The Risk. CAITLIN CREWS

       CHAPTER THREE

      Darcy

      IF IT HADN’T been for my burlesque performance earlier, I wasn’t sure I would have been able to handle this.

      Any of this. All of my darkest, most-hidden fantasies coming true. At once.

      At last.

      The club had been better than I’d imagined it. Everything that carefully nameless woman had promised in New York, and then some. All the staff had been excruciatingly professional and, better still, polite when I’d rung the bell to the quiet staff entrance a world away from the fancier entrance at the front of the building. I’d been greeted, then ushered to a private dressing room several floors beneath the Parisian street, surprised to find it significantly more luxurious than most of the makeshift, communal dressing rooms I’d spent my life in at the ballet. The other talent I’d seen in those downstairs halls hadn’t been amateurs, as I’d feared when I’d received an instruction packet that indicated the show tonight was more than just me. The dancers and performers I’d met were reticent about their names and their current gigs, as was I, but we recognized each other just the same.

      Professionals, in one form or another. I could identify others in my line of work at a glance. It was how we stood. How we held ourselves. I knew the others I saw were just like me. Here to work, then play.

      It was the “play” part I was trying to get my head around now.

      I’d practiced my routine so many times that I’d expected my actual performance to flash by. Or maybe I’d hoped it would. Annabelle and I had laughed about what we’d both called my “snobby striptease” so many times that my emotional response while I was actually doing it in front of an audience took me completely by surprise.

      Alone onstage. Centered in the spotlight. Nothing but the pumping, seductive music.

      And me.

      Just me.

      I felt...walloped by it.

      I could never tell Annabelle this when I got back home, but there was something about the burlesque that got to me in a way I wasn’t sure I understood.

      Or maybe I did understand. Too well.

      Because there was something about the freedom. No one knew the steps except me, and that meant I could embroider upon them as I pleased. For the first time in as long as I could remember—maybe in my whole life—I could do whatever I wanted while dancing onstage.

      I felt powerful. It was thrilling.

      It was like a wave crashing over me, then carrying me out to sea—

      And then I saw him.

      That sensation intensified. Until I became the sea or it ate me alive, and either way I was still dancing.

      And somewhere in that hot, electric moment between one breath and the next, I forgot that I was on a stage at all and found myself dancing only for him.

      He sat in one of the closest booths to the stage they’d set up in what I’d been told was usually a library. I could see him perfectly over the stage lights, and he never took his eyes from me. I danced for the man in the perfectly cut suit, his gaze as brooding as it was bright, and the cut-crystal lines of his beautiful face.

      I danced as if we were alone. As if I was there for his pleasure and nothing more.

      Until that was all I felt.

      And then, afterward, he came to me as if we were magnetic halves, drawn together no matter what.

      I’d always secretly dreamed of handing myself over like this. Offering myself for purchase, and then surrendering to whoever bought me. Not the way I did, in one way or another, in my career. Surrendering to the demands of my ballet overlords...hurt. Always. The pain was an accepted part of life in the ballet.

      In my dreams, I could hand myself over, make myself nothing more than a possession and feel nothing but pleasure. The ultimate dance of pleasure and need. Everything the ballet promised but didn’t deliver. Surrender and greed, lust and longing, all made real. All available if I but dared.

      The taboo made me shiver. The fantasy made me hot.

      But I wasn’t Annabelle. I had never wanted my fantasies to become real, not in the real world. No yachts or monetized “dates” for me, because I knew I would never, ever feel safe enough to go through with it.

      Fantasies in my head were glorious when I was alone in my bed. But I knew a little something about making fantasies real in my actual life. There was always a price, and that price was often pain. I had never wanted to test the thing that made me hottest out there in Annabelle’s world of risky nights and reckless lovers, because I’d always known on some level that reality would ruin it.

      Until tonight.

      Because the beautiful blue-eyed man might be a stranger to me, but he was known to the club or he wouldn’t have been permitted in the audience. One of the numerous documents I had signed had made that clear. The club knew everything about everyone, including medical records and sexual preferences. Everyone was deemed safe for playtime or they weren’t allowed to partake. And no abuses would go unpunished, assuming they even occurred—which was, I was told, so unlikely as to be well-nigh impossible.

      This wasn’t me in my bed at home taking myself on a little fantasy journey. But it wasn’t quite reality, either. That made it perfect.