Page 34 of How to Bang a Billionaire

“I was trying—”

“To say sorry, I know.”

“And thank you.”

There was a longish silence while I wondered what to make of that. In the end I laughed. “Next time just send flowers.”

He smiled, and it was real for a moment or two, gentling his eyes and his fierce symmetry. But all he said was, “I’ll arrange for a car to take you back to Oxford.”

“It’s fine. I bought a day return.”

Yet ten minutes later I was sitting in the back of a Maybach being whisked through the streets of London. It was like a very small hotel in there. Hell, it was more comfortable than my actual bed.

And I felt completely dazed. By loss and luxury, and the suddenness of both.

I’d been pretty firm on the whole not needing to be chauffeured sixty miles up the M40, but nobody had listened to me. Caspian hadn’t exactly been aggressive. More sort of implacable. Telling his lovely assistant—Bellerose, apparently—to have a car brought round and handing me into it (yes, he really did that) while I was still protesting I was perfectly capable of getting the bus like a normal person.

It was a ridiculously fucking nice way to travel though. I was sure, if I’d dared to peek, there’d have been a bottle of champagne in the cooler. But instead I just reclined the seat, closed my eyes, and drifted into a half-dream, remembering Caspian’s hands on me, his mouth, the consuming urgency of his kisses.

All in all, it could have gone worse.

Yes, I’d embarrassed myself in about six different, unique, and special ways, but he hadn’t had me arrested or thrown out of his building. Reported me to college as a dangerous lunatic.

He’d said he liked me.

For reasons that, now I thought about it, seemed hard to understand.

Maybe it had just been a really boring meeting and he was glad to have been interrupted by a crazy student.

Slipping out of the car a little over an hour later and—having no idea of the appropriate etiquette—awkwardly thanking the driver, I thought that would be the end of it.

But when I checked my pidge the next day, I found a scrap of paper telling me I had a parcel to pick up.

It was a bouquet. A simple hand-tie, in crisp, crinkly paper. Not, perhaps, what you’d expect from a billionaire.

Except he’d sent me tulips.

My own private rainbow, so riotously bright on an otherwise gray Tuesday before spring had properly found its feet.

Nobody had ever given me flowers before.

I didn’t even own a vase but Nik lent me a tankard and that did the job nicely.

I kept them until all their colors were gone. Until they looked like they were made of paper. Until they started to make my room unpleasantly swampy-smelling.

Until I had no choice but to let them go.

Along with the man who had sent them to me.

Chapter 10

Nik had been in the bar the night before his first exam. “If I don’t know it now,” he’d said, “I’ll never know it.” I tried to do the same but my nerve broke after one pint of Guinness, and I fled to my room.

I had some vague intention of cramming, but, God, where did I start? I picked up a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare and then put it down again, feeling jumpy and sick and unable to remember what happened in Timon of Athens.

Was it the one with the incest? Or the one with the financial mismanagement in Greece?

Fuckfuckfuckfuck.