by Alexis Hall
How to Blow It
with a Billionaire
Alexis Hall
New York Boston
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Alexis Hall
Excerpt from next book copyright © 2017 by Alexis Hall
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ISBN 978-1-4555-7136-9 (ebook edition)
ISBN 978-1-4555-7135-2 (print on demand edition)
E3-20171031-DA-NF
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgments
Don’t miss the final installment of Arden and Caspian’s story,
About the Author
Also by Alexis Hall
Praise for Alexis Hall and His Novels
Newsletters
To CMC, you are still the fucking best.
Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish’d and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
—As You Like It, William Shakespeare
Prologue
Fifteen years, Arthur. And sometimes I still can’t quite believe you’re dead. Your son is so like you in some ways—passionate, obstinate, ambitious—and in others not at all. He has such dark needs. A twist of sexual cruelty as integral to his nature as gold through marble. You would not have understood him. Not the way I do. To you I was nothing but an experiment, an impulse of fondness and alcohol, cast aside for that doe-eyed whore you married, relegated to the ranks of mere friend. But Caspian is mine in ways you could never be. We made him together. Your final gift to me. My reward for half a lifetime of unregarded love.
I did not plan what happened between us. But he came to me, the rage and grief in him an irresistible reflection of my own. He thought he wanted to punish you, but all he truly needed was to mourn. I, however, had needs too. I will admit that manipulating your son into bed is hardly an accomplishment worthy of my abilities. Nor any true testament to my taste. But what are rules to men like us? Petty middle-class limitations placed upon those with the capacity for greatness. And, Arthur, he has your eyes. Blue as forever.
He was so enticing. So young and restless and full of pain. It was not like loving you at all. It was far superior. He was everything you could have been, were you only less hidebound, less conventional. Less excruciatingly kind. And what are you now? Nothing but an absent father. When I am his teacher, his lover, and his friend. Of course, he has his dalliances. It does him good, I think, to test the limits of the ties that bind us. And, as the loosed hawk returns always to the hand of its master, so will Caspian to me.
Ah, but sometimes he tries my patience. I offered him a gift—the perfect subject for his desires—and he uses him like a secretary. Nathaniel Priest should have been a passing folly. Instead he nearly ruined what I gave so much to create. And now this boy. This boy of no consequence.
While I would infinitely prefer Caspian to return of his own volition, perhaps it is time to remind him where, and to whom, he belongs. Of course, I would never stoop to an instrument as blunt or as unreliable as force. Rather, I am the loving vivisectionist of Caspian’s soul. I have shaped and reshaped him with incalculable cuts, and I can bring him back to me whenever I will it. All I have to do is show him who he truly is.
Chapter 1
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. The
se 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.
Chapter 2
Despite our eagerness, it actually took a while to get on the road because Mum made us breakfast.
And sex was all very well but pancakes.
Caspian went for the lightest sprinkling of sugar and a twist of lemon jui
ce. While I went for syrup. And cream. And strawberries. And chocolate. And—okay, yes. Everything. I went for everything.
I couldn’t help but notice the way he was watching my lips.
It’s possible they were a little bit glisteny.
And sticky.
He was looking all tormented by the time I was chasing the last swirl of syrup from my plate with a fingertip. And I seriously hoped I was going to pay for this later.
It didn’t take me too long to pack on account of the fact I’d been living out of my suitcase since I got home. Then we said our goodbyes to my folks and headed to his car.
It was this silver hatchback thing. Very “family of four on a daytrip.” So unlike his fleet of billionairemobiles.
Caspian must have noticed my amusement because he explained somewhat grumpily, “This is what was available in Inverness.”
“You didn’t think to get chauffeured up in comfort?”
“And have an audience for what could very likely have been a futile twelve-hundred-mile round trip?”
I still wasn’t sure if it was terrifying or reassuring that you could have all the beauty, wealth, and power in the world, and still be uncertain about a boy. But, then again, if you were a total dick to the boy, you probably deserved to be uncertain.
Anyway, it had all worked out: happy endings ho.
We dropped off the car at Inverness and headed into the airport. When Caspian had told me he had a plane waiting, I hadn’t quite realized what it would be like. What it meant to be a man who owned a private jet.
The terrifying value of his time.
Time he was currently spending with me.
It was an overwhelming thought. Knocking me silent as we were whisked across the concourse and then ushered into a plush private waiting room.
I had just enough knowledge of cars to be able to recognize status vehicles when I saw them, but private jets were completely beyond my sphere of experience. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between a Gulfstream and a Bombardier if my life depended on it.
So all I could really say about Caspian’s, as I gazed at it through the viewing windows, was that it looked like a plane. With wings and engines and wheels and everything else you’d expect.