this transaction we’d agreed upon.
But that was the beauty of this situation. There was no changing it. He was a member of this club and could do what he liked, but I had signed very specific contracts. I was not to take the initiative and contact anyone I met here afterward. I was certainly not to make my own arrangements. And if I wanted to come back to the club, to continue what I’d started here tonight, as I was informed many “fantasy guests” did, I would have to pay them for the privilege.
The price they quoted to me had made my eyes water and my stomach twist in a kind of panic.
I would not be coming back here on my dime, that was for sure.
“I don’t know what you’re doing to me,” he said, his voice low, his hand hot and strong against my jaw. And there were too many things I was afraid I understood all too well in his gaze. “I am a man of duty, not debauchery. I blow off steam only under the most controlled circumstances, and I never lose myself. And you have me imagining things I would have told you were impossible eight hours ago.”
I knew there was no hope in it. No happy ending, save the ones we gave each other here. Orgasms aplenty, but absolutely nothing else. I told myself that made it safe.
I leaned my cheek into his hand. “What do you imagine?”
“You don’t understand.” His voice was even darker now. Something far more dangerous than a mere growl. “My father was a man who broke things because he knew he could always buy more. He particularly liked to break companies down into parts, sell them off at a profit and enrich himself. Still, the thing he broke most often was my mother.”
He shouldn’t be telling me something like that. Something so real it seemed to hurt him as he said it. I wanted to tell him to take back those words. To steer us in a different direction altogether, back to yes, sir and the stark honesty of sex, but I couldn’t seem to make my mouth work. I could still taste him on my tongue.
I told myself that it was better, maybe, that he should talk to me as if he was nothing but a man. Any man at all. The kind I could find annoying after a few weeks. Maybe this way I’d believe it.
“Everything I know about emotion I learned from a broken, bitter woman whose only friend comes in liquid form and keeps her drunk around the clock. She keeps a good face for the public, which means I’m usually the one treated to her drunken displays. She taught me that love means always, always, being the victim.”
“You don’t have to talk about these things,” I murmured, not sure why my instinct was to soothe him.
His smile was merciless. “I keep my life in strict compartments. Work. Play. Family on one branch, my social life, such as it is, on another. And these branches never, ever cross.”
“I think everybody does that.”
I thought of my own parents, chilly and remote. Never quite pleased, no matter what. They had attended my early recitals—if the dates didn’t conflict with their social calendars—but I’d always thought they supported their ballet-dancer daughter because that made them seem more sophisticated to their friends. It meant I had worked that much harder, as if I needed to prove myself to them. As if that might make them love me. I was almost thirty and I wasn’t sure they did. I never asked them about it. I just…danced. With more focus and intensity. And I had never considered introducing Annabelle to them, for example. It was unimaginable that they might have access to my actual life.
“Families are like secret wounds that never quite heal,” I found myself saying, there in a suite in Paris while a man watched me too closely with eyes like every summer I’d missed because I’d been too busy rehearsing. “Sometimes they leave scars. But I think those scars mean you’re lucky. For the rest of us, there’s no hoping that the scar tissue fades from pink and becomes white over time. For most of us there’s no healing. There’s only coming to terms with the maintenance and the bandages as best we can.”
“Why, Darcy.” His hand moved against my cheek. “I had no idea someone who moves the way you do could be so cynical.”
“It’s not cynicism, it’s reality. No one can work in fantasy without a serious grounding in reality. Not if they want to survive. Much less succeed.”
I surprised myself, because I was talking about ballet. And what it took to live the life I did. The kind of life that strangers assumed they could imagine when all they saw was pancake makeup and costumes floating across the stage, never the years of work that went into looking that effortless—
But he thought I was talking about sex.
“And here I thought it was your emotions that made this work.”
“Emotions are fuel,” I said lightly. “Let them take control, and they’ll eat you alive. Use them as fuel, and they’ll help you burn brighter.” His thumb moved along my jawline, hypnotically. “But then again, I am not drunk.”
“Indeed, you are not.” His mouth flattened. “I cannot imagine a woman like you ever allowing a man to break her the way my father broke my mother. Over and over again.”
“I break things all the time.” That happened to be true. “What are a few broken bones among friends?”
It occurred to me after I said it that possibly that was the sort of joke better confined to the ballet rehearsal halls.
“Bones heal. Marriages? Not so much.” Again, that smile without any mirth. “I promised myself I would never make myself so vulnerable to another. I would never allow anyone close enough to break me. And I never have.”
“Forgive me,” I murmured then. “You do not strike me as particularly…unbroken.”
He let out a sound at that, though I would not call it a laugh. “Tell me, little dancer, why do I have the impression that you will be the wound I cannot heal?”
“I can give you what you paid for,” I whispered, my heart pounding in ways I refused to analyze. “Nothing more.”
“I want another night. The whole bloody weekend.”
“No,” I whispered. “That will only make it worse.”
“I don’t think it will. I don’t think it could.” He lifted me up and settled me on his lap, and for a moment there was nothing but the electricity between us. The crackle of that connection. Heat and longing. “But this will. I’m sure of it.”
I held my breath, not sure what he was about to do. And not prepared when what he did was wrap his hand around the nape of my neck.
Then slowly, inexorably, he drew my mouth to his.
“You can’t…” I began.
“Did I buy all of you? Or only a small part of you?”
It was a silken challenge. Dark and hot.
“I don’t even know—”
But I cut myself off. Horrified that I’d nearly given myself away.
And something far more complicated than merely horrified that the very thought of his kiss…panicked me. All the sex we’d had must have gotten to me. But not like this.
His
