The Risk, page 13
“Of course not.”
“It might have been hard for her, and of course you feel badly about that, but you didn’t actually betray your mother by choosing to have a relationship with your brother.” She shook her head when I started to argue the point. “Your father might have betrayed her, and you, but he’s your brother. It makes sense that you wanted a relationship with him. It makes sense that she doesn’t. But you’re not actually required to hate him just because his existence reminds her of a dead man’s sins.”
When she said it like that, it landed differently. It even felt different. It was almost as if—
But I knew better.
“I’ve been paying penance as long as I can remember,” I told her, my voice low and full of all the ways I’d let down the people closest to me. And all the ways I’d earned their enduring dislike and disdain. It was the axis that kept my world spinning. “But I welcome it. I can’t change the past. I can’t make my father faithful. I can’t restore Ash’s trust in me. Most of all, I can’t be the man you want me to be.”
She sat up a little straighter on the leather couch, drawing the soft throw tighter around that body of hers that regularly made me imagine I was a religious man. “I don’t recall asking you to be one way or another.”
“Do you truly think I don’t know that you feel things for me?” I demanded. “Do you suppose I can’t see it?”
She didn’t flush. She didn’t look the least bit flustered. She tilted her head to one side, regal and beautiful and entirely too composed.
God, she was so beautiful it hurt. All these months later, it still hurt.
“I could say the same, Sebastian,” she said quietly. As if she was rendering a judgment. “The only difference between you and me is that I’m not over here lying to myself about it.”
And the storm in me...broke.
“I can’t be that man!” I thundered at her. “I can’t. I told you from the start that I want you. But not this. Happiness. Joy.” And that other thing that filled the rooms we inhabited, no matter how hard I worked to ignore it. I decided to stop pretending I couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it. “Love is for other people, Darcy.”
I braced myself for a storm in return, but all she did was sigh.
And then she rose to her feet before me, sinuous and mesmerizing. She wasn’t wearing those wings of hers tonight, but I could almost see them there. Not as part of a costume, just a part of her. Angelic in the fiercest, most gloriously fiery way.
Her gaze on me was intense. It made that storm in me rage all the more. “I have a radical idea, Sebastian. What would happen if you accepted the possibility, just for one second, that you actually deserve to be loved?”
I would have preferred it if she’d hauled off and punched me. Then kicked me a few times for good measure.
“I don’t want to have this discussion.”
“Because let me tell you what this has been like for me,” she continued in that same ferociously calm way. “I went to Paris to live out a fantasy. And now, looking back, I realize that none of it would have worked at all if it hadn’t been you. I looked up from that performance and I saw you, Sebastian. I think I fell in love with you then and there.”
There was so much thunder in my head it should have drowned her out, but instead it seemed to amplify her.
“Stop it,” I managed to grit out.
But she didn’t. Instead, Darcy unwrapped the throw from her perfect body and dropped it to the side with a certain dramatic flourish. Or maybe it was a dare.
Because she didn’t need to hide a thing. I was the one who felt as if I needed to lock myself away somewhere until I could figure out how to handle this. How to handle her. And not just metaphorically.
“I can’t believe I actually imagined that I could just...have sex with some stranger like that,” she was saying, as if she was knocking down all the walls inside me on purpose. “Because of course I couldn’t have. Don’t get me wrong. It might have been fun. Erotic, certainly. I would have been glad I did it, no matter who it was, if only so I’d stop fantasizing about it. But it was you, Sebastian. And it changed everything.”
I wanted to shout at her. Or whatever else would make this stop. Make her stop. But I couldn’t seem to move, much less make noise. I felt frozen solid and rendered mute, there before the window with the cold, careless city at my back.
Maybe I should have known that I could never have her. Not the way I wanted her. And not because she didn’t want me. But because deep down, as everyone who had ever been close to me had discovered at one point or another, I was defective. No one who truly knew me wanted anything to do with me.
That was why I’d wanted to marry her before she could get to that point. That was why I’d hoped that sex could confuse the issue and keep her from realizing what everyone else had.
“Sometimes,” she was saying, as if she was wholly unaware of what she was doing to me, “it’s easy to get lost in a rut even when it doesn’t feel good any longer. And particularly if it hurts, because you’re so desperate to make the pain mean something.”
“I’m fine,” I seethed at her.
“Congratulations,” she shot back at me. “I’m not. I love ballet, but I’m tired of it. I don’t want to dance the same thing over and over and over again, particularly when I’m always at the back of the stage. There are other ways to dance. My contract is up in March, and I’m not going to renew it.”
I saw the way she swayed a little after she said that, as if she hadn’t meant to let that out. Not like that. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
“Darcy.”
Her gaze was wide and faintly shocked, but she lifted her chin.
“And I’m not going to marry you unless you love me,” she said, her voice soft. But that didn’t make it any less fierce. “I’m not going to torture myself with one more thing that doesn’t love me back. I’m not going to batter my body and break my heart against another brick wall.”
My chest hurt. “Darcy...”
“I think you love me already,” she said, and the catch in her voice almost wrecked me where I stood. “You promised me you’d be honest. Can you do that, Sebastian? Now, when it counts?”
Everything inside me was mad storms and wild earthquakes, and still, somehow, I kept my feet beneath me.
And then I was moving. There were words on my tongue, but I couldn’t seem to find them. Instead, I found her.
I wrapped my hands around her strong, slender shoulders, then stared down at her face. Her beautiful face that haunted me even when she was right there in front of me.
Her lovely face that I knew would haunt me forever.
She had already wrecked me. Or I had wrecked myself. And I didn’t know what to do with all the wreckage.
So I set my mouth to hers.
She surged to meet my kiss as if she was returning a punch, and she wound her arms around my neck.
And I couldn’t pretend I didn’t feel the desperation. The loss.
The love, something in me whispered.
She pulled away, and I thought she would turn and run, finally. Was that what I’d wanted all along? But this was Darcy. My little dancer, as brave as she was beautiful.
She pushed me back onto the sofa and I let her do it. I let myself fall, feeling greedy and nearly delirious with it as she followed me down, climbing on top of me as we went.
I would never get over the way we fit together. Electricity and need, skin against skin.
I lay lengthwise on the couch and waited, teeth gritted, as she knelt over me. Her pussy brushed against me, molten hot. I didn’t know how I managed to stay still as she lifted herself up, then worked herself down on my cock.
We’d fucked a thousand times by now. More. Several times today already.
But this was different. Everything was different. My hands circled her hips and she braced herself against my chest. Her gaze locked to mine, and I saw too many things there.
I told myself I didn’t know what they were.
And then slowly, deliberately, she drove us both insane.
A slick, slow lift, then that hot clasp of her sweet pussy as she glided back down.
Again and again, until there was only the sensation. The joining.
And all the things I couldn’t feel. Or wouldn’t let myself feel. Or more precisely, wouldn’t let myself name.
There was only Darcy. And this dance she taught me.
And it didn’t matter who knew the steps and who didn’t. All that mattered was that it lasted forever. That was all I wanted. Darcy. This.
But all too soon, I felt her shudder. And that ripple washed over her, down into her tight, hot pussy, then threw her over that cliff.
And me along with her.
It was a long time later when she stirred, then pushed herself off me. She got to her feet and gathered the throw around her like a robe again.
“Darcy,” I started.
She had already begun to head for the door, but she stopped then and looked back over her shoulder. Her black hair spilled down her back in abandon, the way I liked it. But her melting brown eyes were filled with loss.
“You deserve love, Sebastian, no matter what you think,” she told me, her voice hushed. “No matter what you’ve convinced yourself all these years. You deserve it. But so do I.”
“Don’t do this.”
It was as close as I’d ever come to begging. And her gaze only grew sadder.
“I don’t need you to love me,” she said. “I wish you would, but I’ve lived without it all these years. I’ll be fine.”
I knew that I was never going to be the same. I wasn’t even sure I’d make it to fine.
But I couldn’t seem to say a thing. Much less the thing that would stop this. The thing that might keep her.
“I’m going to love me for a change, Sebastian,” Darcy said. “Not the ballet. Not a man who’s happy to pay for me but refuses to love me. Me. And I don’t care if anyone likes it.”
And then, again and for good, I watched my little dancer walk out of my life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sebastian
FIRST I LOST my temper, having already lost my woman.
I let the kick of it propel me across oceans and continents alike. How dare she issue ultimatums? How dare she leave me—again? When it was obvious how good things were between us. When she was the one who had changed the game, not me.
But the trouble with temper was that it faded. And sooner or later, there was no more hiding from myself. No matter how I tried.
I found myself in Surrey some ten days after my last night with Darcy, in the foyer of that same cold house where I’d grown up. The New Year had rolled in. The world had been ripe with resolutions and vows, many already broken. Yet here in this house, everything was the same as it had always been.
Upstairs, I could hear my mother hurling things around, and the sound of shattered glass. It was my own personal symphony.
I climbed the stairs slowly. It took me longer than it should have to make my way down that same old familiar hallway. I knew this was my duty, but it sat heavier on me today. In the bright glare of this new year.
And when I stood in the door to her private drawing room, this interaction with my mother didn’t feel like penance anymore. It didn’t feel like a hair shirt.
It felt sick.
“Finally!” she shrieked at me when she saw me. “You dare to show your face here, after abandoning me the way you did? What kind of son are you?”
Normally, I would sit down. I would endeavor to be calm. Soothing. Something.
Today I stayed where I was.
“Things have to change,” I told her, in a voice I’d never used before. Not with her.
“You need to change, Sebastian,” she fired back at me, unsteady on her feet. “But I know you won’t. You’re too much like your father. It’s how you’re made. So cold straight through it’s like frostbite when you enter a room.”
I had accepted that as truth my whole life. And why? Because a drunk woman told me so?
“You’re a grown woman.” And the funny part was that after all the rage and fury that had held me in its grip since I’d last seen Darcy, today I felt quiet straight down into my bones. “I’m not going to tell you what you can and cannot do, Mother. But I will tell you this. I’m finished standing by while you indulge in yet another drunken tantrum. If you want to get drunk and throw a tantrum, go right ahead. But if you want to see me, you cannot be drunk. If you can’t do that, you can’t see me.”
I didn’t wait for her to respond. I turned and headed for the stairs.
And with every step I took, I felt lighter. Brighter. As if tethering myself to her downward spiral had made it mine, too.
How had I not seen that? I wasn’t paying penance. I’d been suffering through a prison sentence, maybe, but it had allowed me to lock myself away. It had kept me from feeling anything. It had made me distant and cold. My father by default.
And it was time I took responsibility for my own damned life. For what I had made it simply by standing by and letting these things go on.
My phone rang in my pocket as I stepped outside into the gloomy English January afternoon. I glanced at it, but it was never who I wanted it to be. This time it was my secretary.
“I don’t mean to bother you while you’re with your family,” he said, sounding harried. “But we’ve received another bid on the Delaney islands. Your brother has taken it upon himself to—”
“Enough,” I said.
“Sir?”
“Give him the islands,” I ordered my secretary. “He can have them. I don’t care. I’m not fighting with him anymore.”
“As you wish,” my secretary said, and rang off to do as I asked.
I made a mental note to send him an extra bonus for not mentioning that I’d waffled back and forth about this deal for months.
I had extended these olive branches before, of course. I’d stepped away from negotiation tables and left deals to Ash. I’d waited for him to recognize those gestures for what they were. I slipped my phone back into my pocket and heard something crash inside, but I didn’t look back.
None of this was mine. It never had been. It was my mother’s to hold or put down, as she chose.
I folded myself into my sports car and fired up the engine, but I didn’t drive away. I sat there for a moment. Considering olive branches and grand gestures.
I had made myself into a martyr. Ash hated me, and I knew he had a right to those feelings, so I’d done nothing, directly. Periodically, when he’d fought me for business, I’d handed over the thing he appeared to want and then I’d sat about, waiting to see if he did something else.
I’d done exactly nothing on my own. I hadn’t followed up. I hadn’t reached out to him. I expected him to divine from the ether of a business deal that I regretted what had happened between us and wished it could change.
And when he didn’t respond, because of course he didn’t respond, I used that as further ammunition that I was precisely as wretched and unlovable as my parents had always made me feel.
I was thoroughly sick of myself, in fact. The only thing martyrs were good for, as far as I was aware, was kindling. And I was tired of letting myself burn.
I pulled my phone out again and stared at the screen.
And then I punched in a number I hadn’t called in years.
It rang once. Again. Then shifted to voice mail.
I wanted to hang up. Because it was easier by far not to change. It was easier to keep doing what I’d always done. But the only place that had led were these ruins I’d made of myself, my life. This sad wreckage.
And I was tired of living my life like a salvage operation.
The voice mail beeped.
I cleared my throat. I had no idea how to do this.
Which meant I had no choice but to go ahead and do it anyway.
“Ash,” I said. I blew out a breath and told myself the only olive branch that mattered was the one I extended with my own arm. My own hand. Not a series of corporate sallies through intermediaries that meant nothing in the end. “This is your brother. I think it’s time we talked.”
Darcy
It was a brisk, blustery morning in the beginning of February, and I would normally have felt grim and deeply aggrieved as I walked toward a restaurant behind the New York Public Library to meet my mother.
But this was a different sort of New Year. I’d decided. I was a different Darcy from the one who’d seen out the last year with more of a whimper than any kind of bang.
I’d already had my initial discussions with the Knickerbocker. And I knew that I’d made the right decision when their protestations that they would miss me only made me smile. Maybe because I knew that they weren’t lies, necessarily. But that they also weren’t the truth. Not really.
The thing about the corps was that if you wanted to leave, they were happy for you to go. You needed to go. It was a hard enough life when you loved it.
Annabelle felt betrayed.
“I don’t understand this!” she cried, when I told her that I’d informed the Knickerbocker that I didn’t want to renew my contract with them this year. And worse, that I was planning to go over to the dark side, after all. “Why would you blow up your entire life? Is this what happens when you do burlesque?”
But it didn’t feel like blowing up my life. It felt like living it—at last.
Winston’s dance company required an audition no matter my résumé, and I thought I should have been far more nervous than I was. I hadn’t auditioned for a new company in a decade. Instead, I felt excited.
That was the burlesque, I thought, though I didn’t tell Annabelle. It hadn’t blown anything up. It was the key that had opened a lock at the front of a cage I hadn’t known was holding me in. Now the door was open and I could do anything.
