So I had this totally crazy dream. I dreamed I met a billionaire called Caspian Hart and he kind of liked me. Well, liked me enough to put me up in a ludicrously expensive London flat but not enough to trust me, talk to me, or spend any time with me. A sufficiently self-esteem-tanking level of liking that I ended up running back to my family’s place in Scotland. But, also, a sufficiently something level of liking that he wound up following me. And telling me a bunch of things which made me realize that not only did my level-of-liking scale need serious recalibration, but I liked him enough to give it another go.
Except, oh wait, that wasn’t a dream.
It had really happened.
And there was Caspian himself, tucked into the corner where the bed met the window, watching the distant sea. He was pale in the cool, blue-tinted morning and a little tousled—that one wayward lock of his fallen free again. The smile he gave me, as I emerged from the duvet, was slightly shy, as if he wasn’t sure how to greet me.
“Good morning.” I stretched with abandon, spine arching, toes uncurling. “Did you sleep okay?”
“I’m fine. I saw the sunrise.”
“Really?” It was a little hard to imagine. Or maybe not? He was probably the only person I knew who would have the patience to do something like that: watching and waiting as the light cracked wide the night. Lonely, though. With me snuggled and oblivious right there beside him. “Um, maybe you should have woken me? Or…I don’t know. I might have been grumpy.”
“I didn’t want to wake you. You looked, frankly, terribly cute.”
I looked what now? I wrinkled my nose, unimpressed. “Cute in a way that makes you want to do bad things to me?”
“Oh yes.”
He crooked a finger and—after a second of OMG, will I taste of mornings based hesitation—I dived under the duvet, surfacing again between his knees. He wrapped his arms around me, hauled me up, and kissed me, not roughly exactly, but without mercy. Prizing my mouth open like the lid of a treasure box and taking possession. These simple caresses infinitely preferable to whatever drug I’d taken with Ellery in London. No feverish ecstasies but a deep, heavy, and all-consuming bliss. A spell to turn me to butter.
He was smooth and silken against me—his hair surprisingly soft, though I could also feel the wicked tightening of his nipples and the hot pressure of his cock. He smelled of warmth, if that was a thing that was possible. A cozy, sleep-clinging scent of skin, with only the faintest trace of sweetness from his cologne. This unexpected nakedness that was just him.
He made a low sound at the back of his throat—almost a growl—and flipped me. I went gladly, though the bed made a godawful telltale creaking as I landed on my back amid the pillows and rucked-up sheets. I wasn’t even sure Caspian noticed, let alone cared, as he came down on top of me.
I’d been kissed and delightfully manhandled enough by him that I had a pretty good notion of what he might like. So I stretched my hands over my head. Giving him my surrender. The safety and the dark thrill of it.
His eyes glinted. Turned stormy.
And he reached up, dragging a finger from my wrist to my shoulder, making me very aware of that line of pulled-tight skin, all exposed and unprotected and held that way by nothing but the desire to please him.
As he settled between my thighs I couldn’t help arching my spine and tilting my hips, making very, very explicit all the places of my body I was up for yielding.
“God, Arden.” I was always suspicious of the phrase ground out when I saw it in books, but it seemed to apply to Caspian’s words right then. Especially if you also took into account what he was doing on top of me. “You’re such a…”
“Wanton?” I offered, tightening my calves around him.
“Tease.”
Tease. My cock gave an eager jump.
I loved this kind of talk but it was tricky. There were lines in my head even I didn’t properly know how to navigate. And I’d found asking people to call me names tended not to go so well. It seemed to make them either act weird or get nasty. Neither of which I was into.
But tease…that was lovely. Made my toes curl with the naughty delight of being bad.
And Caspian said it just right too.
In this sexy-angry way.
As if being a tease was something wicked, not something wrong.
I was already swooning slightly—because of that, and also because his cock was pressed right against the warm, tingly space beneath my balls. But then he twisted a hand in my hair, yanking my head back, and my overthrow was complete.
The breath shuddered in my throat.
The fear was animal, instinctive, and so very sweet.
He leaned down even further and licked a long, wet stripe up my trembly, stubble-speckled Adam’s apple.
I made a sound.
I guess you could have called it a whimper.
His teeth found the tender places under my jaw. Playful little nips that didn’t really hurt so much as spark.
And then he pressed his open mouth to the side of my neck and—
Oh oh oh.
Something at once familiar and surprising about that damp suction and the blunt edge of his teeth: pleasure with a hot heart of pain.
It was sufficiently sanity-consuming that I forgot myself, moaning shamelessly as I curled my palm around the back of his neck, holding him to me. That strange and glorious push-pull of yes-no-doitharder.
My skin was as fiery-achy as my cock by the time he drew back.
He stared down at me, mouth red and eyes wild. “What the hell am I doing?”
“Um.” I touched my fingers gently to the throbbing circle he had left on my neck. “Giving me a hickey, I think.”
He winced. “I’m so sorry. I’m not some brutish adolescent. I don’t know what came over me.”
It was the teeniest bit ridiculous.
Caspian Hart—billionaire, sophisticate, chess grandmaster—and me with what was probably a glowing red-purple bruise. The proud teenage symbol for “getting some.” Which, embarrassingly enough, I’d missed out on when I was an actual teenager, on account of being literally the only gay in the village. And English to boot.
I’d made up for it at university—although, now I thought about it, while I’d occasionally been bitten (with varying degrees of conviction), I’d never received an actual, one hundred percent genuine, bona-fide hickey.
Turned out, I was oddly glad it was Caspian.
And I liked—more than liked—that he wanted to mark me.
Unfortunately, he was looking a little bit traumatized about it.
“No, no,” I said quickly. “It was lovely.” I twisted my head helpfully. “Do it again.”
He laughed, and kissed the bite so that it lit up like a flare and made me gasp. “I think I might have been wrong when I called you a tease.”
“I’m not a tease?” I just about managed not to pout but I couldn’t keep the disappointment from my voice.
“I think perhaps”—he’d gone all husky again—“you’re worse.”
I brightened. “Coquette?”
He didn’t answer. Only tongued at a wildly sensitive spot beneath my ear.
“Uhh.” I swallowed. “Minx?”
He shook his head.
“T-tart?” It was getting increasingly difficult to think of, well, anything. But every suggestion sent a pulse of whiskey-rough arousal through me.
“Worse,” he whispered.
And, God help me, it felt like a caress. Like a compliment.
I tried to breathe and realized I was already panting. “Um…”
His eyes had that “all the better to eat you with, my dear” gleam as they found mine. Pinned me as surely as his body. “What are you, Arden?”
I wanted to say it so badly. Have him brand me with it like a badge of honor and sexual freedom.
But I was sort of…scared and squirmy at the same time. In case it wasn’t true. Or it would be different outside the safety of my head.
“Arden.” There was a low note of warning in his voice this time. It sounded so deliciously dangerous that I nearly came.
And then—bam—whatever was holding me back wasn’t there anymore.
Broken or yielded or simply vanished.
“I’m a slut,” I gasped out. “Am I a slut?”
He slid a possessive hand up the naked underside of my thigh. “Yes. Yes, you are. A very depraved, wayward little imp of a slut.”
“Oh god.” I squirmed frantically. “W-what happens to…slutty little imps?”
“What do you think happens to slutty little imps?”
My tongue flicked across my lips and, wow, they were dry. Almost as if every spare ounce of fluid I possessed had already leaked out my cock. “Do they…do they get punished?”
Which was when he rolled away. Taking all his heat and strength and the promise of erotic cruelty.
Before I could panic or complain, he covered his face with his hands and gave a deeply gorgeous groan. “Get dressed, Arden. I need to get you to London. I need to get you to London right now.”
“Might take a while. Trains are really ropey at the weekend.”
“Then it’s fortunate I have a plane waiting at Inverness.”
“You have a—” Of course he did. “Oh wow. But we’ve still got to get to Inverness.”
“I hired a car.”
“You can drive?” I blurted out.
He gave me a reproving look, softened by the hint of amusement in his eyes. “And I can tie my own shoelaces too.”
Being whisked to London in a billionaire’s private jet made such a ludicrous contrast to my miserable, lonely, to say nothing of lengthy, journey up.
But I guess that was life with Caspian Hart. And life without him.