Page 92 of How to Bang a Billionaire

In a gutted derelict hospital.

Ellery turned to me and smiled, the light breaking across her face in neon rainbows.

I leaned in and yelled, “Can’t you just go clubbing like a normal person?”

“I prefer this.”

She closed her eyes and lifted her arms, the music slipping over her like silk, her body softening, shaping itself to the rhythms. She looked relaxed—happy even—in a way I would never have expected.

The crowd broke open and swallowed her whole.

I stumbled after her, panicking. If I lost her here, I’d never find her again. And I had no money, no phone, and only the barest idea of where I was.

Everything was heat, dark, light, noise.

Overwhelming.

“Here.” Ellery pressed something into my hand.

Thankfully I was sufficiently sweaty that I didn’t immediately drop it in surprise. Or fumble as I attempted to see what it was.

I shouldn’t have needed to look: it was a small, chalky pill.

Probably not a good idea.

But there was something about the insistent tug of the music that made me want to dance…really dance. Be consumed by dancing. Claimed by it. Lose myself in the shadowy figures that surrounded us. Find a sense of connection that had nothing to do with words or touch or any of the usual, civilized mechanisms for human interaction.

I just wanted to be part of something.

And, for a little while, purely physical.

In my body, not my head.

So I did it. I took the pill. Popped it, technically.

Waited.

“Um. I don’t feel any different.”

Ellery just laughed, pushed a bottle of water into my hand—where the fuck had she got it from?—and kept dancing.

Maybe I was a new breed of super-evolved, drug-resistant human.

Maybe one of the people around us would turn out to be an undercover agent and he’d kidnap me and take me to some secret facility where they’d want to perform all kinds of horrible tests on me.

And maybe Caspian would—

No. No.

Dancing. Not thinking.

And definitely no daydreaming about Caspian.

Who would not be carrying me out of an MI6 research laboratory as it exploded.

Anyway, I didn’t really need drugs to dance. Three years of gay-attracting club nights in Oxford had seen to that.

It wasn’t quite what was I used to—a distinct lack of Kylie among other things—but I tried to feel out the music. Let my body respond and my heart be free.