Page 53 of How to Bang a Billionaire

Then he went all quiet on me. There was water on the table, in one of those classy-looking misted bottles, and he leaned forward to pour me a glass. “You should keep drinking. And maybe try to eat something.”

“Right.” I didn’t want to be snapped at again and it was good advice. Only semi-mutinously, I took a sip of water. Wishing he would get on with it. Whatever it was.

But, for some reason, he still wasn’t saying anything. He was just sitting there, watching me, as unreadable and unreachable as ever.

Except, there was a tightness to his jaw, to his carefully positioned hands. And I wasn’t sure, but his foot was…not quite moving, but twitching as if he was trying very hard to keep it still. It was my first true glimpse of the restless boy he’d told me he used to be.

It softened me toward him.

Even if I was still confused and hurt and embarrassed and epically hungover.

“Arden,” he began.

“Still here. Sitting as ordered.”

“Arden, I want to fuck you.”

He wanted to…Gosh. Well. I hadn’t been expecting that.

Especially not when I felt—and probably looked—like I’d been shat out by a gastrically distressed camel.

But it was Caspian Hart. Offering me something I could barely even begin to imagine. Would he fuck me like he kissed me? As though I were his world to be conquered? Come undone as he had with his cock down my throat? Passion-flayed, whispering my name like it was the only word he could remember.

“Um, sure, okay.” I stood and undid the cord of the dressing grown. “Let’s go.”

He recoiled a little. “Not now. Not like this.”

“Oh.” I grinned hopefully at him. “Are you going to take me to dinner first?”

“Please sit down. And be serious. This is a negotiation.”

I hadn’t been aware of being unserious but I sat down again, not sure I was entirely happy with where this might be going. “Sleeping with me is a negotiation?”

“Well.” He crossed one leg over the other, his whole body taut now, a bow bereft of an arrow. “You said yourself there is a spectrum between casual sex and a relationship. I require neither, but I do wish to have sex with you on a short-term, prearranged basis.”

Was I dreaming? Or still drunk? He wanted me? He really wanted me? Wait. He wanted me on a…short-term, prearranged basis? “Wow, you could turn a boy’s head with dirty talk like that.”

He gave me a look that probably made him the terror of boardrooms from here to New York: banked ferocity and merciless conviction. But it was so…so practiced, I wondered if he was nervous.

Nervous?

No. Caspian Hart would never be nervous.

“You have expressed quite plainly your desire to sleep with me on no less than three occasions. And on at least one of them you were sober. There’s very little purpose in dissembling now.”

He was right. But also wrong. It wasn’t that I was unconvincingly attempting to play hard to get. It was just difficult to get all that excited about negotiation. “I’m sorry, I’m not dissembling. I’m just, you know, swept off my feet here by the passion of your invitation.”

“I would not be suggesting it if I did not want this very much.” He sounded faintly irritated. As though admitting he wanted me was some kind of concession he’d been obliged to make. And his foot did this jerky little tap that he stopped almost at once.

I tilted my head, instinctively quizzical at all the contradictions here, and then wished I hadn’t because it made my dehydrated brain flop around painfully. Was this why he’d come to Oxford? To arrange to have sex with me? Or to actually have sex with me, only to discover I was pissed off my head and about to go down on another bloke? “But you said no before. What changed?”

“Nothing changed. That is”—he hesitated a moment—“what changed was my understanding.”

“Um, I’m going to need more than that.”

His fingers twisted. Knotted. Turned white at the knuckles. “I’ve always wanted you. I just overestimated my capacity to resist it…resist you.”

“And me throwing up all over myself totally sealed the deal? Because I’m pretty sure some people would have been put off.”