The Risk / Friends With Benefits

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.