“A muse? Who is he, Van Gogh?” Clarissa asked.
“An engineer.”
“What’s his name?” Clarissa pulled out her laptop.
“Darrell,” I said doubtfully. “Darrell Carner.”
Clarissa’s fingers skittered across the keyboard. She took a sip of her coffee as she waited for the results to come back and then froze, staring at the screen. I could see her eyes darting back and forth as she read. “This Darrell Carner?” she asked disbelievingly, and spun the laptop to face me.
It was him. He was in jeans and a shirt again, shaking hands with some guy in a suit, his floppy black hair soft and perfect. Something went through me when I looked at him, a crackling wash of energy that started in my face and soaked straight down, hitting the gas pedal on my heart and finishing in my groin. When I dragged my eyes away from the photo, I saw it was a news story.
Jasmine crowded in. “Ohmygod he’s hot!”
Clarissa read the first line to us, one perfect eyebrow raised. “Darrell Carner today signed his third deal with Sabre Technologies, licensing his latest design for an estimated twenty-six million dollars.” She looked at me. “You left out that part.”
“I didn’t know.” I was trying to fit rich together with the guy I’d talked to outside the audition, but the two refused to stick. “He didn’t seem—”
“Did he offer to pay you?” asked Jasmine.
I had to think about it. “Well, yes, but—”
“Well then what the hell are you waiting for?” Jasmine was staring at me incredulously. “He’s super-gorgeous, you should do it.”
“Wait, wait...” I held my hand up. “A second ago he was a creep and probably wanted a lap dance. Now just because he’s rich and”—I flushed—“and hot, he’s suddenly okay? What if he’s a rich, hot creep?”
“I don’t think you can be rich, hot and a creep,” Jasmine told me, then turned to Clarissa. “Can you?”
Clarissa shook her head happily. “No, if he’s rich and hot then he’s just kinky. Adventurous.” She saw my expression and sighed. “I’m kidding! Of course you should be careful. I’ll drive you there and check you’re okay. We’ll do the phone call thing and everything.”
Jasmine bounced up and down in her chair. “Ooh, ooh, we can have a duress code, in case he’s got you tied up in a tutu.”
I looked at both of them in turn. “I don’t have a choice about this, do I?”
Clarissa shook her head. “This is easily the most interesting thing that’s happened to you in about a year, and the thought of you possibly hooking up with some uber-bachelor...? No. You don’t have a choice.”
“Who says I even like him?”
Jasmine smirked. “We saw your face when you looked at his photo. Don’t ever play poker.”
Clarissa suddenly grinned as she remembered something. “Is this who you were—”
I kicked her under the table, my face turning red. I really didn’t want to talk about the couch incident.
Jasmine leaned forward. “What? What did she do?”
Clarissa glanced at Jasmine, holding the secret over me like an axe. “Answer!”
I sighed and nodded and Clarissa squealed with delight. “You have to call him, right now. Before he finds some other dancer.”
I hadn’t considered that. Of course, he’d probably already found someone else. The idea made me suddenly angry—jealous, almost, which was crazy. “I can’t. I don’t have his number.”
“He’s famous,” Clarissa told me. “We can find it.”
“Facebook him,” Jasmine suggested. She lived her life on Facebook, when she wasn’t watching cop shows and 24 reruns.
I took out my phone, mostly because I was curious to see if there were other pictures of him on his Facebook profile. But something stopped me before I could enter his name in the search box.
I had a new friend request. From him.
***
I hit ‘accept’, because I didn’t know what else to do (and I knew Clarissa would kill me if I didn’t). My heart was thumping so hard everyone around me must have been able to hear it.
In less than ten seconds, I got a message from him.
“Hi.”
I tried to come up with something witty, or clever, or flirty.
“Hi,” I typed back at last.
There was a pause, as if he was choosing his words very carefully. Then, “I’d really love to see you dance again.”
Why me? Why not any of the other dancers at the audition? Or...a horrible thought went through my head. Was he talking to all of us? For all I knew, he’d propositioned every one of them as they came out the door.
“You couldn’t find anyone else?” I typed.
“I haven’t asked anyone else.”
Clarissa and Jasmine demanded an update. I was sitting pushed back from the table, so they couldn’t see my phone’s screen. “He hasn’t got a muse yet,” I told them. They both gasped and made do it, do it gestures.
Before I could type anything, though, another message arrived.
“Dance for me, Natasha.”
I can’t explain why, but seeing him use my name sent a thrill through me, rising and soaring in my chest. And there was something else, too. I remembered his voice, and now I imagined it saying my name. Growling it, almost. The thought of him doing that, of his hot whisper against my neck, sent a dark heat twisting down between my thighs.
“He just asked me,” I told Clarissa and Jasmine.
“Check it’s not a lap dance, before you do it,” Clarissa said.
“Or check it is a lap dance, and do it anyway,” Jasmine offered. Behind those big, innocent eyes lay a truly filthy mind.
“What would I have to do?” I typed.
“Just dance. Here at my house.”
“What sort of dancing?”
“Ballet. Why, what did you have in mind?”
I flushed. “It’s ballet,” I told the others.
“Just checking,” I typed.
“Check it’s not nude,” Clarissa told me.
I was taking a sip of coffee and spluttered it halfway across the table. “What?!”
“Just in case. He is paying you to dance at his house.” She looked like she was half serious.
“You don’t mean nude or anything, do you?” I typed back. And immediately regretted it.
“No. Why, would you like to dance nude?” It was impossible to judge his mood from the messages...so how come I just knew he was smirking?
“It’s not nude,” I told the other two tightly.
“Ask how much,” Jasmine told me.
“How much?” I typed.
“How much would you like?” he replied.
Jasmine and Clarissa had moved around behind me now. I knew it was useless to try to stop them reading. They were right—this was the most exciting thing to happen to me all year.
“Say, like, $500 an hour,” said Clarissa.
“I can’t say that! That’s nuts!”
“Opening bid,” she told me.
“$500 per hour,” I typed, hesitating before I finally hit the button to send.
Almost immediately: “Fine. Is that a yes?”
The world seemed to narrow down to a tunnel, everything but the screen of my phone fading out. I barely heard Clarissa and Jasmine gasp. And yet I didn’t feel like things were sliding out of control, somehow. This complete stranger, with his crazy demand for a muse, felt solid. In fact, it felt like the only truly solid thing around me, besides the exercise bike and the sweet escape nestling inside the cigarette case.
What was this, really? On one level, it seemed legit—he didn’t seem like some creep who really wanted a lap dance. But he was rich—seriously rich. Why had he pursued me, when he could have called any casting agency and found a dancer for a fraction of that price?
I remembered the way he’d looked at me, when he’d burst in. The way his eyes kept going to me, even when the others were dancing. Could he really be interested in me? My stomach lurched. Had I put on that good a show, convinced him that I was normal? Could I keep it up, and dance for him without him ever knowing the real me?
And was it just dancing he wanted, or was there the possibility of something more? The idea of getting close to someone, of risking them finding out the truth, should have terrified me. With him, the fear was being countered by raw desire at least as strong, and I didn’t know which one was going to win.
I stared at the screen for a long moment. What was the alternative—carry on as I was? A year ago, I’d been cutting maybe once a week. Now I was up to once a day, and the exercise bike in the evenings. How long before that wasn’t enough, and I broke down in class?
I had to take a chance.
I typed “Yes,” and then let out a long breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
Almost immediately, he came back with “Could you dance for me today?”
What have I done? “Could you drive me—this afternoon?” I asked Clarissa without looking at her.
Her eyes were locked on the screen too. “I’ll drive you anywhere you want. I have to meet this guy,” she told me.
“3pm?” I typed back.
“See you then,” he replied, and sent an address. Somehow, in the space of ten minutes, I’d become his muse.
Now what?
Chapter Seven
Natasha
Clarissa slowed the car until it was barely crawling along, then let it coast to a stop in a scrunch of gravel.
“This is not the place,” she said disbelievingly.
I double-checked the address. It was.
We were thirty minutes out of the city and had turned off a quiet, tree-lined road onto a private driveway, iron gates swinging open in invitation. Now we were looking at—there was no other word to describe it—a mansion.
It was three stories high, built from huge stone blocks and looked like it’d been there a hundred years. A water feature stood in the center of the sweeping gravel driveway, a stone bowl big enough to swim in with white water spraying high into the air before arcing down to cascade over the sides. Parked in front of the house was a bright yellow sports bike with Ducatti stenciled on the side. Clarissa and I exchanged a look.
Darrell came out to meet us just as we were getting out of the car. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, the faded red fabric tight over his biceps. I watched his eyes take in me, then Clarissa. Then back to me. A little frisson of excitement went through me. I wasn’t used to being the one a guy focused on.
“I’m Clarissa,” she told him. “Natasha’s friend.” And bodyguard who will knee you in the balls if you so much as touch her, her smile seemed to say.
Darrell gave her a solemn nod and led us inside. I hadn’t known exactly what to wear or what to bring, so I’d put on what I’d worn for the audition with my street clothes over the top, and pinned my hair up. I’d spent about five times longer on my make-up than usual, which hadn’t gone unnoticed by Clarissa.
Inside it was even more intimidating, if that was possible. The hallway seemed bigger than our apartment, black and white tiles of shining marble stretching away into the distance. A chandelier the size of a small car hung overhead. Clarissa grabbed my arm and pulled me to her, so we could whisper to each other.