“Vodka makes everything better. Even unexpected reappearances on the street outside my house.”
I followed suit, feeling the top-shelf liquor burn a smooth, hot trail through me. Then I sat back, still watching her closely. “I’ve never had sex like that in my life. I want more. A lot more.”
Her cheeks burned, but she shrugged. “I already told you, I’m not selling myself again.”
“I’m not asking you to. Or not like that, anyway. As it happens, I also need a wife.”
I didn’t know what I expected, but all she did was sigh. Then roll her eyes. “Of course you do. Also, no.”
“I will eventually need an heir,” I said as if she’d asked. “It occurred to me, as my mother was lecturing me on this topic, that I have no interest in any of the women I’ve ever met. I like them well enough in the moment, but I never think about them again. You, on the other hand, I can’t seem to get out of my head.”
“Maybe you should see a doctor.”
“You have a lovely pedigree, for an American.”
“Be still, my beating heart.”
I ignored that dry little comment. “And even if you did not, the fact remains that I cannot imagine that there’s even the slightest possibility that I will ever draw breath and not want to fuck you. In every possible way.”
She regarded me steadily. Too steadily. “That’s not a good basis for marriage. You must know that.”
“It’s a better basis than most have, as far as I can tell.”
She poked at her shot glass with one finger. “I have received several marriage proposals, you know. One was a desperation sucker punch of a proposal from my first serious boyfriend after I found him in bed with his college study buddy. The other three were from much older men who had never really spent any time with me, but wanted a ballerina to add to their collection. Pathetic, really. And yet all of them seem more romantic than yours.”
I didn’t know why I was smiling. “I’m not a romantic man. I told you. I’ve been surrounded by emotion my whole life, and I want nothing to do with it. But I want this. I want you.”
“I understand that you’re very rich.” Darcy made that sound vaguely sordid. “You’re not the only one who knows how to search the internet. But I have to wonder, what exactly went through your brain as you came here to confront me? What made you think that a woman you don’t know—who you purchased for the express purpose of having sex with, nothing more—could possibly make you a good wife? Even if she wanted to try?”
There were a hundred things I could have said to that. Instead, I decided that there was too much space between us. The booth was shaped like a horseshoe, so I slid over until she was right next to me. I stretched one arm around her shoulders and dropped the other below the table, resting my hand on her thigh.
Then, holding her wide gaze with mine, I slid my hand up her thigh until I could cup her pussy through the sheer leggings she wore. Slowly. Deliberately.
Waiting for her to say no.
But she didn’t.
“Why not?” I asked.
I could feel her heat. Her need. And a surge of dampness that told me everything I needed to know about that night we’d spent together.
It hadn’t been a fluke. She hadn’t been pretending.
“I was playing a role,” she told me now. Primly.
“You can consider marrying me a long-running private theater appointment, if you like.”
“With you in charge, then?”
“Darcy. You like me in charge.”
“People don’t roam around the earth asking strangers to marry them,” she argued. “Not after one night.”
“They don’t typically sell themselves for that night in an exclusive club, either. But here we are.”
“You don’t even know me.” That came out of her in a different kind of voice altogether. Wispier. Quieter. More real, I thought. “And maybe if you did, you wouldn’t think that sex is enough. Because guess what? It’s not.”
“Fair enough.” I smiled at her, while beneath the table, I squeezed her pussy. Once, then again. And I continued, building a rhythm. Feeling her dampness in my palm and the restless motion of her hips. As if she couldn’t help herself. “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way. Darcy James, I want to date you.”
“No,” she said, but her voice was barely there and she was grinding her pussy into my hand.
“What’s life without a little risk?” I murmured, moving closer and getting my mouth on her neck. “I’ll take that as a challenge.”
Darcy
“I DON’T BELIEVE in love,” Sebastian told me solemnly that first night of our second act. “But I will care for you. I will support you. I will give you anything and everything you desire. This I can promise you.”
“People don’t say that on dates,” I replied, but I wasn’t scowling at him anymore. He’d taken care of my temper with his hand between my legs, right there at the table in my favorite local bar. I’d rocked against him heedlessly, and I’d come almost too fast to believe, hiding my face against his wide shoulder as I fought to hide what was happening. “I think you’ll find it’s considered a little creepy.”
“A risk I’m prepared to take,” he said drily.
I had never intended to see him again. Oh sure, I’d dreamed about him. But before I met him, I’d dreamed about the fantasy that we shared. I told myself that dreaming about him had nothing to do with him, personally. It allowed me to put a face to the fantasy, that was all.
A particularly gorgeous face, as it happened.
“Okay,” I said later that same night, while we fought to catch our breath in the vast king-size bed in the penthouse he stayed in when he was in Manhattan. Because, naturally, he was the kind of man who had property everywhere he might wish to go. Which was lucky, because it turned out our connection hadn’t dimmed any now that we knew each other’s names and were outside the confines of the club. “I guess we can date.”
“You guess?”
“I guess it would be okay. As an experiment. Probably a short experiment.”
“Then I will tell you the rules,” he replied, as if he’d been waiting for me to say that. And more, as if he’d known all along that I would. His mouth curved as I propped myself up, my hands beneath my chin as I sprawled there across his chest. “There will be no one else. Just you and me, you understand?”
“You can make all the rules you want,” I said lazily, because I felt deliciously limp and wrung out. “You’re about to find out that I already have a demanding lover.” I smiled when something dark and hot flashed in those bright blue eyes of his. “The ballet. I’ve yet to meet anyone it doesn’t make wildly, madly jealous. And fast.”
That hot gleam in his eyes changed. He reached over and took a strand of my hair between his fingers. And tugged a little. Not entirely gently.
“You have the ballet. I have a Fortune 500 company. Somehow, I don’t think jealousy will be an issue.”
I didn’t argue, though I knew better. These things always followed the same pattern. Within a month, I