In the second installment of The Billionaires Club quartet, arrogant tycoon Sebastian Dumont risks everything for one night with an exquisite dancer...whose dark fantasy leaves him wanting more.

Love is a risk I will never take, a prize too good for a man who betrayed his family. That’s why I prefer to keep things transactional. So when I see an exquisite dancer in the exclusive Parisian billionaires club, turning her burlesque into an erotic art form, I’ll give whatever it takes to have her...

She is mine for one night, to do with as I please. But following my commands seems to bring her as much pleasure as it does me. And I can’t help wondering at her performance. She almost makes me believe this is a fantasy of her own making.

I’m not ready to let her go after just one night, but I never imagined my hunt would lead me to New York City, or to a restrained and disciplined ballerina. Stoking the fire that rages between us could be the biggest risk I’ve ever taken...one that may cost me everything, including my damaged heart.

Harlequin DARE publishes sexy romances featuring powerful alpha heroes and bold, fearless heroines exploring their deepest fantasies.

Four new Harlequin DARE titles are available each month, wherever ebooks are sold!

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature that she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

The Risk is the second instalment of The Billionaires Club series, which began with

The Debt by Jackie Ashenden

and continues with

The Proposition by JC Harroway The Deal by Clare Connelly

Join an exclusive, elite, exciting world and meet the

globe’s sexiest billionaires!

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The Risk

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08713-1

THE RISK

© 2019 Caitlin Crews

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE
Darcy

ONCE I WALKED through the door, there was no going back.

I stood there on the Paris street in the thick, rich darkness of an autumn night, staring at the discreetly unmarked door in question. I was breathing hard and felt faintly dizzy, as if I’d danced a difficult night of several shows on very little food.

I was used to the feeling. It was the reason for the feeling that was making my heart pound tonight.

I had signed all the documents, in triplicate, from the straightforward performance contract to several different NDAs that would make certain I never dreamed of telling a soul what happened within the walls of the M Club. To me or around me. I had practiced the burlesque routine that was my entrance into this excruciatingly private club in Paris—though I’d been informed there were many other locations scattered across the globe—until I could do it in my sleep.

“All you have to do is dance,” my friend Annabelle had told me with an eye roll when she’d asked me to take her place here at M Club. “Or whatever you want to call it.”

We’d laughed, because we were proper, professional ballet dancers, not burlesque performers. We dedicated our lives to perfecting lines and steps, counts and patterns, in a world-renowned ballet company. We didn’t play pretend with feathers and bloomers or whatever it was burlesque was meant to do when, really, it was just a striptease. Emphasis on tease.

And, yes, we were maybe a little full of ourselves. Annabelle and I had met in the corps de ballet of the prestigious Knickerbocker Ballet in New York City when we were both seventeen. Ten years of dancing and struggling through injuries and setbacks, occasional partying and rooming together in a tiny walk-up in New York City, and we were still hanging in there.

That we were both still—and only—members of the company meant, of course, that we were not likely to be promoted to principal dancers, despite whatever dreams we’d had as younger, newer dancers. It also meant that our inevitable retirements were looming, whether we wanted to stop dancing or not.

No one wanted to stop dancing. I certainly didn’t. But the body could only take so much, and nothing but sheer greatness in the eyes of the world—and demanding artistic directors—ever seemed to combat the ravages of gravity. Soloists and principal dancers were more likely to fight their way toward the age of forty before retiring—when their bodies finally gave out after too many surgeries and untreated injuries and the daily toll of so much pointed use. Or when they could no longer maintain the preferred form and appearance required by most of the major ballet companies, no matter what lip service they might give to a newer, more body-positive approach. Ballet was about precision. And even the most celebrated principals were forbidden the creeping ravages of age.

But dancers who had never made it out of the corps in the first place? They leaned in hard, made themselves indispensable and became ballet mistresses when they could no longer perform, like the Knickerbocker’s much-feared and widely respected Miss Fortunato. Otherwise, they tended to give up the fight sooner, usually after a steep downward spiral from an esteemed company like Knickerbocker through far less demanding organizations until even those wouldn’t have them.

That I knew my own future didn’t make it any less grim. I did my best to focus on the day before me, not the future I couldn’t change no matter what I did.

It didn’t surprise me that Annabelle had found yet another new and strange way to get her center stage fix, while crossing as many lines as possible in the process. She had always been the adventurous one.

For every lover I took, Annabelle took three. At once, whenever possible. Annabelle’s boundaries were fluid, smoky. One year, between seasons, she beguiled a well-known older Broadway actress who still called our apartment, all these years later, begging for one more night. Another year, while nursing a broken ankle that took her out of the company, she had entertained two princes and a number of politicians on the sort of Mediterranean yachts that were forever appearing in the tabloids.

Last year, when rent money had been scarce between our performance seasons, Annabelle had decided that she might as well monetize her dating life. She’d found the initial experience electrifying. She liked to indulge herself on nights we didn’t perform, and liked to tell me every scandalous detail of the men who paid her for the privilege of touching her.

Others might call it escorting. They might use other, less euphemistic words. But Annabelle didn’t care what anyone else thought of her. And I was the one who pretended to find her stories scandalous...and then, when I was alone in the dark, imagined it was me starring in all those dark and dirty scenes.

“And if you’re not too afraid,” she’d told me, when we’d finished laughing about burlesque and the idea that it was on a par with what we did, “who knows? Maybe you can finally do something about your own prudishness.”

“Your definition of a prude is anyone else’s definition of a lusty, committed whore,” I pointed out drily.

It had been a morning last spring. We’d been limbering up before the daily company class, which we took every morning before the afternoons of rehearsals and the evening shows. We stood in the back of the studio space behind the Knickerbocker theater, because everything in ballet was a hierarchy, even where we practiced. I was trying to pretend that my body was as supple and invincible as it had felt when I was seventeen and had believed that, truly, I could fly. And had, here and there, across stages in my toe shoes.

These days, my hamstrings and hips protested a lot more than they used to. And my feet were so battered that it was never a question of whether or not I was in pain but what, if anything, I planned to do about it. That day.

Everyone was injured, always. We all had to pay attention to these injuries, taking care not to let minor flare-ups become major problems.

That day I flexed my toes as I went into my first split, failed to wince and decided I was about as good as I could expect to get.

“You know what I mean,” Annabelle had been saying.

She was holding on to the barre as she worked her way through a few positions, her willowy body flowing as she moved. To the untrained eye, every move she made was deserving of applause. I could see my own reflection in the mirror and knew it was the same for me. But we did not dance for untrained eyes. We danced for beauty and learned judges. For precision and grace. We chased perfection, and were willing to starve and slave, whatever it took, to get as close to the sun as we could for as long as we could.

Annabelle’s hair, bright and red, was in the typical bun on the top of her head. Next to her, I always felt dimmer. My dark hair never seemed glossy enough to combat her brightness. And my eyes certainly never shone like that, wicked and insinuating.

Annabelle might not be a prima ballerina any more than I was, but she always captured attention. Though that was not always a good thing in company class, where those of us in the corps were working on uniformity, not interpretation.

“I don’t understand why you think your kink has to be my kink,” I told her, perhaps a bit loftily. It was an old argument. “As I think we’ve established in the past decade, you like things that I definitely do not.”

“How do you know if you won’t try?” she asked, as she always did. Her gaze was wicked, as usual, but steady on mine in the mirror. “And believe me, Darcy, you will never find more controlled circumstances than these.”

“Annabelle.” I was afraid that the sudden roughness in my voice would give away the startling truth that this conversation felt emotional to me. Which I was terribly afraid meant that, as usual, my fearless, impetuous friend had poked her finger directly onto the sort of button I preferred to keep to myself. As if she knew exactly what fantasies I toyed with in the dark. Alone. “I have no interest whatsoever in selling myself.”

She sniffed, then grinned cheekily when our friend Bernard, another member of the corps, looked over his shoulder at us with his eyebrows raised.

“You sold your body to the ballet ten years ago,” she told me, with the brutal practicality that made me love her no matter how little I understood her. “Selling a fuck or two is far less wear and tear on your body, pays more, and unlike a lifetime in the corps, will make you come your face off.”

But all my face did that day was turn red, which got me a sharp rebuke from Miss Fortunato when we were called out into the floor to begin the class.

All through my rehearsals that day and the show I danced that evening, I pretended that I’d put Annabelle’s nonsense out of my mind the way I normally did, whether she was claiming she’d seduced the chiropractor or pretending she might at any moment become a stripper, instead.

But that night, I dreamed. Of a private dance in a dark room, and the hot, demanding stare of the man I danced for. I imagined peeling off my clothes and embracing the true vulnerability of my performance, around and around until I landed between his legs. I dreamed I knelt there before him, alive with need.

I could feel his hand like a brand against my jaw, lifting my face to his, and what I saw there made my body tremble.

Because he saw me as his. A possession. An object.

Something he could use for his pleasure, however he wished.

My whole body clenched. My thighs pressed tightly together. And a wild, intense orgasm woke me from a sound sleep and left me panting there in the dark.

In my bed. Alone.

“There are some fantasies that should never become reality,” I told Annabelle a few mornings later.

We’d set out on the run we sometimes did in the mornings before company class, if we weren’t in the mood to swim or hit the elliptical. That left our break times free for the more pointed bodywork or extra rehearsals we might need as the day wore on. That morning we’d followed our usual loop, running up a few blocks from our nondescript street on the Upper East Side, along Fifth Avenue, then into Central Park.

Annabelle and I lived in a studio apartment in the low 70s we’d long ago converted into a makeshift two-bedroom—which was to say we’d put a few bookcases and a screen here and there to create a little psychological space. It meant that no matter how often I might hear Annabelle crying out her pleasure or making her lovers sob her name I didn’t actually have to witness any of it unless I wanted to.

“Why?” she asked me then. “Making fantasies reality is the point of life, as far as I can tell.”

Neither one of us liked running that much, though we dedicated ourselves to it the same way we did everything else: with intense focus and determination because of course we needed the cardio. We always needed the cardio. We were still in our twenties, but our metabolisms were already shifting and we were certainly no longer the seventeen-year-olds we’d been when we’d started. A few miles every morning helped, and went by quicker with a friend and some conversation. But soon I was much too aware nothing would help. Time came for us all, whether we wanted to face it or not.

There were no elderly ballerinas in the Knickerbocker.

“Why?” I repeated. “Let me think. First of all, safety.”

“You’re a grown woman, Darcy,” Annabelle said with a laugh. “I feel certain that you can make yourself safe, if you want. Or not so safe, if that’s hotter.”

“Just because you sell yourself without blinking, it doesn’t mean that kind of thing comes easily to others. It’s a social taboo for a reason.”

“I consider myself a world-class performer. Why shouldn’t a lover pay just as they would if they were coming to see me dance at the theater?” She laughed again when I made a face. “I always forget that you have this traditional streak. This is what happens when you grow up sheltered in Greenwich, Connecticut, the toast of all those desperately preppy boarding schools.”

“I was not the toast of Miss Porter’s.”

“Miss Porter’s,” Annabelle repeated, pronouncing the name of my high school alma mater as if she was belting it from the center stage. While also mocking it. “I’m just saying that I had fewer moral quandaries at good old Roosevelt High.”

“To hear you tell it, your tiny little high school in Indiana was ground zero for debauchery.”

“It’s Indiana. What’s there to do except get a little twisted and dirty?” Annabelle blew out a breath as we sped up to pass a group of nannies. “Your trouble is, you think that if you actually got what you wanted, it would ruin you.”

“I do not.”

I did. I really, truly did.

“Here’s the deal, Darcy,” Annabelle said, coming to a stop when we’d only done the first of our three miles. She rested her hands on her hips, and I knew she was serious when a good-looking man ran past and looked at her admiringly and she didn’t look back at him. “I’ve spent years trying to get inside this. Any branch, anywhere.”

“Then you shouldn’t give up your opportunity to do it this time.”

“I’m understudying Claudia,” Annabelle said, naming one of our soloists. She shrugged. “I can’t be flying off to Paris during our season break, indulging myself, and possibly miss an opportunity that both you and I know is unlikely to come again. Not that it will come this time, either. You know Claudia. She won’t miss a show. She’d dance through the plague.”

I did know Claudia, younger than us and far more ambitious. I also knew Annabelle. And I’d been hearing her talk about the pleasures to be had in this exquisite M Club of hers for at least two years. There was no applying for membership. There was no showing up or waiting in a line. The club was by invitation only, membership was rumored to be extended only to the wealthiest individuals alive, and clearly, the only possible way that someone like Annabelle or me was getting inside was as the help.

Or in this case, as the talent.

“If they’re so fancy, why wouldn’t they hire real burlesque dancers?” I didn’t even smirk when I said it. Because, between Annabelle’s first mention of it and now, I had accidentally spent a little too much time researching the art form. “There are world-renowned burlesque dancers who I’m sure would leap at the chance—”

“For exactly that reason. World-renowned, professional burlesque dancers would likely perform burlesque, then go about their business. M Club is looking for dancers who might do a little bit more than that.”

“You mean dancers who want to be whores.”

Annabelle tipped back her head and laughed at that loudly. Once more drawing attention from passing men and women alike. And ignoring the attention entirely, which was unlike her.

“Keep your morals to yourself, please.” She waved a hand over the sports bra and tiny running shorts she wore. “This body is my instrument. I’ve honed it, beaten it into submission and gloried in it. But what I choose to do with it, who I choose to do it with, and what I want in return is entirely my business. I don’t think that makes me a whore.”

“Please stop saying that word so loudly,” I said. Through my teeth.

Annabelle smiled. “My understanding is that the club wants dancers who are open to using this opportunity as more than just a simple performance. Dancers who will push the envelope and give themselves over to the fantasy.”

I wanted to dismiss the whole notion of M Club out of hand. I wanted to laugh, much as Annabelle had, all lust and delight. I wanted to start running again, stop talking and chalk this up to one more of Annabelle’s predictable flights of fancy.

But my heart was kicking inside my chest as if we’d sped up instead of stopping. Between my legs, I was slippery. Too hot and trembling again, as if on the verge of another intense orgasm like last night’s.

I didn’t know what was happening to me.

I didn’t want to know.

“You need to call the number I already have. You will have to update them about our little cast change. Tell them who you are, answer all their questions, and they will ask you to share your deepest, darkest fantasies with them.” Annabelle smirked at me. “I think we both know what that is.”

“I don’t know what makes you think you have the slightest idea what I fantasize about. For all you know, I’d like nothing more than to zip-tie a room full of domineering men, then make them crawl around and serve me.”

“Yes, yes,” she murmured. “Anyone who’s ever suffered through rehearsals with François has entertained a thousand fantasies of tying up men just like him and torturing them within an inch of their lives.” François was the Knickerbocker’s most temperamental male soloist and a diva beyond compare. “But that’s not quite the same thing, is it? That’s a revenge fantasy. It’s not what haunts you. It’s not what makes you moan in your sleep. Rhythmically. Waking up with a gasp—”

I could feel my face turning red again. Bright and obvious, even outside on a sunny spring morning.

“You must be thinking of yourself,” I countered. “Or either one of those twins you had over last night.”

“I exhausted the twins long before I heard you, Darcy. But tell yourself any fiction you like.” Annabelle reached up and adjusted her ponytail. “I don’t need an answer until next week. You’re welcome to say no and condemn yourself to your usual life of mediocre sex and a thousand fantasies that you will soon enough be too old and too decrepit to enjoy.”

“I don’t have mediocre sex—how dare you—and I have no intention of becoming decrepit.”

“It’s one night, Darcy. In Paris.” Annabelle sighed as if she, too, played out some fantasies in her head instead of hurling herself headfirst into every last one of them. “You dance suggestively for strange men and women whose names you will not know. You show them as much of your naked body as you like, but only on your terms. Then, afterward, if you are so moved, you let the man who most captures your fancy draw you into a private room. You let him purchase you for the rest of the night and then do with you, to you, absolutely everything and anything he desires.”

Her gaze was hot. Demanding. I told myself that was why I couldn’t breathe.

“Just think about it,” Annabelle said.

It took me much too long to remember I was in New York in the bright light of day, not under a dark Parisian night sky with a relentless stranger... I repressed a shiver.

“I’ll be thinking about the ballet we need to perform,” I told her loftily. “Not your latest sexcapade.”

But I thought of nothing else.

And one of the reasons I loved Annabelle as much as I did was that when I went to her one largely sleepless week later and couldn’t quite meet her eyes as I muttered that yes, in fact, I could go to Paris in her stead, she only smiled.

I’d undergone the written interview. The intrusive background check. I’d signed away every right I could think of and several I had not.

I had met with a woman who had never offered me her name in a brownstone just steps from Fifth Avenue. She was obviously meant to be intimidating, but I’d been contending with famed dragon ladies like the Knickerbocker’s formidable ballet mistress most of my life. I’d smiled politely as we sat together in a room bursting with understated elegance and just enough wealth to seem accessible instead of off-putting. I’d answered what had seemed to me like an excruciating set of personal questions.

What were my fantasies? Why? What would happen if I discovered that the reality was something far different than what I’d dreamed?

“Well, ordinarily, I would demand everything stop. Then leave.” I’d blinked at the woman. “Is that allowed?”

“Of course it is allowed,” the woman replied, with that faint accent I couldn’t quite place. She was regal, silver-haired, and with the sort of bearing that it was tempting to ascribe to rampant plastic surgery and a life of ease but was far more likely, I was certain, to be a simple combination of genetics and rigorous discipline.

She reminded me of my first ballet teacher all those years ago in Greenwich. Madame Archambault had been unflappable and much, much kinder than she’d looked. She had once danced with Balanchine. She had brought out the best in all her students, and she’d made a dancer out of me. Maybe that was why I told this stranger, who knew everything about me though I knew nothing about her, my most secret, most tightly held fantasy.

The one Annabelle had guessed but which I’d never admitted out loud.

“It is not a fantasy for everyone,” the woman said when I had finished, feeling dirty and ruined and torn apart by my own black-and-white morality, just as Annabelle had long accused me. “It is easy to get lost.”

My heart was a lump in my throat. “That’s why I’ve never done it.”

“I think what you seek is surrender,” she said, smiling slightly. “For a woman who has always kept her body so tightly controlled, it would be something, would it not, to be under the control of another?”

“You could argue that I’ve been under the control of this or that instructor, director or choreographer for most of my life.”

The woman shrugged and she did that, too, with an innate elegance that made me wonder if she’d ever danced herself. “Ballet is your art. Your ambition. You submit to the tyrants of your daily life in service to your ego, your determination. It will be something else entirely, I think, to truly surrender your will to another’s.”

“Or pretend to.” My voice had cracked on that, and it was a measure of how far I’d already fallen that I didn’t flush with embarrassment or try to clear my throat as if it was a trapped sneeze instead of emotion. “Isn’t that what we’re talking about? A game of pretend?”

“If you like.” The woman’s gaze was steady. And she saw entirely too much. “Let us be clear what we’re talking about here, shall we?”

“I love clarity,” I managed to say, though my lips were numb.

“You wish to sell yourself to a man. A stranger.”

And there it was, stark and unmistakable. I told myself it was an ugly thing, this strange fantasy that had flirted with me for as long as I could remember.

But it didn’t feel ugly. Not here. Not in the face of this woman’s matter-of-factness.

Here, and inside me, it felt beautiful. Pure. Relationships were always muddied by so many external factors. Feelings, histories. Schedules. Resentments. But this fantasy was all about simplicity.

My body. His. Sex and lust, need and surrender, and a deep, intimate dance that ended in the most glorious flight of all.

All unsullied by the mud of our lives outside the space we carved out for our indulgence.

I couldn’t look away from the woman sitting across from me in that hushed, watchful room.

“I do,” I said. And I sounded far more certain than I’d expected I would.

“There are certain expectations in such a transaction,” she said, and her very briskness felt like an acceptance of me, of the dark needs that coiled inside me, of this. I felt my overly straight back ease. “Certain rules. What he wants. How he wants it. When he wants it. And for however long he wants it. He will not ask after your feelings. Your family. He might suspect that you have a history of dancing, but he will certainly not know. Or care. All he will see is something he wishes to possess. Use. Then discard.”

My throat hurt from whatever I was holding back. A sob? A cry of joy and excitement as she outlined precisely what I wanted most? “Are you trying to talk me out of it?”

“My dear girl, I can see your arousal written all over you,” she told me with the detachment of a doctor, which kept me from surrendering to the same mortification that had made me blush when I’d discussed these things with Annabelle. “This excites you, and well it should. Fantasies are powerful. I find it is when you begin to second-guess yourself that the trouble comes.”

I was shaking. I felt jittery, as if I’d downed too many cups of coffee and eaten nothing but sugar for days.

“I understand that you don’t want someone who might back out—”

“You will not back out of the performance, as you are a professional,” the woman said. “But I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity that you are being given to explore your darkest desires. This is normally a privilege of membership. You will not be hurt in any way, unless you request it. The members of our club who choose to purchase what we call ‘party favors’ have all agreed to a certain framework that ensures your safety and theirs. I feel certain that momentum will carry you through this encounter handily. What concerns me is how you will handle it on the other side.”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” I told her with tremendous confidence. If I could stop shaking, I was sure I’d be able to feel it, too. “I get butterflies before I go onstage, but I never think about the show once it’s over.”

Once again, that enigmatic half smile. As if she knew things I did not.

“I hope very much that you enjoy your time in our club in Paris,” she said quietly. And that was that.

I practiced the burlesque routine at home on those summer nights after we got out of ballet rehearsals. Annabelle threw dollar bills at me to “set the scene,” and we laughed and carried on as if it was all a big joke. The required costume came, what little there was of it, fitted so perfectly to my measurements that it almost felt like a lover’s hands when I put it on. And even more so when I took it off, there in our living room that we’d made a stage. As summer gave way to fall I grew comfortable with it. It was another show, that was all, if more naked than anything the Knickerbocker put up.

Still, it seemed like a lark. A story I would tell, the way we all did when we strayed a bit from the ballet, then came back. We always came back. Because the ballet couldn’t last, so we were addicted to what little piece of it we had while we had it.

And now I was here, across an ocean from the place I danced my heart out, always knowing I wasn’t good enough to find myself elevated from the corps. The night I’d been working toward in my scant free time was upon me, and yet I was frozen in place outside. Staring at a door.

It’s only stage fright, I told myself. Just a few butterflies.

All I had to do was the routine. And no one would be looking for missed steps or bungled counts—they’d be looking at my flesh. And then, afterward, instead of tending to my sore muscles and preparing to do it all over again the next day, I could play out one of my more deeply held fantasies.

My pussy was melting hot and slick already.

“You don’t have to do anything but dance,” I reminded myself. Sternly. “You can go straight home after the performance if you want.”

This was my choice. My yes or no that made it happen, or didn’t.

The only thing required of me was the performance, and I knew I had that down. Everything else was icing.

I walked the last few remaining steps until I was square in front of the unmarked door, a world away from the fancy entrance out front. I reminded myself that I was a professional. This was what I did, no matter the costume or lack thereof. I had nothing to fear.

Except surrender, a voice inside me whispered.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of if I choose it,” I told myself, my voice sounding harsh and rough against the night.

I reached out my hand. I took a breath.

Then I rang the bell as I’d been directed, and sealed my fate.

CHAPTER TWO
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.”

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