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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 (#u8905ec84-acf1-505d-973c-443c88b216a0)
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.
