Читать книгу Dare Collection October 2019 - Margot Radcliffe - Страница 21

Darcy

“I DON’T BELIEVE in love,” Sebastian told me solemnly that first night of our second act. “But I will care for you. I will support you. I will give you anything and everything you desire. This I can promise you.”

“People don’t say that on dates,” I replied, but I wasn’t scowling at him anymore. He’d taken care of my temper with his hand between my legs, right there at the table in my favorite local bar. I’d rocked against him heedlessly, and I’d come almost too fast to believe, hiding my face against his wide shoulder as I fought to hide what was happening. “I think you’ll find it’s considered a little creepy.”

“A risk I’m prepared to take,” he said drily.

I had never intended to see him again. Oh sure, I’d dreamed about him. But before I met him, I’d dreamed about the fantasy that we shared. I told myself that dreaming about him had nothing to do with him, personally. It allowed me to put a face to the fantasy, that was all.

A particularly gorgeous face, as it happened.

“Okay,” I said later that same night, while we fought to catch our breath in the vast king-size bed in the penthouse he stayed in when he was in Manhattan. Because, naturally, he was the kind of man who had property everywhere he might wish to go. Which was lucky, because it turned out our connection hadn’t dimmed any now that we knew each other’s names and were outside the confines of the club. “I guess we can date.”

“You guess?”

“I guess it would be okay. As an experiment. Probably a short experiment.”

“Then I will tell you the rules,” he replied, as if he’d been waiting for me to say that. And more, as if he’d known all along that I would. His mouth curved as I propped myself up, my hands beneath my chin as I sprawled there across his chest. “There will be no one else. Just you and me, you understand?”

“You can make all the rules you want,” I said lazily, because I felt deliciously limp and wrung out. “You’re about to find out that I already have a demanding lover.” I smiled when something dark and hot flashed in those bright blue eyes of his. “The ballet. I’ve yet to meet anyone it doesn’t make wildly, madly jealous. And fast.”

That hot gleam in his eyes changed. He reached over and took a strand of my hair between his fingers. And tugged a little. Not entirely gently.

“You have the ballet. I have a Fortune 500 company. Somehow, I don’t think jealousy will be an issue.”

I didn’t argue, though I knew better. These things always followed the same pattern. Within a month, I would feel smothered. Too many dramatic phone calls, wondering why I never had any time to lavish on him. Too many demands that I skip this or that to spend a little more time together, as if skipping my workouts didn’t directly impact my dancing.

It always came down to a choice. I always chose the ballet, and regretted only the time I’d taken away from it while attempting to appease a new lover.

But Sebastian was beautiful. Dark and demanding. And my half-formed fears that we would only find each other electric within the confines of our Paris fantasy disappeared almost immediately. He’d come to find me here in New York, which I couldn’t pretend I didn’t love. And I had never fit anywhere better or more securely in all my life than in his arms, with him surging deep inside of me, turning me inside out.

Over and over again.

“No other people.” His voice was stern. Just the way I liked it. “And no lies.”

“Has there been a rash of lying that I’m unaware of?” I laughed. “I thought our relationship was remarkably straightforward, actually. Given that until tonight it was literally a transaction.”

“I’d like it to stay that way, as much as possible. I prefer the clarity of commerce. I favor direct conversation over missish half truths.”

I raised a brow at him. “I prefer less male posturing and more applied emotional intelligence.”

Sebastian blinked. “Did you just obliquely suggest that I’m…dumb?”

“Not dumb. Just a man.” But I grinned to take the sting out of it. “If you feel something, say so. Don’t grunt it out, pick a fight, then storm off because you don’t know how to say what’s bothering you.”

“Have I given any indication that I might be likely to do such a thing?”

“I thought we were laying out our ground rules for…whatever this is. Not making pointed commentary. I can do pointed commentary, too, if you want. Just say the word.”

There was something like steel in his gaze, though it was much, much hotter. But he didn’t argue.

“We have a deal,” he said, instead.

And he showed me exactly how he liked to celebrate it.

When I made it in to our morning class the following day, I was a wreck. Miss Fortunato was appalled by my arabesque, and I was so delirious that I only laughed in reply—which was not wise. But it was worth the grueling, painful day that followed, because the night with Sebastian had been that good.

It’s been a total of two nights, I told myself later as I dragged myself home after the show. Two nights are always good. Two nights suck you in and make you believe. It’s the day in and day out that ruins everything.

“That’s life, though, isn’t it?” I ranted at Annabelle a few mornings later. We were on side-by-side ellipticals at the gym, and I was going much faster than usual. Too fast, you might even say, but I didn’t stop. I courted the ache in my quads and glutes. “Everyone wants center stage. The spotlight. They think they’re going to wake up one morning, and boom! There it is. Everything they ever dreamed about, right in front of them on a silver platter. You and I know that’s not how it goes. There’s no such thing as an overnight success. There’s only years upon years of practice. Failures. Rejections and reinvention, over and over again. That’s what success is.”

“You need to stop yelling at me,” Annabelle replied, sounding grumpy as her red ponytail swished back and forth. “You’re making me feel hungover and I didn’t even drink last night.”

I slowed down and bit my tongue. I started counting days. It had never taken more than about two weeks to know that I was wasting my time with a man, and another two to extricate myself. And I expected that a man who would go to the trouble to hunt me down outside of the club’s anonymity would insert himself into my life with a vengeance and stay there, expediting that timeline with all of that arrogance he wore so well.

But Sebastian Dumont wasn’t like any man I’d ever known.

When he told me that he was busy himself, and that it was unlikely he’d find himself jealous of my work or my life, he’d meant it.

I couldn’t leave New York, not as fall rolled on and the season started in earnest. Sebastian’s business took him all over the world, so he spent the week attending to a hotel chain here, a negotiation over some islands there. He flew back in at some point on the day before my weekly day off, and I would always leave those shows amped and way overexcited as I headed for the penthouse overlooking Central Park, where so far, we spent almost all of our time naked. Or nearly naked.

He would greet me at the door and most of the time, we didn’t make it much farther. We needed each other, hard and deep and now. We tore off each other’s clothes. We fought to get close. He lifted me against his body and I wrapped myself around him, anchoring myself to him and groaning out the unbearable pleasure of it when finally—finally—he was inside me again.

It was only after we took the edge off—sometimes more than once—that we moved on to other things. Conversation, for example.

At first, it was almost hesitant. Like it really was the early stages of dating someone, without sex or the club or the rest of it.

“I didn’t realize you had a brother,” I said on one of those nights, wearing his shirt like a robe as I sat in the spacious, modern kitchen. Sebastian, it turned out, might not be a gourmet chef, but he could throw together a basic meal, and usually did, because I was always hungry after a show. And after our extended greetings. He always had big plans for the rest of the night, which went on into my one day off each week that required I keep up my strength. “By which I mean, you seem to have kept that pretty quiet on the internet, which is hard to do.”

“It’s not a secret,” he said. I’d gotten to know him better as October had rained and blustered its way into November, weeks passing without the usual irritants—which I opted not to pay too much attention to, in case that made it change. I’d gotten to know him well enough that the shift from how he normally spoke to me—open, focused, and always commanding—to this stiffness was…jarring. “But it also isn’t something that either one of us likes to talk about if we can avoid it.”

“Why?”

He slid the omelet he’d made onto my plate and set it before me on the granite countertop. He raked his hand through his hair, then frowned. “We aren’t close.”

“Is that a good thing or bad thing?” I asked. It had been a good show and even better sex, and I was buzzing along nicely. But I could feel my stomach growling, so I picked up my fork and dug in. “Siblings fascinate me. I always wanted one.”

“When I discovered I had a brother, I was overjoyed,” Sebastian said, almost idly, when he was never idle. “It was all I had ever wanted.”

“When did you discover it?” Because that was a weird way to talk about the arrival of a baby brother, surely. Usually there were stories about mommy’s belly and the hospital and all that baby wailing. Not…discoveries.

“When my father saw to it that we were both enrolled in the same boarding school in the same year,” Sebastian said. His blue gaze met mine, and I froze. That was how cold it was. “Ash and I do not share a mother. But no son of my father’s could be raised without the benefit of the education my father values above every other thing on this earth, save money. And if I’m honest, I always suspected that what the old man really liked was the idea of the two of us at each other’s throats. Because that meant he was always the focus, as he believed he deserved to be.”

I was still hungry, but I put my fork down. Especially when Sebastian’s lips twisted.

“But Ash and I became best friends, instead. It was my rebellion, I suppose.”

“Best friends. But you said you weren’t close…?”

“We were close in school. Inseparable, in fact. My mother is a drunk who periodically pretends to dry out but never does. My father was cruel and delighted in it. In many ways, Ash was the only person I was ever close to.”

That was sad enough. But what struck me was that he didn’t say it as if he expected pity. He just said it. Matter-of-factly. That broke my heart all the more.

Even though I knew my heart wasn’t supposed to be involved in this.

“After university, we decided we should take it a step further and go into business together. Our success would be yet another two fingers to the old man. We each put up half the capital. Ash urged caution. He wasn’t sure he liked our potential investors or the fine print. But I didn’t care. I wanted to get the deal done, so I could throw it into my father’s face.”

He was silent for a long moment, a faraway look on his face that struck me as…sad.

I wanted nothing more than to go to him, and hold him, and try to somehow make him less alone than he seemed then. But I didn’t quite dare. He was too remote. Too self-contained and forbidding. I liked those things about him, especially during sex.

But for the first time, I wondered what it must have cost him to become those things. And what he’d lost.

“I’m guessing it didn’t go well.”

I tried to keep that ache out of my voice and off my face.

“We lost everything.” He shook his head. “But when I say that, what I mean is that Ash lost everything. I lost my savings, my father’s respect, and the confidence of the corporate world. But Ash didn’t have what I had. My father might have paid for his schooling, but he didn’t pay for anything else. Whatever I might have lost, I still had a roof over my head and my job in the family company, no matter what. I was not only reckless and out of control, it had literally never occurred to me how much more Ash had to lose.”

He winced at that, all these years later. And my poor heart kicked at me, foolishly.

“Sure,” I said. “But you didn’t lose all your money at him, right?”

Sebastian frowned at me. “As far as Ash was concerned, I was a liar. Untrustworthy and despicable, just like our father, or how else could I have ruined us both so completely? Maybe on some level he was waiting all those years for me to prove that I was no better than the old man. And how could I argue with that? He didn’t want my explanations. Our father died not long after, and left everything to me. It doesn’t surprise me that Ash reckoned I might have known that would happen. Maybe I even went so far as to set him up to take that fall, knowing I’d have it cushy enough in a few years’ time.”

“That sounds a little far-fetched to me. This is your life you’re talking about, not a soap opera.”

He let out a short laugh. “You didn’t know my father. When I tell you he was cruel, I mean that. He held grudges forever, but none so potent as the grudges against his own sons. If he was alive he would tell you that had all been in aid of toughening us up. But I doubt it.” Sebastian shook his head. “I think he liked causing us trouble and pain, the more the merrier.”

“He sounds awful,” I said quietly. Suddenly, my father’s cherry-picked stories and endless mustached years seemed almost cute in comparison. “And I know what it’s like not to have a brother, Sebastian. But I have to think it’s much worse to have one, then lose him. Is there no way…?”

Sebastian’s expression shut down, like a door slamming shut. “None.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think my parents know how to love anything, either,” I said. Brightly, even. “Especially not me.”

And it wasn’t until the words were sitting there between us, like a garnish on the omelet he’d made me, that I realized I’d never said it quite so baldly before. Not to another person, certainly.

“Maybe that’s not fair,” I continued in a kind of panic before he could say anything. And before I could think better of it. “They might very well love their sophisticated friends. Their summers in Bar Harbor and their season tickets to the opera. But not their daughter.” I pretended I couldn’t hear the catch in my voice. “Definitely not that.”

“Then they’re fools.” Sebastian’s voice was dark. Stirring. And when he looked at me, that shut-down look faded, to be replaced by a heat I recognized. “And you need to eat, little dancer. You’ll need your stamina.”

The weeks kept passing. We spent what little time we had free with each other. And slowly but surely, we communicated more the rest of the time. He liked to call me before I went to bed, sometimes purely to hear my voice. Other times so he could whisper filthy things down the line, and the two of us could drive each other crazy while apart.

I couldn’t possibly say which I liked better. Yes, I would think. Both.

And it wasn’t until the run up to Christmas—which was to say, Nutcracker season—that I realized it had been more than a month. More than two months, in fact, and going on three. Now and again I daydreamed about throwing it all in and joining Winston’s company. But the bulk of my daydreams were spent on Sebastian.

And in acting them out.

I still wasn’t sick of him. He hadn’t irritated me at all.

But the holidays meant the Knickerbocker put on The Nutcracker, which meant even more shows than usual to meet the demand for Tchaikovsky’s music and the traditional Christmas story. I was impressed that Sebastian had lasted as long as he had, really I was, but there was a reason we call it Nutcracker season.

Because walnuts weren’t the only nuts it cracked.

It took out would-be lovers left and right.

“I’m exhausted,” Annabelle said as we sat on the bench in the studio one December afternoon in what little downtime we had between matinees. “I’ve hit that point when I’m so tired I don’t even want to have sex.”

I laughed. “A fate worse than death.”

Annabelle rolled her eyes. “You joke. But losing my libido is like losing a piece of my soul.”

“Who gets the luxury of a soul this time of year?” our friend Bernard asked from Annabelle’s other side as he bandaged up the calf that was giving him trouble. “You’re lucky if you get to survive. Soul or no soul.”

And a few nights later, after the third consecutive night in a row that I hadn’t gotten on the phone with him and hadn’t had the energy to respond to a text—after a previous week of much the same—I wasn’t particularly surprised to find Sebastian waiting for me at the stage door after our last performance.

“Bye-bye, Mr. Penthouse,” Annabelle murmured in my ear as she left me there to deal with the stern, beautiful man in his exquisite suit who stood there next to a long, low car that gleamed beneath the streetlights. But she didn’t say it unkindly.

I hadn’t told her that I’d met Sebastian at the club. I doubted I would tell anyone that I had ever been to M Club, and certainly not what I’d gotten up to while I’d been there. Instead, I’d told her that I’d met him around the corner from our apartment in our favorite dive bar. Which wasn’t entirely untrue.

Just my luck, she’d grumbled. I’ve slept with most of New York and I can’t find a man like that. All you have to do is have a single drink on your way back home from a tedious dinner with your parents and it’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, hello Central Park West.

But she was Annabelle, so her grumpiness had quickly turned into support.

We all knew how rare it was for something to survive our grueling schedule. I got more than a few sympathetic looks from other members of the company as they streamed past me, until they were swallowed up in the cold New York night.

I was bone tired, so tired that I thought I might actually burst into tears, and I didn’t want that. Not when I was very much afraid that he was about to break my heart all on his own. You need to save your tears, Darcy, I told myself sternly.

I let him usher me into his car, and slumped there bonelessly on the wide back seat as he slid in after me. The car pulled away from the curb and I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing that I had paid more attention to those rules he’d laid out at the beginning. Mainly the part where he’d said that he didn’t believe in love and had little tolerance for feelings.

Because I felt neck deep in feelings and drowning, as it happened. But I figured that whatever he was about to say—however he was going to do it, this inevitable breakup that I didn’t want at all—it was the time to share them.

“Sebastian,” I began.

“Quiet, little dancer,” was all he said, in that voice that I remembered from Paris. Strong and sure. Controlled.

I didn’t realize that I’d fallen asleep until he was lifting me into his arms and carrying me out of the car. He didn’t put me down as he stepped into his private elevator with its own private entrance to the building, and I was more than okay with it. That meant I could pretend a little while longer. I could rest my head on his shoulder. Lose myself in his arms.

Pretend this could last forever, the way I’d started to imagine it might.

I expected him to let loose when we walked inside the penthouse, but he didn’t. He carried me through one high-ceilinged, scrupulously elegant room after the next, until he brought me into the bathroom next to the master suite. He didn’t have a giant pool masquerading as a bath like the club had offered us in Paris, but it was an elegant, claw-foot tub all the same. It wasn’t until he sat me down beside it that I realized it was already filled. And the water was steaming. Ready.

“Sebastian. I don’t…”

“Get in,” he ordered me. “Soak.”

And I didn’t think I was the only one who shuddered a bit as the echoes of Paris swirled there between us.

Just like I had in Paris, I obeyed him.

Because it felt good to let him take control. It felt like freedom to simply…surrender. The way that fearsome woman in that Fifth Avenue brownstone had suggested so long ago.

After the bath, he fed me. He iced my feet, then helped me apply my favorite ointments and bandage them up. He didn’t speak. I thought that certainly he would exact some form of payment in the currency we both liked best—but instead, he merely put me to bed.

And in the morning, he was gone when I woke.

But he had left strict instructions with his staff. And from that night on, whether he was in town or across the world, I was met after every performance. There was always a tub waiting, and all the ice packs and easily digestible protein a girl could want.

It lulled me into a sense of security.

Christmas came and went. Nutcracker season was almost over. Sebastian had arrived two days before from his Christmas with his mother in England, and I would have known that he’d seen her even if he hadn’t told me.

He held himself differently. His mouth was tighter, his eyes bleaker.

The great benefit of what I did was that I had to do it on Christmas Day. Which meant I couldn’t head up north to celebrate the holiday with my parents. An arrangement that had suited all of us for years now.

“I can’t wait for New Year’s,” I said, because I had it off. I smiled at him. “I’m hoping it will snow you in and we can sit here, just like this.”

We were in the study, my favorite room in his penthouse. There was a fireplace with a delightful fire, the cold weather outside held at bay, and I had wrapped myself in one of the soft cashmere throws that lay over the leather furniture. Sebastian sat beside me, a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and his brooding gaze on the dancing flames.

We were both, for the moment, sated.

“We can do that,” he said. He shifted that brooding gaze from the fire to my face. “But I need you to marry me.”

This time, I laughed, though my heart leaped inside my chest. “You realize you’re talking about a lifetime of tending to these feet. A lifetime of Nutcracker season, when you’re lucky if I rise to the level of brain-dead for the entire month of December. At least.”

His mouth curved, and I got the sense—as I often did—that he surprised himself when he smiled. “I understand what it is to do what you love. And what sacrifices it requires.”

His hand was on the nape of my neck, because he liked to hold it there. As if he liked to know exactly where I was at all times when we were together. And I liked the weight of his hand there. It centered me. Connected me to him and reminded me of Paris. All these weeks since. And the mad fire that still roared between us. No matter how many times we surrendered to it, stoked it and immolated ourselves, still it burned on.

“Do I love it?” I asked, and I wasn’t sure as the words came out of my mouth whether the question was as rhetorical as I’d meant it to sound. “It’s a complicated love, at best. Sometimes I think I hate it. You dream of being a ballerina. You don’t dream about being that girl in the back. Especially when the amount of work is the same. But you’re doing it, so you dance. And you give it everything you have. And the sad truth is that some people have that thing. That spark that sets them apart. And others don’t, no matter how hard they work. Maybe it’s not about work. Maybe it’s luck. The right dancer and the right choreographer and the right ballet… I don’t know.”

Sebastian’s gaze seemed to sharpen on me. “Does it matter how your success can be measured? Or does it matter that it’s what you love?”

“I love ballet.” I didn’t understand why it felt as if I was making vows. Here, now. And at some great risk that made my chest feel tight. “I love everything about it. The obsession with form. How strict it is. How rigid. All in service to that flow. That perfect flight. But it doesn’t matter how much you love some things, does it? Loving them doesn’t mean they bring you any joy. The act of loving something doesn’t make it good for you.”

“Are you talking about ballet, Darcy?” His voice was crisp. His eyes burned. “Or me?”

I was flustered suddenly. “I’m just talking.”

“I never told you I would bring you joy. Or that I would be good for you, whatever that is.” He sounded fierce. Remote. “I guaranteed you orgasms. And anything else you could possibly want, the moment you want it. Why isn’t that enough?”

“I didn’t say it was or wasn’t enough.” I studied his face. “Is this about me? Because I was talking about ballet.” Or I thought I had been. “Is this what happens when you spend time with your mother?”

“You don’t understand.” Sebastian got to his feet, moving restlessly toward the window. Outside, the city looked cold and bright. As if it was filled with chilly light, not all those lives. “It’s not her fault.”

“Yes, yes. Your father was cruel.” I rolled my eyes. “But he died a long time ago. And she’s a grown woman. At what point does a person have to take responsibility for their own happiness?”

He turned back around. And he looked like a stranger, then. Something in me, some kind of panic, coiled tight.

“Why do you continue in the ballet if you don’t love it, Darcy?” he fired back at me. “If it doesn’t make you happy, why do it at all?”

That felt like a kick, as if he’d taken out a knee, and I found I was curling my hands into fists in my lap.

Are you really lecturing me on happiness? I wanted to shout, but I didn’t. I made myself stay calm—or look calm, anyway. “Do you even know what happy is, Sebastian? Your mother’s horrible to you and you let her do it. Your brother stopped talking to you years ago, and you accepted it. You don’t love me, as you make sure to tell me in case I get ideas, but you still want to marry me. Why?”

“What would you have me do? Throw my mother on the street? Force my brother to revisit the most painful time of his life when that’s clearly not what he wants?”

I noticed he didn’t touch the marriage thing. And that made me clench my fists even harder.

“All I’m saying is that if we’re talking about pursuing happiness tonight, you could start with yourself.” There was something wild in that bright blue gaze of his that seemed to match that panicked thing in me. I should have stopped. I told myself to stop. But I didn’t. “Maybe try to practice what you preach, Sebastian.”

“I thought you understood,” he said, and he sounded…different. Something like foreboding prickled down the length of my spine. “I thought it was clear. Happiness is for other people. I don’t deserve it.”