Читать книгу The Risk / Friends With Benefits - Margot Radcliffe - Страница 12

Sebastian

I WOULD ORDINARILY avoid a burlesque show or anything resembling such a thing like the plague.

I was a man of discipline. I had been ruled by my passions precisely once, and it had cost me. Now I indulged them as I pleased, but only as far as I could control them. I did not leap heedlessly into spontaneity. I did nothing heedlessly at all.

And I certainly did not vie for the attention of women.

I preferred directness to coy flutterings and anything involving glitter or bejeweled bikinis—which was the only thing the woman descending from ribbons in the ballroom appeared to be wearing as she writhed about—but I found myself watching the M Club burlesque show anyway. I was a longtime member of the world’s most exclusive club, membership by invitation only and based entirely on net worth, and these charity displays were part of the package. The membership made charitable gestures a few times a year, the better to disguise the true purpose of the club as far as I was concerned.

Which was business. And when business was concluded, excess in controlled circumstances. Meaning no press, no scrutiny, and no possibility of anyone emerging later with blackmail fodder.

I had not been expecting to see my half brother tonight.

I hadn’t been expecting to see Ash anywhere, for that matter. He had suffered the most from my one and only hotheaded decision all those years ago and had hated me ever since—a feeling he expressed by competing with my luxury hotel business, disrupting what deals he could and generally making sure I knew he would never, ever forgive me my error.

I didn’t forgive myself, either.

Ash Evans had been my best friend and closest, most trusted ally during our boarding school years, a relationship that had flourished despite—or because—we both knew our father had intended for us to hate each other. Ash was my father’s illegitimate son; his very existence, and the affair right under my mother’s nose that had made him, had been the final hail of bullets that had broken my mother’s heart and made her the brittle, fragile woman she was to this day.

Our friendship had been unlikely. Its end inevitable.

Ash had saluted my surprise at seeing him here tonight in a manner only he could, with one finger raised high at the bar. In the scruffy jeans and a T-shirt that extended that same fuck you to the entirety of the club and all its members. Much as the Ash I’d known well when we were kids had always done in our aristocratic boarding school.

If he wasn’t so dedicated to my downfall, I might have admired him. The way I always had.

After Ash stalked off—no need to speak when he’d already been so eloquent—I found myself restless. I normally saved that sort of drumbeat and drive for my business, especially when I so often had to fight off Ash’s attempts to steal deals out from under me.

Making money was my religion and I its high priest. But it was not until tonight, when the brother who called me his betrayer stirred things up like a stone tossed into a quiet pool, that I realized how much I had come to view the club as my sanctuary. For both business and pleasure.

There were very few places that a man like me could indulge himself, in a controlled manner or otherwise, without having to fear the consequences. There were no tabloids within the M Club’s walls in a handful of major cities across the globe. No stray mobile phone cameras to record indiscretions and use them for extortion or favors. This was a place where names were known, but rarely spoken. Where kings brushed shoulders with self-made captains of industry, we all played as hard as we bargained, and the outside world faded to irrelevance.

I had learned from my mistakes. I kept my temptations transactional.

And I confined them to the walls of the club.

I had come here tonight to smile for the paparazzi outside on one of the few nights the club permitted them access. And much as I knew the club liked its members to show up for their charity events, I wouldn’t have come if there hadn’t been another, more strategic reason. There was a man, John Delaney, with Caribbean islands for sale and I wanted them for my next five-star resort. I’d seen him in the bar and had been talking to his assistant when I’d seen Ash.

And Ash had flipped me off.

Which was as good as a billboard announcing that Ash had come for the same reason I had: he wanted those islands.

In that moment, a familiar swell of emotions had charged through me. Guilt. Temper. But it all swirled around to the same end. Ash would never forgive me. He would take whatever he could.

And I would let him, because I had brought it on myself.

I had been so cocky about my friendship with Ash when we’d been young. It had been a burr in my father’s side, and I’d enjoyed that because I had hated him. Not only because young men must hate their fathers at one point or another if they wish to grow, but because of how he’d hurt my mother.

It hadn’t occurred to me then that my friendship with Ash had hurt her, too.

All I did was hurt those I loved. I understood that now. And I loved no one and nothing. I cared for my mother, who confined her alcoholism to the walls of the listed house in Surrey that had become her very own prison, but called me almost nightly with her slurred accusations and tears. I did not mourn my father. And I cared for my angry half brother, too, in my fashion—by now and again bowing out of negotiations like this one because I kept imagining that if he took enough from me, his hatred of me would ease.

Ash had to have crossed the line to become a billionaire to enter these premises and he showed no sign of stopping.

But I would keep paying my penance.

And I would never love again, no matter what.

I had made myself one of the most powerful men in the world by following those two cardinal rules.

And tonight I decided I needed a little something extra to soothe away the sting of my unacknowledged atonement.

I left the bar, and avoided the ballroom with its caterers and aerial displays. I wanted something less public. I made my way through the crowd, choosing not to meet the gazes of any acquaintances as I headed for one of the smaller rooms off the ballroom. Rooms that were called by anodyne names like the study or the library but were, like tonight, transformed into more intimate venues. The club never threw one show when ten would do.

I was focused on what small slice of oblivion I could court while still retaining my faculties.

I settled myself in the dark in the library, in one of the plush booths that were supposedly for reading or business but often played other roles on nights like this, when the library had been made over into a performance space. I ordered the finest whiskey, grimacing in respect as it burned, then warmed me. But then I found myself in the suggestive shadows of the long, high room, much closer to the stage than I’d intended.

The music was hypnotic. Beneath it, the faint sounds of pleasure from the booths around me. A gasp here, a groan there.

I didn’t know what to do with the edginess in me. It felt almost brutal in its intensity. So I watched the show before me and ordered another drink.

The woman on the stage was beautiful, but I expected nothing less. Unlike the aerial performers in the ballroom, this woman did not soar overhead. She was performing an elaborate striptease that held as much humor as temptation, and I wondered idly who the act was aimed at.

My cock did not require costumes to get hard.

I swirled my drink in my hand, liking the dark and the relative privacy of the booth. I didn’t want anyone—especially my half brother—gloating over the agitation I was sure was visible on my face. One of the reasons I loved the club was that it permitted me these opportunities to disappear in plain sight.

I had been running the family corporation since my father’s unlamented death, not long after I had lost both Ash and my savings. A stupid move that would have haunted me whether Ash hated me or not. I had believed that our too-good-to-be-true investors were on the level, because I’d wanted so badly for the deal to work. Instead, they’d walked away with all of our money and we’d been left with nothing to show for it.

Ash had warned me. I’d ignored him.

Thanks to that loss, I was a much more careful CEO than I had been an upstart junior executive cutting his teeth in the big leagues. I’d been so certain that deal was Ash’s springboard to legitimacy in the only realm that mattered to our father—the corporate world. I’d thought it would prove my mettle, too.

Instead, it had made everything worse.

My father had died thinking I was an idiot and Ash was unscrupulous. The failed deal had wiped Ash out and made him hate me. My mother had spent six months pretending to dry out in an exclusive facility somewhere in America while recovering from the shock and betrayal she’d felt that I’d been in business with Ash in the first place.

I’d been made CEO amid plunging stocks and a thousand articles in business journals smugly predicting that I would run the company into the ground just as I’d lost all my money once already in a stupid, speculative gamble. I hadn’t.

But it had required a long, extended fight. It had taken everything I had. It still did. I had enemies and business associates, nothing else, and depending on the deal they were often one and the same. I’d learned to love the fight.

And these days I didn’t take unnecessary gambles without performing exhaustive risk assessments first.

It was only in the dark, in rooms like this, that I could simply...be. No fight. No fury. No high risks with even higher consequences.

The woman on the stage, too perky and blond for my tastes tonight, faded off. The music changed, becoming brooding and sensual.

A new dancer took the stage.

And everything...shifted.

One moment I’d been idly wondering how anyone found shows like these provocative, something better suited to the kind of hearty stag nights I was happily never invited to attend.

In the next, I was as hard and ready as if the woman on stage had leaned forward and wrapped her hands around my cock, then bathed me with her tongue.

I sat forward, my drink forgotten.

She looked tall, though she wasn’t. There was a certain willowy quality to her, lithe and slender. She wore the same bejeweled bikini that all the others did, but on her, all I saw was the sparkle. The sensual shine. Even the headdress she wore was captivating, feathered and inviting.

And she had wings. Great, feathered white wings that she used to conceal and then reveal her exquisitely toned body as she danced.

Like an angel already decidedly fallen.

She danced like liquid. She was art and sex in sultry motion, a feathered being that couldn’t possibly be real. But I was so close to the stage I could see her breathe. I could very nearly smell the scent of her. Her eyes were luminous and wicked, her hips were a wonder, and her sultry mouth wasn’t hitched into an unconvincing smile.

It was pure temptation.

I was vaguely aware that she was doing some routine. A shifting of hips and dance steps of some description that only drew my attention to what little she wore beneath those feathers she opened and closed as if she was tempting me, personally. Sparkling stones covered her breasts, holding them aloft and leaving the sweep of her glorious abdomen bare. More bright, shining stones covered her pussy and rippled as she did. Her legs were like poetry. She wasn’t simply toned. She was strong.

I felt her everywhere.

And at some point during her performance on the intimate stage before me, she saw me there in the audience.

I felt the electric pulse of the connection. The crackle of it. I was certain every hair on my body stood on end.

What I felt was like a fury. That driving. That impossible. That dark and all consuming.

Soon it became clear that she danced for me. She still didn’t smile. Her eyes seemed heavy to me, thick with secrets, and she found me in the dark.

Again and again, she found me.

As if she knew.

Who I was. What I’d done.

What I needed.

When she was done with her routine, she walked down the stairs at the side of the temporary stage and was almost instantly swept up in a throng of admirers. I couldn’t blame the men and women who wanted a piece of her. Who wouldn’t?

But I was having none of it. I wanted her.

I wanted her with that all-consuming fury that I was very much afraid was desperation. But a desperate man was a determined one, and I’d built an empire on the strength of my determination.

What was one night?

I cut my way through the crowd, and I knew she was aware of me coming. I could feel that awareness like my own blood in my veins, thick and insistent. And then I was before her.

Her gaze locked to mine and I couldn’t breathe. And, oddly, didn’t care.

I was dimly aware that I must have looked angry. Menacing, perhaps, given the second glances others threw my way.

But my dancer—my dancer—didn’t look the slightest bit afraid.

“I want you,” I told her baldly. “Now.”

That sultry, pouty mouth did not curve, and I wanted it beneath mine. And all over my body. But her eyes sparkled. “Do you always issue orders like that? Do you just...snap your fingers and watch your minions jump to do your bidding?”

I was surprised she sounded American. No one walked around the club with a name tag on, it was true. Still, it was a long while since I had gotten the impression that someone did not recognize me. I was Sebastian Dumont. I had been born rich, and had made myself infinitely wealthier after that one, early failure. After losing my fortune, I’d doubled it before I was twenty-five. Tripled it by thirty. And I very rarely succumbed to want.

Because there was so very rarely something to want that I didn’t already have.

“Yes,” I gritted out. “Is that how you jump? I like your dancing better.”

I was vaguely aware that the rest of her fans had peeled off, no doubt recognizing the ferocity of my claim.

Or, more likely, the fact that she looked only at me.

It would have felt like a triumph if I’d already been inside her.

She gazed at me a moment. Something indefinable moved through her dark eyes. I could have sworn she hesitated, when the women who came to the club as part of its offerings were usually far more overt.

But then she tipped her head, the feathers on her headdress swaying as she moved, and it was hypnotic. She was.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how much?” she asked.

This was familiar ground. I liked the purity of a transaction. Compensation for goods and services, no muss and no fuss. But this woman was already like a madness in my veins. I had the strangest thought that there was nothing I wouldn’t do to have her. Nothing at all.

I wanted her no matter the cost.

I didn’t care that the club normally handled these things far more discreetly and behind the scenes. There was something refreshing in discussing it openly. It put us both on the same page, with no possibility of later confusion.

Better still, it made my dick ache.

“I don’t care what you charge,” I growled. “Name a price.”

“That would be vulgar.”

But then—at last—her lips curved, and there was something wicked and innocent in it. Angel and devil and, my God, I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted her.

I leaned forward, unable to keep my hands to myself. I traced her lips with my thumb, and that electric charge between us ignited.

Her lips were soft, with a hint of wetness that drove me wild and had me imagining what sort of dance she could perform with that mouth. She smelled sweet, with a hint of musk that reminded me she’d just performed.

I wanted a far different performance.

I wanted everything.

I wanted.

I lifted a finger and a member of staff materialized before me.

“Whatever the price,” I told the man without looking at him. “No cap.”

“Very good,” the man murmured. Then he pressed a key into my hand. “Please enjoy Suite Six, monsieur.”

I took her hand in mine, marveling at the slide of skin on skin. It was a lush little preview.

“Very good,” she said, as if daring me.

Challenge accepted, I thought.

I drew her with me. The private rooms of the club were accessed through the sweeping stair out front, and I didn’t care who watched me take my prize with me to the second floor. I wasn’t sure I would have cared if it ended up in the tabloids. That was how much I wanted this woman.

We didn’t speak as we walked. I held her hand, led her behind me and wondered how I could possibly keep my cock from unmanning me as I moved.

When we reached the suite I drew her inside. As with all things involving the club, the private suite was exquisite. Quiet elegance in all its details and Paris at our feet and, far more important for my purposes, privacy.

She was mine.

I had bought her for the night.

And I had never felt something as primitive as the dark thing that beat in me then.

Need. Desire.

Destiny, something whispered, but I shoved it aside.

“Strip,” I ordered her, hardly trusting my own voice. “I want to see you.”

Again, I thought I caught a moment of hesitation. The cynical part of me chimed in then and told me it was because she was a professional. She knew how to inflame a man’s desires with these little bread crumbs that hinted at an innocence she might never have possessed.

Her regular punters must like it.

I liked it, and I was no punter. Regular otherwise.

Anyway, I didn’t care that she hadn’t left the show onstage. I wanted her too much.

We were standing there in the grand foyer of the suite, with a chandelier sparkling above and a marble floor at our feet. Just beyond, there was a living area with sturdy couches and thick rugs. A million surfaces on which to enjoy her, but I needed her naked. Right now.

When she didn’t move, I only lifted a brow. And waited.

She didn’t smile, but she started with her headdress. She pulled out a few pins, then lifted it up and off her head. She held it aloft and looked at me inquiringly.

I nodded toward the ground between us.

My little dancer set it down gingerly, then released her hair, rubbing her fingers through the thick length of it, releasing into the air between us the scent of ripe apples. Her shampoo, presumably.

I hissed in a breath as if the scent would send me over the edge. It nearly did.

Bread crumbs, I snarled at myself.

She leaned down much the way she had onstage to unlace one shoe. Then the other. Then she stepped out of them, leaning to one side and balancing her fingers against the wall, her eyes half lidded and fixed to mine.

And lost about six inches, making her even tinier than I’d imagined.

Perfectly sized to lift and move and handle as I wished.

Her wings were dispensed of with a few tugs behind her shoulders, which she did herself. Showing me all the ways she was flexible. Limber.

My mouth was dry.

Her hair tumbled around her shoulders as she reached behind her and unwrapped those shining jewels from around her breasts.

“That’s enough,” I growled.

Because I knew that if I saw her fully naked right now, this would end far too soon.

This round, I amended.

She would be no businesswoman at all if she didn’t take me for the fortune I had offered her, and that meant I intended to get my money’s worth.

Again and again.

But something else had happened as she stood there with her angel’s wings in a feathery cloud around her and that stark, wicked invitation on her face.

It had suddenly become wildly important to me that she want me, if not as much as I wanted her, then at least enough.

Enough to shiver. Enough to ache.

Just as I did.

“Show me,” I commanded her. “Touch yourself, little dancer, and show me exactly how much you want me.”