His presence was everywhere. Filling up the room. I could feel the attention of people who didn’t even know who he was straining toward him. Sometimes I’d catch their eyes when I was doggedly not looking at him.
Whatever he had, it wasn’t charm exactly. He made no effort to engage anyone, but he drew them regardless, like planets to the sun. I didn’t know what else to call it but…mastery. That unyielding certainty of power.
It wasn’t…nice. It was a feral thing, perhaps a cruel one.
But I wanted it anyway. I wanted him. All his ice and strength and darkness.
His rare smiles.
Though he probably didn’t think about me at all. Or if he did, it was likely only as a diversion, a curiosity. Someone it amused him to temporarily indulge.
“Arden St. Ives?”
I cringed. It was the junior dean. Or Bad Cop as she was known. I’d spent most of my first and second years being nonsexily castigated by her for various negligible infractions.
Probably because she suspected I was involved in the Bog Sheet, St. Sebastian’s most informal student newspaper. Which was fair because I did run the thing. Not one for the CV, really, but it did mean I got to cast her as a deranged Space Nazi in the weekly cartoon. It was pretty accurate.
I pasted a smile on my face. “Uh, hi, Tash.”
“Did you not read the invitation properly?” She glowered at me from behind thick, black-framed spectacles. She was in a tuxedo herself, doing the full Dietrich, and I would have normally thought it was cool. But she was Dr. Tash Vijayendran and she ate fun for breakfast and I refused to think anything good about her. “You do know there’s a dress code? Why aren’t you in black tie?”
I opened my mouth to answer. But I had nothing. What was I supposed to say? Because Caspian Hart told me not to?
“Well?”
I felt like a kid who had come to school without his uniform. “Um…”
“Because”—Caspian hadn’t even raised his voice but the room fell quiet around him anyway—“he doesn’t like it.” All that determined not-looking for him and he’d been close enough to hear me speak.
Tash blinked. “Oh. Well. All right, then.”
Of course, it wasn’t a real explanation for what I was wearing. If I’d tried to say something like that…God, my mind flinched from imagining it. Best-case scenario—everyone would have laughed at how fucking ridiculous it was. As if two hundred years of Britishness were just going to roll over for the sake of my comfort. I’d never have been able to get away with it. Not in a million years.
But Caspian could.
And he’d done it for me.
I tried to catch his eye as conversation resumed, but, actually, it didn’t matter if he looked at me or not. It was enough that he was aware of me. Watching out for me. I liked it. It made me feel sort of…his.
As though he could claim me again without a glance or a word, simply by willing it. Like that G.K. Chesterton thing about the unseen hook and the invisible line.
The rest of the evening went pretty much the way these things always did. We milled around for a while in Melmoth, there was a brief (well, brief in the Oxford sense, meaning under an hour) welcome from the Master, and then we trooped along to hall for a fairly decent three-course meal. With great poise and finesse, I managed to use all the right cutlery and I didn’t put my elbow in my bread roll once. But, as the hours trickled past, boredom seeped into me like drizzle.
I was too far away from Caspian to be able to steal secret glances at him or listen to his conversation. And by the time we were herded back to Melmoth for yet more booze and speeches, he was nowhere to be seen.
He’d probably already gone. I should have expected it, but somehow I hadn’t. And I wasn’t quite prepared to be disappointed. To be hurt. I wasn’t exactly picking out wedding crockery but the least he could have done was say goodbye.
The Alumni and Development officer was going on and on about the St. Sebastian’s campaign. And my eyes were stingy with tears because I was sad over the loss of a man who had never been mine anyway.
What an idiot.
I slipped onto the forbidden balcony to wallow in aforementioned idiocy in private.
And there he was.
Chapter 5
It was as though he’d been waiting for me all along…except, well, he hadn’t.
He was standing by the crenellations, looking out at the city, which was all shadows and spires and streams of golden traffic in the distance. Cliché or not, he looked good by moonlight. Sculpted in silver and steel, a man so coldly perfect he was barely real at all.
Maybe it was some essential contrariness but his very untouchability made me want to…touch. To spark his beauty to life with passion and surrender.
He lifted a hand, bringing a cigarette to his mouth. He was briefly illuminated by a flare of amber and then he tilted his head back, eyes falling closed as he exhaled a sinuous plume of smoke into the darkness.
And God, his face like that. Open in pleasure. The suddenly undeniable sensuality of his parted lips.
I must have been staring at him like a cartoon American cop at a doughnut because, at that moment, his eyes snapped open and I’d never seen anyone shut down that fast, his expression becoming a mask again: smooth, composed, impenetrable.
I tried to think of something nonawkward to say but instead blurted out, “I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I allow myself one.”
“A day?”
“A month.”
I didn’t dare tell him that was kind of completely…adorable. “Why?”
“I like smoking. But I believe in controlling one’s vices.”
“Really?” I strolled across the balcony as casually as I could. Pretending I just wanted to admire the view, rather than be close to him. “Because I believe in letting them run riot.”
He gave a soft laugh and passed me the cigarette. “Then indulge yourself for me.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
As it happened, I hadn’t smoked much tobacco. I’d done a bit of weed, because it was available at student parties. Well, at the dull ones anyway, where you sat around talking about Kant instead of getting laid. But when I was fourteen, my mother had given me a cigarette in order to teach me how deeply uncool smoking was.
And, honestly, it had worked.
It was hard to find things rebellious or subversive when your mum introduced them to you.
But there was no way I was passing up an opportunity to share something with Caspian Hart. To put my lips and fingers where his own had lingered. Perhaps leave the taste of me for him. And I could just imagine us, monochrome in the moonlight, so elegant and sophisticated as we passed the cigarette between us like lovers in the movie I kept inventing. He would be played by Gregory Peck and I would be Lauren Bacall and at some point I’d be terribly willful and he’d be obliged to seize my wrists and kiss me cruelly until I’d learned my lesson.
“Arden?”
“Yes?”
“Do you want this or not?”
Oh God. “Sorry, yes. Thank you.”
Our hands brushed as I took the cigarette, that small touch of skin to skin crackling through me, electric-neon, lighting me up. I’d expected to look effortlessly sexy, with my cancerous accessory, but I wasn’t sure how to hold it. It was different to a joint, and I felt self-conscious. Like the pretender I was.