Dare Collection October 2019. Margot Radcliffe

      It always came down to a choice. I always chose the ballet, and regretted only the time I’d taken away from it while attempting to appease a new lover.

      But Sebastian was beautiful. Dark and demanding. And my half-formed fears that we would only find each other electric within the confines of our Paris fantasy disappeared almost immediately. He’d come to find me here in New York, which I couldn’t pretend I didn’t love. And I had never fit anywhere better or more securely in all my life than in his arms, with him surging deep inside of me, turning me inside out.

      Over and over again.

      “No other people.” His voice was stern. Just the way I liked it. “And no lies.”

      “Has there been a rash of lying that I’m unaware of?” I laughed. “I thought our relationship was remarkably straightforward, actually. Given that until tonight it was literally a transaction.”

      “I’d like it to stay that way, as much as possible. I prefer the clarity of commerce. I favor direct conversation over missish half truths.”

      I raised a brow at him. “I prefer less male posturing and more applied emotional intelligence.”

      Sebastian blinked. “Did you just obliquely suggest that I’m…dumb?”

      “Not dumb. Just a man.” But I grinned to take the sting out of it. “If you feel something, say so. Don’t grunt it out, pick a fight, then storm off because you don’t know how to say what’s bothering you.”

      “Have I given any indication that I might be likely to do such a thing?”

      “I thought we were laying out our ground rules for…whatever this is. Not making pointed commentary. I can do pointed commentary, too, if you want. Just say the word.”

      There was something like steel in his gaze, though it was much, much hotter. But he didn’t argue.

      “We have a deal,” he said, instead.

      And he showed me exactly how he liked to celebrate it.

      When I made it in to our morning class the following day, I was a wreck. Miss Fortunato was appalled by my arabesque, and I was so delirious that I only laughed in reply—which was not wise. But it was worth the grueling, painful day that followed, because the night with Sebastian had been that good.

      It’s been a total of two nights, I told myself later as I dragged myself home after the show. Two nights are always good. Two nights suck you in and make you believe. It’s the day in and day out that ruins everything.

      “That’s life, though, isn’t it?” I ranted at Annabelle a few mornings later. We were on side-by-side ellipticals at the gym, and I was going much faster than usual. Too fast, you might even say, but I didn’t stop. I courted the ache in my quads and glutes. “Everyone wants center stage. The spotlight. They think they’re going to wake up one morning, and boom! There it is. Everything they ever dreamed about, right in front of them on a silver platter. You and I know that’s not how it goes. There’s no such thing as an overnight success. There’s only years upon years of practice. Failures. Rejections and reinvention, over and over again. That’s what success is.”

      “You need to stop yelling at me,” Annabelle replied, sounding grumpy as her red ponytail swished back and forth. “You’re making me feel hungover and I didn’t even drink last night.”

      I slowed down and bit my tongue. I started counting days. It had never taken more than about two weeks to know that I was wasting my time with a man, and another two to extricate myself. And I expected that a man who would go to the trouble to hunt me down outside of the club’s anonymity would insert himself into my life with a vengeance and stay there, expediting that timeline with all of that arrogance he wore so well.

      But Sebastian Dumont wasn’t like any man I’d ever known.

      When he told me that he was busy himself, and that it was unlikely he’d find himself jealous of my work or my life, he’d meant it.

      I couldn’t leave New York, not as fall rolled on and the season started in earnest. Sebastian’s business took him all over the world, so he spent the week attending to a hotel chain here, a negotiation over some islands there. He flew back in at some point on the day before my weekly day off, and I would always leave those shows amped and way overexcited as I headed for the penthouse overlooking Central Park, where so far, we spent almost all of our time naked. Or nearly naked.

      He would greet me at the door and most of the time, we didn’t make it much farther. We needed each other, hard and deep and now. We tore off each other’s clothes. We fought to get close. He lifted me against his body and I wrapped myself around him, anchoring myself to him and groaning out the unbearable pleasure of it when finally—finally—he was inside me again.

      It was only after we took the edge off—sometimes more than once—that we moved on to other things. Conversation, for example.

      At first, it was almost hesitant. Like it really was the early stages of dating someone, without sex or the club or the rest of it.

      “I didn’t realize you had a brother,” I said on one of those nights, wearing his shirt like a robe as I sat in the spacious, modern kitchen. Sebastian, it turned out, might not be a gourmet chef, but he could throw together a basic meal, and usually did, because I was always hungry after a show. And after our extended greetings. He always had big plans for the rest of the night, which went on into my one day off each week that required I keep up my strength. “By which I mean, you seem to have kept that pretty quiet on the internet, which is hard to do.”

      “It’s not a secret,” he said. I’d gotten to know him better as October had rained and blustered its way into November, weeks passing without the usual irritants—which I opted not to pay too much attention to, in case that made it change. I’d gotten to know him well enough that the shift from how he normally spoke to me—open, focused, and always commanding—to this stiffness was…jarring. “But it also isn’t something that either one of us likes to talk about if we can avoid it.”

      “Why?”

      He slid the omelet he’d made onto my plate and set it before me on the granite countertop. He raked his hand through his hair, then frowned. “We aren’t close.”

      “Is that a good thing or bad thing?” I asked. It had been a good show and even better sex, and I was buzzing along nicely. But I could feel my stomach growling, so I picked up my fork and dug in. “Siblings fascinate me. I always wanted one.”

      “When I discovered I had a brother, I was overjoyed,” Sebastian said, almost idly, when he was never idle. “It was all I had ever wanted.”

      “When did you discover it?” Because that was a weird way to talk about the arrival of a baby brother, surely. Usually there were stories about mommy’s belly and the hospital and all that baby wailing. Not…discoveries.

      “When my father saw to it that we were both enrolled in the same boarding school in the same year,” Sebastian said. His blue gaze met mine, and I froze. That was how cold it was. “Ash and I do not share a mother. But no son of my father’s could be raised without the benefit of the education my father values above every other thing on this earth, save money. And if I’m honest, I always suspected that what the old man really liked was the idea of the two of us at each other’s throats. Because that meant he was always the focus, as he believed he deserved to be.”

      I was still hungry, but I put my fork down. Especially when Sebastian’s lips twisted.

      “But Ash and I became best friends, instead. It was my rebellion, I suppose.”

      “Best friends. But you said you weren’t close…?”

      “We were close in school. Inseparable, in fact. My mother is a drunk who periodically pretends to dry out but never does. My father was cruel and delighted in it. In many ways, Ash was the only person I was ever close to.”

      That