Читать книгу The Risk / Friends With Benefits - Margot Radcliffe - Страница 16

Sebastian

SHE CALLED HERSELF DARCY, and her eyes were big and brown and shaded with what looked like vulnerability.

I told myself that was what she wanted me to see. That it was not cynicism to remember that she was a treat I’d bought myself, an act to witness rather than a date to attempt to trust. It was reality.

Though, of course, I came to the club because I liked my reality filtered by their expert selection of possibilities. I wasn’t the kind of man who was turned on by purchasing a stranger off a street corner. It was more accurate to say I wasn’t turned off by transactional sex—in the right setting. With the correct controls in place. I didn’t have to ask my dancer if she was safe or sane, or whether this encounter was consensual. I knew it was or she wouldn’t be here.

But consensual didn’t necessarily mean she couldn’t keep her hands off me. It was entirely possible what turned her on was my net worth, not the magic I could work with my cock.

There were some nights I might have cared about that. Tonight wasn’t one of them.

Whatever had brought her here to me, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

I felt like a new man. As if she’d cleansed me, somehow, of all the darkness and guilt that had hung over me earlier. As if she’d made me brand-new.

It should have been just sex, quite a lot of it. But it hadn’t felt like just anything to me.

And I had spent so many years trying to atone for my rashness. My mistakes. I’d spent a lifetime making myself responsible and dutiful to make up for the one time I’d been neither.

But tonight I felt filled with rashness. Hollowed out by greed.

All I wanted was...more.

I ignored the alarms that set off. I dimmed the lights and hit the other switch that lit up the electric candles that sat in sconces all over this room. Then I went to the tub that was more of a small swimming pool and climbed in, letting the hot water envelop me. The world I’d left outside this suite could wait. Ash. The endless negotiations over this deal or that. My mother’s endless demands. The life I’d built so deliberately, so carefully. I knew it would all be there after I lost myself in my lovely little dancer.

I found a seat on one of the interior benches, then pulled her toward me.

“Kneel here,” I said, low and dark.

And the way she moved was endlessly fascinating to me. It was as if she didn’t have a bone in her body. As if she was entirely made of supple, glorious muscle and grace. She didn’t slosh around in the hot water. Instead, she flowed as she moved from where she’d been sitting to kneel in the place I’d indicated, between my legs.

She’d piled her hair on top of her head, and the steam from the tub was making curls of the strands twist down. I knew it was humidity, that was all, but it seemed like magic. As she settled there on her knees between my outstretched legs, the water caught her at her breasts. And once again, I found myself unable to look away from her nipples, hard and proud. I reached out and found one of the soft, porous sponges along the rim of the tub, squeezed some of the provided gel into it and handed it to her.

“Make yourself soapy. Squeaky clean, Darcy, if you please. We have a long night ahead of us.”

She laughed, but she didn’t argue. She didn’t throw out something suggestive, as I half expected. She only took the sponge I offered her, dipped it in the water and kept her melting brown gaze on mine as she slowly began to work it down one side of her elegant neck.

My mouth went dry.

It was another performance, I knew. Another dance. She might not have been removing her clothes, but she still commanded the stage. And every last bit of my attention.

I watched her, as wildly greedy as a man who hadn’t just come—so hard it had left me something like dizzy, so I’d had to remove myself until I’d regained my control. She smoothed the sponge down the length of one arm, over each of her fingers, then up the other arm. Then she knelt up higher and arched her back in that way of hers that I thought might haunt me for the rest of my days, tracking hot water and soapy bubbles across one breast and proud nipple, then the other.

It was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen, especially because I knew how she tasted. How her pussy gripped me when she came. And all the hungry noises she made while she fought to take all of my cock.

“How are you enjoying Paris?” I found myself asking her, perhaps because it was the sort of question a man might ask a woman in more innocuous circumstances. Over a sedate dinner, perhaps. While pretending not to notice the stultifying boredom. “Will you be staying here long?”

“Maybe I live in Paris.” She grinned. “In a charming garret, the way you’re supposed to live here. Or maybe I have no particular home at all. And merely roam about the planet, wherever the wind takes me. Then again, maybe this is my secret life and I spend the rest of my time as a very junior accountant in an unremarkable suburb somewhere.”

“Pick a life, Darcy,” I drawled, enjoying the way she played with herself, arching this way and that with all of her mouthwatering flexibility. “And tell it to me like a bedtime story.”

“Are we going to bed?” she asked, and there was more than simple feminine awareness in her gaze, then. It was shot through with something else. I wanted to call it delight, but I told myself I was making that up. Putting it where it didn’t belong. Making this something it wasn’t. Something I shouldn’t want it to be. “That’s not where I thought this was heading, sir. If I’m honest.”

“Make sure it’s a good story, then. And who knows where we’ll end up?”

My own words seemed to sit in me strangely. As if they were too heavy, or too ripe with something I refused to call foreboding. As if I was talking about something else altogether.

I shook that off because she swayed closer, balancing herself—though I felt certain she didn’t need any help to balance herself—with her fingers on my thigh beneath the water. She dipped the sponge in the water and began to run it slowly over the thigh she wasn’t already touching.

“Once upon a time there was a girl named Darcy,” she told me, and there was laughter in her voice and in her gaze. It was like sunshine to me, who had been born and bred in the rains of England and the cold of my father’s house. I wanted to bask in her. “Unrelated to anyone present here tonight, of course.”

“Of course,” I agreed, caught somewhere in the heat of the steam, the water and the sensation of her hands on me. Her body, slippery and lithe, and the sound of her voice like a spell.

That was the secret I didn’t want told, not even to myself. I wanted to be enchanted, if only for the night.

“Darcy lived in a house big enough to be a castle, though it wasn’t. It had tennis courts. Its own bowling alley, though no one ever actually bowled in it, because bowling was considered low-class. There was an indoor swimming pool that no one ever used, but was always mentioned in public anyway, especially in the winter. And there were miles and miles of lawn, always green and manicured. And quickly Darcy learned that though she had come into the world as a daughter, her true purpose in the castle was to be a doll.”

“A doll?”

“Dolls are collected. They’re dressed perfectly and can be left to their own devices for years at a time if necessary, remaining pristine. Dolls never talk back. They not only do what they’re told, they don’t do anything at all unless someone does it for them. Darcy was more of a puppet, really. And where there’s a puppet, there are puppet masters. I think you know the puppet masters make the rules.” She laughed, though it held less sunshine than before. “And if the dolls don’t obey, they get set down and ignored. Possibly replaced.”

She wrung out the sponge, then dipped it in the water all over again and started on my other leg.

If she noticed that my cock was hardening again, she gave no sign.

“Darcy decided that if she had to be a puppet, a doll, she might as well be the best of all the dolls. The prettiest. The most accomplished. The kind that was so universally beloved that she belonged in the puppet masters’ favorite music box, twirling around and around whenever the box was opened.”

“This does not exactly sound like an uplifting bedtime story.”

“That really depends on how you think about dolls and puppets, I guess.”

“I don’t.”

“But you’re British. Punch and Judy and all those terrifying pantomimes. Puppets are in your blood, surely.”

“I have never paid the slightest attention to dolls, puppets, or bloody pantos.”

“Haven’t you?”

Her mouth curved at that. And she moved again, sliding that soft, warm sponge across my chest, rubbing me like she was polishing me to a shine.

I didn’t care that she was challenging me.

On the contrary, I liked it.

“Dolls exist to be bought,” she said. “To be played with. To dance while the music plays, then be put away until they are useful again.”

Her voice changed at that last part, melting a bit as she spoke. Not quite singsong, but close enough.

I found my hands moving of their own accord. I spun her around so her back was to my chest and her ass was snug against my cock. She braced herself, one hand on each of my thighs, and she moved in a sinuous, delicious little wiggle that made me groan.

“You can keep talking to me about dolls,” I managed to say, though I wanted to roar it. “But do it with my cock inside you.”

She arched against me, and I filled my hands with her breasts, small, but perfect. And those nipples that I could pluck and roll between my fingers until goose bumps broke out all over her neck. She tilted her hips and impaled herself on the tip of my cock. Then slowly, rolling her hips, worked herself down my full length.

And her pussy was scalding hot. Far silkier than the bathwater all around us.

“I told you to keep talking,” I growled against her neck, and raked my teeth across the goose bumps I’d raised.

I could feel her shudder from where she clenched tight around my cock to the breasts she pushed harder into my palms.

“This is how a doll dances,” she told me, a catch in her voice. “Music box dancers are all the same, you know. You must nail them down on some kind of peg or pole.” And she demonstrated by clenching me tight with her internal muscles. Locking me inside her in such a fierce grip that for a tumultuous moment I thought I might come there and then. I gritted my teeth, bit her a little in warning and held on. Barely. “And as long as the music plays, they dance. Like this.”

And she rocked against me then, her hips the enchantment I’d been looking for. Pure magic. Lust and light. She rose, then settled back against me, each sweet, sexy wriggle taking me deeper.

Beneath the surface of the water, I could see the way she looked splayed against me like this. Riding my cock, open and abandoned.

She was most beautiful thing I had ever seen. There was no possible way that one night with her could ever be enough. I accepted that, and the regret I would feel when this was over.

But it wasn’t over yet.

“Our Darcy takes each and every music box she finds herself in seriously,” she told me, tipping her head back so she could lean into my mouth against her neck. “One way or another, she still wants to be the favorite doll. Everyone’s favorite.”

“I think that’s really down to her owner, don’t you?” I asked.

I left one hand where it was, toying lazily with her nipple, and let the other one fall down to the place where we were joined. I felt my own cock, and I felt her. That sweet, hot pussy, greedy and lush.

Then I found her clit, and began to play with it the way I was playing with her nipple. Lazy enough to make her flush. Intense enough to make her moan.

“I like the way you dance,” I told her as she began to make those choked noises that I knew meant she was close to coming again. “And I had no idea how much I like a music box. I like to turn it on. Then turn it off, at will. My will.”

I stopped playing with her nipple and moved my hand to hold her pussy flush against me, so she couldn’t keep rocking us both toward bliss.

“On,” I growled against her neck, and resumed what I’d been doing. Pinching her nipple and her clit in turn. She sobbed out something that could have been words, and moved again. More jerkily this time, her body trembling in my hands. “Then off.”

Again I stopped. Her breath sawed in and out of her. I could feel her pulse beneath my mouth, thundering in her veins.

“Darcy.” I said the name she’d given me because I liked it. And because it made her shudder. “I don’t play with dolls. But a music box? That’s something I could get my head around. I like to collect pretty things, after all. But there’s something you should know. When I take something and make it mine, I don’t like to let it go.”

I didn’t know why I said that. Or why I raked the soft, sweet skin of her neck with my teeth until she cried out, then bucked against me wildly as if she’d lost all semblance of control.

“Please, sir. I want to come. I want to dance. I want whatever it takes—”

“You get what I give you, little doll. Maybe that’s the shelf for you, cast aside with nothing to do but watch.”

I pulled her off me then and set her before me, turning her around again until she settled back down on her knees.

And this time, her eyes were unfocused. She was panting, her lips parted, a pretty flush all over her cheeks.

She was so beautiful it hurt. I reached over and helped myself to some more of the bath gel. I wrapped my hand around my cock, made a fist and pumped myself as she watched.

And very nearly lost myself entirely when that unfocused look turned greedy. Hungry.

“Sir...?”

But I shook my head, enjoying myself. And her need. “I want you to stand up. Climb out of this tub and wrap yourself in a towel.”

She swallowed. “Can I make you come first?”

I felt my cock pulse in my own hand.

“Did I ask you to?” I demanded. Severely.

She blew out a breath as if that hurt her, which only made me harder.

Then she did what she was told.

And that was when I knew.

No matter what, no matter what it cost or how foolhardy it was, there was no way in hell one night with this woman who called herself a doll—and who I wanted to call mine—was going to satisfy me.

I wanted more.

And I was Sebastian Dumont. What I wanted, I usually got.

My little dancer didn’t stand a chance.