Читать книгу Dare Collection October 2019 - Margot Radcliffe - Страница 20

Sebastian

IT HAD BEEN a shite few weeks.

At first, I told myself everything was normal and I was fine. Because everything was normal and I bloody well should have been fine.

I’d left the club that following morning and I hadn’t charged about the streets of Paris like a madman, looking for a woman who wanted neither me nor my money. I hadn’t begged or pleaded with her before she left, or given in to any of the equally appalling urges I was horrified to discover clambered there inside me. She had left, then I had called for my car, and I had resumed my life with nary a ripple.

That was the point of the club, after all.

But no matter how hard I worked to stop thinking about that night—and that woman—I couldn’t quite make it stick.

I thought about my little dancer in meetings. During negotiations. When I woke in the morning and all throughout the day, when I should have been thinking about other things—from macro concerns like the corporation I preferred not to run into the ground due to my inattention and more micro concerns, like John Delaney’s islands that my brother, Ash, was doing his level best to steal out from under me. I castigated myself for these lapses in the strongest possible terms.

And then, every night, I dreamed about her in vivid color—sound and scent and the silken feel of her skin against mine—and woke to begin the mad cycle anew.

I hardly knew who the hell I was.

Maybe I didn’t have to fear becoming like my father, which had always been my gravest concern—especially after my great failure, which he’d openly sneered at. It had been easy enough for me to keep everything and everyone at arm’s length after the disaster with Ash, because my father had been a huge fan of pretending that he was capable of relationships. Fidelity. Fatherhood. My solution was not to pretend.

But maybe the true worry was how easy it was for me to become like my mother, instead. Obsessed forever with a person who had forgotten her long ago.

Everything I had told Darcy was true. My mother had never tolerated my father’s infidelities well, but it was Ash’s existence with which she found it impossible to make her peace. It was Ash who had rendered her distraught—for years. Not Ash himself, whom I doubted she had ever met, but the fact of him.

My mother had believed herself special among my father’s many liaisons because she alone was the one my father had married. She’d imagined that she was the only one to bear him a child, too. And even all these years later, she couldn’t stand the idea that Ash’s mother had been doing the same thing. At the same time.

She had viewed my friendship with him in school as a betrayal. And after everything had fallen apart, I had agreed. I should never have let myself imagine that I—or Ash and I—could overcome the curse of my father’s blood. I should never have allowed my youthful naivete to hurt my mother, whose only sin was in wishing my father was a different man.

I paid my penance to this day. That was why I subjected myself to trips home to the unhappy house in Surrey where I had been raised—between terms at my various boarding schools, that was—and danced attendance on the woman who acted as if I’d wronged her yesterday. And was capable of turning operatic when distraught.

I was no longer friends with Ash. He considered me an enemy now and had for years. My father was dead, and my mother had received the bulk of his estate. He had not recognized his host of mistresses in that way. Only my mother got to live in style with the old man’s ghost.

I would have preferred to burn the house and its memories to the ground, I reflected as I drove up to the sprawling old house that day. That I hadn’t yet done so was a monument to my strength of character, I liked to think.

Especially when I knew my mother would spend our visit as she spent every visit, regaling me with tales of her victimhood as she sat surrounded by all the luxuries my father’s money could buy and mine could support. But that was part and parcel of the penance I paid her. She behaved as she liked and I took it.

I strode inside, nodding curtly at the butler. “Is she downstairs today?”

“I’m afraid not, sir,” the man replied, without inflection.

That wasn’t a surprise. I took the grand stairs two at a time, then made my way down the hall toward my mother’s private rooms. And found her where I expected I would, swaying as she stood behind the settee in her drawing room, shakily fixing herself a drink.

It was clearly not her first.

That wasn’t remotely surprising. My mother did not work. She did not even dabble at the sort of “work” women in her tax bracket normally did—meaning hosting charity events with high profiles. What was surprising was my own irritation with it today. I normally viewed interactions with my mother as a kind of hair shirt. Not comfortable, certainly. But mine to suffer anyway.

I should have been focused on my mother today, a week or so after I’d left Paris, but all I could think about was Darcy.

She had given me one night. I shouldn’t have wanted more.

Yet I dreamed of her every night—and was daydreaming about her even now as I greeted my mother and sat across the room in the chair closest to the door. Because sometimes she liked to throw things.

“If you have better things to do, Sebastian, don’t let me keep you,” she said when her glass was full. Her voice was the typical mix of petulance and malice that only got worse—and more shrill—the more she drank. I could tell by her pitch that she’d been at it all day.

There were other clues. My mother was a beautiful woman whose vanity had increased with age and insecurity in equal measure. Her version of day drinking involved dressing as if she planned to attend a black-tie ball at any moment, with hair and cosmetics to match. Today she wore a flowing gold gown that made her look like a statuette. Her dark hair was arranged into an elegant coiffure that I knew her staff made certain could withstand a selection of gales.

It was the smudged lipstick that gave her away. The unfocused gaze. And the shadow beneath her eyes that told me she’d already raged and cried, then had tried to wipe the telltale mascara runs away.

I forced myself to smile. “What could be a better thing to do than spend time with my mother?”

“Everything, apparently. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“I was here last month.”

“Last month,” she said, to the walls. As if it hurt her. “Last month, if you please.”

“Mother.” It was harder to keep my voice level and pleasant than it should have been. Harder than it had ever been before. “You know full well I have a company to run.”

She drank from her glass, then sauntered out from behind the settee—and the bar that was always stocked with the finest liquors for her to toss back at will. She swept to the center of the settee and then settled herself, likely imagining she looked regal and haughty, like the queen she sometimes fancied herself. When, instead, she was obviously unsteady, and sloshed whatever she was drinking today over the rim of her glass onto the cushion beside her.

“You spend too much time working. And not nearly enough time with your family.”

She had no idea how I spent my time, but I didn’t bother to point that out. I had long since come to terms with the fact that when my mother addressed me, she was seeing her late husband, not her son. I gave her what he never had: the courtesy of remaining in the room to hear her out, and a response.

“The company is my responsibility,” I said evenly. “It takes up most of my time, but then, it should.”

It took up all of my time and I liked it that way.

All of my time save one memorable night in Paris, that was.

I blinked. Surely I was not going to daydream about my little dancer here and now. In the presence of my mother. I might enjoy shattering taboos now and again in the safety of the club, but that seemed a bridge too far.

“I think it’s high time you found yourself a wife, Sebastian,” she said, high color on her cheeks and something hectic in her eyes as she regarded me. “A good one to settle you. And I don’t trust you to pick her. You’re far too much like your father.”

It always ended this way. On good days she would shower me with love, then smother me with her various protestations. Too quickly, she would veer into insults. I was too much like my father. I was cold, withdrawn. Being near me was like being staked out in a field in the middle of winter, and so on.

Apparently, we were fast-forwarding straight into the insults.

Normally, I took this as part of my penance, too. Because I’d always understood that I really was too much like him. It had been my needing to be too much like him that had led to my attempt to put together that deal. It had been my unearned certainty that I could pull it off that had lost Ash’s money. And lost me Ash in the bargain.

I thought of his raised middle finger across the club bar. Eloquent as always. And I wasn’t sure why that old hollow feeling swept over me again. It was as if I’d left my best armor behind in that suite in Paris. As if Darcy had taken it with her when she’d left me.

She haunted me.

And in all that mess, as always, there was my mother. Needy and demanding, lonely and shrill.

“Why would I ever marry?” I asked, though I knew better than to engage. “I have seen no evidence that you enjoyed your marriage. Or that anyone else does, either.”

“A man like you needs a wife,” she replied. She sniffed. “You can stash her away in a place like this. After all, you will need her to produce an heir at some point.”

“Yes, that was a lovely childhood. I remember it well.”

“You had everything you needed, Sebastian. This is about what I need. A daughter-in-law will fill the space nicely when you’re not here. And I fancy I’d make a darling grandmother, don’t you?”

“I have no intention of marrying,” I said, amazed she was still going on about it. “The notion has never crossed my mind.”

“Sebastian.” Now her expression had turned scornful. “You are a Dumont. Of course you must marry. And pass all of this along to your children. Or what will become of everything you’ve built?”

I had never thought about marriage. Or children. Or any of the supposed joys of domestic bliss that the rest of the world treated like an inevitable hangman’s noose. And yet later, after I escaped my mother that afternoon, I couldn’t think of anything else.

I had always thought of marriage in terms of my parents’. My mother had been in love. My father had been quickly bored. I’d never wanted any part of that. But why not buy what I wanted instead of hoping I happened upon it emotionally?

The more I thought about it, the more I knew that I’d found a solution. Because my mother wasn’t wrong. Men in my position generally produced a few heirs, hoping to train one up behind him. I didn’t want a relationship like my parents’. But then, I didn’t want love or even the pretense of it. I’d stopped believing in love long ago, likely during one of my mother’s unhinged, drunken rants when I was still a child.

That was fine. I preferred the clarity of money. My only friend—my brother—had cut me off because of money. My father had loved nothing but money. And money—a whole lot of money, according to my bankers—had bought me the best night of my life.

Why couldn’t it buy me everything else I needed?

A woman who would sell herself once might just do it again, and with far better incentive this time. And no need to perform a public striptease, either.

The more I considered it, the more I congratulated myself for my brilliance.

And then I set about trying to find her.

I expected it to take a day or so. Instead, it had taken weeks.

But I was here at last. In New York City, standing in a chilly night on a busy sidewalk.

And she wasn’t dressed in feathers, or better still, naked—but there was no denying that it was Darcy. My Darcy.

Whose name, it turned out, really was Darcy, after all.

I had taken that as a sign. I’d given her my real name. And unbeknownst to me, she had done the same.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me, her eyes wide and that fascinating heat climbing into her cheeks. “How did you find me? It’s not supposed to be allowed, is it?”

“I didn’t find you through the club. I found you in spite of the club.” Imogen Carmichael, owner and director of the club, had been surprisingly unforthcoming. She kept quoting contracts I didn’t care about at all. It had been irritating, but I’d persevered. I always did. “I took everything you told me and everything I’d observed about you, and found you.”

I had started with every dark-haired dancer, which was an impossibly wide pool. But I had been so certain that she couldn’t possibly have given me her real name that I didn’t bother to search for it. It wasn’t until one week had turned into two, then a third, that my frustration led me to search for American dancers named Darcy.

I’d found the Knickerbocker Ballet, and her, quickly.

“I have a proposition for you,” I told her.

“I’m not for sale.” She looked wildly around the street where we stood, as if she expected to be overheard in a city that specialized in deliberately not hearing most things. “I shouldn’t have to say that, should I? You asked for another night before and I said no. That’s not going to change just because we’re on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean tonight.”

But she didn’t turn on her heel and walk away. She didn’t order me to stay away from her. The color in her cheeks intensified and her dark eyes seemed fathomless, but she stayed where she was. Right there in front of me, at last.

“I heard you,” I assured her. “I assume that means you sell yourself only under specific circumstances.”

“Once.” She threw that at me, and I didn’t know which one of us was more surprised at how fierce she sounded. “I sold myself once. I have no intention of doing it again.”

I knew I wasn’t a good man. I’d been told so a thousand times, often by my own mother. But that truth was made clear to me then as her words pounded in me. Like heat. Like sex. Like a victory drum.

Once.

Meaning, she had only ever sold herself to me.

As far as I was concerned, that made her mine.

“Are you married?” I asked her. Because her presence in the club meant she was acting out some kind of fantasy, and I needed to establish what it was. There had been no mention of a husband in the materials I’d found about her, but that didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t for me to judge another person’s extracurricular activities outside of their marriage—but if that was what she was doing, she wasn’t for me.

“Of course I’m not married!” She rubbed a hand over her mouth and I saw it was trembling slightly. “I would never… No. I’m not married. Or anywhere close to married.”

“Boyfriend?”

She frowned at me. “What did I just say?”

“Habitual sexual partners?”

Her hand wasn’t trembling anymore. She dropped it. “How is any of this your business? I think we can both agree that you got your money’s worth. That doesn’t give you the right to come here, throw yourself into the middle of my life, and start interrogating me.”

“I apologize.” Though, really, I wasn’t sorry. “It’s not my intention to upset you.”

“I’m not upset.” She looked around again, then scowled. “Come with me.”

She wheeled around, then stomped off toward the intersection. I followed, bemused, because she wasn’t quite the biddable burlesque dancer I remembered. I wondered whether that woman had ever really existed. If she had been as much a part of the act as the suggestive dance and her wings.

A wise man would cut his losses and leave. But when it came to this woman, I discovered I was many things. None of them the least bit wise.

She ushered me into a small dive bar around the corner that seemed remarkably empty.

“It’s early,” she said when I pointed that out. “This is the kind of place you go to on your way out or on your way home. Not in between.”

She lifted two fingers at the bartender as she headed for a U-shaped booth on the back wall, then slid into it. I sat across from her, my initial worry that this had all been foolish fading as she scowled back at me.

Because even scowling, dressed like a real, live woman instead of a wet dream, she made my body…hum. She made me feel alive. She was even more beautiful than I remembered, effortless and elegant with shawls wrapped around her in a way that struck me as far more European than American. And much as I’d liked her on her knees, on all fours, astride me and beneath me, I couldn’t deny the fact that I liked her just as much now that she faced me. Dressed.

My dick just liked her. Full stop.

“Fantasies are just that,” she said after a moment. “Fantasies. They’re not supposed to be real. And the point of that night was that it was meant to be anonymous.”

“You told me your name.”

“You were never supposed to know it was real.”

“But I do know.” I studied her. “Why did you give it to me at all if you were concerned about preserving the fantasy?”

Her scowl deepened, but I could see that flush on her cheeks and after the night we’d spent together, I knew it was the truth of what she was feeling. “It was a regrettable impulse, nothing more.”

“I don’t think so,” I said quietly. “I think you wanted me to know you. And to find you. And Darcy, I have.”

I expected her to scoff at that. But when she only huffed out a breath, then looked down at her hands before her on the table, I knew I was right.

That pounded in me, too. Drums on drums, and my pulse like heat.

The bartender slid two shot glasses filled with clear liquid onto the table between us, and Darcy nodded her thanks. She picked up the small glass nearest her and tossed it back. She didn’t cough or choke. She only blew out another breath, then nodded at me as if she’d settled something.

“Vodka makes everything better. Even unexpected reappearances on the street outside my house.”

I followed suit, feeling the top-shelf liquor burn a smooth, hot trail through me. Then I sat back, still watching her closely. “I’ve never had sex like that in my life. I want more. A lot more.”

Her cheeks burned, but she shrugged. “I already told you, I’m not selling myself again.”

“I’m not asking you to. Or not like that, anyway. As it happens, I also need a wife.”

I didn’t know what I expected, but all she did was sigh. Then roll her eyes. “Of course you do. Also, no.”

“I will eventually need an heir,” I said as if she’d asked. “It occurred to me, as my mother was lecturing me on this topic, that I have no interest in any of the women I’ve ever met. I like them well enough in the moment, but I never think about them again. You, on the other hand, I can’t seem to get out of my head.”

“Maybe you should see a doctor.”

“You have a lovely pedigree, for an American.”

“Be still, my beating heart.”

I ignored that dry little comment. “And even if you did not, the fact remains that I cannot imagine that there’s even the slightest possibility that I will ever draw breath and not want to fuck you. In every possible way.”

She regarded me steadily. Too steadily. “That’s not a good basis for marriage. You must know that.”

“It’s a better basis than most have, as far as I can tell.”

She poked at her shot glass with one finger. “I have received several marriage proposals, you know. One was a desperation sucker punch of a proposal from my first serious boyfriend after I found him in bed with his college study buddy. The other three were from much older men who had never really spent any time with me, but wanted a ballerina to add to their collection. Pathetic, really. And yet all of them seem more romantic than yours.”

I didn’t know why I was smiling. “I’m not a romantic man. I told you. I’ve been surrounded by emotion my whole life, and I want nothing to do with it. But I want this. I want you.”

“I understand that you’re very rich.” Darcy made that sound vaguely sordid. “You’re not the only one who knows how to search the internet. But I have to wonder, what exactly went through your brain as you came here to confront me? What made you think that a woman you don’t know—who you purchased for the express purpose of having sex with, nothing more—could possibly make you a good wife? Even if she wanted to try?”

There were a hundred things I could have said to that. Instead, I decided that there was too much space between us. The booth was shaped like a horseshoe, so I slid over until she was right next to me. I stretched one arm around her shoulders and dropped the other below the table, resting my hand on her thigh.

Then, holding her wide gaze with mine, I slid my hand up her thigh until I could cup her pussy through the sheer leggings she wore. Slowly. Deliberately.

Waiting for her to say no.

But she didn’t.

“Why not?” I asked.

I could feel her heat. Her need. And a surge of dampness that told me everything I needed to know about that night we’d spent together.

It hadn’t been a fluke. She hadn’t been pretending.

“I was playing a role,” she told me now. Primly.

“You can consider marrying me a long-running private theater appointment, if you like.”

“With you in charge, then?”

“Darcy. You like me in charge.”

“People don’t roam around the earth asking strangers to marry them,” she argued. “Not after one night.”

“They don’t typically sell themselves for that night in an exclusive club, either. But here we are.”

“You don’t even know me.” That came out of her in a different kind of voice altogether. Wispier. Quieter. More real, I thought. “And maybe if you did, you wouldn’t think that sex is enough. Because guess what? It’s not.”

“Fair enough.” I smiled at her, while beneath the table, I squeezed her pussy. Once, then again. And I continued, building a rhythm. Feeling her dampness in my palm and the restless motion of her hips. As if she couldn’t help herself. “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way. Darcy James, I want to date you.”

“No,” she said, but her voice was barely there and she was grinding her pussy into my hand.

“What’s life without a little risk?” I murmured, moving closer and getting my mouth on her neck. “I’ll take that as a challenge.”