“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 j
ust 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.