“And you had fun too, right?”
“You gave yourself to me like a gift. Offered without restraint things I would never have dared ask or hope for. And you were so beautiful I could hardly believe that you would do this for me. So yes, Arden. I had fun.”
Some of the heat accumulated in my arse redistributed itself, giving me a serious case of the warm fuzzies. “I’m not…you know. I’m not beautiful.”
“Do you want me to turn you over my lap and spank you again?”
“Not right now.”
“Then be quiet.”
Nestling close, I hid my smile in his neck. Then be quiet was hardly the three-word declaration of my dreams. But, right then, it fell upon my ears as tenderly as if it were. He was, after all, Caspian Hart. Not some tamer beast.
And, anyway, I wasn’t very into princes.
Chapter 4
I wasn’t really aware of being awake or not awake but I guess I must have been not-awake, because I was woken up by Caspian whispering to me: “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but we’ll be landing soon.”
I whimpered. “Do we have to? Can’t we live here forever?”
“On the plane?”
“Yes.” I curled into him stubbornly. “We can spend all our time having sex and cuddling”
“We can also do those things on the ground. And with a smaller carbon footprint.”
It should have been reassuring—well, it was reassuring, since I hadn’t seriously expected we’d become joint founders of a flying and fucking commune—but I was feeling fragile. In a way that was completely unlike the raw vulnerability of writhing naked and sobbing over Caspian’s knee, and a lot less fun.
“Arden? What’s the matter? You haven’t…haven’t changed your mind, have you?”
He sounded so genuinely anxious that I came in immediately with a “No.” And, anyway, it was true.
Well. Mostly.
“Then what’s wrong?” he asked.
I stared at my toes. The polish needed touching up. Also maybe Sally Bowles green hadn’t been the best color choice—I looked a little gangrenous down there. “I don’t know. I think maybe I’m failing London.”
“How could you possibly be failing London?”
“Same way I failed Oxford.”
“You have no idea whether you failed Oxford.” He curled a comforting hand over my knee. “Your results haven’t even been released yet. And, when they are, you’ll get a 2.1, exactly like everyone else.”
He was probably right. You had to fuck up super hard to get out of Oxford with anything less than a 2.2. But that led to a situation in which a lower pass was as good as an admission of failure anyway. “Even if I do get a 2.1, I won’t deserve it.”
“It’s hardly an assessment of your moral character, Arden.”
“But I got offered this incredible opportunity. And I squandered it.”
Caspian sighed. I thought he was about to tell me to grow up and stop whining but, instead, he just drew me closer. “Oxford is only a university,” he murmured. “And there are many things besides the academic to learn at university.”
“What, like how to go six weeks without doing any laundry?”
“Like what sort of man you wish to become.”
“I’m not sure I even figured that out.”
