CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Caitlin Crews
In the second installment of The Billionaires Club quartet, arrogant tycoon Sebastian Dumont risks everything for one night with an exquisite dancer…whose dark fantasy leaves him wanting more.
Love is a risk I will never take, a prize too good for a man who betrayed his family. That’s why I prefer to keep things transactional. So when I see an exquisite dancer in the exclusive Parisian billionaires club, turning her burlesque into an erotic art form, I’ll give whatever it takes to have her…
She is mine for one night, to do with as I please. But following my commands seems to bring her as much pleasure as it does me. And I can’t help wondering at her performance. She almost makes me believe this is a fantasy of her own making.
I’m not ready to let her go after just one night, but I never imagined my hunt would lead me to New York City, or to a restrained and disciplined ballerina. Stoking the fire that rages between us could be the biggest risk I’ve ever taken…one that may cost me everything, including my damaged heart.
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The Risk is the second instalment of The Billionaires Club series, which began with
The Debt by Jackie Ashenden
and continues with
The Proposition by JC Harroway The Deal by Clare Connelly
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Darcy
ONCE I WALKED through the door, there was no going back.
I stood there on the Paris street in the thick, rich darkness of an autumn night, staring at the discreetly unmarked door in question. I was breathing hard and felt faintly dizzy, as if I’d danced a difficult night of several shows on very little food.
I was used to the feeling. It was the reason for the feeling that was making my heart pound tonight.
I had signed all the documents, in triplicate, from the straightforward performance contract to several different NDAs that would make certain I never dreamed of telling a soul what happened within the walls of the M Club. To me or around me. I had practiced the burlesque routine that was my entrance into this excruciatingly private club in Paris—though I’d been informed there were many other locations scattered across the globe—until I could do it in my sleep.
“All you have to do is dance,” my friend Annabelle had told me with an eye roll when she’d asked me to take her place here at M Club. “Or whatever you want to call it.”
We’d laughed, because we were proper, professional ballet dancers, not burlesque performers. We dedicated our lives to perfecting lines and steps, counts and patterns, in a world-renowned ballet company. We didn’t play pretend with feathers and bloomers or whatever it was burlesque was meant to do when, really, it was just a striptease. Emphasis on tease.
And, yes, we were maybe a little full of ourselves. Annabelle and I had met in the corps de ballet of the prestigious Knickerbocker Ballet in New York City when we were both seventeen. Ten years of dancing and struggling through injuries and setbacks, occasional partying and rooming together in a tiny walk-up in New York City, and we were still hanging in there.
That we were both still—and only—members of the company meant, of course, that we were not likely to be promoted to principal dancers, despite whatever dreams we’d had as younger, newer dancers. It also meant that our inevitable retirements were looming, whether we wanted to stop dancing or not.
No one wanted to stop dancing. I certainly didn’t. But the body could only take so much, and nothing but sheer greatness in the eyes of the world—and demanding artistic directors—ever seemed to combat the ravages of gravity. Soloists and principal dancers were more likely to fight their way toward the age of forty before retiring—when their bodies finally gave out after too many surgeries and untreated injuries and the daily toll of so much pointed use. Or when they could no longer maintain the preferred form and appearance required by most of the major ballet companies, no matter what lip service they might give to a newer, more body-positive approach. Ballet was about precision. And even the most celebrated principals were forbidden the creeping ravages of age.
But dancers who had never made it out of the corps in the