Page 63 of How to Blow It with a Billionaire

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. You generous madman.” I put a hand to my mouth to stifle a slightly hysterical sound. “I can’t believe you were going to come out here because I implied a mild state of disorientation.”

“You sounded lonely.”

“I’m all right. And I’ve got you, haven’t I?”

“Always, my Arden.”

He’d made me smile. When ten minutes ago I wouldn’t have imagined it was even possible. Of course, it was immediately followed by a shard of guilt that I was smiling and flirting and being comforted while Nik was alone in a hospital bed. Although I also knew that was just my brain being mean to me. Nik wasn’t going to get better or worse depending on how miserable I was. But, then, thoughts were thoughts and feels were feels, and, if you were me, their power to influence each other was less than zero.

“How’s London?” I asked.

“Much as you left it, I suspect it. Warmish, with some scattered showers.”

“How’s the humidity?”

He thought about it. “About sixty percent—now why are you laughing?”

“Because you are legit terrible at small talk.”

“And you,” he said crisply, “are legit terrible at going to sleep.”

“You’d better get on with lulling me, then.”

He gave an un-lullful snort. “Is that what I’m doing?”

“Not right now, no.”

Another pause.

He cleared his throat. “Lulling is quite difficult.”

“Tell me what you’re looking at. What you’re thinking.” I closed my eyes. And let the last twenty-four hours thunder through me, and over me, until I was dust. “I just…I just want to hear you.”

“Anything you need.” He sounded almost as raw as I did. But his words, coming to me down a phone, took me to familiar places. To Oxford in spring when Caspian had been a stranger. And the summer night he’d first made me feel safe. “I’m in my office. Standing by the window. It’s my favorite spot.”

“Good view?”

“I’ve never noticed.”

“So…you really like the frame? The floor is especially nice there?”

“No.” Caspian’s voice had dropped into its lowest register: the secret one, full of sex and teasing. “I kissed someone here once. Right against the glass.”

“Did you now?”

“I did. And perhaps somewhat ill-advisedly. You see, I’d made the young man in question very angry—fairly, as it happens—and he burst into my place of work to confront me over it.”

I squirmed. “That seems a pretty embarrassing thing for him to do.”

“He has nothing to be embarrassed about. He was magnificent and fearless and, even in the midst of his own hurt, kind. I was a fool to think I could ever possess power enough to resist him.”

“Why would you want to? He sounds like a peach.”

“He has no idea. Sending him home was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. Watching the car vanish into traffic, carrying my Arden away from me, when all I wanted to do was force you down across my desk and make you mine forever.”

It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the best bedtime story anyone had ever told me. I mean, it had everything. An unlikely protagonist. A dashing—if slightly tormented—hero. And all the exciting feelings.