Page 46 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

He sounded slightly distant. I guess he was worried I was going to freak out. And I could sort of see why, since a room like this suggested a commitment to BDSM that went way beyond a little bit of spanking and begging. Maybe I should have been scared, or at least a little bit apprehensive, but I wasn’t. I just wasn’t. I trusted Caspian. And I wanted to explore this with him. As much for my sake as for his.

“You know, you didn’t have to hide your naughty sex room from me,” I said.

“I wasn’t hiding it. I told you, I don’t come here anymore.” He wasn’t lying about that. The air smelled stale, and nearly every flat surface had accumulated a faint patina of dust. “I keep meaning to have it dismantled, but it seems unduly mortifying to hire someone for the task.”

“You must have hired someone to build it,” I pointed out.

“I…actually, that wasn’t me.”

Nathaniel? Except that seemed incredibly unlikely, given what Caspian had told me of their relationship. “So you tripped, fell, and landed on your very own home dungeon?”

“It was a gift. From…a mentor of sorts.”

We were getting off track. I went further into the room, running my fingers through the tails of a row of floggers, before perching on the edge of…well…I wasn’t sure what it was. Like, if a chair and a chaise and saddle had a threesome and covered the resulting offspring in dark purple velvet. One of those. Though it was only when I was sitting on it that I discovered it also had stirrups. And reins. Oh my.

“But”—I gave Caspian my best come bonk me on your outrageous furniture look—“we can still play, can’t we?”

He didn’t seem at all enticed, despite my blandishments. “No.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to bring you here in the first place.”

“You brought Nathaniel.”

Caspian made a convulsive gesture, his fingers opening and closing impatiently. “This isn’t about him.”

“How can it not be?” I cried. “When he got everything and I get compromises. When you can’t even spend a full night with me? How long did you make him wait before you let him stay with you? Or before you let him touch you?”

“It was different, Arden. I was different.” He gazed at me, almost pleadingly. “I’m trying to learn from my mistakes with him, so I can be better with you.”

“So…you won’t let me have fun in your sex dungeon as a mark of special favor?”

He glanced round sharply, almost as if he didn’t quite recognize where he was. Then said, in a strange, rough voice, “Can’t you understand? I don’t like being here.”

“Because it reminds you of Nathaniel?”

“Yes, but not in the way you think.” He took a step across the threshold, but almost immediately retreated, fine tremors running through his body. “All you see right now is a tawdry fantasy. What I see is the room where I hurt someone I loved.”

He’d said something like this to me in Kinlochbervie. At the time I’d been a bit too preoccupied with everything going on between us to get caught up in specifics about someone else. But I was finally starting to get it: if I wanted to understand Caspian, I would also have to understand Nathaniel.

“What did you do?” I asked. “Push him too far? Ignore his safeword?”

“It was always too far. Every single time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh Arden.” Caspian put a shaky hand briefly to his eyes. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he might have been blinking back tears. “I was twenty-three when I met Nathaniel. The attraction between us was instant, and powerful. He was a light, when I thought only darkness existed. I’d never dreamed someone like him, so good and so unswerving in that goodness, could love someone as sullied as me.”

This was everything I’d been asking for. Truth. Openness. And it was fucking awful. Not so much the idea that Caspian had once been in love with Nathaniel. I knew that already. But the reality of it? Right in my face? Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. “Sounds great.”

“I was very…lost back then. Very twisted by the choices I’d made. I believed that love and pain were inextricable.” He swept an arm out to encompass the room. “Nathaniel didn’t want any of this. But he suffered it for me.”

“Wow,” I drawled out, in a voice I didn’t quite recognize, “must’ve been hot.”

He glanced over at me, visibly startled. “What the— Why would you say that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t like hearing about how amazing and wonderful your ex is.”