Читать книгу Dare Collection October 2019 - Margot Radcliffe - Страница 18

Darcy

SOMETHING WAS DIFFERENT.

I wrapped myself in a towel as ordered and watched as he did the same. Then I followed him out through the sumptuous bedchamber to the main room again, where an elegant meal had been set up on the table for two, placed to take in the breathtaking views of Paris all around us.

It looked romantic. Intimate. And I felt something tug at me, because there was a part of me that wished it was—

Stop, I ordered myself. I needed to remember my place. The transaction I’d agreed to, no matter what it looked like.

But I couldn’t keep myself from trying to make light of it, somehow. I laughed as we walked toward the table. “Is this a date? I think we’re doing it backwards.”

“Do you have dinner with all your dates without your clothes on?” He didn’t wait for my answer. He pulled out a chair for me, helped me sit in it with distinct courtesy, though I didn’t require assistance, and then took my towel from me.

I should have protested. I meant to, surely. Instead, goose bumps prickled all over my skin in a new kind of delight and I…didn’t.

When he sat down across from me, he kept his towel knotted loosely around his hips. That meant I could still admire that beautifully formed chest of his. I could marvel at the clean, masculine line of his jaw. I could watch his hands as he used them to pour the wine and remember what they felt like on me. In me.

It was possible I sighed a little. Happily.

“Surely this night is whatever I want it to be,” he said as he filled one crystal glass, then the other. “Or did I misunderstand what I paid for?”

On some level, I imagined that was meant to be a slap. But I liked it. It was good to be reminded of what this was. Who we were. Every dancer had to know the limits of the stage, after all. Or she risked toppling off into the orchestra pit.

“Are you hungry?” he asked after a moment, when I didn’t respond.

And I understood the difference in him, then. It was this sudden solicitude. I could see the same greediness in that blue gaze of his that had held us both so tightly before. The same driving hunger I’d seen from the stage. But first he’d had me soak. Now he wanted to feed me.

“It really isn’t a dinner date,” I said. Sternly.

Because I wasn’t worried he needed the reminder; it was me.

“Thank you, Darcy.” And there was a gleam I suspected was amusement in his bright gaze. “I am aware. I have a great deal of money and even more influence, and even I cannot dine out wearing so little.”

For some reason, that calmed me. And it wasn’t until I felt calm again that I understood I hadn’t before. Not really. There had been too much sensation. Too much feeling. Too many emotions circling around and not quite landing. Too much soaking.

For a little while, there was silence. If this had really been my job, I probably would have leaped to fill it. I would have attempted to entertain him with my sparkling personality and wit—assuming I could access either, after all that astonishing sex—but then again, that wasn’t what he’d signed up for. The burlesque was a lot of things, suggestive and saucy in turn, but it didn’t involve conversation. At least, not the way I did it.

And the truth of the matter was, I was ravenous.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the hollow feeling in my belly, because we’d come up to this room right after I’d finished my act. And I’d had other, more pressing concerns. And with all that ruthless, glorious fucking, it was like my performance had just…kept right on going. I was used to controlling any flashes of hunger while I danced, in class or rehearsal or in strange little pockets of my performances. It was to be expected when using my body with such intensity.

And this night was a very different kind of performance, but it wasn’t over yet—and it was already requiring just about all the intensity I could stand.

He had taken the ordering upon himself, but there was a variety to choose from on the table between us. Meat, fish. Salads and sides. I helped myself to a little bit of everything, and ate. Heedlessly.

With the table manners my mother had drilled into me since birth, in deference to my opulent surroundings, but heedlessly all the same.

“You eat the way you fuck,” he said when I finally sat back and sighed, happily full. “But you are so slight. You cannot possibly eat that way all the time.”

I shrugged. “When I allow myself to eat, I eat whatever I want.”

“And what are your allowances?”

I grinned, not in the least put off by this line of questioning. No matter how progressive the ballet pretended to be to get in line with the times, we were all obsessed with food. Eating too much or too little of it. Eating the wrong things that would adversely affect our performance or stamina.

We did what we had to do to keep attention on how we danced, not our shapes while we did it. People didn’t like to admit these things out loud in these welcome days of body positivity out there in the real world, but I had always been of the mind that my body belonged to the company. The company was responsible for its aches and pains, its sometime ability to almost fly, and so too whatever shape was best to fit into their costumes and blend into their backgrounds. It was only when I strayed outside the confines of the ballet that I remembered the rest of the world viewed these things rather differently.

Because the rest of the world didn’t have to dance beautifully enough to disappear, night after night after night.

But this man was not the world. I had the distinct impression that if he could, he would take the place of the company. And mold me to his own specifications.

The notion thrilled me, like his hands on me again.

“I usually eat after a performance,” I told him. “But I don’t like to eat much beforehand. It makes me feel…heavy. And cranky. And no one likes a cranky—” I remembered myself. And my anonymity. “Dancer.”

His gaze was as sharp and incisive as it was blue. “And when you speak of performance, you mean the burlesque?”

I felt as caught in his gaze as I had been in his arms. My throat was dry. I had the strangest urge to tell him my whole life’s story—and not in the form of a thinly veiled fairy tale this time.

Instead, I smiled airily. “What else could I mean?”

I expected him to smile back at me. To acknowledge that we were both playing this little game of masked identities, secrets and lies. Wasn’t that the purpose of a single night like this? Everyone could be who they pretended to be for this little window of time. You could do anything for a night, after all. Anything at all.

“I want another night,” he said.

He might as well have tossed a grenade across the table. I lowered the linen napkin I’d pressed to my lips and set it beside my plate. I swallowed hard. And suddenly, I couldn’t bear all that bright blue regard. “That’s not our arrangement.”

“Is it money?” He lifted a shoulder. “I will pay you whatever you wish, of course.”

“It’s not the money.” The moment I said that, I thought better of it. What enterprising prostitute said such a thing? Of course it was about the money, as it should be. “Every night is the same price, rest assured. But this? You? One night only, as agreed.”

A brow lifted in a way that told me he was used to great swaths of underlings vaulting about to tend to his every whim, expressed or not. “Why?”

It would have been different if he’d seemed upset. Or too…determined, in any of the ways that might have tripped alarms in me. But he didn’t. Instead, he lounged back in his seat as if this was all a foregone conclusion, and I had the impression of a predator trying to hide in plain sight. The intense focus in those bright blue eyes didn’t fade in the least.

“Our arrangement was for one night,” I reminded him primly.

“Then let’s change the arrangement.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Darcy.” The folly of telling him my name was all too apparent then, because it was exactly as I’d intended. He used my name, and it felt intimate. It felt real. I might cling to these things later, but they only made this moment harder to navigate. “If an item is for sale, and I have the money required to purchase it, there is no reason I shouldn’t have it. Is there?”

I made myself laugh, bright and sparkling. “My feeling is that a performer should never commit to more performances than she knows she can do well.”

And I tried to smile the way I imagined a burlesque dancer would. More earthy, less regal. More happy hooker and less hungry princess.

When his expression took on that intent look again, I figured that whatever I was doing, it was working.

“I’ve been doing this awhile,” I continued. I meant dancing, of course, but he could think whatever he liked. “There’s a certain point where the spirit might be willing, but the body can’t quite keep up. I prefer to make sure I get all the beauty sleep I need.”

“Why do I not quite believe you, little dancer?”

He asked the question in such an idle, offhand way that I almost confessed the truth. That he was right not to believe me, because I was full of it. Apart from the practicalities and the papers I’d signed, I knew I couldn’t let myself have another night with him because it was a high possibility that I’d forget myself completely. I’d tell him who I was. I’d beg him for more. I’d ruin this fantasy by shoving it too far into reality, and that would destroy the whole thing.

I didn’t want the reality of him, because I wasn’t sure I could handle it. I wanted this high-octane night of endless sex and happy obedience. I wanted his cock in my mouth and my knees on a hard floor. Not the mundane reality of another man I wouldn’t have enough time for and who would irritate me before the month was out.

This was the only way I could have him just like this, forever. It was my fantasy. It belonged in the dark, in my bed, and in reality for only one night. I didn’t want to bring it out into the light where it would inevitably spoil.

No matter how much I thought I might like to roll around in the sunlight with him.

“One night,” I said quietly.

“Very well. If that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

My hands were in my lap and I laced them tightly together, then squeezed, to remind me that this really wasn’t a dinner date of any kind. I was not here to ask his name. Or to question him at all. I was here to do what I did best: look pretty, bend in every direction, and smile at the applause.

I’d expected the fantasy to be potent, no matter the man. I hadn’t expected him to be as potent as the taboo.

He was still studying me as if he could see what he wanted that way. He toyed with stem of the wineglass before him, using those same strong fingers that had made me weep with passion. And I wanted to break the mood. I was naked and entirely too aware of my body. The tightness of my nipples pulled into points. The melting, slippery heat between my legs.

That trembling thing, deep inside, that I knew had nothing to do with the fantasy and everything to do with me.

I slid from my chair, sinking down to my knees beside it. Then I tipped myself forward onto all fours and kept my eyes on him. There wasn’t much space between us, but I made the most of it. I crawled, sensuous and deliberate, from my chair to his.

“What are you doing, little dancer?” His voice sounded darker than before, but indulgent.

“It was such a good dinner.” My voice was husky when I reached him. I ran my hands up over the hair-roughened muscles of his thighs, pushing the towel out of my way as I went. “I thought there had to be dessert.”

He didn’t order me to stop. He didn’t tell me to sit back, drop my hands, or await his orders. He only stared down at me, heat and greed and something darker on his hard, beautiful face. I followed my gut feeling, and that trembling thing inside me. I cupped him in one palm, and wrapped the fingers of my other hand around the shaft of his cock. He was already hard, and he thickened even more as I gripped him.

I kept my eyes locked to his as I leaned closer, circling the plump head with my tongue.

“Don’t tease,” he growled.

I smiled. Then I sucked him in deep.

And for long moments, there was nothing but this.

Communion. Consolation.

This fantasy made real in the best way imaginable.

He tasted male. And like me. I couldn’t get enough. I wished I could take all of him and I did my best, triumph washing through me when his hands moved to fist in my hair.

And I moaned out my pleasure when he lifted his hips, gently fucking my mouth.

I rocked my hips from side to side, desperate for some friction, but I was too busy holding on to him to tend to myself.

I liked that almost more than I could bear. Aching for him even as I serviced him. Leaving myself needy while he grunted out his pleasure, then came hard, salt and man down the back of my throat.

I sat back, feeling dazed and delicious. There was moisture in the corners of my eyes and that lovely used feeling making my mouth feel like his, not mine.

His eyes glittered as he looked down at me, still kneeling there beside his chair. He smoothed my hair back with those hard hands of his I knew without question would haunt me for the rest of my life. He wiped the excess moisture away from beneath my eyes with his thumb, then kept his hand there. He cupped my cheek, holding my face tilted toward his.

And it was so easy to forget how I’d come to be here. All the necessary lines between fantasy and real life. In this moment, I was a woman and he was a man, and everything else felt like make-believe.

I was tempted to forget myself.

I wanted more than one night. I wanted a thousand nights. I wanted to take this fantasy, make it real all the time and, more than that, make it work. Whatever that meant. I wanted what I knew I couldn’t have. I wanted things I couldn’t name and wouldn’t know how to ask for. I wanted the sheer ecstasy of this to transcend this transaction we’d agreed upon.

But that was the beauty of this situation. There was no changing it. He was a member of this club and could do what he liked, but I had signed very specific contracts. I was not to take the initiative and contact anyone I met here afterward. I was certainly not to make my own arrangements. And if I wanted to come back to the club, to continue what I’d started here tonight, as I was informed many “fantasy guests” did, I would have to pay them for the privilege.

The price they quoted to me had made my eyes water and my stomach twist in a kind of panic.

I would not be coming back here on my dime, that was for sure.

“I don’t know what you’re doing to me,” he said, his voice low, his hand hot and strong against my jaw. And there were too many things I was afraid I understood all too well in his gaze. “I am a man of duty, not debauchery. I blow off steam only under the most controlled circumstances, and I never lose myself. And you have me imagining things I would have told you were impossible eight hours ago.”

I knew there was no hope in it. No happy ending, save the ones we gave each other here. Orgasms aplenty, but absolutely nothing else. I told myself that made it safe.

I leaned my cheek into his hand. “What do you imagine?”

“You don’t understand.” His voice was even darker now. Something far more dangerous than a mere growl. “My father was a man who broke things because he knew he could always buy more. He particularly liked to break companies down into parts, sell them off at a profit and enrich himself. Still, the thing he broke most often was my mother.”

He shouldn’t be telling me something like that. Something so real it seemed to hurt him as he said it. I wanted to tell him to take back those words. To steer us in a different direction altogether, back to yes, sir and the stark honesty of sex, but I couldn’t seem to make my mouth work. I could still taste him on my tongue.

I told myself that it was better, maybe, that he should talk to me as if he was nothing but a man. Any man at all. The kind I could find annoying after a few weeks. Maybe this way I’d believe it.

“Everything I know about emotion I learned from a broken, bitter woman whose only friend comes in liquid form and keeps her drunk around the clock. She keeps a good face for the public, which means I’m usually the one treated to her drunken displays. She taught me that love means always, always, being the victim.”

“You don’t have to talk about these things,” I murmured, not sure why my instinct was to soothe him.

His smile was merciless. “I keep my life in strict compartments. Work. Play. Family on one branch, my social life, such as it is, on another. And these branches never, ever cross.”

“I think everybody does that.”

I thought of my own parents, chilly and remote. Never quite pleased, no matter what. They had attended my early recitals—if the dates didn’t conflict with their social calendars—but I’d always thought they supported their ballet-dancer daughter because that made them seem more sophisticated to their friends. It meant I had worked that much harder, as if I needed to prove myself to them. As if that might make them love me. I was almost thirty and I wasn’t sure they did. I never asked them about it. I just…danced. With more focus and intensity. And I had never considered introducing Annabelle to them, for example. It was unimaginable that they might have access to my actual life.

“Families are like secret wounds that never quite heal,” I found myself saying, there in a suite in Paris while a man watched me too closely with eyes like every summer I’d missed because I’d been too busy rehearsing. “Sometimes they leave scars. But I think those scars mean you’re lucky. For the rest of us, there’s no hoping that the scar tissue fades from pink and becomes white over time. For most of us there’s no healing. There’s only coming to terms with the maintenance and the bandages as best we can.”

“Why, Darcy.” His hand moved against my cheek. “I had no idea someone who moves the way you do could be so cynical.”

“It’s not cynicism, it’s reality. No one can work in fantasy without a serious grounding in reality. Not if they want to survive. Much less succeed.”

I surprised myself, because I was talking about ballet. And what it took to live the life I did. The kind of life that strangers assumed they could imagine when all they saw was pancake makeup and costumes floating across the stage, never the years of work that went into looking that effortless—

But he thought I was talking about sex.

“And here I thought it was your emotions that made this work.”

“Emotions are fuel,” I said lightly. “Let them take control, and they’ll eat you alive. Use them as fuel, and they’ll help you burn brighter.” His thumb moved along my jawline, hypnotically. “But then again, I am not drunk.”

“Indeed, you are not.” His mouth flattened. “I cannot imagine a woman like you ever allowing a man to break her the way my father broke my mother. Over and over again.”

“I break things all the time.” That happened to be true. “What are a few broken bones among friends?”

It occurred to me after I said it that possibly that was the sort of joke better confined to the ballet rehearsal halls.

“Bones heal. Marriages? Not so much.” Again, that smile without any mirth. “I promised myself I would never make myself so vulnerable to another. I would never allow anyone close enough to break me. And I never have.”

“Forgive me,” I murmured then. “You do not strike me as particularly…unbroken.”

He let out a sound at that, though I would not call it a laugh. “Tell me, little dancer, why do I have the impression that you will be the wound I cannot heal?”

“I can give you what you paid for,” I whispered, my heart pounding in ways I refused to analyze. “Nothing more.”

“I want another night. The whole bloody weekend.”

“No,” I whispered. “That will only make it worse.”

“I don’t think it will. I don’t think it could.” He lifted me up and settled me on his lap, and for a moment there was nothing but the electricity between us. The crackle of that connection. Heat and longing. “But this will. I’m sure of it.”

I held my breath, not sure what he was about to do. And not prepared when what he did was wrap his hand around the nape of my neck.

Then slowly, inexorably, he drew my mouth to his.

“You can’t…” I began.

“Did I buy all of you? Or only a small part of you?”

It was a silken challenge. Dark and hot.

“I don’t even know—”

But I cut myself off. Horrified that I’d nearly given myself away.

And something far more complicated than merely horrified that the very thought of his kiss…panicked me. All the sex we’d had must have gotten to me. But not like this.

His blue eyes flashed a warning, but I didn’t pull away. And not because he’d paid for me. But because I wanted him to kiss me more than I’d ever wanted anything. More than breath.

And when he took my mouth, it wasn’t as if he owned it. Or me. It was as if kissing me was the answer to a question neither one of us wanted to ask. An answer that thudded in me like stone.

But I didn’t pull away.

His kiss was sweet and hot at once. It was searing. And yet it filled me up like a sob.

He pulled back, his mouth close to mine, and I knew.

That nothing would be the same. Least of all me.

“My name is Sebastian,” he said, because it turned out there was always a way to make it worse. To make it hurt. “Sebastian Dumont. I want more, little dancer, but if you won’t give it to me, all I can do is make sure that every single moment we have together, tonight, counts.”

And that was exactly what he did.

Again and again and again.