And lost about six inches, making her even tinier than I’d imagined.
Perfectly sized to lift and move and handle as I wished.
Her wings were dispensed of with a few tugs behind her shoulders, which she did herself. Showing me all the ways she was flexible. Limber.
My mouth was dry.
Her hair tumbled around her shoulders as she reached behind her and unwrapped those shining jewels from around her breasts.
“That’s enough,” I growled.
Because I knew that if I saw her fully naked right now, this would end far too soon.
This round, I amended.
She would be no businesswoman at all if she didn’t take me for the fortune I had offered her, and that meant I intended to get my money’s worth.
Again and again.
But something else had happened as she stood there with her angel’s wings in a feathery cloud around her and that stark, wicked invitation on her face.
It had suddenly become wildly important to me that she want me, if not as much as I wanted her, then at least enough.
Enough to shiver. Enough to ache.
Just as I did.
“Show me,” I commanded her. “Touch yourself, little dancer, and show me exactly how much you want me.”
CHAPTER THREE
Darcy
IF IT HADN’T been for my burlesque performance earlier, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to handle this.
Any of this. All of my darkest, most-hidden fantasies coming true. At once.
At last.
The club had been better than I’d imagined it. Everything that carefully nameless woman had promised in New York, and then some. All the staff had been excruciatingly professional and, better still, polite when I’d rung the bell to the quiet staff entrance a world away from the fancier entrance at the front of the building. I’d been greeted, then ushered to a private dressing room several floors beneath the Parisian street, surprised to find it significantly more luxurious than most of the makeshift, communal dressing rooms I’d spent my life in at the ballet. The other talent I’d seen in those downstairs halls hadn’t been amateurs, as I’d feared when I’d received an instruction packet that indicated the show tonight was more than just me. The dancers and performers I’d met were r
eticent about their names and their current gigs, as was I, but we recognized each other just the same.
Professionals, in one form or another. I could identify others in my line of work at a glance. It was how we stood. How we held ourselves. I knew the others I saw were just like me. Here to work, then play.
It was the “play” part I was trying to get my head around now.
I’d practiced my routine so many times that I’d expected my actual performance to flash by. Or maybe I’d hoped it would. Annabelle and I had laughed about what we’d both called my “snobby striptease” so many times that my emotional response while I was actually doing it in front of an audience took me completely by surprise.
Alone onstage. Centered in the spotlight. Nothing but the pumping, seductive music.
And me.
Just me.
I felt...walloped by it.
I could never tell Annabelle this when I got back home, but there was something about the burlesque that got to me in a way I wasn’t sure I understood.