“Don’t tease,” he growled.
I smiled. Then I sucked him in deep.
And for long moments, there was nothing but this.
Communion. Consolation.
This fantasy made real in the best way imaginable.
He tasted male. And like me. I couldn’t get enough. I wished I could take all of him and I did my best, triumph washing through me when his hands moved to fist in my hair.
And I moaned out my pleasure when he lifted his hips, gently fucking my mouth.
I rocked my hips from side to side, desperate for some friction, but I was too busy holding on to him to tend to myself.
I liked that almost more than I could bear. Aching for him even as I serviced him. Leaving myself needy while he grunted out his pleasure, then came hard, salt and man down the back of my throat.
I sat back, feeling dazed and delicious. There was moisture in the corners of my eyes and that lovely used feeling making my mouth feel like his, not mine.
His eyes glittered as he looked down at me, still kneeling there beside his chair. He smoothed my hair back with those hard hands of his I knew without question would haunt me for the rest of my life. He wiped the excess moisture away from beneath my eyes with his thumb, then kept his hand there. He cupped my cheek, holding my face tilted toward his.
And it was so easy to forget how I’d come to be here. All the necessary lines between fantasy and real life. In this moment, I was a woman and he was a man, and everything else felt like make-believe.
I was tempted to forget myself.
I wanted more than one night. I wanted a thousand nights. I wanted to take this fantasy, make it real all the time and, more than that, make it work. Whatever that meant. I wanted what I knew I couldn’t have. I wanted things I couldn’t name and wouldn’t know how to ask for. I wanted the sheer ecstasy of this to transcend this transaction we’d agreed upon.
But that was the beauty of this situation. There was no changing it. He was a member of this club and could do what he liked, but I had signed very specific contracts. I was not to take the initiative and contact anyone I met here afterward. I was certainly not to make my own arrangements. And if I wanted to come back to the club, to continue what I’d started here tonight, as I was informed many “fantasy guests” did, I would have to pay them for the privilege.
The price they quoted to me had mad
e my eyes water and my stomach twist in a kind of panic.
I would not be coming back here on my dime, that was for sure.
“I don’t know what you’re doing to me,” he said, his voice low, his hand hot and strong against my jaw. And there were too many things I was afraid I understood all too well in his gaze. “I am a man of duty, not debauchery. I blow off steam only under the most controlled circumstances, and I never lose myself. And you have me imagining things I would have told you were impossible eight hours ago.”
I knew there was no hope in it. No happy ending, save the ones we gave each other here. Orgasms aplenty, but absolutely nothing else. I told myself that made it safe.
I leaned my cheek into his hand. “What do you imagine?”
“You don’t understand.” His voice was even darker now. Something far more dangerous than a mere growl. “My father was a man who broke things because he knew he could always buy more. He particularly liked to break companies down into parts, sell them off at a profit and enrich himself. Still, the thing he broke most often was my mother.”
He shouldn’t be telling me something like that. Something so real it seemed to hurt him as he said it. I wanted to tell him to take back those words. To steer us in a different direction altogether, back to yes, sir and the stark honesty of sex, but I couldn’t seem to make my mouth work. I could still taste him on my tongue.
I told myself that it was better, maybe, that he should talk to me as if he was nothing but a man. Any man at all. The kind I could find annoying after a few weeks. Maybe this way I’d believe it.
“Everything I know about emotion I learned from a broken, bitter woman whose only friend comes in liquid form and keeps her drunk around the clock. She keeps a good face for the public, which means I’m usually the one treated to her drunken displays. She taught me that love means always, always, being the victim.”
“You don’t have to talk about these things,” I murmured, not sure why my instinct was to soothe him.
His smile was merciless. “I keep my life in strict compartments. Work. Play. Family on one branch, my social life, such as it is, on another. And these branches never, ever cross.”
“I think everybody does that.”
I thought of my own parents, chilly and remote. Never quite pleased, no matter what. They had attended my early recitals—if the dates didn’t conflict with their social calendars—but I’d always thought they supported their ballet-dancer daughter because that made them seem more sophisticated to their friends. It meant I had worked that much harder, as if I needed to prove myself to them. As if that might make them love me. I was almost thirty and I wasn’t sure they did. I never asked them about it. I just...danced. With more focus and intensity. And I had never considered introducing Annabelle to them, for example. It was unimaginable that they might have access to my actual life.
“Families are like secret wounds that never quite heal,” I found myself saying, there in a suite in Paris while a man watched me too closely with eyes like every summer I’d missed because I’d been too busy rehearsing. “Sometimes they leave scars. But I think those scars mean you’re lucky. For the rest of us, there’s no hoping that the scar tissue fades from pink and becomes white over time. For most of us there’s no healing. There’s only coming to terms with the maintenance and the bandages as best we can.”