Welp, I was miserable.
It was hard work, getting over Caspian Hart. But at least being at home gave me time and space to do it. Endless amounts of both. I slept a lot, read every Georgette Heyer in the house in mad, weepy binges, and wandered the hills and shore in a fashion that would surely have made my Byronic locks and long black coat billow in the wind.
If I’d had Byronic locks and a long black coat.
Hazel must have said something to Mum and Rabbie because they didn’t bug me. Just let me come and go as I pleased. Talk when I felt like it.
The days moved very slowly.
It must have been a week later, I was sitting in the garden, on this swing Rabbie had strung from our gnarly old oak tree. It was the best spot because you could see all the way down to the sea. And if you went high enough and fast enough, it felt like you could drown in the sky. I’d probably spent hours out here when I was growing up, chasing clouds and daydreaming. Waiting for my prince to come.
Swinging was probably a pretty banal pleasure to most people, but I’d discovered it never got old, the rush of joy as I kicked off just as bright and clean as it had ever been. And thankfully it was a really good swing—well-made and sturdy, with a broad wooden seat suspended on well-tended chains—so there was absolutely no danger of pulling a What Katy Did.
I was just getting into the…hah…swing of things, enjoying the ruffle of the wind through my hair and the whoosh of the descent when the back door opened.
And there was Caspian Hart.
Coming toward me down the overgrown garden path.
I damn near fell off the swing. Managing, instead, to jerk myself to a bone-juddering halt, hands wrapped tight around the suspension chains.
For a moment, I half believed I’d hallucinated him, but even my wildest fantasies couldn’t have done him justice. I’d never seen or thought to imagine him out of a suit before, yet here he was, slightly wind-tousled, in dark wash jeans, a cashmere V-neck, and a charcoal gray peacoat, its collar turned up to stylishly frame his infuriating gorgeousness.
Power dressing set him like a diamond. Turned his loveliness into this dazzling thing: hard and cold and beautiful and beyond you. This was better. It didn’t precisely soften him—nothing could—but there was something undeniably sensuous in the way the fabric clung to him. Oh those long, lean thighs of his. The gentle slope of his pectorals. The suggestive contours of his abdomen. I’d always known he had a body dreamed up by horny angels. But having it showcased for me made my palms ache to touch him, stroke him, warm and worship him.
And the fucknuckle had treated me like shit.
“What are you doing here?” I was a little bit proud that I sounded pissed off. Instead of incoherent with lust or just…confused.
I couldn’t tell if it was the cold, but he was a little flushed. Just this edge of pink along his cheekbones to entice the sweep of a thumb. If the thumb wasn’t fucking furious that is. “I missed you.”
Rage ripped me through me, so hard and fast I thought it was going to burst out of my chest like something from the Alien movies. Next thing I knew I was off the swing, right in his face and yelling at him. “You mean you missed having an available body at your beck and call.”
I think he’d got used to me being hopeful and conciliatory and therefore wasn’t expecting me to suddenly acquire a spine and start beating him about the head with it. His eyes widened. And, the worst of it was, some part of me couldn’t help appreciating how very bright they were just then. As if all their blues were finally free. He opened his mouth, presumably to respond, but I was in such a state that I actually plowed straight on before he got the chance.
“I tried to give you what you needed. To understand who you were. And heaven forfend I be logistically inconvenient.” I had to pause a moment to breathe. Stop my voice shaking with the weight of everything I was finally saying. “But all the time…all the time I was thinking about you and desperate for you and begging for scraps of you…there was someone else.”
I felt hot and undignified and undone. But Caspian didn’t react. Just stood there, calm and cool, a perfect English gentleman before the firing squad of my feels. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said at last.
“I saw you.” I blinked rapidly. There would be no crying. None. “In Milieu. You were at a-a hospital thing. A fund-raiser. With another man.”
His face didn’t change.
“Tall? Blond? Looked good on your arm and in tuxedo?” Unlike me.
At last. A flash of recognition. “Oh, you mean Nathaniel. We broke up a long time ago.”
“But apparently you still swan off to benefit events with him.”
“On the contrary, he simply happened to be there.”
Okay…maybe I’d jumped to a conclusion or two, and Nathaniel wasn’t a major part of Caspian’s life anymore. But, in some ways, that only made it worse.
“Then why didn’t you come?” I cried. “I bought you sushi for God’s sake. I mean, well, I guess technically you bought the sushi for yourself since I sure as hell couldn’t afford it. But I acquired the sushi. And I waited and waited. And you didn’t come.”
Instead of answering me like a normal person, he stepped back and turned away. Stood for a while staring out toward the sea.
While I fumed helplessly.
And then, so softly I barely heard him. “You ask too much of me, Arden.”
If this had been a movie, I’d have come at him, flying, flailing, trying to strike him and scratch him and make him hurt. Except obviously I couldn’t do that in real life because it would be, well, it’d be abuse.
Instead, I just kept shouting. Words flying about like wasps.
“Oh my God, I ask fuck all of you. I do exactly what you say exactly when you want. And I know so little about your life outside the bits of it you spend with your dick in my arse that I wasn’t even sure if you were dating some other guy.”
He flinched and I was glad for that too. He deserved to flinch. He deserved to flinch lots. Motherfucker.
“You just had to come to dinner. Or not. You could have said no. That’s what I don’t get. Why build my hopes up if you knew you were going to smoosh them? Was it a game to you? Or did it turn you on? Making me wait for you and ache for you and rip my heart to shreds for you?”
That was as far as I got.
He was on me with all the ferocity of a storm breaking, a hand covering my mouth, his arm curving round me pulling me tight against him. And, fuck me for a blazing idiot, my body wanted to be there. Powerless against his strength. Silenced by his touch.
I tried to bite him. But he must have had lots of experience in gagging and restraining people because my teeth just glanced off his palm. I think if he’d fought me, I’d have struggled. Except he just held me. An embrace with the threat of violence. Or an assault with the threat of tenderness. I couldn’t tell anymore.
I was breathing heavily behind his hand. My eyes were heavy with treacly tears I desperately wanted to shed and desperately wanted not to. I hoped I was glaring at him. But mainly, in that moment, what I felt was…relieved. Safely contained. Released from the burden of expressing my fury, my pain and confusion.
He leaned in—God, he was so tall sometimes, always having to accommodate me, to align himself with me—his lips sweeping the arch of my cheek, all the way to my ear. “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you like this. But you need to stop pretending too.”
His fingers loosened just enough for me to be able to mumble, “Pretending what?”
“It’s never just dinner. It’s never just sex. You always want more.”
“I just want you.”
He gave a strange, sad laugh. “You say that so easily. As if it’s so small a thing.”
“What do you mean?” My anger was already fading, exposing instead the complex strata of longing and sadness that lay beneath it. “I don’t understand.”
I was sufficiently overwhelmed that even when he moved his hand I didn’t pull away. Just stood there quietly, while he kissed my cheeks, my eyes, the tip of my nose. “I know you don’t, but I think we could have something good together. If you could just accept its—my—limitations.”
“We already tried it your way, and you made me feel like shit.”
“It wasn’t exactly straightforward for me, either. Being constantly aware of letting you down.”
I stared at him, shocked and a little bit horrified. He always seemed so controlled and unreachable that I hadn’t really imagined the possibility of, well, affecting him at all. “You won’t let me down, as long as you try.”
“You have no idea what you’re asking.”
And here we were: going round this mulberry bush again. “Stop treating me like I don’t understand my own desires. Or like I can’t handle yours.” I dragged myself out of his arms with a frustrated noise. “And why are we talking about this? What are you even doing here?”
“I would have thought that was obvious. Come back to London with me.”
Honestly, if he’d told me I’d won a scholarship to a school for boy wizards, I would have been less astonished. For a moment or two my brain just wouldn’t work. Blanked out by absurdity. “What? No. Not in a million, gazillion, tatrillion years.”
There was a long silence.
“Do you hate me so much?” he asked. And, God, for a moment the pale fractals in his eyes looked like broken glass.
“Of course I don’t. I would never have agreed in the first place if I hated you.”
“Then perhaps we should reconsider our arrangement rather than simply dissolving it.”
“Oh, Caspian, the whole thing is fucked up. Can’t you see that?”
He’d gone horribly pale. “I had no idea you were that unhappy.”
“I wasn’t. I mean, not all the time. I mean, it was complicated.” I sighed. It was like being trapped in one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books, but every path led to hurt. “It’s not that I wasn’t grateful for all the lovely things you gave me, and all the ways you tried to take care of me, but I was always the supplicant, y’know?”
“I didn’t ask that of you.”
A great wave of an achy interior tiredness rolled over me. I wanted to be in his arms again. And I wanted him to go away and never come back. All at the same time. “I know, but it was inevitable. I lived in your apartment and I kept your schedule and everything happened on your terms.”
“You’re right,” he said at last. “I can see how such an inherent power imbalance could have made you uncomfortable. What if I gave you the apartment?”
“You…you can’t just give me an apartment.”
“Why not? It would mean you were no longer dependent on me.”
“Right, because owning somewhere I could literally never afford wouldn’t make me feel weirdly obligated at all.”
“You wouldn’t have to. I bought it as an investment property. I would simply see it as investment in you.”
I was…oh my God, fuck knows. Pretty sure my brain was about to start melting out of my ears. I stumbled away from him and collapsed onto the swing. “I don’t want it. I’m not even sure I like it.”
“Then we can find somewhere—”
“Nonono, stop it.” I hid my face in my hands. “How can you like me enough to spend millions on me but not enough to have dinner with me? Don’t you understand why that does nasty things to my sense of self-worth? Why it makes me wonder if you want me at all?”
His hands closed around my wrists and I slowly looked up again. He was crouched in front of me, as calm again, but for the tightness of his lips and the furrow between his brows. And when he spoke, there was a note in his voice I wasn’t sure I’d heard before—something that almost could have been desperation. “I’ve wanted you since you were nothing but an imagined smile and a voice on a phone. And I want you still.”
“How am I supposed to believe that?”
“Perhaps you’re looking in the wrong places? I came to Oxford for you, didn’t I? I came here. I’ll beg if that’s what you need.”
“You know what I need.”
He gazed up at me and I could have cried over how completely fucking miserable he looked. “But that’s a phantasm. If you would abandon these ridiculous, romantic notions, we could have something real. Something attainable and sustainable.”
“That sounds like a renewable energy source, not a relationship.”
“Do you like me, Arden? Do you like the time we spend together? Do you like the way I touch you? Do you like the things I can give to you and do for you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then why can’t that be enough for you?” His voice had gone rough with urgency. “If you would let me, I would do everything within my power to make you happy.”
“Except be honest with me about who you are.”
“I would ruin you. And I…I could not bear it.”
He still had my hands but my fingers curled with my restirring temper. “You can’t know that.”
“I’ve seen it happen. I bring nothing but pain to the people I love.”
“You mean…Nathaniel?” You didn’t exactly have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that.
“And you’ve met Eleanor. My own sister despises me.”
“You did, um, say you were going to drag her to therapy by her hair.”
A touch of telltale color had risen to his cheeks. “That was not well done of me, I admit. But she thinks too little of me to be coaxed, so threats are all I have left. And Machiavelli does say it’s better to be feared than loved, if one cannot be both.”
“Yeah, I think he was talking about medieval Italian politics. Not sibling relations.” Fuck. We’d gone way off track. “And anyway,” I went on quickly, “I’m not Ellery. Or Nathaniel.”
“But I’m the same. I’ve done what I’ve done. Made the choices I’ve made. And my nature is…what it is.”
I broke free of his hold. Reached out, took his face in my hands. He shuddered, but then stilled. It was like leashing a wild thing. Or cradling a butterfly on my palm. “I told you in London. I’m not scared of who you are or what you’ve done. I want you, and that means all of you. And if it also happens to involve some pretty kinky sex”—I managed a grin, though it was frail and slightly crooked—“then that’s okay with me.”
“You shouldn’t have to—”
“There’s no have to about it. For God’s sake, Caspian. Can’t you see I’m desperate for you to let go and dominate the fuck out of me? I like it rough. I like it filthy. And, most of all, I like it with you. When it is you. Not just the paper-thin façade of the man you think I want you to be.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Isn’t it? It’s just sex. And I’m a fully consenting grown-up. No matter how rubbish I am at the grown-up part.”
“Those impulses in me aren’t…that is, they don’t come from a good place.”
“Well, neither do mushrooms, but they’re delicious in garlic.”
Caspian made a sound that could have been a laugh. “I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”
“Just that maybe it doesn’t matter where your desires come from? Only that they’re there and I…um…I welcome them.”
“But I don’t like what they make me.”
“Who says they have to make you anything? What you’re into can sometimes just be what you’re into.”
“I…I…” He closed his eyes. “I don’t want to make you hate me. I don’t want to lose the bright look on your face when you see me. Your smiles. Being able to make you laugh. The way you come with such fearless joy.”
I wasn’t prepared for him to be sweet in quite such a vivid way.
“The way you blush flamingo pink.”
“Oh my God, stop it.” But I was laughing. “What about the way I fall over and vomit on you?”
“Endlessly charming.”
His teasing was a twist on the blade of a knife I’d forgotten was sticking right the fuck into me. And I was suddenly bleeding with fresh longing.
“What’s the matter?”
“N-nothing.”
He drew back, but it was only to stand and pull me from the swing and into the crook of his arm. He didn’t usually hold me like this, so there was a brief moment when he almost felt like a stranger. But his cologne swept over me like homecoming and I melted. Snuggled. Pressed my cheek into the soft, body-warmed cashmere of his jumper. And then burst into tears.
“What did I do?” he asked, sounding kind of stricken.
I made a grotesque gurgling noise. And finally managed, “I just missed you. I missed you way too much.”
“I missed you too. Enough to chase you to the ends of the earth, my Arden.”
“Only on a technicality.”
“It still counts and I’m taking it.”
I sort of laughed and sort of sobbed. “You’re not going to lose me unless you push me away. Can’t you trust, just a little bit, that I like you?”
“It’s hard to believe.”
“Why? Haven’t you seen yourself?”
“Yes, and you’re everything I’m not.”
“You mean a short-arsed nobody?”
“I mean…happy and good and free.” He tucked his free hand beneath my chin and turned my face up to his. The pale Scottish light had made him a study in contrasts: dark hair, pale skin, those amazing eyes of his, as cold and deep and changeable as the waves of Oldshoremore Beach. I thought he was going to kiss me—I would have been okay with it if he had—but, instead, he simply held my gaze and murmured, “Come back to London with me.”
I wanted to. And I was terrified. And I was sure cuddling me was cheating. Because it was unraveling every sensible thought in my head and replacing them with sparkly rainbows and cartoon hearts. “I don’t know…I mean…I…oh God. I want to…but I’m scared and I don’t know.”
“Please.”
It was a single word. But it hit my heart like a nuke. Kaboom.
I’d always thought that begging—outside the safe context of the bedroom, anyway—would be embarrassing. But when Caspian did it for me? Put all his power and pride aside for the sake of my messed up, vulnerable heart? He didn’t seem weak at all. In fact, I couldn’t quite imagine the strength that allowed such rare and unbowed humility.
I swallowed, my mouth coppery with the residue of weeping. “It can’t be like it was.”
“I know what you need from me. You’ve made that very clear. But, Arden…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t expect me too much too soon. This goes against every instinct I possess and I’m going to…stumble.”
“All I’ve ever asked is that you try.”
“And I will. For you. If you can learn to be just a little patient.”
Oh God, I wanted to believe him. More than anything in the world. Except…“These are both pretty nonspecific and difficult-to-measure goals,” I whispered.
“Yes, well….” His mouth curled up a little—that suggestion of whimsy I loved so much. “My efforts at a quantitatively optimized approach to risk management in human relations did not meet with your approval.”
“You’ll really try it my way?”
“You’ve already left me once. What do I have to lose?”
I curled my fingers into his jumper. “Can I have some time to think?”
“Of course. You know where to find me and how to contact me.”
“Or”—I peeped up at him—“you could stay here? Just for a day or two.”
“Is that what you want?”
It seemed, suddenly, an outrageous request to make of a man like Caspian Hart: forget your insanely demanding job and the multibillions for which you’re responsible and just chill out in Scotland while I faff about with my feelings. “I know you don’t have much time—”
“My time is Bellerose’s problem. I’ll stay.”
“Wow, he’s going to extra hate me.”
“He’s not what’s important to me right now.” His hold on me tightened and I nuzzled into…well, I guess it was his armpit, which shouldn’t have been especially sexy or romantic, but it was delicious in there. This warm, Caspian-scented space for me to be in.
“You might have to meet my family.”
“I already have, very briefly. I don’t think your mother was entirely impressed with me.”
“Who? Mum?” I couldn’t picture it. “Are you sure?”
“Well, unless you have a small, glaring woman with purple hair who lives in your house with your father but isn’t your mother.”
Oh. “Um, actually that’s Rabbie and Hazel. And we live in their house.”
“You and your mother?”
“Yep. Hazel is Mum’s girlfriend. And Rabbie is Hazel’s husband. And my dad is…somewhere else.”
“You know,” he said after a moment or two, “I’m beginning to realize how much I still have to learn about you.”
I gave an unconvincing, bleaty laugh. “Who me? No. Never. Open book.”
“Trust goes both ways, Arden.”
I couldn’t think of a good answer to that. Probably because there wasn’t one on account of him being, y’know, 100 percent right.
Both what he said.
And the fact that it was terrifying.
And for some reason, Caspian Hart was willing to do this for me.
I gazed up at him, blinking away tears, and tried to smile. “Next time, I’ll stick to pokey.”