“I wasn’t sure I would have time.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Yes.” Whatever had troubled him before had passed and he was perfectly composed as he met my eyes again. “Here I am.”
“Am I…I mean, is it what you were expecting?” Oh wow, classy, Arden. Not blatant at all.
But his mouth finally yielded up its smile. And, like his laugh, it was unexpectedly shy, as though he wasn’t used to doing it. It disordered the harmonies of his face, but I liked him better that way, a little bit messy, a little bit realer. God, the man was killing me. Actually killing me. “I’m not sorry I came.”
“How does it feel to be back?” I asked.
“I’m afraid I’m not given to sentiment.”
I peeped up at him from under my lashes. Yep, it was official: I was flirting. “What? No sudden rush of nostalgia for these dreaming spires?”
He shook his head.
“But Oxford’s beautiful, isn’t it? Like nowhere else.”
“Some might say,” he said, in the same quietly playful tone I’d heard him use on the phone, “it’s rather like Cambridge.”
I gasped. “You traitor.”
“That assumes loyalty in the first place.”
He had me there. “Um, I think I’m supposed to take you to this reception thing? It’s in Melmoth.”
“And you’re going like that?”
It wasn’t really an encouraging sentiment but the slide of his eyes down my body made me hot and cold and tingly. “Well, I was going to wear my bespoke Savile Row suit like you but then I remembered I don’t have one.”
If I’d been hoping to win another smile, I was disappointed because all I got in response was, “Turn around.”
It was a phrase that had come my way often enough and I was pretty fond of it. But the way he said it, oh God the way he said it, turned my insides to honey. Not bossy or rough but implacable.
A command.
If he did it in a voice like that—all steel and velvet and the promise of his approval—I would have done anything he told me.
No matter how slutty or degrading.
Actually.
Strike that.
Especially if it was slutty or degrading.
I turned around, trying to shut down the porno in my brain. We were in a public place, and I was fully dressed (in several layers of formal wear as it happened), but it felt vulnerable. Giving this man, this stranger, my back. My trust.
His arm came around me from behind. And the heat of it, the pressure. The tightening muscles of his forearm made me a bit delirious. I leaned back and his body was right there, all hard planes and angular curves for me to nestle into. I tilted my hips, wriggling my arse until I was tucked in against him, pinned and protected at the same time, at once safe and overwhelmed.
I tried to breathe and an excited little moan happened instead.
Caspian tugged me in tighter still. No humiliatingly inappropriate noises from him. But his heart was thudding hard and fast against my spine. He pulled the bow tie out of my hand and straightened my collar. A finger touched me lightly under the chin and I tipped my head back against his shoulder, exposing my throat. That was when I heard him growl. Softly enough I almost missed it, but there it was. This sound of deep, primitive pleasure that shivered all the way down my back and headed off in a few other directions as well.
As he leaned over me, his breath grazed the top of my ear and that insubstantial caress felt so ridiculously intimate it made my knees go weak. Like I was supposed to be on them. At his feet. His other arm came around me as he did whatever you have to do to make a bow tie happen. He didn’t fumble at it the way Nik had. His movements were swift and assured. And, just for a moment, I felt a brush of warmth across my pulse point, like a touch that wasn’t.
I only noticed he was done when he gave me a little push. Too busy swooning into his neck and shoving my bum into his crotch like the wanton hussy I was. I turned, stumbling a little, discovering too late I was basically jelly, and just about managed not to end up on the ground again.
“Um, thanks.” I lifted a hand instinctively, wanting to feel the shape of the knot, but then stopped. I’d only wreck it.
He just nodded, his eyes slipping away from me again. I wished he’d stop doing that. Was my face that boring? But his color was up, his breath a little unsteady. And, y’know, there’d been movement back there. When I’d been doing my thing. So maybe he was just…embarrassed?
“That’s some good tying,” I heard myself say. “Is it practice or natural talent?”
That got his attention. And, for a throat-clogging second, I thought I’d fucked everything up already. I could just see the headline in the Book of Making You Feel Bad About Yourself: Rampant Undergraduate Sexually Harasses Famous Alumnus. But Caspian’s mouth softened into that nearly-smile of his. “What if I told you it was a little of both?”
“Then I guess it’d be my lucky night.”
He cleared his throat. “Aren’t we supposed to be going to a reception?”
We. “Oh yeah. But, honestly, if you’d rather wile away the evening adjusting my clothing, I’m game.”
He reached out, fingers stroking lightly over my lapels as he tried to settle the tux less lopsidedly across my shoulders. “I know a lost cause when I see one.” He was right, but I must have looked hurt, because he went on with the same uncertain gentleness I remembered from our telephone conversation. “Did you shrink in the wash?”
“Hah! No. I’m naturally pocket-sized. These gladrags aren’t mine.”
“Who do they belong to? A gorilla?”
“My best friend. I don’t have a set of my own. Don’t like wearing the stuff.”
“Neither do I.”
I gazed up at him, so pristine and exquisite, this sleek, shining Lamborghini of a man. In other words: a ride way beyond my budget. “Yes, but you can get away with it.”
“It’s quite simple, Arden.” He stepped past me, gold-edged by the last of the light, the softer hair at his brow and temples gilded into tempting little curlicues. “Don’t give people a choice. If you want to change, I’ll wait for you.”
(Or you could come up with me…) “But you just fixed my bow tie.” A swift tug from his fingers and there was that problem dealt with. “Ah.”
“Go.”
“But…what if everybody looks at me funny?”
“Why do you care?”
“Um, because I’m helplessly inculcated into the sartorial kyriarchy?”
He laughed and I smiled back, feeling indulged by his amusement, petted almost. But then he told me, “You have five minutes,” in That Voice. The one I wanted to hear telling me to do utterly filthy things, just so that I’d do them. I felt a drift of air, the suggestion of heat, at the small of my back, as though he’d been about to rest his hand there but had changed his mind.
“Seriously?” It came out a squeak. “You’ll really wait?”
“Yes. For five minutes.”
“Shit.”
I ran, ripping off the tuxedo as I went, like I was the Incredible Hulk or something. Apart from the hulky bit, anyway.
Weird Owen was still lodged in our doorway, talking about, oh, who knew what, as I pelted past. Nik made a crack about Clark Kent as my shirt fluttered over my head but I didn’t have time to stop.