Page 1 of How to Bang a Billionaire

Prologue

The crop strikes me with a snap like breaking ice. The pain that follows is sharp and cold, but I don’t cry out. I know I will, eventually, that I’ll sob, gasp, scream perhaps, but I make him break me every time. He needs to see what he does to me. He needs to see what it costs to love him.

At last it’s over.

I can feel him behind me, his heat and his hoarse breath. He’ll be tender now as he takes me, though it’s not my pleasure that brings the flush to his skin and the fire to his eyes. It’s my pain.

This is the ugly truth of what he needs: someone to suffer for him.

He rolls me over. The sheets are rough against my burning skin. Another hurt I will bear and forgive.

I hear the soft slap of the crop as it falls. He looks desolate and savage, the sweat on him as bright as tears.

“I can’t,” he whispers. “I can’t do this anymore.”

He’s said this before. But it always brings us back to this room. And to this. Me on my knees. Or in chains. The marks of his shame and torment on my back.

I go to him and draw him into my arms. He resists for only a moment, then surrenders, pressing his damp face against my neck. I hold him as he shudders and weeps and shatters.

“Nathaniel.” He lifts his head. His eyes are as cold as the moon. As empty. “I mean it. I can’t keep hurting you.”

“Then don’t.”

“It’s not that simple. This is what I need.”

“No.” I press my hand over his frantically beating heart. “I believe you’re better than this. Stronger than this. You don’t have to be what he made you.”

“I am what he made me. I don’t deserve you. And I can’t make you happy.”

“But I love you.”

“You shouldn’t.” His voice breaks. “Nobody should.”

He leaves me in that terrible room, the room where I first understood what he would do to me and what had been done to him. Though he turns away now, though he denies me and rejects me and flees from me, I know he’ll come back to me.

I am not the only man who has touched him but I’m the only one who truly knows him. The only one who loves him. The only one who ever could.

He’s mine. My beloved. My monster. My broken prince.

He’ll come back to me. And I will save him from himself.

Chapter 1

Hello! I’m Arden St. Ives, calling from St. Sebastian’s Colle—”

Click.

“Hello! I’m Arden St. Ives, calling from St. Sebastian’s Colle—”

Click.

“Hello! I’m Arden St. Ives, calling from St. Sebastian’s Colle—”

Click.

Oh dear. It was going to be a really, really long night.

I was supposed to be doing this college fund-raiser thing where undergraduates called up wealthy alumni and connected deeply with them in a way that got them all nostalgic and wallet-opening or bank-transferring. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly an ideal candidate for the role. Given that I got all squirmy borrowing 60 pence for a can of Coke Zero from the vending machine, I had no fucking clue how I was going to work “and how would you feel about endowing a Chair of Philosophy in perpetuity” into a casual conversation with a complete stranger.