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.
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