walked the last few remaining steps until I was square in front of the unmarked door, a world away from the fancy entrance out front. I reminded myself that I was a professional. This was what I did, no matter the costume or lack thereof. I had nothing to fear.
Except surrender, a voice inside me whispered.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of if I choose it,” I told myself, my voice sounding harsh and rough against the night.
I reached out my hand. I took a breath.
Then I rang the bell as I’d been directed, and sealed my fate.
Sebastian
I WOULD ORDINARILY avoid a burlesque show or anything resembling such a thing like the plague.
I was a man of discipline. I had been ruled by my passions precisely once, and it had cost me. Now I indulged them as I pleased, but only as far as I could control them. I did not leap heedlessly into spontaneity. I did nothing heedlessly at all.
And I certainly did not vie for the attention of women.
I preferred directness to coy flutterings and anything involving glitter or bejeweled bikinis—which was the only thing the woman descending from ribbons in the ballroom appeared to be wearing as she writhed about—but I found myself watching the M Club burlesque show anyway. I was a longtime member of the world’s most exclusive club, membership by invitation only and based entirely on net worth, and these charity displays were part of the package. The membership made charitable gestures a few times a year, the better to disguise the true purpose of the club as far as I was concerned.
Which was business. And when business was concluded, excess in controlled circumstances. Meaning no press, no scrutiny, and no possibility of anyone emerging later with blackmail fodder.
I had not been expecting to see my half brother tonight.
I hadn’t been expecting to see Ash anywhere, for that matter. He had suffered the most from my one and only hotheaded decision all those years ago and had hated me ever since—a feeling he expressed by competing with my luxury hotel business, disrupting what deals he could and generally making sure I knew he would never, ever forgive me my error.
I didn’t forgive myself, either.
Ash Evans had been my best friend and closest, most trusted ally during our boarding school years, a relationship that had flourished despite—or because—we both knew our father had intended for us to hate each other. Ash was my father’s illegitimate son; his very existence, and the affair right under my mother’s nose that had made him, had been the final hail of bullets that had broken my mother’s heart and made her the brittle, fragile woman she was to this day.
Our friendship had been unlikely. Its end inevitable.
Ash had saluted my surprise at seeing him here tonight in a manner only he could, with one finger raised high at the bar. In the scruffy jeans and a T-shirt that extended that same fuck you to the entirety of the club and all its members. Much as the Ash I’d known well when we were kids had always done in our aristocratic boarding school.
If he wasn’t so dedicated to my downfall, I might have admired him. The way I always had.
After Ash stalked off—no need to speak when he’d already been so eloquent—I found myself restless. I normally saved that sort of drumbeat and drive for my business, especially when I so often had to fight off Ash’s attempts to steal deals out from under me.
Making money was my religion and I its high priest. But it was not until tonight, when the brother who called me his betrayer stirred things up like a stone tossed into a quiet pool, that I realized how much I had come to view the club as my sanctuary. For both business and pleasure.
There were very few places that a man like me could indulge himself, in a controlled manner or otherwise, without having to fear the consequences. There were no tabloids within the M Club’s walls in a handful of major cities across the globe. No stray mobile phone cameras to record indiscretions and use them for extortion or favors. This was a place where names were known, but rarely spoken. Where kings brushed shoulders with self-made captains of industry, we all played as hard as we bargained, and the outside world faded to irrelevance.
I had learned from my mistakes. I kept my temptations transactional.
And I confined them to the walls of the club.
I had come here tonight to smile for the paparazzi outside on one of the few nights the club permitted them access. And much as I knew the club liked its members to show up for their charity events, I wouldn’t have come if there hadn’t been another, more strategic reason. There was a man, John Delaney, with Caribbean islands for sale and I wanted them for my next five-star resort. I’d seen him in the bar and had been talking to his assistant when I’d seen Ash.
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.