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.”