Page 57 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

Oh God. I was ugly and awful and he’d seen me.

“Sorry about that.” I make a valiant attempt to pull myself together. “I was just a bit…anyway. Do you want to get that sushi?”

“Stop talking about sushi.”

“Sorry.” Usually I liked Caspian’s commands, finding not harshness there, but the opposite. A kind of care-taking. Unfortunately I was in no state to be strong or understanding or react to anything except the surface of things. So it felt like a slap. Made me flinch.

He sighed. Crouched in front of me. Drowned me in the sweet familiar scents of his body and his cologne. “Look at me, Arden.”

I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.

He caught the edge of my jaw and forced me. I didn’t even have it in me right then to resent it—just blinked at him with swollen eyes. “The car will be here in ten minutes,” he said. “The jet will be ready in thirty. Bellerose will meet you at Heathrow.”

My brain was static. “W-wait. What?”

“I said you should be with your friend and I meant it.”

“But…I can’t…”

“You can. And you will. Now go and pack.”

For some reason, the simplicity of that—of going and packing—cut through the numbness of my body and the emptiness of my mind. I rose jerkily and stumbled toward the bedroom.

Then something made me stop. Look back at Caspian.

I don’t know how it happened. If he moved first or I did. But his arms opened for me and I rushed into them, and he held me. His embrace tight and warm and absolute, with nothing held back. It was overwhelming—overwhelming in a way I desperately needed—the purity of his affection. The ferocity of his solace.

I pressed myself against him, shuddering. And he let me stay.

His hand crept into my hair, soothing me. “It’s going to be all right, my Arden.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I will do everything in my power to make it so.”

My eyes burned, as if they wanted to shed more tears. “You can’t stop someone dying.”

“No, but I can give your friend the best possible chance. And I can make sure you’re by his side if the worst happens.”

There was a silence. Beneath my cheek, his heart pulsed, its rhythm unwavering within its cage of flesh and bone. It seemed impossible that something so powerfully vital could ever falter. Or stop altogether.

“I got snot on your pocket square,” I mumbled.

“Then I will have it dry cleaned.” He unpeeled me carefully. Stroked the moisture from my cheeks with his thumb. “Now you really do need to pack.”

I nodded, bent my head to swiftly kiss the inside of his wrist—felt his responsive shiver—and went.

My sense of time was blurry but I was pretty sure it didn’t take long to fling a handful of clothes into my trundly and zip it up. And then Caspian took me down to the car, steering me expertly with one hand at the small of my back like we were guests at a cocktail party. I was trying to find words to thank him—any words would do—but the magnitude of what was happening was simply too great.

And then I was in the car and it was too late anyway.

At Heathrow, I was taken to a special entrance, where I was greeted by name and whisked off to a private lounge. As promised, Bellerose was there, looking far too elegant for a man who had presumably been yanked away from his evening in order to arrange a trip to America for his boss’s…his boss’s whatever I was.

He took my passport from my unresisting fingers and went off to deal with the pilot for me. I perched on the edge of one of the leather sofas and stared blankly out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Caspian’s plane was waiting on the runway, a pale bird against the oily dark.

Eventually, Bellerose dropped down beside me, and pushed a cup of something into my hands. “I got you some tea. It’s hot and milky and you should drink it. And then I need you to listen to me.”

I nodded. Took a sip of tea. I wasn’t particularly into the stuff, but it did, actually, make me feel slightly more human. Unfortunately, “slightly more human” meant full of fear and misery again. Only wanting to be in Caspian’s arms, with all the badness of the world held at bay.