The Risk / Friends With Benefits

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.