And Ash had flipped me off.
Which was as good as a billboard announcing that Ash had come for the same reason I had: he wanted those islands.
In that moment, a familiar swell of emotions had charged through me. Guilt. Temper. But it all swirled around to the same end. Ash would never forgive me. He would take whatever he could.
And I would let him, because I had brought it on myself.
I had been so cocky about my friendship with Ash when we’d been young. It had been a burr in my father’s side, and I’d enjoyed that because I had hated him. Not only because young men must hate their fathers at one point or another if they wish to grow, but because of how he’d hurt my mother.
It hadn’t occurred to me then that my friendship with Ash had hurt her, too.
All I did was hurt those I loved. I understood that now. And I loved no one and nothing. I cared for my mother, who confined her alcoholism to the walls of the listed house in Surrey that had become her very own prison, but called me almost nightly with her slurred accusations and tears. I did not mourn my father. And I cared for my angry half brother, too, in my fashion—by now and again bowing out of negotiations like this one because I kept imagining that if he took enough from me, his hatred of me would ease.
Ash had to have crossed the line to become a billionaire to enter these premises and he showed no sign of stopping.
But I would keep paying my penance.
And I would never love again, no matter what.
I had made myself one of the most powerful men in the world by following those two cardinal rules.
And tonight I decided I needed a little something extra to soothe away the sting of my unacknowledged atonement.
I left the bar, and avoided the ballroom with its caterers and aerial displays. I wanted something less public. I made my way through the crowd, choosing not to meet the gazes of any acquaintances as I headed for one of the smaller rooms off the ballroom. Rooms that were called by anodyne names like the study or the library but were, like tonight, transformed into more intimate venues. The club never threw one show when ten would do.
I was focused on what small slice of oblivion I could court while still retaining my faculties.
I settled myself in the dark in the library, in one of the plush booths that were supposedly for reading or business but often played other roles on nights like this, when the library had been made over into a performance space. I ordered the finest whiskey, grimacing in respect as it burned, then warmed me. But then I found myself in the suggestive shadows of the long, high room, much closer to the stage than I’d intended.
The music was hypnotic. Beneath it, the faint sounds of pleasure from the booths around me. A gasp here, a groan there.
I didn’t know what to do with the edginess in me. It felt almost brutal in its intensity. So I watched the show before me and ordered another drink.
The woman on the stage was beautiful, but I expected nothing less. Unlike the aerial performers in the ballroom, this woman did not soar overhead. She was performing an elaborate striptease that held as much humor as temptation, and I wondered idly who the act was aimed at.
My cock did not require costumes to get hard.
I swirled my drink in my hand, liking the dark and the relative privacy of the booth. I didn’t want anyone—especially my half brother—gloating over the agitation I was sure was visible on my face. One of the reasons I loved the club was that it permitted me these opportunities to disappear in plain sight.
I had been running the family corporation since my father’s unlamented death, not long after I had lost both Ash and my savings. A stupid move that would have haunted me whether Ash hated me or not. I had believed that our too-good-to-be-true investors were on the level, because I’d wanted so badly for the deal to work. Instead, they’d walked away with all of our money and we’d been left with nothing to show for it.
Ash had warned me. I’d ignored him.
Thanks to that loss, I was a much more careful CEO than I had been an upstart junior executive cutting his teeth in the big leagues. I’d been so certain that deal was Ash’s springboard to legitimacy in the only realm that mattered to our father—the corporate world. I’d thought it would prove my mettle, too.
Instead, it had made everything worse.
My father had died thinking I was an idiot and Ash was unscrupulous. The failed deal had wiped Ash out and made him hate me. My mother had spent six months pretending to dry out in an exclusive facility somewhere in America while recovering from the shock and betrayal she’d felt that I’d been in business with Ash in the first place.
I’d been made CEO amid plunging stocks and a thousand articles in business journals smugly predicting that I would run the company into the ground just as I’d lost all my money once already in a stupid, speculative gamble. I hadn’t.
But it had required a long, extended fight. It had taken everything I had. It still did. I had enemies and business associates, nothing else, and depending on the deal they were often one and the same. I’d learned to love the fight.
And these days I didn’t take unnecessary gambles without performing exhaustive risk assessments first.
It was only in the dark, in rooms like this, that I could simply...be. No fight. No fury. No high risks with even higher consequences.
The woman on the stage, too perky and blond for my tastes tonight, faded off. The music changed, becoming brooding and sensual.
A new dancer took the stage.
And everything...shifted.
One moment I’d been idly wondering how anyone found shows like these provocative, something better suited to the kind of hearty stag nights I was happily never invited to attend.
In the next, I was as hard and ready as if the woman on stage had leaned forward and wrapped her hands around my cock, then bathed me with her tongue.
I sat forward, my drink forgotten.
She looked tall, though she wasn’t. There was a certain willowy quality to her, lithe and slender. She wore the same bejeweled bikini that all the others did, but on her, all I saw was the sparkle. The sensual shine. Even the headdress she wore was captivating, feathered and inviting.
And she had wings. Great, feathered white wings that she used to conceal and then reveal her exquisitely toned body as she danced.
Like an angel already decidedly fallen.
She danced like liquid. She was art and sex in sultry motion, a feathered being that couldn’t possibly be real. But I was so close to the stage I could see her breathe. I could very nearly smell the scent of her. Her eyes were luminous and wicked, her hips were a wonder, and her sultry mouth wasn’t hitched into an unconvincing smile.
It was pure temptation.
I was vaguely aware that she was doing some routine. A shifting of hips and dance steps of some description that only drew my attention to what little she wore beneath those feathers she opened and closed as if she was tempting me, personally. Sparkling stones covered her breasts, holding them aloft and leaving the sweep of her glorious abdomen bare. More bright, shining stones covered her pussy and rippled as she did. Her legs were like poetry. She wasn’t simply toned. She was strong.
I felt her everywhere.
And at some point during her performance on the intimate stage before me, she saw me there in the audience.
I felt the electric pulse of the connection. The crackle of it. I was certain every hair on my body stood on