“I do not.”
I did. I really, truly did.
“Here’s the deal, Darcy,” Annabelle said, coming to a stop when we’d only done the first of our three miles. She rested her hands on her hips, and I knew she was serious when a good-looking man ran past and looked at
her admiringly and she didn’t look back at him. “I’ve spent years trying to get inside this. Any branch, anywhere.”
“Then you shouldn’t give up your opportunity to do it this time.”
“I’m understudying Claudia,” Annabelle said, naming one of our soloists. She shrugged. “I can’t be flying off to Paris during our season break, indulging myself, and possibly miss an opportunity that both you and I know is unlikely to come again. Not that it will come this time, either. You know Claudia. She won’t miss a show. She’d dance through the plague.”
I did know Claudia, younger than us and far more ambitious. I also knew Annabelle. And I’d been hearing her talk about the pleasures to be had in this exquisite M Club of hers for at least two years. There was no applying for membership. There was no showing up or waiting in a line. The club was by invitation only, membership was rumored to be extended only to the wealthiest individuals alive, and clearly, the only possible way that someone like Annabelle or me was getting inside was as the help.
Or in this case, as the talent.
“If they’re so fancy, why wouldn’t they hire real burlesque dancers?” I didn’t even smirk when I said it. Because, between Annabelle’s first mention of it and now, I had accidentally spent a little too much time researching the art form. “There are world-renowned burlesque dancers who I’m sure would leap at the chance—”
“For exactly that reason. World-renowned, professional burlesque dancers would likely perform burlesque, then go about their business. M Club is looking for dancers who might do a little bit more than that.”
“You mean dancers who want to be whores.”
Annabelle tipped back her head and laughed at that loudly. Once more drawing attention from passing men and women alike. And ignoring the attention entirely, which was unlike her.
“Keep your morals to yourself, please.” She waved a hand over the sports bra and tiny running shorts she wore. “This body is my instrument. I’ve honed it, beaten it into submission and gloried in it. But what I choose to do with it, who I choose to do it with, and what I want in return is entirely my business. I don’t think that makes me a whore.”
“Please stop saying that word so loudly,” I said. Through my teeth.
Annabelle smiled. “My understanding is that the club wants dancers who are open to using this opportunity as more than just a simple performance. Dancers who will push the envelope and give themselves over to the fantasy.”
I wanted to dismiss the whole notion of M Club out of hand. I wanted to laugh, much as Annabelle had, all lust and delight. I wanted to start running again, stop talking and chalk this up to one more of Annabelle’s predictable flights of fancy.
But my heart was kicking inside my chest as if we’d sped up instead of stopping. Between my legs, I was slippery. Too hot and trembling again, as if on the verge of another intense orgasm like last night’s.
I didn’t know what was happening to me.
I didn’t want to know.
“You need to call the number I already have. You will have to update them about our little cast change. Tell them who you are, answer all their questions, and they will ask you to share your deepest, darkest fantasies with them.” Annabelle smirked at me. “I think we both know what that is.”
“I don’t know what makes you think you have the slightest idea what I fantasize about. For all you know, I’d like nothing more than to zip-tie a room full of domineering men, then make them crawl around and serve me.”
“Yes, yes,” she murmured. “Anyone who’s ever suffered through rehearsals with François has entertained a thousand fantasies of tying up men just like him and torturing them within an inch of their lives.” François was the Knickerbocker’s most temperamental male soloist and a diva beyond compare. “But that’s not quite the same thing, is it? That’s a revenge fantasy. It’s not what haunts you. It’s not what makes you moan in your sleep. Rhythmically. Waking up with a gasp—”
I could feel my face turning red again. Bright and obvious, even outside on a sunny spring morning.
“You must be thinking of yourself,” I countered. “Or either one of those twins you had over last night.”
“I exhausted the twins long before I heard you, Darcy. But tell yourself any fiction you like.” Annabelle reached up and adjusted her ponytail. “I don’t need an answer until next week. You’re welcome to say no and condemn yourself to your usual life of mediocre sex and a thousand fantasies that you will soon enough be too old and too decrepit to enjoy.”
“I don’t have mediocre sex—how dare you—and I have no intention of becoming decrepit.”
“It’s one night, Darcy. In Paris.” Annabelle sighed as if she, too, played out some fantasies in her head instead of hurling herself headfirst into every last one of them. “You dance suggestively for strange men and women whose names you will not know. You show them as much of your naked body as you like, but only on your terms. Then, afterward, if you are so moved, you let the man who most captures your fancy draw you into a private room. You let him purchase you for the rest of the night and then do with you, to you, absolutely everything and anything he desires.”
Her gaze was hot. Demanding. I told myself that was why I couldn’t breathe.
“Just think about it,” Annabelle said.
It took me much too long to remember I was in New York in the bright light of day, not under a dark Parisian night sky with a relentless stranger... I repressed a shiver.