How to Blow It with a Billionaire

by Alexis Hall

  But then I caught sight of Ellery crossing the room toward us. She was still in the dress, barefoot, and without the violin. So I had to let go of Caspian in order to give her a birthday hug.

  Despite the supermodel sweep of the gown, she was still very much herself underneath it, sharp and fragile and Ellery, all jutting bones and elbows. So holding her felt a bit like wrangling a feral coat hanger.

  I’d expected a brief, public occasion salute and she didn’t exactly come across as the cuddly sort, so I was surprised by how tightly she squeezed me back, pushing her sweat-damp face kittenishly against my neck hard enough to leave me with a lipstick mark.

  When we parted, Caspian stepped forward with a touch of awkwardness and murmured, “Happy birthday…Ellery.”

  She stared at him, her eyes—oddly naked without the heavy liner I was used to—bright and startled. Perilously close to pleased. Then she shrugged. “Whatever.”

  He didn’t quite flinch but he got that look: the closed down, I am a million miles away from you look I knew all too well. “I’ll leave you to enjoy it.”

  And, with that, he…went away.

  Again.

  I bit down on a gah of frustration. I wanted to kick him in the shins. You couldn’t just fix what was probably years of hurt and misunderstanding with a single, and very small, gesture.

  Also the fucker had barely spent five minutes with me.

  But I pushed all that aside. And turned my very best and sparkliest smile on Ellery. “So what happens next? Do we all die of the plague?”

  She sneered at the room. “Mm, here’s hoping.”

  “Wow, that’s the last time I RSVP to an invitation from you.”

  “I don’t mean it.” She sighed and with the air of a small child being forced to eat Brussels sprouts added, “Thank you for coming.”

  “I didn’t know you played the violin.”

  She shrugged. “I’m brilliant. When I’m not rusty.”

  “Well, if that’s how you play when you’re rusty.”

  “Not exactly.” She looked briefly uncomfortable. “I had to practice the shit out of that thing. Worth it though. Did you see their faces?”

  I hadn’t, as it had happened. I’d been too absorbed by the music and then by Caspian. “I think everyone was really impressed.”

  “They were freaking out. I’m this total fuck up, remember? But now nobody knows what to think.”

  “Are you seriously telling me that you spent weeks—”

  “Months.”

  “—months practicing a violin solo just to annoy people?”

  “Yep.” The corners of her mouth curled upward. “And it was awesome.”

  I suspected at least some of this was simply bravado. But it was her birthday and you let people get away with things on their birthdays, so I laughed. “I can’t wait to see what you do next year.”

  “Oh there’s nowhere to go from Sibelius. I’ll have to auto-erotically asphyxiate or something.”

  “I think that’s only for creepy politicians.”

  She thought about it for a moment. “The auto part sounds especially pathetic.” Then she heaved another sigh. “You know, I don’t actually hate absolutely everyone here. I should probably go and say hello and shit.”

  “Good plan.”

  “It’ll suck, but you can come if you like.”

  It might have been delivered Ellery-style but it was still more consideration than Caspian had shown me all evening. And the fact I’d been waiting for something like it, just a fucking goddamn hint that he cared I was there, and it was Ellery—sulky, thoughtless, self-absorbed Ellery—who wanted to make sure I was okay, had me blinking back tears. “Thanks, but I’m going to look for Caspian.”

  Look for him. Find him. Shout at him.

  Her only answer was a theatrical eye roll.

  I spent the next ten minutes or so wandering through gilt rooms, past all the beautiful people, in hopeless pursuit of the questing beast that was Caspian Hart.

  Only to discover he was nowhere.

  Typical.

  Ellery, however, in her red dress was as easy to spot as a flame in a forest. Remembering the theme of the ball, it was a little bit macabre of her. But I wouldn’t have expected anything less and she was so clearly reveling in it. Several of her guests had even obligingly pretended to drop dead at the sight of her. It was one of the few times I’d heard her laugh without wariness.

  I eventually ran out of places to look. Unless I started peering under chaises and behind curtains. Was he still dealing with the caterers? After five hours? If there’d even been something that needed dealing with in the first place. And it wasn’t an excuse to fuck Nathaniel in the pantry.

  Oh God, I didn’t want to think about that.

  Besides, I knew with the certainty of sunrise that Caspian wouldn’t cheat on me.

  And, actually, now the notion had sidled stickily across the threshold of my mind, I couldn’t really imagine them together. They’d look beautiful—like a slightly risqué, designer underwear advert—but Nathaniel didn’t strike me as someone to readily abandon his dignity.

  And, in my experience, dignity was pretty much the opposite of sex.

  Trying to rid myself of an image that almost epitomized my understanding of the tragicomic (though not one, thankfully, that had found its way into my apparently rubbish finals essay on the subject), I stared out at the gardens. There wasn’t much to see—just the shadowy wash of a perfectly maintained lawn and the pale gleam of what was probably a gazebo or a folly, half lost amid a haze of distant willows.

  Aaaaaand that was when I knew exactly where Caspian was.

  I tried the handle on one of the French windows and, sure enough, it was open. A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed that nobody was paying any attention as I slipped outside.

  I’d never entirely worked out what a folly actually was—or how it differed from, say, a building—but I found Caspian in this miniature classical temple type affair of slender marble pillars supporting a domed iron roof. Swept in dusty starlight and overlooking a tiny silver lake, it was an absurdly romantic spot. It looked like the sort of place where you’d sit in a crinoline, waiting to be ruined and then jilted by your no-good suitor.

  Caspian was smoking.

  He turned as I approached and cast the cigarette aside. I’d prepared a casual hey you type greeting but I never got the chance to utter it.

  I was too busy being slammed up against the nearest pillar and kissed—holy fuck kissed—like he’d never kissed me before. The aggression I was used to, the will to dominate, to control, to claim. The ruthless determination simply to have me and wring a yielding from me that left me shaking and breathless and undone. But, this time, he was rough because he was clumsy, and he was clumsy because he was desperate.

  Desperate for me.

  He tasted of tobacco and the salt of unshed tears, and the sound he made against my lips, oh God, the sound. So helpless and naked and frantic.

  And, of course, I forgot everything. I forgot my frustration and disappointment and hurt. The words I’d been going to say. All that mattered right then was that he needed me.

  I reached for him, wanting to draw him close—to show him how safe he was, and how absolutely I was his. For a moment, he allowed it, shuddering against me, wrapped in my arms. But then he caught my wrists and pulled me away and I let him. Because whatever I could give, whatever he wanted to take with his cruel hands and his harsh mouth, was his.

  He drew back a little, eyes wild in the uncertain light. And ran a single finger down the line of my throat, bringing with it a sharp, bright bliss. I tilted back my head and pressed into his palm. He could have that too. All my pleasure and all my pain, my heart and soul, my very breath.

  “What do you want, Arden?” He sounded ragged and feral and dangerous: a beast about to snap and make me bleed.

  I leaned into him as much as I dared, so he could feel the word gather in my throat before I gave it to him. �
��You.”

  It was the truth. The only answer I could give. But it made his eyes darken, the curve of his mouth turn cruel. The pressure of his hand eased. His fingertips skated over my leaping pulse. “Even like this?”

  “Yes. Like this.” I was trembling a little beneath his touch, but if it was fear it was indistinguishable from excitement. From love. “Like everything.”

  For a moment, he said nothing. Just stared at me, searching my eyes as if he wanted to crack me open like a coconut. And then, so softly, “You really want to hurt for me?”

  I could have told him I already do. “Yes.”

  “Scream and weep and beg for me?”

  “Fuck yes.” And then because I saw no reason not to get a head start. “Please.”

  His fingers were still idling at my neck. He caught the corner of my bowtie and gave a sharp tug. The rasp of silk on silk made me gasp as if it was me he unraveled. “You’ll let me have complete control?”

  There was something about him tonight. Some edge that felt as brittle as it was sharp. I wanted to comfort him as much as inflame him—but there was no denying what he did to me, his threats as sweet as promises to my ears. And maybe the only way he’d ever let me truly reach him was through surrender. I tried to muster my usual tone of minx-ish provocation. “I’ll give you anything you want, Mr. Hart.”

  “God.” It was little more than a despairing groan. “Why? Why do you let me do this to you?”

  I almost couldn’t answer, my throat too clogged with tears at the thought he’d have to ask me that. “Because I like you. Because I trust you.”

  I took a chance and took his hand. Held him softly and gently. As if he were the butterfly tonight. And, when he didn’t shake me off, drew him down to my cock. Which was hot and straining and aching for him. “Because it turns me on.”

  His fingers closed around me through my trousers and squeezed until I bucked and moaned. Some of the anguish faded from his face, the tight lines of his brow and mouth yielding to desire, and something tender I might have called hope. “Don’t move,” he whispered, as he stepped away.

  “Okay.” My heart thumped as eagerly as a puppy’s tail. I loved the anticipation that came with his commands. And I loved pleasing him.

  Of course, my nose started itching almost immediately. But I was manly and ignored it and held still as he’d told me to.

  Caspian circled the pillar, leaving me standing there like Andromeda. Well, Andromeda if she’d had a massive erection. Then he drew my hands behind me and I felt the cool brush of silk against my skin.

  It encircled my wrists. Pulled taut.

  Oh my God.

  My bowtie. He was bondaging me with my own bowtie.

  I made a noise of surprise and excitement, which came out as a delirious hiccup that would have been embarrassing if I’d still had the brain space to care. I’d been fantasizing for years about what it would be like to be properly tied up and the answer was fucking amazing. Kind of like having my feet tickled. Terrifying and wonderful and just the right amount oh-no-too-much to turn my bones to treacle and fill my head with stars.

  He’d pinned me with his hands and his body often enough, and I’d loved it, the weight of him and the sense of being physically overpowered. But this was different.

  This was…this was special.

  The care in it. Being wound inescapably in silk.

  Like a gift, prepared for his pleasure.

  I’d never dared struggle when he held me in case he let me go. But now I could. And so I did, simply for the visceral pleasure of feeling the knots tighten, reminding me that I was trapped. Bound. Helpless. At his mercy.

  Exactly where I wanted to be.

  He came back round, all flushed and wild in the moonlight, and I wriggled with wanton abandon. The absence of him, the handfuls of air between us, were so potent suddenly—as physical as hands upon me—all because it was beyond my power to breach them.

  I felt like a heretic martyr waiting for the flames.

  “Oh fuck, Caspian.” Wow. I sounded half drunk. “Touch me do something please.”

  “Do something?” He looked gloriously wicked right then—taunting me with my own desire.

  “Anything you want. Just…please.”

  He reached out and flicked open the topmost button of my shirt. Cool air hit that sliver of exposed skin like a blade and I whimpered. Usually clothes went quickly when Caspian wanted me, but tonight he bared me one fastening at a time. The sense of exposure was dizzying. And entirely disproportionate considering I was still mostly full dressed.

  I stole a quick glance at my bare chest, aroused and embarrassed by how brazen I looked: shirt hanging open, shoulders pulled back, nipples pointy and straining toward him like they were shouting memememe. Any other time I might have been irritated I was wearing the butterflies he’d seen before, but then he reached out and pulled lightly on their chains. I went up on my toes with a squeak, sharp little tingles shooting all the way to my cock.

  His eyes were intent on mine as he circled me with the pad of his thumb. Circled and circled and circled. His caresses so light and so relentless, they quickly became torture. Attention and sexual cruelty: my two favorite things, especially from Caspian. It wasn’t long before my eyes were wet with wanting and I was writhing against the pillar, basically attempting to fuck the air.

  He paused, and I sagged, relieved and aching and disappointed all at once.

  He put his mouth close enough to mine that I could feel the heat of his breath. “Say it.”

  Teased and tormented to the point of incoherence, I answered something like “whu.”

  “Ask me.”

  Another command, but one so filled with longing that I finally understood. And my own voice, for once, was steady. “Give me more. Hurt me, Caspian.”

  Shuddering, he pressed into me with a muffled moan. A strange embrace, but perhaps one I couldn’t return was the only kind he knew how to seek just then. I grazed my lips against the edge of his brow, accepting this too, letting him take whatever solace he wanted.

  “Do you remember,” he murmured, fingers tracing the outline of one of my butterfly nipple shields, “the last time I hurt you like this?”

  I gave a shaky laugh. “I’ll never forget. All I had was your voice on the phone. And I wanted you to be there so badly.”

  “I wanted it too. I wanted to be the one touching you. Watching you. Making you suffer.”

  “You can now.”

  He lifted his head. His face was open for a moment, full of warmth as well as passion, the upward curl of his lips unexpectedly tender. And then he put a hand across my mouth and, before I even quite realized what was going to happen, gave my nipple chain a savage twist.

  The pain was shocking—a bolt of silver-white lightning—all the more intense for my powerlessness. I couldn’t really move. Couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t control it. Couldn’t do anything except feel it.

  Which I did—my frantic scream muffled by his palm.

  We were both panting when he let me go. And I…I started to laugh. Adrenaline, I guess. And the dizzying rush of fading hurt which was in that moment as sweet as pleasure. Perhaps sweeter.

  “Arden?” Caspian’s question was as gentle as his touch was ruthless.

  I grinned at him, feeling rather feral myself. “Again.”

  He didn’t, though. Not at first. Just toyed with me, tugging this way and that, turning me into a whimpering mess, want and fear feeding each other until I couldn’t tell them apart anymore.

  “Ohgodohgodohgodohg—”

  One hand caught the rest of my wail, as he wrenched on the chain with the other. And, somehow, the pain was worse—sharper and harder and nastier—for my being familiar with it. Or maybe because it came from him, not my own trembling fingers, taking me deeper than I’d have ever dared take myself.

  Maybe that should have been terrifying. And…well…yeah, in some ways it was. But mainly it was…freeing. Being able to sob into his skin whi
le he hurt me. The twin flood of agony and arousal making me feel strong and weak and overwhelmed all at once.

  And so close to Caspian I could almost taste his heartbeat.

  This time, it took me a handful of seconds to realize he was done. All the borders between sensations had dissolved, and I was flying on wings of pleasure and pain.

  He pressed himself against me, putting his lips to the edge of my jaw before tracing a tear track all the way to the corner of my eye. The fabric of his tuxedo was exquisitely harsh across my tormented nipples, his tongue like warm velvet against my cheek. I shuddered on the contrast and on the strange intimacy of him tasting the tears he’d caused.

  “Arden,” he whispered. “My Arden.”

  Words were so not happening with me but I moaned and nodded and conveyed my enthusiasm for the general sentiment of being his.

  “You’re so beautiful.”

  A slightly ridiculous comment coming from Caspian Hart. Especially when I was half undressed, and soggy all over from crying and sweating and leaking precome like a busted, uh, leaking thing. But he said it with such conviction that I believed it was true. Right then, anyway. For him.

  He kissed my damp eyes. And, so softly I was half convinced I’d started hallucinating, murmured, “Everything I’d have dreamed, if I’d let myself.”

  And while I was still reeling from that, he dropped to his knees. I probably couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d turned into a chicken. He yanked my trousers open so hard that I heard the button go pinging off somewhere and then he peeled my pants down my hips, freeing my painfully eager cock to the night.

  So there I was: tied to a pillar with my nipples still stinging and my dick hanging out. And yet I felt…totally okay. This moment of calm at the heart of a storm.

  Caspian glanced up at me. And I thought I caught the glitter of moisture on his lashes too. “You shouldn’t be with someone like me.”

  Okay. Not…not the most encouraging thing I’d ever heard. “This,” I croaked, “would be a super terrible time to dump me.”

  “I couldn’t. I’m too selfish.” He pressed his cheek to my thigh and I twisted in my bonds, wishing I could touch him. Reassure. “But I hate how much I want to hurt you.”