The Risk / Friends With Benefits. Margot Radcliffe

I wanted those scars. I wore the ones ballet had given me like badges of honor. Audiences had no idea what it took to look that effortless onstage. We covered our scars and danced straight through them.

      I wanted whatever this man would give me. I wanted to wear his marks forward, like brands.

      I expected him to start fucking me again, much harder this time—a notion that made me quiver—now that he called it his turn.

      Instead, he moved one of his big, strong hands to fit against the curve of my cheek. It wasn’t gentle, particularly. It felt like the very brand I’d just been imagining. A mark of ownership, especially when his thumb moved over my lips again.

      As if he’d seen the raw, unbound truth behind my smile and was rubbing it away.

      “You don’t have to worry about anything,” he told me then, and there was something in the way he said it. So dark. So intent and sure. So certain. That, too, made me quiver. “You have one job. Do you know what that is?”

      “I thought I was doing it.”

      His blue eyes sharpened. “All you have to do is what I tell you to do, little dancer. No more. No less. I will tell you what I want. What I like and what I don’t. You don’t have to worry about anticipating my needs. I’ll make sure you know what they are. Do you understand?”

      A thousand responses to that swirled around inside me, each one as raw and powerful and emotional as the next, but in the end I chose the only response that mattered.

      “Yes,” I said. He watched me, something expectant and commanding on his face, and I felt myself flush. “Yes, sir.”

      “Good girl.”

      And then he showed me what he meant.

      His hands smoothed their way down my torso to grip my hips. I thought he would order me to move, but he didn’t. Instead, he lifted me up, an easy slide along the length of his cock because I was so wet and hot and melting. He lifted me up, then slammed me back down.

      Sensation exploded inside me, and he did it again. And again.

      I didn’t have to do a thing. He was using me like his very own fuck toy.

      Something else exploded in me then. Something so bright and sharp and beautiful that I wanted to grand jeté straight into the center of it. I wanted to spin around and around and around until I became it.

      I wanted this to last forever.

      Still he lifted me, then slammed me down against him. Faster and faster. Harder each time.

      I didn’t know if it was aftershocks or a new tremor all its own, but I shook. Each slam of my body against his, with his cock so deep inside me, made my whole body hum in a sort of startled delight that spread everywhere until I was lit up with it.

      And inside, I understood exactly what it was I felt. What all that rawness and wildness was.

      Joy.

      Freedom.

      Because this was not the ballet. There I was an object valued for the pain I could withstand in my ability to make it all pretty and perfect for the audience. But here I was a different sort of object altogether.

      Made for pleasure, not pain. And there was no putting a foot wrong. There was no messing up a step or ruining the perfect uniformity expected of the corps.

      There was only this man’s needs, his imagination and what he told me to do. Or did himself with my body as his instrument.

      It was like magic.

      He slammed me against him until I couldn’t tell where I ended and his iron control began. There was only the sweetness of total surrender. And all the while, the building crisis of sheer delight inside me.

      “Come once more,” he ordered me, and it didn’t occur to me to do anything but what I was told.

      I let my head tip back, my breasts jutting forward as I curved my back into the arch.

      And the cries that came out of me as I convulsed on his dick once again, as ordered, seemed to bounce back from the marble floors and the carefully brocaded walls. Calling me out. Calling my name when I didn’t know his.

      But the true music was when he finally roared out his own release, coming deep inside me in what felt like a scalding flood.

      That tripped off another shock inside me and I sobbed with it, riding it out until I finally collapsed against him.

      If I was on a stage, I would have to remove myself from it. I would have to dance my way off, no matter how I felt or what had happened to me up there. Or I would have to crawl off—maybe even ask someone to pull me off if I was really hurt—once the lights went down. The stage was an addiction, and there were times the price it demanded seemed impossible to pay. And no matter what, the show had to go on. The music would swell and the next act would take their place. That was the nature of the business we called show.

      But this was no stage. There was no spotlight. This was a far simpler transaction.

      The price had already been paid, and not by me.

      And somehow, that notion made me feel safe. Enough that I hardly moved when he stirred beneath me, then swept me up with him as he stood.

      I assumed he meant to set me on my feet. And then...who knows? Slap me on the ass and tell me to leave? Tell me to collect my things and go? Whatever he did, it certainly couldn’t be worse than standing before the ballet master—or any one of the fierce teachers I’d had in my career—fighting to control my breathing while also trying to pay attention as they ripped my performance to shreds. Step by step.

      Was there a critique in a transaction like this? Notes?

      I wasn’t sure what it said about me that my nipples hardened at the thought. As if all this time, all I’d really wanted was someone to take all these brutal little pieces of the life I’d chosen and turn them into sex.

      Not just anyone, something inside me whispered. Him.

      He didn’t set me down. I thought the wiser course of action was to close my eyes, the better to avoid looking at the overwhelming perfection of his face. Not to mention the impossible blue of his gaze.

      I rested my head against his broad shoulder as he carried me. And I peeked from under my lashes as we left the main room, moving through a bedchamber with a crackling fire in a picturesque grate and on into a seductively lit bathroom suite. It was there that he set me on my feet, propping me up against the nearest tiled wall as if I really was no more than a sex toy.

      The same delirious heat curled in me again. I stood where he’d put me, happy to wait and see how he would use me next.

      That this was a suite set aside for sex was obvious, because the bathroom was clearly arranged for seduction first and hygienic purposes second. There was a door across the room with a WC written on it, but everything in the chamber where we stood was either gold, marble or dark wood, all of it as beautiful as it was functional.

      Like me, I thought. My career in a nutshell.

      He moved around the tub, which was vast and tall and clearly made to service at least four people. The water spilled out of the faucet like a waterfall, quick and quiet. The room grew steamy, scented with lavender and something spicier I couldn’t identify. I breathed it in, deeply.

      He looked up, then tilted his head toward the water in silent command. I had never been waited on in this fashion before. No one saw to my physical needs after a tough class, no matter how many muscles I’d pulled. It was up to me to care for my body, always making sure it could withstand the demands of all that dancing.

      And even if I’d imagined someone tending to me, it would never have occurred to me that someone could perform the tasks he did while making it seem like some kind of noblesse oblige. The lord of the manor ministering to his underlings, but certainly not serving them.