Page 105 of How to Bang a Billionaire

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.”

There was a long silence.

“Do you hate me so much?” he asked. And, God, for a moment the pale fractals in his eyes looked like broken glass.

“Of course I don’t. I would never have agreed in the first place if I hated you.”

“Then perhaps we should reconsider our arrangement rather than simply dissolving it.”

“Oh, Caspian, the whole thing is fucked up. Can’t you see that?”

He’d gone horribly pale. “I had no idea you were that unhappy.”

“I wasn’t. I mean, not all the time. I mean, it was complicated.” I sighed. It was like being trapped in one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books, but every path led to hurt. “It’s not that I wasn’t grateful for all the lovely things you gave me, and all the ways you tried to take care of me, but I was always the supplicant, y’know?”

“I didn’t ask that of you.”

A great wave of an achy interior tiredness rolled over me. I wanted to be in his arms again. And I wanted him to go away and never come back. All at the same time. “I know, but it was inevitable. I lived in your apartment and I kept your schedule and everything happened on your terms.”

“You’re right,” he said at last. “I can see how such an inherent power imbalance could have made you uncomfortable. What if I gave you the apartment?”

“You…you can’t just give me an apartment.”

“Why not? It would mean you were no longer dependent on me.”

“Right, because owning somewhere I could literally never afford wouldn’t make me feel weirdly obligated at all.”

“You wouldn’t have to. I bought it as an investment property. I would simply see it as investment in you.”

I was…oh my God, fuck knows. Pretty sure my brain was about to start melting out of my ears. I stumbled away from him and collapsed onto the swing. “I don’t want it. I’m not even sure I like it.”