by Alexis Hall
The post-telethon dinner was black tie and I didn’t have the right kit, so I’d borrowed Nik’s. Not completely grasping the impact of Nik being six foot four and an athlete. When I was pretty much the opposite of that. “What if I rolled the sleeves up?”
“Don’t you fucking dare. That’s my best tux.”
As I walked across the room, the trousers slipped ominously down my hips. I tightened the rainbow canvas belt I’d hidden under the cummerbund and managed to stave off disaster.
Nik winced. “Do you really want to meet important alumni looking like that?”
“It’s not that bad.” My hair was having a small rebellion of its own. I’d quiffed six ways to Sunday but the whole thing had fallen sideways like a drunk on Saturday night. But fuck it. Caspian Hart wasn’t coming anyway. Not because of a single conversation.
He’d probably forgotten about me the moment he’d put the phone down. And I wasn’t going to be…sad or disappointed or messed up about it. Nope. Not even a little bit. The amount of time I’d spent Googling him probably counted as immersion therapy anyway.
He wasn’t all that. Okay, he was fairly—well, very—good-looking, but he wasn’t…photogenic really. He never smiled. Always the same flat stare, as though he regarded the camera as an enemy, his body caught at a moment of artificial stillness: a tiger about to spring away through the long grass.
“I’m telling you,” Nik was saying, “it is that bad.”
I waved a hand, implying that he could—if he so chose—talk to it, and picked up the bow tie he’d laid out for me. Turning up the collar of Nik’s dress shirt and slipping the silk around my neck, I abruptly remembered I had no idea how to tie the thing. The last time I’d had to do this had been matriculation and it hadn’t gone well. Maybe because I’d still been drunk from the night before. Or maybe because bow ties were bullshit.
I messed with the ends, crossing them over each other and moving them about randomly, as if this would miraculously make a bow appear under my chin.
Nik sighed. “You don’t know how to do that, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Come here.”
I went there and Nik stood up, pushing my hands out of the way. And then, just like that, his confidence seemed to desert him. We’d always been fairly snuggly, but this was different somehow: my eyes turned up to Nik’s, him frowning down at me, a piece of black fabric twisted between his fingers, so close to my throat that it felt like a promise or a threat. “Shit,” he muttered, “it’s hard to do it backwards.”
There were about sixty-four million jokes I could have made. Instead I closed my eyes. Tilted my chin to make it easier for him. “I trust you.”
He fiddled, the touch almost aggressively impersonal. “Left end lower than right, bring it over, make a loop, up and through…fuck.” A knock on the door and Nik jerked away from me, the ungainly knot he had created unraveling instantly. “Um, yeah?” he called out.
Weird Owen stuck his head in, gingerish curls flopping haphazardly. “Message from the Lodge. You’ve got a visitor.”
Nik looked startled. “Me?”
“Nuh-uh”—he pointed at me—“that one.”
It couldn’t be…could it? “Who?” I asked, like a disingenuous fuckwit.
“Hard somebody? No. Hart. He’s waiting for you.”
“Oh my God.”
Reality hit me. A cartoon anvil dropped from a balcony. Dong. Little tweety birds flying round my head. Caspian Hart. Not just a name on a list, a picture on a screen, a voice on the phone. He was here. He had come. To see me. And he was waiting.
Oh fuck.
Oh shit.
Oh fuck shit fuck.
I’d thought “suddenly nerveless fingers” was something that only happened to people in novels but one minute I was holding a fallen-apart bow tie and the next it was on the floor. As I bent to pick it up, I realized my hands were sweating. What a totally fabulous impression I was going to make.
“I…uh…I guess I’d better be going.”
“Yeah, man.” The way Nik matched my casual tone ruthlessly revealed it as the lie it was. “Might be a good idea.”
Deep breath. “Right. Well. I’m going.”
I had to squoodge past Weird Owen, who had no sense of personal space and was right in the doorway.
“Hey, Arden?” Nik’s voice followed me into the corridor. I turned and he gave me a two-fingered salute. “Be careful.”
It was our cheesy…joke, routine, whatever. I couldn’t remember when we’d started but it was a thing. The more banal the activity (“I need to go to the loo”), the funnier it got. Right now, even though I wasn’t exactly going off to fight aliens or sacrifice my life in service to my country, it was hard not to take it a bit seriously.
Which made no sense because…I was going to meet a guy, we were going to have a polite conversation, he was maybe going to donate some money to St. Sebastian’s, and then I was never going to see or think of him again.
That should not have been a big deal.
Although if I kept him waiting much longer, I probably wouldn’t meet him at anyway. The man who didn’t have time to read letters was unlikely to have time t for disorganized undergraduates. He’d cast an irritated glance at the empty quad and then get back in his chauffeur-driven who-knew-what or his private jet (okay, there probably wasn’t room for a private jet in the middle of Oxford) and that would be that. St. Sebastian’s would probably slip right to the bottom of the Norrington Table, fall into financial ruin, and eventually be overrun by zombies. All because I couldn’t get my act together.
I whooshed to the staircase, holding up my trousers as best I could and still clinging to that damn bow tie, telling myself there’d be time to fix it later.
Down to the first floor, ground floor, out.
It was a typical late spring evening, powder-puff pink and gold, and I sprinted over the flagstones, heading toward the front quad and the Lodge (and, ohgodohgodohgod, Caspian Hart).
My mouth was tangy with copper, as though I could taste my own too-fast beating heart.
The lawns of St. Sebastian’s, like pretty much everywhere else in Oxford, were sacrosanct, but I cut across the corner of one anyway because it was a legit emergency.
And that was when I saw him.
Initially with a faint sense of outrage because, instead of black tie, he was dressed in a midnight blue three-piece suit. And also because my immersion therapy hadn’t prepared me properly.
Fairly good-looking my arse.
Those Google images had lied. They had actively lied.
The man was beautiful.
So ridiculously fucking beautiful it was hard to get your head round it somehow. He looked like a film star. Not the modern sort—not one of your amiably shaggable Chris Pines or Charlie Hunnams—but a screen idol from a lost age, all perfect symmetry and effortless poise, the remote and overwhelming splendor of a temple to cold and ancient gods.
I hadn’t let myself waste a single thought on what would happen if he actually came to the dinner. Of how I might greet him or what I might say. But I was starting to wish I’d planned and practiced. I could have stepped up to him, just as self-assured, holding out my hand for him to shake like that was totally the sort of thing I did. Mr. Hart, I would have purred, a pleasure to meet you.
Unfortunately, I caught my shin on the KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign and fell over instead. Face-planting—after a few comedic but ultimately useless arm flails—right in front of his polished shoes. Oxfords, of course, not brogues.
Not the worst place I could ever have imagined being. But not just then.
He made a startled noise and then eased himself to his haunches, giving me an up-close-and-personal view of just how top class his tailoring was. It was all I could do not to follow those crisp creases all the way up his thighs to his—
“Are you all right?” he asked.
What I wanted to say was no. I was seriously abso-fucking-lutely not all right. I’
d fallen over like the Andrex puppy. In front of a man I desperately, desperately wanted to…not fall over in front of. I lifted my head a little bit.
God, he was so elegant. This vision of exquisite masculinity carved by a bent Pygmalion. Everything about him flawless, from his graceful, long-fingered hands to that stern mouth, its unyielding curve touched by the faintest hint of sensuality. And those gray-blue wolf’s eyes, all ice and savagery, watching me.
“Arden?” His voice sounded different in person, somehow more. “Arden St. Ives?”
“Nope,” I mumbled. “Definitely not. He’s someone else. Someone really attractive and totally vertical.”
“Come on.”
Oh God. He was touching me. Helping me up. And, thankfully, while it wasn’t my most agile ascent, Nik’s trousers stayed in place. If they hadn’t, it would have been the clincher on whether I had to commit suicide pretty much immediately.
But now I didn’t know what to do. It had been easier on the phone when his beauty wasn’t burning my eyes like magnesium and my capacity to make a fool of myself was somewhat lessened by distance.
He held out a hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Arden.”
We shook and I was sure I was limp and sweaty and slightly grassy. “That’s not fair. I was planning to say that.”
“Likewise.”
“You what?”
“Likewise. I find it a useful word in such circumstances.”
“Oh right.” I smiled at him. I couldn’t help it. He was just so…so…He looked like he needed to be smiled at. “Likewise, Mr. Hart.”
I thought he might smile back but instead his eyes darkened, and then his attention flicked away from me. “Caspian is fine.”
“Okay.” I followed his gaze, but he didn’t seem to be looking anywhere in particular. Just away from me, which wasn’t exactly a good sign. “Um, thank you for coming. I didn’t think you would.”
“I wasn’t sure I would have time.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Yes.” Whatever had troubled him before had passed and he was perfectly composed as he met my eyes again. “Here I am.”
“Am I…I mean, is it what you were expecting?” Oh wow, classy, Arden. Not blatant at all.
But his mouth finally yielded up its smile. And, like his laugh, it was unexpectedly shy, as though he wasn’t used to doing it. It disordered the harmonies of his face, but I liked him better that way, a little bit messy, a little bit realer. God, the man was killing me. Actually killing me. “I’m not sorry I came.”
“How does it feel to be back?” I asked.
“I’m afraid I’m not given to sentiment.”
I peeped up at him from under my lashes. Yep, it was official: I was flirting. “What? No sudden rush of nostalgia for these dreaming spires?”
He shook his head.
“But Oxford’s beautiful, isn’t it? Like nowhere else.”
“Some might say,” he said, in the same quietly playful tone I’d heard him use on the phone, “it’s rather like Cambridge.”
I gasped. “You traitor.”
“That assumes loyalty in the first place.”
He had me there. “Um, I think I’m supposed to take you to this reception thing? It’s in Melmoth.”
“And you’re going like that?”
It wasn’t really an encouraging sentiment but the slide of his eyes down my body made me hot and cold and tingly. “Well, I was going to wear my bespoke Savile Row suit like you but then I remembered I don’t have one.”
If I’d been hoping to win another smile, I was disappointed because all I got in response was, “Turn around.”
It was a phrase that had come my way often enough and I was pretty fond of it. But the way he said it, oh God the way he said it, turned my insides to honey. Not bossy or rough but implacable.
A command.
If he did it in a voice like that—all steel and velvet and the promise of his approval—I would have done anything he told me.
No matter how slutty or degrading.
Actually.
Strike that.
Especially if it was slutty or degrading.
I turned around, trying to shut down the porno in my brain. We were in a public place, and I was fully dressed (in several layers of formal wear as it happened), but it felt vulnerable. Giving this man, this stranger, my back. My trust.
His arm came around me from behind. And the heat of it, the pressure. The tightening muscles of his forearm made me a bit delirious. I leaned back and his body was right there, all hard planes and angular curves for me to nestle into. I tilted my hips, wriggling my arse until I was tucked in against him, pinned and protected at the same time, at once safe and overwhelmed.
I tried to breathe and an excited little moan happened instead.
Caspian tugged me in tighter still. No humiliatingly inappropriate noises from him. But his heart was thudding hard and fast against my spine. He pulled the bow tie out of my hand and straightened my collar. A finger touched me lightly under the chin and I tipped my head back against his shoulder, exposing my throat. That was when I heard him growl. Softly enough I almost missed it, but there it was. This sound of deep, primitive pleasure that shivered all the way down my back and headed off in a few other directions as well.
As he leaned over me, his breath grazed the top of my ear and that insubstantial caress felt so ridiculously intimate it made my knees go weak. Like I was supposed to be on them. At his feet. His other arm came around me as he did whatever you have to do to make a bow tie happen. He didn’t fumble at it the way Nik had. His movements were swift and assured. And, just for a moment, I felt a brush of warmth across my pulse point, like a touch that wasn’t.
I only noticed he was done when he gave me a little push. Too busy swooning into his neck and shoving my bum into his crotch like the wanton hussy I was. I turned, stumbling a little, discovering too late I was basically jelly, and just about managed not to end up on the ground again.
“Um, thanks.” I lifted a hand instinctively, wanting to feel the shape of the knot, but then stopped. I’d only wreck it.
He just nodded, his eyes slipping away from me again. I wished he’d stop doing that. Was my face that boring? But his color was up, his breath a little unsteady. And, y’know, there’d been movement back there. When I’d been doing my thing. So maybe he was just…embarrassed?
“That’s some good tying,” I heard myself say. “Is it practice or natural talent?”
That got his attention. And, for a throat-clogging second, I thought I’d fucked everything up already. I could just see the headline in the Book of Making You Feel Bad About Yourself: Rampant Undergraduate Sexually Harasses Famous Alumnus. But Caspian’s mouth softened into that nearly-smile of his. “What if I told you it was a little of both?”
“Then I guess it’d be my lucky night.”
He cleared his throat. “Aren’t we supposed to be going to a reception?”
We. “Oh yeah. But, honestly, if you’d rather wile away the evening adjusting my clothing, I’m game.”
He reached out, fingers stroking lightly over my lapels as he tried to settle the tux less lopsidedly across my shoulders. “I know a lost cause when I see one.” He was right, but I must have looked hurt, because he went on with the same uncertain gentleness I remembered from our telephone conversation. “Did you shrink in the wash?”
“Hah! No. I’m naturally pocket-sized. These gladrags aren’t mine.”
“Who do they belong to? A gorilla?”
“My best friend. I don’t have a set of my own. Don’t like wearing the stuff.”
“Neither do I.”
I gazed up at him, so pristine and exquisite, this sleek, shining Lamborghini of a man. In other words: a ride way beyond my budget. “Yes, but you can get away with it.”
“It’s quite simple, Arden.” He stepped past me, gold-edged by the last of the light, the softer hair at his brow and temples gilded into tempting little curlicues.
“Don’t give people a choice. If you want to change, I’ll wait for you.”
(Or you could come up with me…) “But you just fixed my bow tie.” A swift tug from his fingers and there was that problem dealt with. “Ah.”
“Go.”
“But…what if everybody looks at me funny?”
“Why do you care?”
“Um, because I’m helplessly inculcated into the sartorial kyriarchy?”
He laughed and I smiled back, feeling indulged by his amusement, petted almost. But then he told me, “You have five minutes,” in That Voice. The one I wanted to hear telling me to do utterly filthy things, just so that I’d do them. I felt a drift of air, the suggestion of heat, at the small of my back, as though he’d been about to rest his hand there but had changed his mind.
“Seriously?” It came out a squeak. “You’ll really wait?”
“Yes. For five minutes.”
“Shit.”
I ran, ripping off the tuxedo as I went, like I was the Incredible Hulk or something. Apart from the hulky bit, anyway.
Weird Owen was still lodged in our doorway, talking about, oh, who knew what, as I pelted past. Nik made a crack about Clark Kent as my shirt fluttered over my head but I didn’t have time to stop.
I knew, in some distant way, this was ridiculous, but I couldn’t deny I was enjoying it. Feeling silly and eager and panicky all at the same time. And thudding along with my quickened heartbeat, the need to please.
I had no idea how long I’d taken, so I didn’t dare linger over my choices. I just shucked the rest of the formal wear, pulled on my skinniest skinny jeans (the ones that, it had been suggested, made my arse look like a ripe apricot) and my MANIC PIXIE DREAM BOY T-shirt. Then I grabbed my plum velvet jacket from the armchair and sprinted back to Caspian Hart.
Chapter 4
He was sitting on the bench beneath the lime tree, one leg crossed languidly over the other in the way that only really tall people seemed able to manage. He was diddling with an iDevice but he looked up as I skidded to a halt and smiled at me. Not his usual polite, half-smile, but a real one, all heat and unhindered pleasure.
I’d given him that.