In a little while, the new phone wuzzed—it was a text from Caspian, letting me know he’d be coming round later that evening. Which provided just enough motivation to make me stop rolling around the heavenly cloud of bed and investigate what else One Hyde Park had to offer.
Bellerose had run down a rather intimidating list of facilities, so I decided to investigate the swimming pool first, since I at least knew what a swimming pool was and what to do with it. Unfortunately, finding the damn was its own adventure. I ended up creeping through endless silent corridors, surrounded by mirrors and aluminum and padded silk—a bit like living in the world’s most expensive sanatorium, all the time caught in the unblinking Argos gaze of innumerable security cameras.
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.”
“I wasn’t trying to…that is, I’m perfectly willing to—”
“No, no. We have an agreement. I didn’t know you were in a rush.” Fuck, I was a sexual drive-through. Did he want fries with me?
“Arden, I…”
Double, triple, quadruple fuck with a cherry on top. I was a sexual drive-through and he was reluctant. I shoved my laptop out of the way, bounced off the sofa, and made a run for the bedroom, ripping my T-shirt over my head as I went.
My trousers were a pimpin’ puddle on the floor by the time he caught up with me. I shivered, suddenly realizing that while being naked, goose-pimply, and semi-flaccid in front of a man in a three-piece suit was rife with kinky potential, in reality it was just embarrassing.
But we got to it anyway. Him still pretty much dressed, me bent over the bed, staring down at Hyde Park, the green trees, and the silver-gray river.
“Nice view.” Fuck, that was me.
And absolutely not the right thing to say when somebody was putting a cock in you.
I’d been resting on my forearms but now I dropped my shoulders to the bed, mainly to muffle my stupid mouth before it offered up any further observations. Something about the soft furnishings maybe.
At any rate, the movement changed the angle, forcing him deeper, the pressure and the pleasure pulling each other along like lovers on a summer’s day.
And, in spite of everything, that felt good.
Wow, what was wrong with me? I was nervous and awkward and feeling desperately unsexy but apparently all my body needed was a dick in a hole and a man on my back and it was ready to rumble.
I tried not to be a total whore about it but…nope. I was moaning helplessly as he fucked me into the mattress, his fingers digging into my hips, pinning me in place. The strokes of his cock inside me were unerring: stretching me open and shoving me inevitably toward orgasm.
Close, and closer, but…not…quite…close enough.
I worked a hand under my body, except then he landed a crisp slap right on my arse. It hurt but not really. More this hot sting that sent a sudden sizzle of increased awareness rippling through me and made me arch my spine hopefully in case he felt like doing it again.
Apparently, he didn’t.
No matter how enthusiastically I wiggled.
I’d always assumed that pain and pleasure were opposites. Opposites that could get interestingly muddled in the proper context. But the way the bright flash of his palm had cut through the dull, sweet ache of being about to come…it was more like two tastes that went great together. Like cream cheese and marmite. Salt and caramel.
Oh God. I really wanted him to hit me again.
And the thought felt outlandish even inside my own head.
Maybe if we’d been on the phone—that tantalizing mixture of closeness and distance and trust and hope—I’d have dared to ask. But things felt different now. Even more uncertain somehow. And the stakes were a lot higher. I honestly wasn’t entirely sure that he wouldn’t just call me a painted Jezebel and leave me there, unspanked and unfucked.
To say nothing of seriously embarrassed.
And that was when I formed the closest thing to a cunning plan I was capable of with another man’s dick pounding against my happy place and turning my brain to pre-orgasmic mush. It came down to a second, and even more theatrical, attempt to get at my cock.
This time he seized my hands and pulled them round to the small of my back, holding them there with my wrists forced together and trapped beneath his palm.
“Oh no you don’t,” he growled. “You come when I let you.”
If I’d had breath or focus, I’d have told him that getting all mean and bossy probably wasn’t going to be much of a hindrance to me coming. But, instead, I just gasped out, “Now would be nice.”
Of course, that made him stop. And I guess I’d known that it would.
He kept my hands where they were, sliding an arm around me from behind and tugging me back against his chest. It felt like falling except there was nowhere to fall and then he drove his cock so deep into me that all I could manage was a hitchy little whimper, caught on the tender edge of pain.
“You’re so beautiful when you’re suffering.” Caspian’s breath was hot and unsteady against the side of my neck. “So responsive.”
“And you’re s-so…”
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?”
He half turned. He looked tired—and not in the fun shagged out way—and bleak. “You don’t have to do any of that.”
“The sex? You don’t want to sleep with me anymore?” I just about managed to keep my voice seminormal. But inside I was horrified. How had I managed to put him off already?
“No, of course I do. I meant…the rest of it. The other things you said.”
For a split second, I had no clue what he was talking about. And then I remembered my lust-dazed litany of filthy offerings, which were suddenly way too much and super embarrassing.
His hand curled around my ankle. “You’re everything I want. Just as you are.”
It should have been a lovely thing to hear. I mean, it was probably the closest he’d ever got to a romantic sentiment and, if this was a romcom, we’d be about fifteen minutes from kissing in the rain while the credits rolled. But it also felt kind of disconnected from, well, everything. And from me. The boy who’d just enthusiastically incited the pounding of a lifetime. It wouldn’t even have crossed my mind that what we’d just done could be incompatible with liking Arden St. Ives: the Whole Package. Just the opposite, in fact. So now I was all nervous again that he didn’t want me.
I was about to say something but then his fingers brushed over my hip. “Oh God, what did I do?”
His touch woke a warm ache and I glanced down to discover bruises blossoming on my skin where he’d held in place. They didn’t really hurt but, holy hell, did they make me look well used. I loved them.
“And your wrists too,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” I grinned sleepily at him. “They’ll give me something to remember you by while you’re away doing your billionaire things.”
“I’d rather you didn’t remember me hurting you.”
I matched my fingertips to the marks he’d left. “You know I’m okay with a little pain in a good cause. Especially when the cause is you. I think it’s hot…actually. Knowing you lost control because of me.”
“That’s not a side of myself I’m proud of.”
“Oh, Caspian.” I sat up and threw my arms around him—not an entirely successful maneuver because he went all tense and stiff and elbowy, so it was a little bit like hugging a piece of modern art. “Well, it’s a side of you I’m really into. But even if it wasn’t, I’d tell you what you just told me.”
“I just told you lots of things.” He sounded wary. “Which did you mean?”
“That you’re everything I want. Just as you are.”
He pulled out of my clumsy embrace and turned. I thought he was going to kiss me, but he just leaned in, his brow resting for a moment against mine. It was a chaste and unexpectedly tender gesture. His eyes closed, the lashes silky soft and vulnerable against his cheeks. “I’m never quite prepared for how sweet you are.”
“Sweet?” I repeated, somewhat disappointed. “I don’t suppose you mean sexy and dangerous, like a homme fatale?”
“That too.” Except he was smiling, which rather diminished the plausibility of his assurances.
Not that I minded. Not at all. I wanted to put my lips against his, to feel the shape of his smile beneath my mouth, and tease it gently open into a kiss.
I went to suit the action to the thought, as Conan Doyle would put have it, but for some reason that made Caspian draw back. His thumb moved idly over the smudges that ringed my wrist. “You don’t deserve this, Arden.”
I’d never been a big fan of deserving. It always seemed like something other people decided for you. “What about what I want?” I asked. “Don’t I deserve that?”
I thought it was a winning argument, but Caspian only glanced at his ridiculously complicated, double-faced watch. “Arden, I have to go.”
Not what I’d expected. Even though he’d told me he didn’t have much time. “Right now? Like that?”
“Well”—he reached self-consciously for the open collar of his shirt—“I’ll change first.”
I swallowed. And tried not say anything too stupid. How had I ever convinced myself I was sophisticated enough for this? It was a peril-strewn no-man’s-land between casual fuck and boyfriend, and I had no idea what the etiquette was. What it was safe to want and to ask for. What I was supposed to do. What he expected me to give him or take in return. Basically, which relationship fork to use.
“You really can’t stay longer?” I asked. And, wow, I sounded pathetic. No wonder he wanted to run.
“I’m afraid I have to be in Tokyo tomorrow.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “But thank you.”
The idea of lying there, naked and fucked and watching him leave, was pretty bloody awful. So I peeled myself off the bed and fled into the shower, drowning his footsteps and the click of the door in a torrent of water.