How to Bang a Billionaire

by Alexis Hall

  “Oh…just…boyfriend trouble.”

  “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

  “Yeah”—I tried to force my mouth into the semblance of a grin—“that’s the trouble.”

  “Nice dodge.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Funny, but meaningless. Eight out of ten.”

  “What can I say? It’s a gift.”

  We walked along in silence. The horizon gleamed where the land became sea, the view as familiar to me as my own skin, worn in by day after day of living. I tried to imagine Caspian here, wind-ruffled, his eyes soaking up all the shades of the sky.

  Oh what the hell was wrong with me?

  This was the unfun masochism.

  And I should have guessed that Hazel wouldn’t let things go. “I thought you were settled in London.”

  “Well, I’m unsettled.”

  “Does that mean you’re back for a while? Or is this just a visit?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I might stay, if that’s okay?” I’d meant for that last part to sound considerate and mature, but instead it came out with a prickly sullenness that reminded me of Ellery. Shit. I was regressing to teenager.

  She sighed. “Well, it’s a bit inconvenient, Arden. I’ve already begun converting your bedroom into a sex pad. There’s a giant swing where your bed used to be.

  “Har har.”

  “Of course you can stay, dingbat. This is your home.”

  I took another run at a smile. “Thanks.”

  “Though I can’t really see you as a fisherman.”

  “Oh, but”—I wagged a finger—“he has made me a fisher of men.”

  She tsked. “You and your Father Brown.”

  I nodded, blinking away an unexpected rush of tears, suddenly desperately glad to be home, where affection and understanding were so very certain. For as long as I could remember, our household had been locked into this protracted war over our favorite fictional detectives. Hazel’s husband, Rabbie, was Switzerland, the neutral party just like always, Hazel was a massive Holmes buff, and Mum and me…we loved Father Brown.

  I could remember her reading to me when we still lived with Dad, her voice in the dark, whispering these stories of good and evil, hope and compassion. Holmes, with all his cold brilliance, just couldn’t live up.

  Hazel poked me in the arm, sending my thoughts scattering afresh. “Come on, Ardy. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Oh…oh, there was just this guy. I guess I liked him more than he liked me.” Argh. The words had just…happened somehow. So much for being stoic and noble and locking my pain away like a brave little mushroom.

  “Then clearly he’s a very stupid boy.”

  “He isn’t, though.” I sighed. “He’s amazing. Like nobody I’ve ever met before.”

  “What does he have? Two cocks?”

  I felt myself turning red. “Hazel!”

  “I just wanted to know what’s special about him.”

  “Everything. He’s totally out of my league, just ridiculously smart and successful and beautiful.”

  “Sounds like a bore.”

  “No, he’s…he’s…” God, how did you explain Caspian Hart? “It’s like there’s all that and so much more, you know? Or I thought there was.” My eyes were stinging again. “He kept showing me…I kept seeing these glimpses. Behind the perfection. Of this…ordinary man, who was kind and funny and sexy and lonely and needed me and—”

  And, shitshitshitfuckshit, I burst into tears.

  I heard the thud of my bags as they hit the ground and then I was in Hazel’s arms. And, for some reason, that just made me cry even more.

  “I’m getting snot on your shoulder,” I warned her in a damp, muffled sort of way.

  “I think I’ll cope.”

  Eventually I calmed down. Wiped my eyes and my nose.

  Let Hazel gather up my things and lead me off the path to the top of this little rise where we sat down.

  I took a deep breath. It was cold enough that the air felt almost sharp inside my lungs. Pure. Like I was the first person ever to breathe it.

  Hugging my knees, I let the horizon fill my eyes. The rock-stippled grass rolled away into sand dunes. And then came the golden sweep of Oldshoremore Beach and beyond it the impossibly blue sea, the turquoise waves turning silver-tipped, like something from a Caribbean dream. Except, y’know, way up in the north of Scotland where sun was something that happened to other people.

  Hazel nudged my shoulder. “Better?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I just feel like an idiot.”

  “Isn’t that what being twenty is all about?”

  “Being an idiot?”

  “No.” She grinned, looking all impish and twinkly. “I meant, falling for unsuitable people. Breaking hearts and having your heart broken. Living the stories that are worth telling.”

  It all sounded very nice in principle.

  Except.

  I sighed. “It wasn’t like that. It was messed up in this totally uncool way. I got caught up in this mirage of who I thought he was. And I kept stumbling after it, believing in it, like a complete dongle, and letting him hurt me over and over and over again.”

  I felt her turn tense at my side. “Hurt you how?”

  “Oh God, no,” I said hastily. “Not like that. He just made feel bad. I mean, sometimes he made me feel wonderful. And the rest of the time…completely worthless.” But, then, I would be to a man like that. Why had I ever believed otherwise? Why had he made me? And then burned me down.

  “He did what?” She didn’t sound very much mollified.

  Shit. The last thing I wanted was Hazel on a hate-tear. But how was I supposed to tell her what had happened, when I still didn’t fully understand it myself? Except for the rejection bit. That had come through loud and clear. “It was my own fault, really. I put myself in that position in the first place.”

  “Nobody puts themself in a position to be badly treated. That’s all on him.”

  “I don’t know.” I picked idly at the grass. “Maybe there’s something about me that made him do it.”

  Hazel gave me a sharp look. “What is this? National Daft Day?”

  “I just meant…like…after Mum—”

  “Arden! Stop right there, before I find a bucket of cold water and dump it over your head.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But no. How can you even think that?”

  I never had before, and I didn’t entirely know where it had come from now. Like pulling your sofa away from the wall and finding a squashed slug under there. “I’m tired,” I mumbled. “Fucked in the head.”

  She was quiet a long time. And then, “I met your father, Ardy. At the wedding.”

  My stomach did the wet-fish flip-flop it always did when he was mentioned: a physical manifestation of emotional nausea. I nearly asked her to stop, but I didn’t. I had so few perspectives on him. Just my own fear-distorted memories and the emptiness in Mum’s eyes.

  “He didn’t have horns or goat feet, you know,” Hazel was saying. “He was charming. Had a way about him that made you feel like the center of the universe when he was focused on you. And he seemed devoted to Iris, absolutely devoted. It was like something out of a fairy tale.”

  Yeah. If the fairy tale was Bluebeard. “But why Mum? Why did he choose her?”

  “Not because of something she did, or was, that’s for damn certain, you stupid boy.”

  I blinked back fresh tears. Hideously ashamed of myself. “You won’t tell her what I said, will you?”

  “Never.”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “I know you didn’t.” Her voice softened. “And I know it’s a hard thing to live with. The past is a dark place for you and your mum.”

  I nodded miserably. I really didn’t want to risk saying anything in case it turned out to be awful again. Some nasty secret embedded in the underbelly of my insecurity unearthed by Caspian Hart’s carelessness and my own naivety.

  Hazel l
eaned into my shoulder again, her hair tickling my cheek. “She would never have got away without you, love. You saved each other.”

  I watched the beach. The endless wash of the waves and the gleam of the sky on the wet sand. “Okay,” I said at last.

  “And the fact is, there’s a world of difference between a psychopath and a dickhead.”

  That surprised a laugh out of me. Infinitely easier to think of Caspian Hart, not as some unreachable angel or a demon who had sadistically toyed with my heart, but simply as a bit of a cock.

  “Come on.” Hazel clambered to her feet. “There’s crumpets at home.”

  Oh, that sounded perfect. Mum made her own and they weren’t like the ones you could get in the shops: fluffier and yeastier, served toasty-warm, with the butter melting deeply into the cracks. “Yes. Yesyesyes.”

  We gathered up my things and headed for Oran na Mara. Its crooked white chimney was just visible between the hills, a beckoning finger, calling us in from the cold.

  Chapter 26

  Welp, I was miserable.

  It was hard work, getting over Caspian Hart. But at least being at home gave me time and space to do it. Endless amounts of both. I slept a lot, read every Georgette Heyer in the house in mad, weepy binges, and wandered the hills and shore in a fashion that would surely have made my Byronic locks and long black coat billow in the wind.

  If I’d had Byronic locks and a long black coat.

  Hazel must have said something to Mum and Rabbie because they didn’t bug me. Just let me come and go as I pleased. Talk when I felt like it.

  The days moved very slowly.

  It must have been a week later, I was sitting in the garden, on this swing Rabbie had strung from our gnarly old oak tree. It was the best spot because you could see all the way down to the sea. And if you went high enough and fast enough, it felt like you could drown in the sky. I’d probably spent hours out here when I was growing up, chasing clouds and daydreaming. Waiting for my prince to come.

  Swinging was probably a pretty banal pleasure to most people, but I’d discovered it never got old, the rush of joy as I kicked off just as bright and clean as it had ever been. And thankfully it was a really good swing—well-made and sturdy, with a broad wooden seat suspended on well-tended chains—so there was absolutely no danger of pulling a What Katy Did.

  I was just getting into the…hah…swing of things, enjoying the ruffle of the wind through my hair and the whoosh of the descent when the back door opened.

  And there was Caspian Hart.

  Coming toward me down the overgrown garden path.

  I damn near fell off the swing. Managing, instead, to jerk myself to a bone-juddering halt, hands wrapped tight around the suspension chains.

  For a moment, I half believed I’d hallucinated him, but even my wildest fantasies couldn’t have done him justice. I’d never seen or thought to imagine him out of a suit before, yet here he was, slightly wind-tousled, in dark wash jeans, a cashmere V-neck, and a charcoal gray peacoat, its collar turned up to stylishly frame his infuriating gorgeousness.

  Power dressing set him like a diamond. Turned his loveliness into this dazzling thing: hard and cold and beautiful and beyond you. This was better. It didn’t precisely soften him—nothing could—but there was something undeniably sensuous in the way the fabric clung to him. Oh those long, lean thighs of his. The gentle slope of his pectorals. The suggestive contours of his abdomen. I’d always known he had a body dreamed up by horny angels. But having it showcased for me made my palms ache to touch him, stroke him, warm and worship him.

  And the fucknuckle had treated me like shit.

  “What are you doing here?” I was a little bit proud that I sounded pissed off. Instead of incoherent with lust or just…confused.

  I couldn’t tell if it was the cold, but he was a little flushed. Just this edge of pink along his cheekbones to entice the sweep of a thumb. If the thumb wasn’t fucking furious that is. “I missed you.”

  Rage ripped me through me, so hard and fast I thought it was going to burst out of my chest like something from the Alien movies. Next thing I knew I was off the swing, right in his face and yelling at him. “You mean you missed having an available body at your beck and call.”

  I think he’d got used to me being hopeful and conciliatory and therefore wasn’t expecting me to suddenly acquire a spine and start beating him about the head with it. His eyes widened. And, the worst of it was, some part of me couldn’t help appreciating how very bright they were just then. As if all their blues were finally free. He opened his mouth, presumably to respond, but I was in such a state that I actually plowed straight on before he got the chance.

  “I tried to give you what you needed. To understand who you were. And heaven forfend I be logistically inconvenient.” I had to pause a moment to breathe. Stop my voice shaking with the weight of everything I was finally saying. “But all the time…all the time I was thinking about you and desperate for you and begging for scraps of you…there was someone else.”

  I felt hot and undignified and undone. But Caspian didn’t react. Just stood there, calm and cool, a perfect English gentleman before the firing squad of my feels. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said at last.

  “I saw you.” I blinked rapidly. There would be no crying. None. “In Milieu. You were at a-a hospital thing. A fund-raiser. With another man.”

  His face didn’t change.

  “Tall? Blond? Looked good on your arm and in tuxedo?” Unlike me.

  At last. A flash of recognition. “Oh, you mean Nathaniel. We broke up a long time ago.”

  “But apparently you still swan off to benefit events with him.”

  “On the contrary, he simply happened to be there.”

  Okay…maybe I’d jumped to a conclusion or two, and Nathaniel wasn’t a major part of Caspian’s life anymore. But, in some ways, that only made it worse.

  “Then why didn’t you come?” I cried. “I bought you sushi for God’s sake. I mean, well, I guess technically you bought the sushi for yourself since I sure as hell couldn’t afford it. But I acquired the sushi. And I waited and waited. And you didn’t come.”

  Instead of answering me like a normal person, he stepped back and turned away. Stood for a while staring out toward the sea.

  While I fumed helplessly.

  And then, so softly I barely heard him. “You ask too much of me, Arden.”

  If this had been a movie, I’d have come at him, flying, flailing, trying to strike him and scratch him and make him hurt. Except obviously I couldn’t do that in real life because it would be, well, it’d be abuse.

  Instead, I just kept shouting. Words flying about like wasps.

  “Oh my God, I ask fuck all of you. I do exactly what you say exactly when you want. And I know so little about your life outside the bits of it you spend with your dick in my arse that I wasn’t even sure if you were dating some other guy.”

  He flinched and I was glad for that too. He deserved to flinch. He deserved to flinch lots. Motherfucker.

  “You just had to come to dinner. Or not. You could have said no. That’s what I don’t get. Why build my hopes up if you knew you were going to smoosh them? Was it a game to you? Or did it turn you on? Making me wait for you and ache for you and rip my heart to shreds for you?”

  That was as far as I got.

  He was on me with all the ferocity of a storm breaking, a hand covering my mouth, his arm curving round me pulling me tight against him. And, fuck me for a blazing idiot, my body wanted to be there. Powerless against his strength. Silenced by his touch.

  I tried to bite him. But he must have had lots of experience in gagging and restraining people because my teeth just glanced off his palm. I think if he’d fought me, I’d have struggled. Except he just held me. An embrace with the threat of violence. Or an assault with the threat of tenderness. I couldn’t tell anymore.

  I was breathing heavily behind his hand. My eyes were heavy with treacly
tears I desperately wanted to shed and desperately wanted not to. I hoped I was glaring at him. But mainly, in that moment, what I felt was…relieved. Safely contained. Released from the burden of expressing my fury, my pain and confusion.

  He leaned in—God, he was so tall sometimes, always having to accommodate me, to align himself with me—his lips sweeping the arch of my cheek, all the way to my ear. “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you like this. But you need to stop pretending too.”

  His fingers loosened just enough for me to be able to mumble, “Pretending what?”

  “It’s never just dinner. It’s never just sex. You always want more.”

  “I just want you.”

  He gave a strange, sad laugh. “You say that so easily. As if it’s so small a thing.”

  “What do you mean?” My anger was already fading, exposing instead the complex strata of longing and sadness that lay beneath it. “I don’t understand.”

  I was sufficiently overwhelmed that even when he moved his hand I didn’t pull away. Just stood there quietly, while he kissed my cheeks, my eyes, the tip of my nose. “I know you don’t, but I think we could have something good together. If you could just accept its—my—limitations.”

  “We already tried it your way, and you made me feel like shit.”

  “It wasn’t exactly straightforward for me, either. Being constantly aware of letting you down.”

  I stared at him, shocked and a little bit horrified. He always seemed so controlled and unreachable that I hadn’t really imagined the possibility of, well, affecting him at all. “You won’t let me down, as long as you try.”

  “You have no idea what you’re asking.”

  And here we were: going round this mulberry bush again. “Stop treating me like I don’t understand my own desires. Or like I can’t handle yours.” I dragged myself out of his arms with a frustrated noise. “And why are we talking about this? What are you even doing here?”

  “I would have thought that was obvious. Come back to London with me.”

  Honestly, if he’d told me I’d won a scholarship to a school for boy wizards, I would have been less astonished. For a moment or two my brain just wouldn’t work. Blanked out by absurdity. “What? No. Not in a million, gazillion, tatrillion years.”