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