About the Authors

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.

MARGOT RADCLIFFE lives in Columbus, Ohio, right now, but surrenders to wanderlust every couple of years, so it’s hard to say where she’ll end up next. Regardless of location, her apricot dog will be by her side while she writes fun romances that hopefully make readers laugh and space out for a bit. With heroines who aren’t afraid to take what they want and confident heroes who are up to a challenge, she loves creating complicated modern relationships. She can be found @margotradcliffe on Twitter and @margot_radcliffe on Instagram.

The Risk & Friends with Benefits

Caitlin Crews and Margot Radcliffe

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90110-3

THE RISK & FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS

The Risk © 2019 Caitlin Crews Friends with Benefits © 2019 Margot Radcliffe

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.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Version: 2020-03-02

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

The Risk

Back Cover Text

Booklist

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

Friends with Benefits

Back Cover Text

Dedication

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

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

About the Publisher

The Risk

Caitlin Crews

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!

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!

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

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.”

CHAPTER THREE

Darcy

IF IT HADN’T been for my burlesque performance earlier, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to handle this.

Any of this. All of my darkest, most-hidden fantasies coming true. At once.

At last.

The club had been better than I’d imagined it. Everything that carefully nameless woman had promised in New York, and then some. All the staff had been excruciatingly professional and, better still, polite when I’d rung the bell to the quiet staff entrance a world away from the fancier entrance at the front of the building. I’d been greeted, then ushered to a private dressing room several floors beneath the Parisian street, surprised to find it significantly more luxurious than most of the makeshift, communal dressing rooms I’d spent my life in at the ballet. The other talent I’d seen in those downstairs halls hadn’t been amateurs, as I’d feared when I’d received an instruction packet that indicated the show tonight was more than just me. The dancers and performers I’d met were reticent about their names and their current gigs, as was I, but we recognized each other just the same.

Professionals, in one form or another. I could identify others in my line of work at a glance. It was how we stood. How we held ourselves. I knew the others I saw were just like me. Here to work, then play.

It was the “play” part I was trying to get my head around now.

I’d practiced my routine so many times that I’d expected my actual performance to flash by. Or maybe I’d hoped it would. Annabelle and I had laughed about what we’d both called my “snobby striptease” so many times that my emotional response while I was actually doing it in front of an audience took me completely by surprise.

Alone onstage. Centered in the spotlight. Nothing but the pumping, seductive music.

And me.

Just me.

I felt...walloped by it.

I could never tell Annabelle this when I got back home, but there was something about the burlesque that got to me in a way I wasn’t sure I understood.

Or maybe I did understand. Too well.

Because there was something about the freedom. No one knew the steps except me, and that meant I could embroider upon them as I pleased. For the first time in as long as I could remember—maybe in my whole life—I could do whatever I wanted while dancing onstage.

I felt powerful. It was thrilling.

It was like a wave crashing over me, then carrying me out to sea—

And then I saw him.

That sensation intensified. Until I became the sea or it ate me alive, and either way I was still dancing.

And somewhere in that hot, electric moment between one breath and the next, I forgot that I was on a stage at all and found myself dancing only for him.

He sat in one of the closest booths to the stage they’d set up in what I’d been told was usually a library. I could see him perfectly over the stage lights, and he never took his eyes from me. I danced for the man in the perfectly cut suit, his gaze as brooding as it was bright, and the cut-crystal lines of his beautiful face.

I danced as if we were alone. As if I was there for his pleasure and nothing more.

Until that was all I felt.

And then, afterward, he came to me as if we were magnetic halves, drawn together no matter what.

I’d always secretly dreamed of handing myself over like this. Offering myself for purchase, and then surrendering to whoever bought me. Not the way I did, in one way or another, in my career. Surrendering to the demands of my ballet overlords...hurt. Always. The pain was an accepted part of life in the ballet.

In my dreams, I could hand myself over, make myself nothing more than a possession and feel nothing but pleasure. The ultimate dance of pleasure and need. Everything the ballet promised but didn’t deliver. Surrender and greed, lust and longing, all made real. All available if I but dared.

The taboo made me shiver. The fantasy made me hot.

But I wasn’t Annabelle. I had never wanted my fantasies to become real, not in the real world. No yachts or monetized “dates” for me, because I knew I would never, ever feel safe enough to go through with it.

Fantasies in my head were glorious when I was alone in my bed. But I knew a little something about making fantasies real in my actual life. There was always a price, and that price was often pain. I had never wanted to test the thing that made me hottest out there in Annabelle’s world of risky nights and reckless lovers, because I’d always known on some level that reality would ruin it.

Until tonight.

Because the beautiful blue-eyed man might be a stranger to me, but he was known to the club or he wouldn’t have been permitted in the audience. One of the numerous documents I had signed had made that clear. The club knew everything about everyone, including medical records and sexual preferences. Everyone was deemed safe for playtime or they weren’t allowed to partake. And no abuses would go unpunished, assuming they even occurred—which was, I was told, so unlikely as to be well-nigh impossible.

This wasn’t me in my bed at home taking myself on a little fantasy journey. But it wasn’t quite reality, either. That made it perfect.

It felt like a dream, but I knew I was awake. Awake enough to feel myself jolt and shiver when he touched me, there beside the stage. Awake enough to make it clear I was for sale and extract a purchase agreement, a notion that made me...ache. Everywhere. And more than awake enough to follow him up the sweeping stairs to this suite.

I wasn’t going to sleep through a single moment of this fantasy-made-real. Not now that I was stripped down to nothing but the sparkly bikini bottoms I’d worn onstage, though I didn’t feel exposed or naked. I felt completely dressed in this man’s hot, demanding gaze.

And he wanted me to prove I wanted him. He wanted me to show him.

I wasn’t sure my knees would hold me up as I imagined—in bright detail—how I could do that.

“Haven’t I already proved it?” I asked. We both still stood in the marble foyer of the suite, my costume in heaps at our feet. “If I didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”

“I prefer certainty to innuendo,” he said, a faintly sardonic note in his voice.

It kicked through me. A megawatt jolt in my chest and a helpless shuddering below.

My being present here tonight—on that stage and now here with him—should have been enough. There was no one here who hadn’t asserted their willingness in triplicate. That was part of what the club offered.

But that wasn’t enough for this man.

He wanted my explicit consent.

It made me dizzy. It made me wet.

And as that surge of molten heat left me slippery and achy, I felt the same wild wave that had taken me over on the stage nearly take me from my feet here, too.

He didn’t know who I was. I was a woman he’d bought for the night, that was all. He didn’t know a single thing about me; he didn’t care and wouldn’t pretend to care as long as he was certain I wanted this, too, and that meant... I could be anyone.

I could be as free as I’d felt on that stage, strutting around to steps of my own design, following my body instead of forcing my body to follow rigid protocols to suit someone else’s aesthetic.

I was no longer an indistinguishable member of the corps. I was no longer the perennial understudy, condemned to the back of the stage and judged harshly should I in any way stand out from the crowd. Tonight I would not be judged, for once, on the position of my wrist or the turn of my ankle.

Every lover I’d ever taken had known exactly who I was before we’d touched. And some men loved the idea of a ballerina. A little doll, they thought, who could spin around on command and show off her splits in bed. But what they expected from that little doll was her shyness. A docile willingness to please that tipped over into fragility. Tears, vulnerability and an eating disorder.

I was many things, but meek wasn’t one of them.

And if I was fragile, I never would have made it into the corps in the first place, much less maintained my place for a decade.

But surely no call girl would be expected to be anything like meek.

I smiled at this dark, mouthwatering man who wanted what he’d bought so much that his face looked tight with it. Hungry.

The way he looked at me made me hungry, too.

“I could have had anyone in that room,” I told him, almost unconsciously letting my body move as it liked. And what it liked tonight was the burlesque. The jut of a hip. The exaggerated curve at my waist. The feminine knowledge I could feel in me and all over me, like his hands would be soon, I was sure. “I chose you.”

“And here I thought I was the one who had done the choosing.”

“This isn’t a street corner. Last I checked this was the most exclusive club in the world.”

“You are American,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. If anything, it sounded like an accusation.

“You are British,” I replied. “And apparently very wealthy, to be a member here and to offer me any amount of money I choose. Does that mean you come with a title attached?”

His mouth curved. And here in this quiet, hushed space where he would take me as he liked and I would surrender entirely—a notion that made me feel as if I teetered right there on the edge of an orgasm without his even touching me—I couldn’t help but find myself dazzled by all of his male beauty. He was a hard man, because the fact he was beautiful did not make him pretty. And there was something about the cut of his jaw and that simmering heat in his bright blue gaze that made me want to sink down onto my knees. And show him exactly how much I wanted him.

“I’m not that kind of British, nor that kind of wealthy,” he said, though his accent made him sound like the earl of this or the baron of that. “But you can call me ‘sir,’ all the same.”

That made me even wetter, and I had the strangest sensation that he could tell. That he knew.

That he might think I was some kind of hardened prostitute who did this all the time, but still I was soaking my panties for him.

Maybe that was his fantasy.

“Very well,” I said softly.

I moved toward him, the marble soothing beneath my feet, then hard enough to leave bruises when I sank down on my knees before him. But I was a ballet dancer. I wore my bruises like badges of honor, counted them, and sometimes gave them names. I already knew I would love these wholeheartedly.

I swayed forward, resting my hands on his powerful thighs, and then I tipped my head back so I could meet his gaze up above the impressive length of his toned, muscled body.

Above the thick rod of his cock, which pressed out against the front of his trousers and made me feel something like giddy.

“How’s this?” I asked. Then smiled. “Sir.”

I saw his nostrils flare. His blue eyes glittered like an afternoon sea. And he did nothing but incline his head.

It was an order, not an invitation.

My mouth was watering. My hands felt as if they were shaking, though I could see that they were not. I moved to unzip him, easing the metal teeth carefully over the thick heat of him, so big and so hot to the touch that I felt almost giddy.

I finished with the zipper, then ran my hands over the silk he wore beneath his trousers, getting my first feel of him.

His cock was huge. Heavy. The ridge beneath the silk grew as I rubbed it, and whatever notion I might have had about playing with him a while shivered off into a bright, hot lust.

“Take me out,” he ordered me, his voice a low growl. “I want to watch you while I fuck your mouth.”

People did not say things like that to sweet, meek, fragile ballerinas, that was for sure.

Again, it wasn’t a request.

My nipples pulled so tight a sharp little pain stabbed through me every time I breathed. My breasts felt heavy, my pussy was scalding and soft, and I couldn’t seem to keep myself from pressing my thighs together to give myself a little bit of friction.

And I did what I was told.

I pulled that beautiful cock out from the silk of his boxers, reveling in the textures. The soft, warm silk, then the heat of his satiny flesh stretched over the thick iron beneath.

I moved even closer, pressing my knees against the marble floor to make sure I got that bruise. His hands moved to tangle in my hair, holding me right where he wanted me.

This was what I’d wanted, all this time. This was what I’d dreamed about and feverishly imagined, hidden away in the privacy of my own bed, playing out the stories Annabelle told me in my mind with my hands busy between my legs.

I couldn’t seem to help myself. I let him support my head with those big hands tugging at my hair and keeping my head high. I slid my own hands beneath the sparkling bikini bottoms I wore, finding my way through all that molten heat to my greedy clit.

And as I found myself, I opened my mouth and sucked him in.

He tasted like salt and man; he was big, and I took as much of him as I could. Even though he came perilously close to triggering my gag reflex.

But the truth was, I liked that, too.

I could feel tears form in the corners of my eyes. I wanted to cry, but not because I was sad.

But because his hands controlled my head, holding me as he began to thrust.

He didn’t ask if I was ready. He didn’t consult my feelings. He just took what he wanted and, my God, did I nearly come all over myself in my eagerness to give it to him.

He eased his way in, then pulled out, letting me feel every thick inch of him. My mouth was wide, my tongue busy against his satiny length, but he didn’t wait to see what sort of acrobatics I might perform with it. He didn’t wait to see if I was a licker or a sucker. He took charge and control.

And there was nothing I could do but stay where I’d knelt, keep my mouth open and let him fuck my mouth as he chose.

That hard, uncompromising slide, a little deeper each time, like a test.

I was filled with him. His cock in my mouth and my hands between my legs—two fingers, then three—as I pretended he was fucking me there, too.

And then I was coming. Flooding my own fingers as he maintained that same bossy, insistent rhythm. Once. Then again.

As if I really was an object.

And I’d spent my whole life learning how to be a specific kind of movable, flexible object, set here and there in the choreography of every creative director I’d ever danced for. I was a company dancer, trained my whole life to be interchangeable. My job was to blend. To be indistinguishable from the girl beside me.

I fought for that privilege. I fought to disappear every time I went onstage. I beat myself up, suffered the critiques, and staggered into the studio every day with my aches and nagging pains and protesting limbs to do it all over again.

We are nothing but game pieces they move around their little boards, my friend Winston had said before he’d left the ballet two years back. We’d all pretended to be supportive of what he called a lateral move into contemporary dance, but we’d all viewed it as a death. A suicide.

I prefer to be one of the prettiest, most perfect pieces, Annabelle had said afterward. Or why not just go home?

And here, now, on my knees in a hotel suite in Paris with a man whose name I didn’t know, it was that very objectification that made it all so hot.

He wanted me because I was that object. Because we could play this game, where he did with me as he pleased because it pleased me, too. And I didn’t have to know any steps or worry about perfection.

All I had to do was let him fuck me as he liked.

I came and I came, bucking against my hands, and the man who held me so securely in his grasp growled his approval, but didn’t stop.

He didn’t speed up. He didn’t change his rhythm at all.

He was inexorable. Relentless.

And that, too, made me come.

He fucked my face while my eyes overflowed with my gratitude and my pussy wept and shook.

And when he came, he flooded the back of my throat, and there was nothing to do but take it. Nothing to do but swallow him down, again and again, until he was done.

He pulled me off his cock, then dropped his hands, and I sighed because I wanted them back. Holding me. Controlling me. Making me burn bright beneath his control.

“Take your hands off your pussy,” he told me, dark and intense, only another layer of roughness in his voice indicating anything had happened. But I could feel it inside me. “And lick them clean.”

I shuddered. I stayed on my knees and slowly pulled my hands from beneath my sparkling bikini bottoms. His gaze was bright and hot, and my nipples tightened even further as I lifted one hand and slowly, carefully, licked each finger clean.

I tasted myself, tart and sweet, and felt lust and need coil tightly inside me.

All over again.

He stripped himself of the dark suit he wore, watching me lick my fingers clean of my own need.

By the time I finished he stood before me naked, gloriously male, and packed tight with hard muscles. He was built along powerful lines thicker and more solid than any dancer. I thought I might actually die if there wasn’t more. A lot more.

And that cock of his that I could still taste in my mouth, deep inside me at last.

“Come with me,” he said, another one of those harsh, delicious orders that danced around inside me, kicking up light and heat and more of that dark, dark need I hadn’t understood could boil in me so quickly. “And bring your wings.”

He moved farther into the suite, not bothering to turn the lights up higher than where they sat already, low and inviting. There was the sparkle of Paris in the windows before him, but I was mesmerized by the play of muscles in his fine back, and his high, gorgeous ass.

I would have followed him anywhere. For free.

“Little dancer.” It took me a fuzzy moment to realize my gaze had dropped to admire that ass, but he had turned his head to look back at me. And when I lifted my gaze I found his mouth in a stern line that made my heart wheel about in delight and a kind of erotic anxiety bubble inside my chest. “You really don’t want to keep me waiting.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Sebastian

I WAS HARD again almost instantly, as if I hadn’t emptied myself down my little dancer’s lovely throat.

She was glorious.

I’d controlled the way I fucked her, watching in a kind of greedy disbelief as she rode her own hands and then came. Again and again, red and shuddering as her hips rocked.

It was the hottest blow job I’d ever had.

There was a part of me that was tempted to repeat the experience, again and again, until I couldn’t take it anymore.

But I changed my mind as she rose.

Because that body of hers was like one long, perfect muscle. And I already knew that she was flexible. Lithe and lovely onstage, and even more so naked.

She made my mouth water.

And she did as I asked, reaching down and picking up those feathered wings of hers from the gleaming marble in the foyer, then dragging them behind her as she came toward me. I wondered if she knew the picture she made, my distinctly fallen, sulky angel swaying toward me on her bare feet, her breasts jutting high on her chest with her nipples hard. That mouth of hers swollen from my cock.

And her eyes all over me, filled with a kind of bright, hot wonder that I wanted badly to be real.

I tried to shove that urge aside. It was naive at best, and I was not a naive man. This was a transaction, not a romance, and I needed to remember that. I’d never needed to remind myself such a thing before, but this woman was like a drug. The kind of drug I never permitted myself to sample, too certain was I that it would wreck my control.

And I was nothing without my control.

Or so I assumed, having never released my grip on it after the singular, epic failure that had destroyed my relationship with Ash.

I certainly wasn’t going to lose it tonight because of a woman, no matter how she danced or what she did with her talented mouth.

She stopped before me, there in the middle of the suite’s great room. There were wide, inviting sofas all around, and handy side tables, but no inconvenient coffee table perched on the soft rug in the center. Nothing to work around.

I didn’t speak. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, and that, too, was a first.

Instead, I helped her tie those wings onto her shoulders again. Then I crouched down to hook my fingers in that sparkling bikini bottom she wore, tugging it down from her hips.

She lifted an absurdly graceful hand and rested it on my shoulder with the lightest possible touch as she swayed to help me, lifting one leg, then the other. I had the distinct impression that she didn’t actually need my help to balance herself. That she was touching me because she wanted to touch me.

Maybe I was a fool. But I couldn’t seem to care when my own personal angel was so close to me, smelling of sex. And me.

I’d had some vague intention of doing this or that to her delectable body once I’d finally got her naked, but now that she was I found myself transfixed by her pretty, swollen pussy.

“Hold on,” I told her.

That was all the warning I gave her.

I drew one of her legs up and over my shoulder, and she made a soft sound that might have been a sigh. Then she shifted, and I felt her balance again in an instant—confirming what I’d thought before, that she didn’t need any help finding it. That if she held on to me, it was because she wanted to.

I didn’t let myself bask in the pleasure of that, because there was far more pleasure right there before me. And I thought that if I didn’t get my mouth on her, I might die.

I wrapped my hands around her ass, bringing that sweet, soft pussy to my lips at last. She didn’t simply meet me. She bent back. All the way back, arching herself like a bow.

She was the hottest thing I’d ever had my hands on. And she tasted like sugar.

Sugar and cream, and I growled my lust and approval as I took her clit between my teeth. I tugged at her, then bit down gently.

She came again, flooding me with her scent and taste and impossible heat.

I bent to the task. I ate her like a starving man, growling every time I heard that hitch in her breath or felt her pussy quake against my tongue.

There were ways to fake almost anything, but not this. Not the way she flooded me. Not the way her clit pulsed in my mouth, and not even the way she shook and then ground her pussy against me, as if she wanted to fuck herself straight into oblivion.

Her body was a marvel. She stood with only one foot on the ground, her other leg hooked around my shoulder, and her hands on me from time to time. But she wasn’t gripping me in any way. She swayed with me, as if this was another dance. A beast devouring a beauty like every fairy tale I could recall, and all she did was arch herself back and raise her hips.

I was so hard again it was as if I hadn’t had sex in years.

And she wasn’t simply coming now in those sweet, hot bursts. She was crying out as she did it, her voice getting hoarser with each cry.

If she was faking this, she was the best I’d ever seen. And if she was faking this, she was far better at fucking than she was at dancing, and God knows watching her dance had nearly killed me where I’d sat.

She came again, her whole body flushing with the heat of it. She went red and pink everywhere as she rocked herself against my mouth and let out one of those raw little cries.

I pulled away from her, shifting to set her other foot on the ground. As I rose, she swayed there before me but stayed on her feet. She looked dazed. Drunk, almost.

Something roared in me, triumphant and hot.

“Do you come like this with all your customers?” I asked her.

I didn’t know where the question came from. I had never been a possessive man. I never compared myself to others, and not because I worried comparison might steal my joy or whatever the fuck motivational nonsense people liked to splay all over their mugs of tea. Quite the opposite. I felt confident I had no peer.

If I’d had one at all, he’d stopped speaking to me years ago when I’d lost all his money.

And I wasn’t precisely jealous now, either. It was something else. I wanted to mark her, perhaps. I wanted to leave an indelible mark on her supple, remarkable flesh. I wanted her to remember this—and me—forever.

I did not want to analyze why I had this urge. I just wanted it.

She blinked, then smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

And I don’t know which one of us was more surprised by that, her or me. But I was shocked when I...laughed.

I wanted to throw her down and bury myself inside her—right now—but I didn’t. My own laughter felt like a tension breaker. Like another kind of coming and, oddly enough, it made me feel something like... Exposed.

I studied her body instead. I had been too consumed with the need to bury my cock in her before to take a good, hard look.

I remedied that now. And took my time.

“What kind of dancing do you do?” I asked. Because she was a lithe, taut column of muscle, but she was bruised here and there. And sported the kinds of scrapes that spoke of a body well used.

And her feet.

Her feet were a disaster.

“Don’t look at my feet,” she said, and when I looked up I thought I saw something on her face for second, but it was gone too soon to name it. “I have a horrifying addiction to high-heeled shoes.”

“High-heeled shoes do...that?”

Her feet were so battered that they called to mind something inside me, some memory I couldn’t quite place, of an image—

“You have to be brave to be beautiful,” she told me, with another one of those wicked, mischievous smiles that I wanted to taste. “That’s what my mother always told me.”

“Is your mother dead?”

My little dancer let out a laugh. “I certainly hope not. As far as I know, she’s alive and well and competing for the title of best hostess in the whole of—” She stopped herself, and her smile was rueful. “I apologize. The last thing you want, I’m sure, is a whole lot of unsolicited personal detail.”

This would ordinarily be true, no matter how I’d met the woman in question. But she was...different, somehow, from all my previous dates and conquests.

“It’s not unsolicited. I literally solicited it. Just now.”

Another tilt of her head. “Do you talk about mothers every time you buy a woman?”

I laughed again, but surely none of this was funny. And stranger still, it only made me harder. “What if that’s my kink?”

“Then you can call me Mommy while you come.” Her eyes were alight with a wicked sort of promise I wanted to lose myself in. “If you must. But somehow, I don’t think that’s your thing.”

“Indeed, it is not.” Still, I studied her. “Does your mother know what you do?”

“Of course.” Her smile widened. “She supports my dancing wholeheartedly.”

That made me laugh again, and it was like a light switched on inside me. From pitch-dark to blazing, laughter and secrets and need, and I was done. I needed to fuck her, hard and long and now.

Right now.

I rose then, and she must have seen my intentions on my face, because she sobered as she tipped her head back to look at me.

“Time to fuck, little dancer,” I told her. Softly.

And I watched, in pure delight and no little wonder, as goose bumps broke out all over her skin.

There were things I could do if I was willing to take my time...but I couldn’t wait. Not now, with her taste in my mouth and the evidence that she wanted me as desperately as I wanted her written all over her flesh.

I felt edgy and wild. So close already, as if I might explode or topple over some cliff and lose any semblance of control.

That set off an alarm, deep inside me, but I didn’t care. Not now.

I couldn’t wait another second. I reached down and slid my arm around her waist, then lifted her into the air.

She was a little thing, though she was all muscle. Still, she felt like air, particularly as she flowed with me, wrapping her legs around my waist as if I’d ordered her to do it. And then she held herself there, with thigh muscles that made my head spin around and around with lust, and her arms around my shoulders.

My God, she was a wonder.

I gripped her ass again and began lowering her, but for a heady sort of moment I couldn’t tell which one of us was doing the work.

Was I holding her up? Or was she the one holding herself against me, then lowering herself down, with a kind of impossible precision that made the blood in my cock pulse?

“You have a lot of muscle control,” I managed to say as she inched down my torso the slightest bit more, then the slightest bit more than that, so I could almost feel the heat of her with the head of my cock.

She let out a laugh, her hard nipples brushing my chest. “For a whore, you mean?”

“For anyone,” I managed to get out.

“You saw me on that stage. What did you think? It was all smoke and mirrors?”

Something inside me tore open. Something greedy and dark, an uncontrollable storm of need and longing.

And instead of fearing such a thing, I wanted to lose myself in it.

In her.

“Prove it,” I dared her. “Fuck yourself silly.”

A smile broke over her face, wicked and bright and all mine.

“Yes, sir,” she said, her voice rough and husky.

And then, at last, she obeyed me.

Darcy

Being lifted was nothing new for me. But this was different.

Everything about this was different.

He held me easily, and it was almost like dancing. It was almost like the pas de deux.

Almost.

I adjusted my hold on him and let myself slide until I could feel the thick head of his cock at the opening of my pussy.

I had the mad thought that all those years of ballet training had been for this, all along.

For this moment, when I could look up and hold his bright blue gaze, then lower myself down on that hard, hot length of his.

I was so wet it should have embarrassed me though it didn’t. I was wildly soft and deliciously hot, and even so, I had to adjust to the size of him. He was thick and long, but I dedicated myself to the task of taking him.

One hot inch after the next.

Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself. I waited for my body to accept him, then I went farther.

And we were both sweating by the time I finally made it all the way, my pussy flush against him.

And that glorious huge cock of his buried deep inside of me.

I felt myself begin to quiver. And his gaze shifted, his expression turning almost cruel with hunger and command.

“Don’t you dare come,” he told me. “You need to work for it this time.”

One hand gripped my hair again. The other shifted to my waist, holding me against him as I arched back a little.

But nothing else was up to me.

And I loved it.

First, I had to fight off my own orgasm. And once again, it was years of fighting back my body’s various urges that helped me. I didn’t dare to disobey him, but I didn’t ask myself what I thought he might do if I did.

I fought the need to come. I caught myself at the edge, shook with the effort but pulled myself back.

“Good girl,” he murmured approvingly.

And that went through me like another shudder.

I glanced to the side, thinking a break in the intensity might help me maintain my control.

And I could see us in the window’s reflection. Whoever we were.

A big, strong man. And an angel.

My wings flowed over the backs of my arms, and I arched my back to make them fall even more beautifully toward the floor. A move that lifted me up and got his cock even deeper inside me.

And then I rolled my hips, experimenting with the feel of it and ignoring the protest in my thigh muscles.

I didn’t care if it hurt.

All I cared about was doing exactly what he told me to do.

Again and again, until it swept us both away.

I used my thighs and my core, and my grip on his wide shoulders. I lifted myself up, using my internal muscles to grip his cock all the way. And right when I got to the tip, I settled myself down again.

And that felt so good, so deep and full and glorious that I laughed a little.

I saw him look to the side, taking in that same reflection. I arched back even farther, dramatically, then gasped a little when he put his teeth to the side of my neck.

And then I did what I’d come here to do.

What he’d told me to do.

I fucked myself silly on him.

I found the count, the pattern. The lift and then the settle. The shimmer in my hips.

Again and again I rose up, then dropped myself down, until I lost track of the fact that this was another kind of performance. I was too drunk on the sensation of it. Too wild.

“Please, sir,” I said, then began to chant. “I need to come.”

“Too bad,” he growled in reply.

So I fought my body even as I shook and grew wetter, hotter. Wilder by the moment.

There was no sound in the room save the two of us.

Our bodies, wet and hot, coming together over and over. Harsh breathing, his or mine, I could hardly tell.

I was used to orchestras, but this was a symphony all its own, and I couldn’t tell the difference between the blood pounding in my head and the sounds I made.

“Please,” I begged him. “Please.”

I thought he would ignore me. And he did, for what seemed like forever.

Then he shifted. He wrapped his hands around my ass, easing the tension in my thighs, which felt like its own release.

“Come, little dancer,” he ordered me. “Now.”

Before I change my mind, he didn’t say. But I heard it all the same.

And I exploded. I burst into flame and fury and a thousand pieces of glorious shrapnel.

It was as if all the orgasms that preceded this one didn’t count. They were insubstantial. Releases, that was all.

This was a bomb.

This was life altering.

I felt the way I had the first time I’d danced in my point shoes, spinning around and around as if made of light and air. I felt like I was flying.

The orgasm walloped me and kept going. I thought I heard myself scream.

And then he was turning us around, falling back against one of the sofas, bringing me down astride him with my wings all around us.

He waited until I stopped sobbing against him, there where my mouth had fallen against the crook of his neck.

I lifted my head, though it felt too heavy, and looked down at him.

He was beautiful. He was hard inside me and cruel in all the right ways.

I felt soft all the way through. Even in my heart, though I cautioned myself against such nonsense as best I could when my head was still spinning.

He smiled then, this man who had bought me and had already given me more pleasure than lovers who’d claimed they knew me.

And his smile was a dark, erotic promise.

“My turn,” he said.

CHAPTER FIVE

Darcy

I MADE AN involuntary sound.

I had made many sounds already—some I couldn’t believe had come out of me—but this was different. I realized it even as it escaped my lips, but I couldn’t take it back. I watched that dark, intent expression on his face as it altered slightly at the evidence of my vulnerability still echoing there between us.

I’d spent my whole life denying that I was capable of vulnerability. I smiled, instead. I danced until I bled, then I danced some more. Only actual broken bones made me stop, and sometimes not even then. And I certainly never made vulnerable noises. Ballet dancers were tough. We had to be, or we could never look that graceful.

“Problem?” he asked, his voice gritty.

Less a question than a demand.

I felt my breath shudder through my body, as if I’d forgotten how to breathe. I could feel the ache in my thighs, reminding me that I was splayed open as I sat astride him. And I could feel him, deep inside me, hard and hot. Still.

It made a different sort of shiver curl its way down my spine.

Every part of my body was sensitized. Overly raw and mad with it. Awake and alive in ways that made my head spin. I couldn’t make sense of it. Of him. Of this fantasy brought to life at last. All the sex I’d had before this seemed dull, dim. Unsatisfying in a thousand ways, and we weren’t even finished yet. It was as if this was my first time, as crazy as that was to imagine.

I felt words I shouldn’t say swell inside of me—

But then I remembered myself.

This was the fantasy I had chosen.

And no man—or woman—bought an experience like this so they could hear about someone else’s emotions. I understood that full well. The fantasy was in the anonymity. In the taking. This was a place for only certain kinds of intimacy.

My emotions were my own business. As were his.

That was what made this so hot.

“Of course not,” I said, trying to sound serene and in control. I even managed what I thought was a passable smile. “How could there be a problem?”

His eyes were so bright I was sure they were punching holes right through me. I wondered if when I looked down I would see not only myself impaled upon him, but see those marks, too. Like scars.

And I wanted those scars. I wore the ones ballet had given me like badges of honor. Audiences had no idea what it took to look that effortless onstage. We covered our scars and danced straight through them.

I wanted whatever this man would give me. I wanted to wear his marks forward, like brands.

I expected him to start fucking me again, much harder this time—a notion that made me quiver—now that he called it his turn.

Instead, he moved one of his big, strong hands to fit against the curve of my cheek. It wasn’t gentle, particularly. It felt like the very brand I’d just been imagining. A mark of ownership, especially when his thumb moved over my lips again.

As if he’d seen the raw, unbound truth behind my smile and was rubbing it away.

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” he told me then, and there was something in the way he said it. So dark. So intent and sure. So certain. That, too, made me quiver. “You have one job. Do you know what that is?”

“I thought I was doing it.”

His blue eyes sharpened. “All you have to do is what I tell you to do, little dancer. No more. No less. I will tell you what I want. What I like and what I don’t. You don’t have to worry about anticipating my needs. I’ll make sure you know what they are. Do you understand?”

A thousand responses to that swirled around inside me, each one as raw and powerful and emotional as the next, but in the end I chose the only response that mattered.

“Yes,” I said. He watched me, something expectant and commanding on his face, and I felt myself flush. “Yes, sir.”

“Good girl.”

And then he showed me what he meant.

His hands smoothed their way down my torso to grip my hips. I thought he would order me to move, but he didn’t. Instead, he lifted me up, an easy slide along the length of his cock because I was so wet and hot and melting. He lifted me up, then slammed me back down.

Sensation exploded inside me, and he did it again. And again.

I didn’t have to do a thing. He was using me like his very own fuck toy.

Something else exploded in me then. Something so bright and sharp and beautiful that I wanted to grand jeté straight into the center of it. I wanted to spin around and around and around until I became it.

I wanted this to last forever.

Still he lifted me, then slammed me down against him. Faster and faster. Harder each time.

I didn’t know if it was aftershocks or a new tremor all its own, but I shook. Each slam of my body against his, with his cock so deep inside me, made my whole body hum in a sort of startled delight that spread everywhere until I was lit up with it.

And inside, I understood exactly what it was I felt. What all that rawness and wildness was.

Joy.

Freedom.

Because this was not the ballet. There I was an object valued for the pain I could withstand in my ability to make it all pretty and perfect for the audience. But here I was a different sort of object altogether.

Made for pleasure, not pain. And there was no putting a foot wrong. There was no messing up a step or ruining the perfect uniformity expected of the corps.

There was only this man’s needs, his imagination and what he told me to do. Or did himself with my body as his instrument.

It was like magic.

He slammed me against him until I couldn’t tell where I ended and his iron control began. There was only the sweetness of total surrender. And all the while, the building crisis of sheer delight inside me.

“Come once more,” he ordered me, and it didn’t occur to me to do anything but what I was told.

I let my head tip back, my breasts jutting forward as I curved my back into the arch.

And the cries that came out of me as I convulsed on his dick once again, as ordered, seemed to bounce back from the marble floors and the carefully brocaded walls. Calling me out. Calling my name when I didn’t know his.

But the true music was when he finally roared out his own release, coming deep inside me in what felt like a scalding flood.

That tripped off another shock inside me and I sobbed with it, riding it out until I finally collapsed against him.

If I was on a stage, I would have to remove myself from it. I would have to dance my way off, no matter how I felt or what had happened to me up there. Or I would have to crawl off—maybe even ask someone to pull me off if I was really hurt—once the lights went down. The stage was an addiction, and there were times the price it demanded seemed impossible to pay. And no matter what, the show had to go on. The music would swell and the next act would take their place. That was the nature of the business we called show.

But this was no stage. There was no spotlight. This was a far simpler transaction.

The price had already been paid, and not by me.

And somehow, that notion made me feel safe. Enough that I hardly moved when he stirred beneath me, then swept me up with him as he stood.

I assumed he meant to set me on my feet. And then...who knows? Slap me on the ass and tell me to leave? Tell me to collect my things and go? Whatever he did, it certainly couldn’t be worse than standing before the ballet master—or any one of the fierce teachers I’d had in my career—fighting to control my breathing while also trying to pay attention as they ripped my performance to shreds. Step by step.

Was there a critique in a transaction like this? Notes?

I wasn’t sure what it said about me that my nipples hardened at the thought. As if all this time, all I’d really wanted was someone to take all these brutal little pieces of the life I’d chosen and turn them into sex.

Not just anyone, something inside me whispered. Him.

He didn’t set me down. I thought the wiser course of action was to close my eyes, the better to avoid looking at the overwhelming perfection of his face. Not to mention the impossible blue of his gaze.

I rested my head against his broad shoulder as he carried me. And I peeked from under my lashes as we left the main room, moving through a bedchamber with a crackling fire in a picturesque grate and on into a seductively lit bathroom suite. It was there that he set me on my feet, propping me up against the nearest tiled wall as if I really was no more than a sex toy.

The same delirious heat curled in me again. I stood where he’d put me, happy to wait and see how he would use me next.

That this was a suite set aside for sex was obvious, because the bathroom was clearly arranged for seduction first and hygienic purposes second. There was a door across the room with a WC written on it, but everything in the chamber where we stood was either gold, marble or dark wood, all of it as beautiful as it was functional.

Like me, I thought. My career in a nutshell.

He moved around the tub, which was vast and tall and clearly made to service at least four people. The water spilled out of the faucet like a waterfall, quick and quiet. The room grew steamy, scented with lavender and something spicier I couldn’t identify. I breathed it in, deeply.

He looked up, then tilted his head toward the water in silent command. I had never been waited on in this fashion before. No one saw to my physical needs after a tough class, no matter how many muscles I’d pulled. It was up to me to care for my body, always making sure it could withstand the demands of all that dancing.

And even if I’d imagined someone tending to me, it would never have occurred to me that someone could perform the tasks he did while making it seem like some kind of noblesse oblige. The lord of the manor ministering to his underlings, but certainly not serving them.

My limbs felt deliciously heavy. I hadn’t had sex in a while, and I’d never had sex like that. I could feel the ache of it, the longing deep inside and the actual sensation of use in my pussy. I could feel aches and pains all over, just enough to indicate I’d done something—and a lot of it—but not nearly enough to qualify as actual hurt.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt better.

“Do I need to ask you twice?” His voice was silky then, but I didn’t mistake the erotic menace in it.

And even that rolled over me with a delicious sort of ripple. I tried to hide my smile as I moved off the wall. He watched me—supervised me, maybe—as I climbed into the expansive tub, sighed at the embrace of the hot water, then sank down into it.

“Stay there and soak,” he ordered me.

Then he strode from the bathroom, leaving me there to do just that.

The huge tub was set up on a dais, with a bank of windows splayed out before me, showing me Paris at night. I twisted my hair into an easy knot on the top of my head. I sank down as the water rose, letting it cover me to my chin. And I just...soaked.

As ordered.

I expected to start questioning myself. For the second-guessing to take me over, storming around and around inside me until it made me raw. I expected all the usual voices of doubt and worry to swamp me then and braced myself a little in anticipation.

Because it was one thing to fantasize about something and another to do it. I already knew that all too well. It was my life. Every little girl dreams of being a ballerina at one point or another. But the actual doing of it was something else entirely. Everybody wants the tutu. Everybody imagines themselves starring in Swan Lake.

Nobody wants the reality of practicing the same step over and over and over, day in and day out, ignoring your body screaming, your exhaustion, and all those same voices in your head forever telling you that you can’t make it. That you can’t do it. That no matter what, you’ll never get there. All that to be good enough in your local ballet school.

The reality was that being the best in your ballet school was still not necessarily good enough to make it into the corps, much less out of it to become a principal.

Fantasy was always en pointe, graceful and light like a sylph. Reality was the state of my feet, battered and ugly forever, and that kick of sharp agony every time I used them that told me who I was.

I turned off the water and sank deeper into the tub. I waited for my body to finish cataloging its reaction to what had happened, and for my emotions to catch up and wallop me. I waited for my heartbeat to tip me over into sheer horror at what I had not only allowed tonight, but encouraged. Enthusiastically.

I waited.

But it was as if his order to sit here, to do nothing but soak, and his earlier command to lose myself in what he told me to do...held me, somehow.

It wasn’t that I was numb or hiding from any feelings. I could feel all kinds of things. The silky, warm water against my skin. Every little tug here and sharpness there, each with its own story to tell.

What I didn’t feel was shame. Horror. Self-recrimination or disgust that I had crossed every line there was and, worse still, enjoyed it.

I had taken one of my deepest, most secret fantasies, made it real, and it wasn’t over yet.

And I had no urge to jump up and run. I could have, of course. There were panic buttons in every room, I’d been told. Should anything get out of hand, my intake counselor had told me what seemed like a thousand years ago when I’d rung that bell and set all this in motion. I looked around now and, sure enough, beneath the discreet panel of light switches beside the bathroom door, there was another button. It was big and shiny and glinted like steel. If I didn’t like what was happening, all I needed to do was get out of this tub, go over there and press it.

Nothing was keeping me from it. He had left me in this room all alone. I had nothing to do but consider each and every one of my options. Or even the fact I had some.

I wondered if he’d done it deliberately. I was used to the mind games of famous choreographers and my various ballet masters, who always insisted that we choose. In each and every moment, every step and every note of music, they demanded it. Choose to be here, one of our teachers liked to shout. Choose to be better than yesterday. Choose perfection.

Maybe he wanted me to keep choosing tonight, too.

I didn’t hear anything, but something in the air around me changed. I glanced over, and he stood there in the door, that blue gaze of his as intense as when he’d been deep inside me.

Again, the freedom of this felt heady. I was a little high on it, if I was honest, though I hadn’t touched anything but water since I’d arrived here. Because if he was any other lover, I might have asked him where he’d gone. What he’d done in the other room while I’d sat here, soaking. Why he’d left me in this room in the first place.

But he wasn’t my lover.

This was a different arrangement altogether. There was no reason to ask him a thing. He’d told me so himself. He would make sure I knew what he wanted. All I needed to do was what he told me to do. No thinking or worrying required.

So instead of interrogating him, I smiled. And said nothing.

“Give me a name,” he said.

I noticed he did not ask for my name. I considered. “You can give me one. Whatever you like.”

“If I wanted to give you a name, little dancer, I would.”

I didn’t know what it was about his voice that got to me, like a length of chain coiling inside me, wrapping itself around me and pulling tight. And all those tight links gleaming bright.

“You can call me Darcy,” I said.

That had to be a mistake, surely. I didn’t know where the urge to be honest came from. Why had I given this man my real name? Even if I had tried to dress it up like it was an alias of some kind?

But even as I asked myself the question, I knew the answer.

I wanted him to know me.

Annabelle took great pleasure in handing out fake names wherever she went. Tonight I’m Caroline, she would announced grandly, sweeping into this bar or that party. I’m a disappointed society girl from Beacon Hill, whose inheritance is nothing more than a crumbling old brownstone and three ancient VW bugs. And then she would spend the rest of the night acting and fucking the way she imagined her fictional Boston Brahmin Caroline would.

But I didn’t want to play Annabelle’s games. This was my fantasy, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life replaying it in my head with another woman’s name on this man’s perfectly cruel mouth.

I already knew that I would hoard this night like treasure. I would lie in that bed of mine back in New York, run my hands over my own body and imagine this. Him. The blue of his eyes and the particular scrape of his voice all over me.

I would live this again and again.

It was only one night. But it would have to last me a lifetime.

Because I knew that I was never going to feel safe enough to repeat this, because I certainly couldn’t afford to make myself a member of this club. This was my one chance.

A part of me whispered that it wasn’t only the safety...it was him. This particular man on this specific night.

And if I wanted to make sure that I could hold this close to me forever, in all the years that followed, it required I give him my real name.

“Darcy,” he said, as if he was tasting the syllables. As if it was a fine wine that required its own ritual before he could drink deeply.

I was sure it probably was a mistake to give him my real name, like bread crumbs that might lead away from this enchanted room in this decadent club straight back to my real life. But I would have to beat myself up for that later, when my emotions caught up with me. When I was back in reality, across the sea in Manhattan again.

Because here in this gleaming tub, with Paris like a sea of light outside the windows, all I could think about was the way it felt to hear him say it.

Darcy.

As if I wasn’t just another object to him, as hot as that was.

As if I was his.

CHAPTER SIX

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.

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