I had always thought of marriage in terms of my parents’. My mother had been in love. My father had been quickly bored. I’d never wanted any part of that. But why not buy what I wanted instead of hoping I happened upon it emotionally?
The more I thought about it, the more I knew that I’d found a solution. Because my mother wasn’t wrong. Men in my position generally produced a few heirs, hoping to train one up behind him. I didn’t want a relationship like my parents’. But then, I didn’t want love or even the pretense of it. I’d stopped believing in love long ago, likely during one of my mother’s unhinged, drunken rants when I was still a child.
That was fine. I preferred the clarity of money. My only friend—my brother—had cut me off because of money. My father had loved nothing but money. And money—a whole lot of money, according to my bankers—had bought me the best night of my life.
Why couldn’t it buy me everything else I needed?
A woman who would sell herself once might just do it again, and with far better incentive this time. And no need to perform a public striptease, either.
The more I considered it, the more I congratulated myself for my brilliance.
And then I set about trying to find her.
I expected it to take a day or so. Instead, it had taken weeks.
But I was here at last. In New York City, standing in a chilly night on a busy sidewalk.
And she wasn’t dressed in feathers, or better still, naked—but there was no denying that it was Darcy. My Darcy.
Whose name, it turned out, really was Darcy, after all.
I had taken that as a sign. I’d given her my real name. And unbeknownst to me, she had done the same.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me, her eyes wide and that fascinating heat climbing into her cheeks. “How did you find me? It’s not supposed to be allowed, is it?”
“I didn’t find you through the club. I found you in spite of the club.” Imogen Carmichael, owner and director of the club, had been surprisingly unforthcoming. She kept quoting contracts I didn’t care about at all. It had been irritating, but I’d persevered. I always did. “I took everything you told me and everything I’d observed about you, and found you.”
I had started with every dark-haired dancer, which was an impossibly wide pool. But I had been so certain that she couldn’t possibly have given me her real name that I didn’t bother to search for it. It wasn’t until one week had turned into two, then a third, that my frustration led me to search for American dancers named Darcy.
I’d found the Knickerbocker Ballet, and her, quickly.
“I have a proposition for you,” I told her.
“I’m not for sale.” She looked wildly around the street where we stood, as if she expected to be overheard in a city that specialized in deliberately not hearing most things. “I shouldn’t have to say that, should I? You asked for another night before and I said no. That’s not going to change just because we’re on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean tonight.”
But she didn’t turn on her heel and walk away. She didn’t order me to stay away from her. The color in her cheeks intensified and her dark eyes seemed fathomless, but she stayed where she was. Right there in front of me, at last.
“I heard you,” I assured her. “I assume that means you sell yourself only under specific circumstances.”
“Once.” She threw that at me, and I didn’t know which one of us was more surprised at how fierce she sounded. “I sold myself once. I have no intention of doing it again.”
I knew I wasn’t a good man. I’d been told so a thousand times, often by my own mother. But that truth was made clear to me then as her words pounded in me. Like heat. Like sex. Like a victory drum.
Once.
Meaning, she had only ever sold herself to me.
As far as I was concerned, that made her mine.
“Are you married?” I asked her. Because her presence in the club meant she was acting out some kind of fantasy, and I needed to establish what it was. There had been no mention of a husband in the materials I’d found about her, but that didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t for me to judge another person’s extracurricular activities outside of their marriage—but if that was what she was doing, she wasn’t for me.
“Of course I’m not married!” She rubbed a hand over her mouth and I saw it was trembling slightly. “I would never… No. I’m not married. Or anywhere close to married.”
“Boyfriend?”
She frowned at me. “What did I just say?”
“Habitual sexual partners?”
Her hand wasn’t trembling anymore. She dropped it. “How is any of this your business? I think we can both agree that you got your money’s worth. That doesn’t give you the right to come here, throw yourself into the middle of my life, and start interrogating me.”
“I apologize.” Though, really, I wasn’t sorry. “It’s not my intention to upset you.”
“I’m not upset.” She looked around again, then scowled. “Come with me.”
She wheeled around, then stomped off toward the intersection. I followed, bemused, because she wasn’t quite the biddable burlesque dancer I remembered. I wondered whether that woman had ever really existed. If she had been as much a part of the act as the suggestive dance and her wings.
A wise man would cut his losses and leave. But when it came to this woman, I discovered I was many things. None of them the least bit wise.
She ushered me into a small dive bar around the corner that seemed remarkably empty.
“It’s early,” she said when I pointed that out. “This is the kind of place you go to on your way out or on your way home. Not in between.”
She lifted two fingers at the bartender as she headed for a U-shaped booth on the back wall, then slid into it. I sat across from her, my initial worry that this had all been foolish fading as she scowled back at me.
Because even scowling, dressed like a real, live woman instead of a wet dream, she made my body…hum. She made me feel alive. She was even more beautiful than I remembered, effortless and elegant with shawls wrapped around her in a way that struck me as far more European than American. And much as I’d liked her on her knees, on all fours, astride me and beneath me, I couldn’t deny the fact that I liked her just as much now that she faced me. Dressed.
My dick just liked her. Full stop.
“Fantasies are just that,” she said after a moment. “Fantasies. They’re not supposed to be real. And the point of that night was that it was meant to be anonymous.”
“You told me your name.”
“You were never supposed to know it was real.”
“But I do know.” I studied her. “Why did you give it to me at all if you were concerned about preserving the fantasy?”
Her scowl deepened, but I could see that flush on her cheeks and after the night we’d spent together, I knew it was the truth of what she was feeling. “It was a regrettable impulse, nothing more.”
“I don’t think so,” I said quietly. “I think you wanted me to know you. And to find you. And Darcy, I have.”
I expected her to scoff at that. But when she only huffed out a breath, then looked down at her hands before her on the table,