Page 15 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

He sighed—though I told myself there was more affection in it than exasperation—and walked out.

That threw me a little. Maybe I’d already got too used to the petting and the smiling and the oh my Arden and your magnificent heart type sweet talk. But I guess he had…calls to make? Or maybe watching me de-ejaculate his plane was so unsexy he’d felt obliged to remove himself from my vicinity.

Thankfully, he came back a moment or two later and crouched down beside me. He’d brought a bottle of Vanish.

“Uh, what are you doing?” I asked, as he plucked the cloth out of my hand.

He sprayed and mopped and very soon all trace of my…of me was gone. Leaving the plush carpet as uniformly ecru as it had been before I spoodged all over it. He glanced up and gave me one of his apparently-becoming-somewhat-less-rare smiles. “If there is to be a universe in which the job of cleaning up your come exists, it might as well be mine.”

I laughed and leaned in, hoping for a kiss. “Y’know, you can be weirdly romantic sometimes.”

He stiffened (in the whole body, rather than exciting, way) and pulled back, flushing. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Caspian, it wasn’t an insult.”

“No, I know. But”—he got to his feet, which put an end to our tender moment over a come stain—“I can’t let you pretend that I’m—”

“Oh what? Pretend that you’re kind and funny and sweet? That you look like a god and fuck like the devil?” I rolled onto the floor and lay there on my stomach in the fashion of a kid about to throw a tantrum. I wasn’t actually, but the urge to full-body face-palm was strong right then. “Can’t you for once just let me enjoy being with you? And trust me to handle the emotional fallout when it comes?”

He nodded, though he still looked slightly freaked out. “I’m sorry. You’re right. But you have the most peculiar sense of romance.”

I pushed onto my elbow and attempted a sultry look. “I’ll take what I can get, Mr. Hart.”

He gazed down at me, the curve of his lips softened by another burgeoning smile. “Come and sit with me, Arden. We’re about to descend.”

I decamped. I wanted to be in his lap again with his arms around me, touch-needy idiot that I was, but I knew it wasn’t fair to push him. I’d promised him that degree of control in Kinlochbervie and he hadn’t exactly been measly with his attention. So I squidged up next to him on the sofa instead, and put my hand down between us in what I hoped was an accessible and appealing way.

For a little while we sat quietly.

Then I noticed his hand had somehow ended up right next to mine. And, weirdly, that was okay. Better than okay. It was sort of lovely.

“You bought me Pocky,” I reminded him.

“Hardly an act from which myths are spun.”

“That doesn’t matter.” I turned to face him, tucking a knee under me. “It’s not the size of the gesture that counts, it’s…”

“What you do with it?”

I laughed. Not so much at the joke but at the fact it came from Caspian. He was so…entrancing like this. Shyly playful behind his most severe facade. “What’s romantic to me isn’t the rote stuff like flowers or chocolate or serenading someone on a balcony at midnight—”

“I will not be serenading you ever.”

“Of course not.” I grinned. “I’m sure you’d outsource it to a serenading company.”

“The best regarded and most exclusive serenading company in the world.”

He’d derailed me by being funny, dammit. I made one last attempt to make my point. “I feel, um, romanced when you do things that show that…you know me. As well as care for me.”

“That simple, hmm?”

“What about when you rang me the night before your finals?”

“I was desperate to hear your voice again.”

“But you knew I’d be scared. And you reached out to me. That was romantic. Just like when you came to Oxford. And to Kinlochbervie.”

His eyebrow lifted into its most sardonic arch. “You seem to find a lot of romance in my behaving selfishly.”