he’d been a cat, I’m sure his ears would have gone back. “I think you’re both reading far too much into a simple question, politely meant.”

“I’m sure it’s equally applicable to me.” Caspian’s manner softened again. “There must have been many occasions on which I made Arden feel as frustrated as Mr. Rochester did Jane Eyre.”

I shrugged. “Reader, she married him, didn’t she?” And actually, I’d always found Caspian easy to talk to—even from that very first, bewildering phone call.

“Yes, well.” Nathaniel poured himself another glass of wine, splashing a little as he did so. “In that regard, your story and Jane’s end rather differently.”

“And from your perspective, I’m probably the madwoman in the attic.”

“Nonsense.” He sighed. “I see no reason why I should be concerned by Caspian’s prior associations. It’s not as if you have any legal claim on him, and if he wanted to be with you, he would not be with me.”

Ouch. But then, if Nathaniel was that fucking unthreatened, he wouldn’t feel the need to go on about how threatened he wasn’t. I didn’t say that, though. On account of being either too nice or too cowardly.

“Nathaniel,” said Caspian, very softly. And I couldn’t tell if it was reassurance or rebuke or a little bit of both.

“Anyway.” Nathaniel dabbed at the red stains on the tablecloth, the closest to flustered I’d ever seen him. “I take it, Arden, from your reliance on literary allusions, you read English at university?”

“Yes, but I’ll have you know I’m quite allusively promiscuous.”

“And,” he asked, “you went to Oxford, like Caspian?”

I stopped trying to be cute, and just nodded.

“How did you find it?”

“Horrible. Basically flunked out. Got a two-two.”

“That seems”—he paused, and for once, I didn’t think he was trying to get at me—“rather a wasted opportunity.”

I finished my last bite of lamb. Shame I was at the Dinner Party of the Damned, because it deserved my appreciation—it was melt-in-the-mouth soft, and touched with a musky sweetness from the saffron. Depressingly delicious. “Yes and no. I spent three years nebulously miserable and confused because Oxford is supposed to be this dream, you know? If nothing else, it taught me to be damn sure your dreams are your own.”

“It could never even have been a dream for me.” Nathaniel nudged at his couscous. “With my background, it would have been impossible.”

“It’s not all Russian heiresses and the landed gentry. You’d have done okay.”

“I got two B’s and a C from an inner-city state school, which was more than anyone expected of me, and better than most of my classmates. Neither I nor anyone I knew aspired to read old books in a city of old stone. We did whatever we thought would help us get jobs so we could support ourselves instead of sponging off our parents or the state.”

As much as I hated him taking potshots at me and being good at everything, I hated it even more when he showed me glimpses of who he was. Because that made it hard to keep hating him. “Okay, I get it. I mean, for the record, I’m not a Eton posh boy either, but I know I was lucky in a lot of ways: My school was small, and big on encouraging people to flourish, and my mum used to be a poet and all that. And I get it must suck to have me sitting here whining about how I pissed away something you never had a shot at. If it helps, I spent a really long time feeling rubbish at the thought I’d taken a place from somebody who deserved it more.”

“My philosophy is that if you have something you don’t think you deserve, you should strive to deserve it.”

Welp. Now I hated him again. “Kinda missed the boat on that one.”

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