Page 87 of How to Belong with a Billionaire

“Whatwe’vedone. It takes two to cheat.”

He was buttoning his trousers. Readjusting his jacket. Smoothing the sweat-damp curls from his temples. Whether we were in a bedroom or an alleyway, the sight of Caspian Hart putting himself back together was so familiar to me. And hurt, just the same as ever. “You can’t blame yourself for this.”

“I deserve to be blamed,” I cried. “I was right here. Doing it. Wanting it. Fully consenting to it.”

“Nevertheless, it was my weakness that allowed it to happen.”

“Webothallowed it to happen.” Okay, I had to cool the fuck down. I’d done enough shouting at Caspian in a fire escape to last me a lifetime. I breathed. Tried to be reasonable. “Look, this was really wrong. There’s no getting away from that. But why we did it wasn’t wrong.”

He was still…faffing. Squaring his cuffs. Arranging his hair. Chasing nonexistent creases. “What do you mean?”

“For fuck’s sake.” So much for calm. “That didn’t happen because we both fancied a rough screw against a wall. It happened because…because we can’t keep our hands off each other. Because we’re right together. You must see that now.”

He let out the softest, most defeated sigh I’d ever heard. “I’ve never doubted for a moment that, were I a different man, you would be everything I most desired, admired, and coveted in the world.”

“I don’t want you to be a different man.” I lunged across the space he’d put between us and threw my arms around him. Which made him go completely rigid so, y’know, nonideal. “I love you. Everything about you. And all the things you can’t love about yourself.”

He closed his eyes, and I caught a glint of light upon his lashes that might have been tears. “Oh, Arden, my Arden, I can’t be with you.”

“You can’t be with Nathaniel.”

“He’s…he’s my only chance.”

“Only chance at what? You know he won’t make you happy.”

“My only chance to”—Caspian faltered, choked slightly on his own breath—“my only chance to be someone not made in the image of Lancaster Steyne.”

I stared at him in actual horror. “My God, you’re not. I promise you’re not.”

“How sweet you are.” Compliments shouldn’t have been allowed to sound that fucking sad. “I’d half forgotten how it feels having someone think of me as you do.”

“The way I think of you istrue. It’s who you are.”

Caspian was already untangling himself from my embrace, though my pathetic attempts to retain a state of tangle meant he ended up keeping one of my hands. And he seemed as reluctant to let it go as I was to be let go. “I’m not like you,” he said softly. “Perhaps once I was, or could have been, but what’s pure and good and beautiful in you is such a twisted thing in me.”

“Nothing”—I tightened my fingers around his and squeezed for all I was worth—“we have ever done together has been even a little bit twisted.”

“Because of you.”

“No, Caspian. No. Because when you’ve fucked me, used me, and even when you’ve hur—”

“Must you say it?”

Apparently yes, I did. Despite the pleading note in his voice. “Even when you’ve hurt me, you’ve always made me feel so absolutely cherished. Do you think that would be the case if there was anything of Lancaster Steyne in you?”

“Your capacity to find merit in my corruption is to your credit, not to mine.”

“So what?” I asked, with a bitterness I couldn’t quite control. “You’re just going to stay with Nathaniel even though he makes you hate yourself?”

Caspian swallowed. “He…he sees me.”

“He doesn’t see you.” I closed my spare hand over the one Caspian already held. He was so cold, trembling in my grasp. “He only sees damage and ugliness and his own prejudices.”

“I want to be with him. I want to be the man he needs. Or at the very least”—his mouth tightened, as if to seal away its sorrow—“I want to know that I can be. That I’m not at the mercy of…of what I let happen to me when I was younger.”

I was about to insist that he hadn’tletanything happen. But the last time we’d had this conversation—etched as it was, in layers of horrible, on my memory—he’d described everything that happened when he was a kid as something hedid. As progress went, it was trench warfare slow, but itwasprogress. And if that meant that some part of him was listening to me—wanted to listen to me—why the fuck was he still with someone else?

“So instead,” I snapped when I shouldn’t have, “you’ll be at the mercy of Nathaniel’s bullshit?”