Page 50 of How to Bang a Billionaire

Then—

Nothing.

Chapter 13

My first thought on waking up was that I wished I hadn’t. Unconsciousness had been suiting me just fine.

Holy God.

Everything hurt. Literally everything. My stomach, my head, my throat. Even my fingernails were throbbing. I tried to open my eyes but my eyelashes had been replaced with needles and the light sliced right into the squishy bits of my face.

I would have groaned but it was absolutely beyond me.

Rolling over, I nudged my head under the pillow, finding some small solace in the darkness there.

Which was when it hit me: this wasn’t my bed. This wasn’t my room.

I had no fucking clue where I was.

Ahhhhhh.

I spread my arms. Then my legs. Didn’t even get close to the edge. The covers felt crisp and light and smooth against my skin, the way only really expensive stuff does. Certainly not like my budget duvet and inevitably unwashed sheets.

Against my skin?

Oh fuck. Nakedness.

I was naked.

What had I done?

I eased the pillow off my head. Unlocked my eyes. Tried not to whimper as the light came at me again, brighter and harder this time.

Gradually, though, my vision cleared and I managed to focus on a glass of water standing on the posh table thing next to the bed. It looked like just about the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Clear and cool and perfectly pure.

I groped for it, motor functions also somewhat compromised, and took a swallow. It settled a little uncomfortably in my stomach, but it tasted amazing. It tasted of nothing. Of clean. In the filth that was my mouth.

And left me feeling at least 20 percent alive.

Then I heard the rustle of a page turning. I had another go at looking and the middle distance resolved itself into a hotel suite. Not a room. A suite. A really posh one if the chandeliers were anything to go by. French doors led from the bedroom bit, where the ruin of Arden St. Ives was to be found, to the living area, where Caspian Hart was sitting on a purple damask sofa, reading the Times.

Images from last night hit me like shrapnel: being carried in his arms through the foyer of the Randolph Hotel, the press of his body against mine as I blundered through the streets, the alley behind the club, the boy I’d pulled—

God.

All disordered fragments.

And too many gaps.

“So you’re awake.” Caspian didn’t glance up from the paper. He seemed slightly more rumpled than usual without his tie and jacket, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to show his forearms, all sinewy loveliness, flecked by dark hair. But even a little bit undone he was unassailable. Exquisite. A study in absolute assurance.

“Um.” It came out as a croak. “Yeah.”

The nakedness thing was rapidly becoming a big deal. Parts of my body I’d never previously considered—my elbows and knees and flanks—were getting prickly and self-conscious. “Look, uh, why are you…I mean…why am I…did we…”

He put down the paper. Turned the impossible blueness of his eyes on me. All ice this morning. “Arden, are you seriously asking if I fucked an inebriated child immediately after extricating him from a situation that would very likely have devolved into rape?”

Well at least he hadn’t been put off by the vomiting.