I shoved through the front door of Hart & Associates—which didn’t go as well as I might have hoped because it was revolving, and I had a hard enough time getting through those things when I was completely compos mentis—and then went plunging across the foyer. Everything was a haze of glass and steel and marble. Beautiful in a way, a godless cathedral, full of echoes and refracted light, but it was also the kind of space designed to make you feel shabby and small.
Which, if you asked me, was an architectural dick move.
I kept catching glimpses of myself in too many gleaming surfaces. Wildly out of place in Hart’s Temple of Mammon in scruffy jeans and a T-shirt, and my favorite jacket—the velvet one I’d worn to the dinner, with holes in the elbows and all the nap worn away, my rainbow pride bracelets disappearing under the fraying sleeve. I hadn’t even taken the time to engineer my hair so it was multidirectional and ridiculous. Basically, I looked like a rentboy who’d let himself go.
A voice called after me, “Can I help you?”
And I called back, “No,” as I jumped into the lift and hit the button. He would be right at the top because the top was the best. I’d seen Pretty Woman. I knew how this stuff worked.
The glass bubble shot silently skyward, floor after floor after floor rushing past in streaks of silver, burning at the corners of my eyes like I was about to cry.
But I wasn’t.
I totally wasn’t.
Because I was angry. Angry and invincible. Not sad. And definitely not scared.
The doors swooshed open Star Trek style and the lift disgorged me onto what would have been a landing in a less intimidatingly designed building. It was probably the closest thing to an antechamber I would ever stand in.
And, oh shit, there was another receptionist. A stately blond, built like an underwear model. Calvin Klein, not ASDA George.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m looking for Caspian.”
“Why do you need to see him?”
It was a fair question. I couldn’t think of a single plausible explanation why someone like Caspian Hart would know someone like me. Which was why I ended up blurting out the truth. “Because he’s an arsehole.”
The receptionist’s hand dipped below the edge of the desk, and I’d seen enough movies to know it was the “summoning security” gesture. I probably had about 0.2 seconds before I was dragged out of there by burly men with Tasers.
Fuck, I’d blown this. Ironically enough, considering I’d also blown Caspian.
I wheeled around on an inexplicable instinct—awareness or recognition or some painful entangling of both—and there he was inside a glass-walled conference room: Caspian Hart. Still the most impossibly beautiful man I’d ever seen, as cold and perfect and unreachable as a star.
Except he’d reached for me. And then cast me aside.
Blindly—God, maybe I was crying—I ran for the door. Pushed it open. And practically fell over the threshold.
Caspian paused midsentence. And gazed down at me with his hunter’s eyes, no expression on his face at all. Just the sight of him made me ache with wanting. With wanting to please, to yield, to warm and gentle him. To relieve such stark loveliness with the messiness of joy.
I’d prepared a speech. On the bus down, I’d rehearsed it over and over again in my head. It had been dignified and devastating, but now I couldn’t remember any of it.
All I could remember was Caspian Hart’s fingers, tight and desperate in my hair. The careful pattern of his breath breaking. The sound he made, pleasure-wrecked, as he came down my throat in a hot, harsh rush. And how I’d followed helplessly, touched by nothing but his need.
“You…,” I said. “You’re a…a dick.”
It sounded so childishly inadequate. Just like me.
I tried again. “And I’m not your—” Whore. Except calling yourself a prostitute in an insulty way seemed a bit rude to the oldest profession. After all, there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with exchanging sex for money, as long as you both knew that was what was happening. “Um, non-negotiated sex worker.”
It turned out I wasn’t angry or invincible at all. Just far too young for a game I hadn’t understood we were playing. “What the fuck, Caspian?” I finished helplessly. “Why did you do that to me?”
He blinked. Once.
That was all I got.
Then, “This matter would be better discussed in private.”
Wait. What? Private? Oh God. Of course. He’d been talking when I’d burst in, and for some reason, my jumbled brain hadn’t quite grasped what that meant.
I turned, limbs heavy and awkward as if I’d suddenly become part robot, and sure enough, there was my audience: five of them, be-suited and exquisitely composed, regarding me with the careful nonreactiveness British people adopt when you’ve mortified yourself so severely that they’re embarrassed on your behalf.
I closed my eyes for a second on the off chance all this would have miraculously gone away when I opened them again. But no. Everything was right where I’d left it. I was in London, in Caspian Hart’s office, my heart spattering on the expensive carpet in front of a group of total strangers and the man who’d smooshed it in the first place.
Anger was rubbish. It had deceived me into thinking I was strong and bold and undefeated. And now I wanted to die.
What was I supposed to say? How did you make something like this better? Non-April Fool! “Um…sorry. I can see I’ve interrupted.”
Caspian’s hand closed over my wrist. It was not a reassuring grip. Under different circumstances I might have liked being held that way, trapped and controlled. But right then, not so much.
I tried to pull free and his fingers tightened, the message undeniable: he wasn’t letting me go. He was probably about two seconds from dragging me, struggling, out of the conference room like I was the heroine of a 1950s Hollywood movie. That had also recently been a fantasy of mine, but at the moment, it was such an awful vision that I stopped fighting.
I’d done enough damage for one day. Make that one lifetime. Maybe in sixty years I’d be able to find this funny. Hey, your granddad once…No. Just no. Even imagining looking back on this made my stomach fizz with shame.
Caspian’s gaze flicked to his colleagues. “We will continue this after lunch.”
And then he hauled me out of there.
Past the hot blond guy and into what was probably his office—corporate grandeur and the gray London skyline—where he practically threw me into a chair. My wrist throbbed with the impression of his fingers.
“Um—” I tried again.
“Don’t ever do this again. This is my place of business.”
And that was when I got it: he was furious with me. Not just a loser interrupted my meeting furious but coldly, personally furious. And he was way better at it than I was. He really did look invulnerable as he stalked across the room.
He was dressed in a three-piece suit (so far so city) but he wore it like armor, the hard contours of his body perfectly framed by bespoke tailoring. It wasn’t usually a look I went for and it could easily have crossed the line into fussy or old-fashioned, but on him? Maybe it was his height, or the way he held himself—utterly controlled—but he looked ridiculously fucking good. The epitome of modern masculine power. A predator in pinstripes.
And still, in spite of everything, I wanted to be on my knees for him. Unburdening him, my most ungentle knight, until we were nothing but skin and surrender.
He stood with his back to me, etched in cold light, staring out at the horizon. While I just huddled there, shaking. No idea what to do or say.
At last I managed, “Well don’t treat me like that again.”
“I have already expressed regret for my behavior.” He folded his hands behind his back, the set of his shoulders unyielding. “And tried to make amends.”
Just when I thought he couldn’t hurt me any more. “You regretted fucking me so much you made amends with millions?”
“I didn’t fuck you. It was oral sex.”
“That’s semantics. You join your body with someone else’s in pursuit of pleasure, that’s fucking. And if you pay them afterward, that’s prostitution.”
His fingers clenched. I remembered them on me. Rough in my hair, soft against my cheek. I imagined touching them now, easing the tension from them.
Idiot.
“You wanted a donation for your college,” he murmured. “That was why you contacted me in the first place.”
I was going to cry. End of a perfect bloody day. “It wasn’t why I sucked you off.”
There was a long silence. The phase sucked you off belonged here about as well as I did.
“What do you want, Arden?” He sounded weary suddenly. Not angry anymore. Just sad, like me.
And I didn’t know how to answer him. All the revenge fantasies I’d let run riot through my head were just that—fantasies. The things I truly wanted were stupid and impossible: I want it to have meant something to you. I want you to like me, just a little bit. “I…”
“There’s no need to be timid. You’ve made your point.”
“I have?” I wished he’d look at me. It was eerie talking to his back and the wavering ghost of his reflection in the window.
“Why else would you come to my office?” He half turned, showing me the pale edge of his jaw, the line of his nose. “What will you do? Go to the press? The police?”
The plot. I had completely lost the plot. “Uh, what?”
He put a hand to the glass, the bones all ridging up beneath the whitening skin. “Stop playing games with me. Is it money? I’ll pay.”
“Oh Jesus.” Now I got it. “You think I’m blackmailing you?”
It was so…ugly. So beyond anything I would have thought or expected that, for a moment, I was numb. It felt like the moment after you cut yourself on something really sharp and you see the blood on your skin before you feel the pain. And then it hit me, all this bewilderment and shame and anger and hurt, and I burst helplessly into tears.
Through a silvery blur, I saw him turn away from the window. “What are you doing?”
“I’m”—I hiccoughed snottily—“c-crying, you arsehole.”
“Then please stop.”
“It’s not a conscious choice.” I scrubbed my sleeve across my face. My eyes were sticky and swollen, the velvet of my jacket making my skin sting. “How can you think these horrible things about me?”
The carpet smothered his footsteps as he crossed to where I was sitting and I tried not to notice how good he looked in motion, silent and effortlessly graceful, some glorious hunting beast. Probably coming to rip me to shreds.
He crouched down in front of me, the fabric of his suit tightening across the sleek muscles of his thighs, outlining them for me in all their strength and elegance. Like the chalk sketch of a murder victim except the deceased was my pride. He was just so beautiful. It was unfair. His eyes held mine in a cool, gray-blue forever. And then he told me, “I don’t know you.”
I tried to laugh but it clogged in my throat. “You don’t know me and prostitute blackmailer is where you went straight out of the gate? Is your glass half empty or what?”
“Why else would you come here?”
“God, because”—the truth exploded out of me—“I liked you and…and you made me feel really cheap, okay?”
“I know.” He rose to his feet and then he was off again, toward the window. It was weird—compelling, in one way, painful in another—how much stillness there was in him. And how much restlessness at the same time. It made every room feel like a cage. “My behavior…it was inappropriate.” He was silent a moment. “It was wrong.”
Was that what passed for a sorry in Caspian Hart Land? Except he seemed to be almost-sorry for completely the wrong thing. The one bit of this whole hideously humiliating business I definitely didn’t regret. “Wait. Are you talking about the blow job?”
“It’s not my usual practice.”
Oh shit, no. This was turning into an ever-deepening well of fail. The only thing worse than having enthusiastically gone down on someone who thought he had to pay me after was going down on someone insistently straight. Enshrined forever as some guy’s sleazy little secret. A pit stop at Queertown. “You mean you’re not gay?”
“No, I’m gay. But I don’t know what…happened to me. I shouldn’t have lost control like that. I could have hurt you.”
“Caspian”—his name slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it, the words of a magic spell, a curse or a blessing—“you did hurt me. You hurt me when you tried to buy me off or whatever it was you thought you were doing.”
“I was trying to apologize,” he snapped.
“You didn’t need to apologize. The fact that you thought you did offends me. And, actually,” I added, on a roll now, “you know what else offends me? You thinking I can’t take a bit of deep throating. I did excellent deep throating. I only gagged because you’ve got a big dick.”
His shoulders shifted. I must have been getting good at back reading because I thought maybe I’d embarrassed him. Though probably not in a bad way. I’d never a met a man who didn’t like having his bits admired. But I’d noticed this in Caspian before—the oddest touch of something almost like shyness.
That was when something else occurred to me. I mean, while it was pretty grim to have someone think you’d sleep with them on behalf of your college’s endowment, how much worse would it be the other way around? If your first assumption when somebody touched you was that it wasn’t you they wanted. Maybe it was one of the perils of being way too rich, but he was also way too attractive. Surely people were falling all over themselves to put his cock in their mouth?
I slipped out of the chair and followed him to the window. Rested my hand lightly on his back, feeling the heat and tightness of him through stupidhigh superfine. And he shuddered under my palm like an unbroken stallion.
“You didn’t do anything I wasn’t up for,” I told him.
He sighed. “I am sorry, Arden. I thought the donation would compensate for the way I’d treated you.”
“Well you thought wrong. Shoving your dick down my throat is okay. Even shoving your dick down my throat and never speaking to me again is okay. Shoving your dick down my throat, never speaking to me again, and starting an ‘oops, I’m sorry I shoved my dick down your throat’ scholarship in my name is seriously doubleplus unkay.”
Now that I was closer, his reflection was clear enough to show me nuances of expression: the slight softening of his lips, the hint of amusement. And I remembered that making him laugh was almost as satisfying as making him come.
“I wasn’t expecting anything,” I added. “It’s pretty fucking miraculous you’d want me at all. It’s not every day a boy gets to wrap his mouth round a gorgeous billionaire.”
“Arden, Arden.”
I adored it when he said my name. My memory was bliss-hazy but I thought he’d whispered it to me that night as well. Arden, Arden, oh, Arden the same way some people called out for God.
“Stop.”
“I loved being on my knees for you, being breathless for you. I loved everything we did. I didn’t want or need anything else. And it makes me really fucking sick to think you might regret me.”
He turned abruptly. Nothing between us now, between me and his beauty, his pale gray-blue eyes startling vivid against the dark profusion of his lashes. And oh those lashes, so unexpectedly opulent, the only touch of softness in his face. I thought of him stretched out beneath me, or beside me, lax with satisfaction, my fingertips finding all his secrets. It was, honestly, a little hard to picture. He wasn’t a man for quiescence. It was something I had uncomplicatedly liked about him. But, all the same, maybe lust-tamed he would let me.
“I don’t regret you. I…I…” His voice had gone hoarse, the words ragged, as if they’d had to tear themselves out of his throat. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
“Seriously?” I hadn’t meant to come across quite that pathetic or uncertain, but it was the last thing I’d ever have expected him to say.
Caspian Hart couldn’t stop thinking about me? Me?
He must have meant it, though, because as I stood there staring at him blankly, he caught me by the lapels of my jacket and pulled me round so my back hit the window. My heart jumped and I couldn’t have told you whether it was excitement or fear. The glass was cold and solid behind me, but it seemed unreal just then, as though nothing held me but him.
“Oh God.” A low groan, frayed and frantic. He’d sounded like that with his cock in my mouth. “I can’t…I shouldn’t…oh God.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes.”
You can. You should.
I reached out to draw him closer but he seized my wrists and pinned them over my head, stretching me out, making me helpless. His knee nudged my legs apart, slid up one thigh, brushed the groove of my groin as he leaned into me. He smelled far too good. Clean, expensive, undeniably aroused: skin and sex and that amazing cologne of his. Sweet and dark, just like him. And, oh, the way he touched me, restrained me, made me wait.
It was perfect. Perfect. Everything I wanted.
Whatever he’d claimed about his usual practices, he certainly knew how to please a boy like me.
I wriggled. Moaned. Let the sheer needy excitement of everything he did to me fill me up like fireflies, buzzing and dancing and shining.
His lips were bare inches from mine. The heat of his breath brushing me in prelude.
I’d never been so sure of anything as I was at that moment. Him and me and the possibility of all the things he could do to me—the things we could do together. Romantic and tender and sexy and wicked. I met his wild eyes. Tried to control my shaky breath enough to beg. But all I managed was his name.
And then he covered my mouth with his.