Dare Collection October 2019. Margot RadcliffeЧитать онлайн книгу.

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      Sebastian

      THE THEATER WAS FULL. There were the sounds of soft conversations, programs rustling in people’s hands and the orchestra—or perhaps, more properly tonight, the band—tuning their instruments.

      I couldn’t remember the last time I had allowed myself so much as the faintest hint of nerves, but this was different. This wasn’t something for me to win or lose. This was Darcy’s debut in her new company.

      I was a wreck, though I would die before I’d show it.

      Darcy’s parents sat to one side of me, cool and polite, as ever. We had gone up to Connecticut to celebrate our engagement with them, after a fashion. It had been restrained, but still far more loving than any family dinner I could recall. And I really didn’t care how ferociously manicured and distant they both were as long as they were kind to their daughter.

      On my other side was my mother, which I would have told the world would never happen. And had. She wasn’t sober all the time, but she was sober tonight. We weren’t exactly bosom friends. I wasn’t sure that was possible or even desirable.

      But when my mother didn’t drink, she was a different person. One, I was surprised to discover, I might actually like. We’d spent the last month or so being very, very careful with each other.

      Still, I couldn’t help being optimistic.

      To my great surprise.

      It was one more gift my beautiful dancer had given me.

      These had been the best months of my life. The hardest, in many ways. I might have discovered my heart and handed it over to Darcy on a winter street in New York City. But that didn’t mean I knew how to use it.

      She’d moved into the penthouse with me, if not quickly enough to suit me. She told me she’d set a wedding date in a year’s time, assuming things continued to grow and bloom.

      I’m a ruin of a man, I’d shouted at her in one of our fights. They came like storms, flaring up hot and blowing themselves out again.

      Ruins are where the flowers grow, asshole, she’d hurled right back at me. Try that, for a change.

      And I’d kept my promise about the makeup sex. It was blistering, always.

      Day after day, together, we worked it out.

      Just as, slowly and carefully, I thought Ash and I were working it out, too. At long last.

      My life was unrecognizable from the one I’d had when I’d walked into the club last fall.

      There was love. There was hope.

      And in the middle of it, making it all possible, there was Darcy.

      I got a life of her smiles. Her occasional silliness and her iron discipline. I got her dancer friends, and their camaraderie that sometimes baffled me as much as I admired it. I got that body of hers and all the ways she could use it. I got to care for her and protect her and let her do the same for me.

      She understood my drive because she had her own. She supported me in ways I’d never really understood a partner could. And should. She listened. She felt for me and with me. She made things I would have said were only mine brighter because I told her about them.

      And every once in a while, when I greeted her at the door dressed in a suit with a credit card in my hand or a stack of crisp bills in any currency, I got to buy her for another night, too.

      We would marry when the time was right. And then, forever, I would get to do this thing with the one person who made it all matter.

      If I could just survive opening night.

      As if on cue, the lights in the theater went down.

      I heard an ear-piercing whoop of joy and support and knew it was Annabelle, Darcy’s irrepressible best friend, from her favorite seat in the first row of the balcony with a group of other dancers.

      Then everything was silent.

      A spotlight punched through the inky dark, lighting up the figure who crouched in the center of the stage.

      For a moment she looked like the doll she’d never been, not to me.

      She moved in a sudden, liquid rush, from that crouched-down position into a bold, impossible leap—as if she was scaling a wall only she could see—

      Then she was flying, with those wings of hers that I could always see on either side of her. Tonight, it wasn’t only me who could see them.

      And I knew they were feathered bright and pure, made entirely of joy.

      Pure joy.

      But then, to me, she had never been anything else.

      I let out the breath I’d been holding as the music kicked in. Then I sat back and watched my little dancer do what she loved, as if she was doing it just for me.

      The way I would insist she do later, for my eyes only, naked and flushed.

      And, best of all, mine.