The Risk, page 12
Even though I knew my heart wasn’t supposed to be involved in this.
“After university, we decided we should take it a step further and go into business together. Our success would be yet another two fingers to the old man. We each put up half the capital. Ash urged caution. He wasn’t sure he liked our potential investors or the fine print. But I didn’t care. I wanted to get the deal done, so I could throw it into my father’s face.”
He was silent for a long moment, a faraway look on his face that struck me as...sad.
I wanted nothing more than to go to him, and hold him, and try to somehow make him less alone than he seemed then. But I didn’t quite dare. He was too remote. Too self-contained and forbidding. I liked those things about him, especially during sex.
But for the first time, I wondered what it must have cost him to become those things. And what he’d lost.
“I’m guessing it didn’t go well.”
I tried to keep that ache out of my voice and off my face.
“We lost everything.” He shook his head. “But when I say that, what I mean is that Ash lost everything. I lost my savings, my father’s respect, and the confidence of the corporate world. But Ash didn’t have what I had. My father might have paid for his schooling, but he didn’t pay for anything else. Whatever I might have lost, I still had a roof over my head and my job in the family company, no matter what. I was not only reckless and out of control, it had literally never occurred to me how much more Ash had to lose.”
He winced at that, all these years later. And my poor heart kicked at me, foolishly.
“Sure,” I said. “But you didn’t lose all your money at him, right?”
Sebastian frowned at me. “As far as Ash was concerned, I was a liar. Untrustworthy and despicable, just like our father, or how else could I have ruined us both so completely? Maybe on some level he was waiting all those years for me to prove that I was no better than the old man. And how could I argue with that? He didn’t want my explanations. Our father died not long after, and left everything to me. It doesn’t surprise me that Ash reckoned I might have known that would happen. Maybe I even went so far as to set him up to take that fall, knowing I’d have it cushy enough in a few years’ time.”
“That sounds a little far-fetched to me. This is your life you’re talking about, not a soap opera.”
He let out a short laugh. “You didn’t know my father. When I tell you he was cruel, I mean that. He held grudges forever, but none so potent as the grudges against his own sons. If he was alive he would tell you that had all been in aid of toughening us up. But I doubt it.” Sebastian shook his head. “I think he liked causing us trouble and pain, the more the merrier.”
“He sounds awful,” I said quietly. Suddenly, my father’s cherry-picked stories and endless mustached years seemed almost cute in comparison. “And I know what it’s like not to have a brother, Sebastian. But I have to think it’s much worse to have one, then lose him. Is there no way...?”
Sebastian’s expression shut down, like a door slamming shut. “None.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think my parents know how to love anything, either,” I said. Brightly, even. “Especially not me.”
And it wasn’t until the words were sitting there between us, like a garnish on the omelet he’d made me, that I realized I’d never said it quite so baldly before. Not to another person, certainly.
“Maybe that’s not fair,” I continued in a kind of panic before he could say anything. And before I could think better of it. “They might very well love their sophisticated friends. Their summers in Bar Harbor and their season tickets to the opera. But not their daughter.” I pretended I couldn’t hear the catch in my voice. “Definitely not that.”
“Then they’re fools.” Sebastian’s voice was dark. Stirring. And when he looked at me, that shut-down look faded, to be replaced by a heat I recognized. “And you need to eat, little dancer. You’ll need your stamina.”
The weeks kept passing. We spent what little time we had free with each other. And slowly but surely, we communicated more the rest of the time. He liked to call me before I went to bed, sometimes purely to hear my voice. Other times so he could whisper filthy things down the line, and the two of us could drive each other crazy while apart.
I couldn’t possibly say which I liked better. Yes, I would think. Both.
And it wasn’t until the run up to Christmas—which was to say, Nutcracker season—that I realized it had been more than a month. More than two months, in fact, and going on three. Now and again I daydreamed about throwing it all in and joining Winston’s company. But the bulk of my daydreams were spent on Sebastian.
And in acting them out.
I still wasn’t sick of him. He hadn’t irritated me at all.
But the holidays meant the Knickerbocker put on The Nutcracker, which meant even more shows than usual to meet the demand for Tchaikovsky’s music and the traditional Christmas story. I was impressed that Sebastian had lasted as long as he had, really I was, but there was a reason we call it Nutcracker season.
Because walnuts weren’t the only nuts it cracked.
It took out would-be lovers left and right.
“I’m exhausted,” Annabelle said as we sat on the bench in the studio one December afternoon in what little downtime we had between matinees. “I’ve hit that point when I’m so tired I don’t even want to have sex.”
I laughed. “A fate worse than death.”
Annabelle rolled her eyes. “You joke. But losing my libido is like losing a piece of my soul.”
“Who gets the luxury of a soul this time of year?” our friend Bernard asked from Annabelle’s other side as he bandaged up the calf that was giving him trouble. “You’re lucky if you get to survive. Soul or no soul.”
And a few nights later, after the third consecutive night in a row that I hadn’t gotten on the phone with him and hadn’t had the energy to respond to a text—after a previous week of much the same—I wasn’t particularly surprised to find Sebastian waiting for me at the stage door after our last performance.
“Bye-bye, Mr. Penthouse,” Annabelle murmured in my ear as she left me there to deal with the stern, beautiful man in his exquisite suit who stood there next to a long, low car that gleamed beneath the streetlights. But she didn’t say it unkindly.
I hadn’t told her that I’d met Sebastian at the club. I doubted I would tell anyone that I had ever been to M Club, and certainly not what I’d gotten up to while I’d been there. Instead, I’d told her that I’d met him around the corner from our apartment in our favorite dive bar. Which wasn’t entirely untrue.
Just my luck, she’d grumbled. I’ve slept with most of New York and I can’t find a man like that. All you have to do is have a single drink on your way back home from a tedious dinner with your parents and it’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, hello Central Park West.
But she was Annabelle, so her grumpiness had quickly turned into support.
We all knew how rare it was for something to survive our grueling schedule. I got more than a few sympathetic looks from other members of the company as they streamed past me, until they were swallowed up in the cold New York night.
I was bone tired, so tired that I thought I might actually burst into tears, and I didn’t want that. Not when I was very much afraid that he was about to break my heart all on his own. You need to save your tears, Darcy, I told myself sternly.
I let him usher me into his car, and slumped there bonelessly on the wide back seat as he slid in after me. The car pulled away from the curb and I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing that I had paid more attention to those rules he’d laid out at the beginning. Mainly the part where he’d said that he didn’t believe in love and had little tolerance for feelings.
Because I felt neck deep in feelings and drowning, as it happened. But I figured that whatever he was about to say—however he was going to do it, this inevitable breakup that I didn’t want at all—it was the time to share them.
“Sebastian,” I began.
“Quiet, little dancer,” was all he said, in that voice that I remembered from Paris. Strong and sure. Controlled.
I didn’t realize that I’d fallen asleep until he was lifting me into his arms and carrying me out of the car. He didn’t put me down as he stepped into his private elevator with its own private entrance to the building, and I was more than okay with it. That meant I could pretend a little while longer. I could rest my head on his shoulder. Lose myself in his arms.
Pretend this could last forever, the way I’d started to imagine it might.
I expected him to let loose when we walked inside the penthouse, but he didn’t. He carried me through one high-ceilinged, scrupulously elegant room after the next, until he brought me into the bathroom next to the master suite. He didn’t have a giant pool masquerading as a bath like the club had offered us in Paris, but it was an elegant, claw-foot tub all the same. It wasn’t until he sat me down beside it that I realized it was already filled. And the water was steaming. Ready.
“Sebastian. I don’t...”
“Get in,” he ordered me. “Soak.”
And I didn’t think I was the only one who shuddered a bit as the echoes of Paris swirled there between us.
Just like I had in Paris, I obeyed him.
Because it felt good to let him take control. It felt like freedom to simply...surrender. The way that fearsome woman in that Fifth Avenue brownstone had suggested so long ago.
After the bath, he fed me. He iced my feet, then helped me apply my favorite ointments and bandage them up. He didn’t speak. I thought that certainly he would exact some form of payment in the currency we both liked best—but instead, he merely put me to bed.
And in the morning, he was gone when I woke.
But he had left strict instructions with his staff. And from that night on, whether he was in town or across the world, I was met after every performance. There was always a tub waiting, and all the ice packs and easily digestible protein a girl could want.
It lulled me into a sense of security.
Christmas came and went. Nutcracker season was almost over. Sebastian had arrived two days before from his Christmas with his mother in England, and I would have known that he’d seen her even if he hadn’t told me.
He held himself differently. His mouth was tighter, his eyes bleaker.
The great benefit of what I did was that I had to do it on Christmas Day. Which meant I couldn’t head up north to celebrate the holiday with my parents. An arrangement that had suited all of us for years now.
“I can’t wait for New Year’s,” I said, because I had it off. I smiled at him. “I’m hoping it will snow you in and we can sit here, just like this.”
We were in the study, my favorite room in his penthouse. There was a fireplace with a delightful fire, the cold weather outside held at bay, and I had wrapped myself in one of the soft cashmere throws that lay over the leather furniture. Sebastian sat beside me, a tumbler of whiskey in one hand and his brooding gaze on the dancing flames.
We were both, for the moment, sated.
“We can do that,” he said. He shifted that brooding gaze from the fire to my face. “But I need you to marry me.”
This time, I laughed, though my heart leaped inside my chest. “You realize you’re talking about a lifetime of tending to these feet. A lifetime of Nutcracker season, when you’re lucky if I rise to the level of brain-dead for the entire month of December. At least.”
His mouth curved, and I got the sense—as I often did—that he surprised himself when he smiled. “I understand what it is to do what you love. And what sacrifices it requires.”
His hand was on the nape of my neck, because he liked to hold it there. As if he liked to know exactly where I was at all times when we were together. And I liked the weight of his hand there. It centered me. Connected me to him and reminded me of Paris. All these weeks since. And the mad fire that still roared between us. No matter how many times we surrendered to it, stoked it and immolated ourselves, still it burned on.
“Do I love it?” I asked, and I wasn’t sure as the words came out of my mouth whether the question was as rhetorical as I’d meant it to sound. “It’s a complicated love, at best. Sometimes I think I hate it. You dream of being a ballerina. You don’t dream about being that girl in the back. Especially when the amount of work is the same. But you’re doing it, so you dance. And you give it everything you have. And the sad truth is that some people have that thing. That spark that sets them apart. And others don’t, no matter how hard they work. Maybe it’s not about work. Maybe it’s luck. The right dancer and the right choreographer and the right ballet... I don’t know.”
Sebastian’s gaze seemed to sharpen on me. “Does it matter how your success can be measured? Or does it matter that it’s what you love?”
“I love ballet.” I didn’t understand why it felt as if I was making vows. Here, now. And at some great risk that made my chest feel tight. “I love everything about it. The obsession with form. How strict it is. How rigid. All in service to that flow. That perfect flight. But it doesn’t matter how much you love some things, does it? Loving them doesn’t mean they bring you any joy. The act of loving something doesn’t make it good for you.”
“Are you talking about ballet, Darcy?” His voice was crisp. His eyes burned. “Or me?”
I was flustered suddenly. “I’m just talking.”
“I never told you I would bring you joy. Or that I would be good for you, whatever that is.” He sounded fierce. Remote. “I guaranteed you orgasms. And anything else you could possibly want, the moment you want it. Why isn’t that enough?”
“I didn’t say it was or wasn’t enough.” I studied his face. “Is this about me? Because I was talking about ballet.” Or I thought I had been. “Is this what happens when you spend time with your mother?”
“You don’t understand.” Sebastian got to his feet, moving restlessly toward the window. Outside, the city looked cold and bright. As if it was filled with chilly light, not all those lives. “It’s not her fault.”
“Yes, yes. Your father was cruel.” I rolled my eyes. “But he died a long time ago. And she’s a grown woman. At what point does a person have to take responsibility for their own happiness?”
He turned back around. And he looked like a stranger, then. Something in me, some kind of panic, coiled tight.
“Why do you continue in the ballet if you don’t love it, Darcy?” he fired back at me. “If it doesn’t make you happy, why do it at all?”
That felt like a kick, as if he’d taken out a knee, and I found I was curling my hands into fists in my lap.
Are you really lecturing me on happiness? I wanted to shout, but I didn’t. I made myself stay calm—or look calm, anyway. “Do you even know what happy is, Sebastian? Your mother’s horrible to you and you let her do it. Your brother stopped talking to you years ago, and you accepted it. You don’t love me, as you make sure to tell me in case I get ideas, but you still want to marry me. Why?”
“What would you have me do? Throw my mother on the street? Force my brother to revisit the most painful time of his life when that’s clearly not what he wants?”
I noticed he didn’t touch the marriage thing. And that made me clench my fists even harder.
“All I’m saying is that if we’re talking about pursuing happiness tonight, you could start with yourself.” There was something wild in that bright blue gaze of his that seemed to match that panicked thing in me. I should have stopped. I told myself to stop. But I didn’t. “Maybe try to practice what you preach, Sebastian.”
“I thought you understood,” he said, and he sounded...different. Something like foreboding prickled down the length of my spine. “I thought it was clear. Happiness is for other people. I don’t deserve it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sebastian
I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND what was happening. But then, when it came to Darcy, I didn’t understand much of anything and wasn’t sure I ever had—a sensation that hadn’t gotten any easier to bear over the last few months.
I hadn’t expected to feel like this. I hadn’t expected to feel.
I’d imagined the initial madness would fade, but it hadn’t. If anything, I hated being away from her even more now. Even in these last weeks, when being with her had meant making sure she was fed and cared for and could sleep. Almost as if the sex was secondary, no matter how fantastic it continued to be.
I didn’t like to use words like joy or happiness, because what did I know of either?
If I viewed her as a particularly prime deal I needed to close, it was easier. Or it all made better sense, anyway. I just needed to get the contracts signed and settled. That was what would make things more palatable and less overwhelming, I was sure of it.
But she still wouldn’t marry me.
“What do you mean, you don’t deserve it?” she asked quietly now.
I already regretted my outburst. And everything that had preceded it, like telling her about my family. About me. Something about this woman made me forget all my own rules.
“I’m not a good man, Darcy,” I said when I could be sure I was under control. And I was absurdly, ridiculously glad that I had moved over to the window, because I wasn’t sure what would become of me if she touched me just now. “I haven’t hidden that from you. But you don’t seem to want to accept it.”
“Maybe you’re really not a good man. But you’ve been nothing but good to me, so I can only take your word for that.”
“I bankrupted my brother. I betrayed my mother.” When she only stared back at me, I upped the ante. “I purchased you. For sex.”
I expected her to look poleaxed. Instead, she looked as if I was making her sad. “I sold myself. To you. For sex. Does that make me dirty and undeserving of happiness, Sebastian?”
