Glamour Read online

  She hugged her legs up to her chest, propping her battered feet on the seat of the bench. She leaned her head on her knees and looked at him, golden bun shimmering in the moonlight. She looked like a Degas painting, unreal and gauzily elegant. There was no approaching her, no reaching her dreamy soul through the paint. Forever untouchable.

  “What will happen if he finds out about Persepolis?” Cal asked, even though he shouldn’t. It was none of his business, and worse, the more he knew, the harder it would be to do his job. And he wasn’t in a place where he could walk away from six hundred dollars and feel good about his month.

  Tamsin lifted her shoulder in a gesture like a shrug, keeping her head on her knees. “He’ll be angry,” she said, voice blank.

  It’s none of your business, Cal, none of your business. Don’t go there, don’t even ask—

  “Does he beat you?”

  Cal didn’t consent to the question leaving his mouth, it just did. But he suddenly needed to know, with gut-twisting urgency, whether Purkiss was hurting Tamsin. He couldn’t afford to lose the money…but he didn’t know if his conscience could afford six hundred dollars subsidized by this girl getting the shit kicked out of her by her teacher-dad.

  Tamsin didn’t answer the question, just unfolded her long limbs and stood, grabbing for her pointe shoes. “Don’t worry about me,” she said shortly. “I’ll survive.”

  “Tamsin.”

  Her eyes flared in the dark and she stepped closer to him. In the daylight they were a soft gray, but now they were shimmering pools of silver. “Why are you so worried about it?”

  Cal didn’t have a ready answer for that. Only the truth. “I don’t know.”

  She studied him for a moment longer, silver eyes scorching across his face and down his neck to his body and back up again. He was fit, he knew that much, but it had been a while since he cared what a woman thought of the way he looked. And so it was like a gift when she met his eyes again and her face was flushed.

  “Goodbye, Cal,” she said and left.

  Cal watched her go with a clench in his chest that he hadn’t felt in years. He would be back tomorrow night, he knew that much for certain, but what he didn’t know was whether it was to do his fucking job or whether it was to screw this job altogether.

  He only knew he couldn’t wait to find out.

  Night Two

  Tamsin

  They weren’t in a show tonight, but Mistress Hell had said they could come any night they wanted, and so they did. The night after a man named Cal Dugan stepped out of the darkness to speak to her, they decanted themselves from a bedroom window onto a wide tree branch, dropped to the ground and escaped to Persepolis.

  The other girls chattered and gossiped—who did they want to see tonight, who did they want to fuck? She stayed silent through all of it. She didn’t make it their business what she did at Persepolis, she didn’t make it her business to know theirs. And she hadn’t told them about Cal yet, even though he could bring hell raining down on their heads the moment he decided to do his job.

  But she watched for him. As they crawled out of the window, as they drove, as they parked. She watched for him. She’d only gotten the barest sense of him in the moonlight, but it was enough to make it hard to shake the thought of him. He was older, forty maybe, and built like a fucking wall. Over six foot five, surely, with broad shoulders and wide swathes of muscle that his black T-shirt couldn’t hide. He could have picked her up, tossed her over his shoulder and disappeared with her into the dark, and she wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.

  It was shocking how inflaming that thought was.

  His face, too—even hidden in the moonlight, there had been the stubbled edge of a proud jaw, the flash of eyes that spoke of experience and worldliness and knowledge—and all of that had been in his hard voice too. Everything about him screamed of the kinds of secrets she’d come to Persepolis to learn, only she hadn’t felt half as terrified, half as wildly aroused at the sight of canes and cuffs as she had at the sight of Cal in the dark. Cal was the kind of dangerous she’d been craving, Cal was the kind of knowledge she was so desperate to know.

  And when she’d woken up and the day went as it should, teaching the classes of younger dancers, her father yelling at her but no more than usual, she knew that Cal hadn’t betrayed them.

  Yet.

  Persepolis was busy tonight—a high-profile Dom and sub were showing off tonight—and it was a Friday. The rich and powerful were out to play, and not for the first time, Tamsin sent up a prayer of thanks to whichever deity had seen fit to send Mistress Hell to their spring show. Whichever fit of attraction had compelled Hell to approach them and offer to introduce them to the club.

  She supposed the line between kink and ballet was fairly blurry when you considered it. Pain and beauty in constant exchange. Entire lifestyles built on passion and discipline.

  The girls flitted off the moment they stepped into the playroom, little wisps of sex on pointe shoes, caught by eager hands before they could drift very far. Tamsin herself, she decided to watch the show. She’d been back in a private playroom once or twice, and it’d never carried the taste of taboo she craved, not really. It all felt so…sedate. So safe. A leap with no risk of a fall. And so she was glad the other girls were happy enough here, but she didn’t need to engage in disappointing liaisons night after night to know that she wasn’t going to find what she was looking for.

  “Back again?” a rough voice asked from behind her. It felt like that voice leaked into every crack in her armor; it blew in like cold, exhilarating rain.

  She hadn’t gotten to this point in her ballet studies to let her posture betray her for anything, and so she knew she remained perfectly composed as she turned to face him. In the indoor light, she could see him so much better than last night, and the effect it had on her was…disturbing. He had the kind of gold-infused skin that hinted at Latinx heritage, thick black hair trimmed short, military-style. His eyes were a dark green framed by thick, black lashes, framed by eyebrows that seemed permanently fixed in a suspicious furrow. His jaw was squared and dusted with dark stubble, his cheekbones and forehead were high, his nose the only imperfection in an otherwise perfect face. A crook at the bridge, like it had been broken.

  But for some reason that twisted Tamsin up even more. Cal Dugan seemed like the kind of man who would take a punch to the nose and keep fighting, like the kind of man who would refuse to see a doctor about it. Like he’d drink half a bottle of whiskey, grab a mirror, and reset the broken nose himself. So different than the meticulously groomed ballerinos she danced with. So different even than the sleek suits that frequented Persepolis. This was a man who worked and fought with his hands.

  And she wanted those hands on her.

  “You didn’t tell my father about last night,” she said, skipping past his question and any of the other normal greetings. “Why?”

  “You,” he said simply. “I need you to tell me that you’re going to be okay if I tell him, and you haven’t yet.”

  And she wasn’t going to. There was a difference between taking her father’s blows and lying about them, and the closer to freedom she got, the clearer that line became. But still, that Cal cared, even as a casual stranger, about what happened to her felt foreign, exotic and enticing and good.

  Cal studied her for a minute, then took her arm and led her without asking to a chair in the back. She expected him to offer the chair to her, but instead he sat and pulled her into his lap. Within an instant, she was enfolded in muscle and warmth and a heady masculine scent, wood smoke and skin.

  “What are you doing?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Enough people here know what I do for a living. It’s going to raise questions if I’m here interrogating you, and neither of us are ready for that. We’ll blend in better this way.”

  And they did blend in this way, just another couple getting ready for the show, anonymous in their pose of affection. But the upshot was that
Tamsin couldn’t restrain her body’s reaction to Cal like this, not with so much warm, hard body pressed against hers.

  The lights fell and the couple took the stage to applause, the Dom fastening his submissive wife to a St. Andrew’s cross. Which was when Cal leaned forward and whispered in Tamsin’s ear. “Now, what am I going to do with you?”

  He meant about telling her father. She knew that, yet it was hard to remember with his lips at her ear and his warmth at her back. Hard to remember he didn’t mean the kinds of dangerous, dark things she wanted him to mean.

  “Whatever you like,” she said, meaning that he should do his job or not—she didn’t have any expectation of changing his mind. But the moment the words left her mouth, she knew they sounded much more breathless and eager than she intended.

  “Is that so?” he murmured. A couple walking past glanced down at them, and Cal stroked a warm hand on the outside of her thigh to maintain the illusion that they were just a couple snuggling up for the show. She was only in a leotard, and it was bare skin he was touching, sending goose bumps rippling everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.

  She was hardly able to stand it, the feeling of that calloused hand so possessive on her skin, the solid wall of his chest big enough that she could curl against it. Never had she felt like this, never had she imagined a man could be anything stronger or harder than the ones she’d already met. But those men barely qualified for the label of man, not after meeting Cal, who seemed like he’d already lived three lifetimes in the time it took most people to live half of one.

  “You used to be a cop or something?” she asked. It was out of nowhere in terms of their conversation, but not of her thoughts—she had to know what made a man like him. What scars and horrors added up to the hulking mass of raw danger he was now.

  “Soldier,” he corrected, still stroking her leg. “Iraq and Afghanistan. Left a few years ago.”

  Suddenly she wanted more. More contact, more of his face and his voice. She twisted in his arms and he allowed her, watching her with that same expression of aloof suspicion that he watched everything with. She turned so that she was straddling him and facing him, her pointe shoes tucked delicately under her folded legs, her center resting directly against—oh.

  He was hard.

  He watched her face as she realized this, as her lips parted and her face flushed.

  “Go on,” he said, and there was a hint of lazy admiration in his voice. “Sit on it.”

  She hesitated. If she went any further, she was pushing this conversation past the casual—or whatever passed for casual in their situation—and into the territory of the sexual. She’d be admitting she wanted him. She’d be acknowledging that he wanted her.

  Suddenly, there was nothing she wanted more than just that, to push them into something glittering and sweaty and raw. She sat on it—on him—feeling the impossibly thick, impossibly long ridge of him flush against her center. Through the thin fabric of her leotard, she could feel every seam of his jeans, the line of his zipper, the exact width and heft of his penis. There was a part of her—a big part—that wanted to rub against it like she’d rubbed against Hell’s riding crop last night. To grind down until she worked off some of this tension that he knotted inside her.

  He seemed to read her mind. “Go ahead, princess. Make yourself feel good.”

  “It seems wrong,” she said, even as she started swiveling her hips against him.

  “This is a club full of wrong, sweetheart.”

  It was different, surely he saw that. “But you’re old enough to be my father. That’s bad to like.”

  A flash of teeth in the dim light. “Very fucking bad.”

  “And you could ruin my life if I didn’t do as you said. It’s wrong to like that you have that power over me.”

  His hands brushed along her waist, slowing to explore her navel through the leotard. “But you do like it?”

  She couldn’t explain it, she didn’t even want to try. “I do,” she admitted.

  “You like bad things.”

  “I wanted…I’ve wanted bad things for a long time. But it’s never felt bad here, just safe. Not until you.”

  She couldn’t believe she was confessing all this and yet the thrill she felt when she saw Cal’s stubbled jaw relax in understanding was worth it all.

  “I think I get it now,” he said, leaning back in the chair, as if to enjoy the view. He idly plucked at a nipple through her leotard, and she nearly had a heart attack. The pleasure shot to her center like a lightning bolt.

  “Get what now?” she whispered.

  He stared up at her. “Why you close your eyes when you dance.”

  That’s not at all what she expected him to say, and she slowed the motion of her hips as he continued. “You close your eyes so you can pretend you’re not alone.”

  Her breath caught.

  “And,” he said, his hands settling on her hips. “You close your eyes to dream that someone will take care of you.” He flipped her around with those large hands, lifting her as if she weighed nothing. Settling her so she sat in his lap again, facing the stage, her legs open and hooked around the outside of his knees.

  “And I bet you thought you’d be taken care of here,” he said, one hand holding her hip steady as the other reached around to stroke along the lines of her inner thighs. “Isn’t that right, princess? Find other people who liked the same kinds of wrong?”

  She nodded. It was all she could manage. He was right, of course, so very right. If there was anything she thought Persepolis could promise, it was that there were people here just like her, lonely and hungry for the same things she wanted. But it was all so predictable here. Pain and bondage. No one cared about the grittier kinds of power exchange…like being spread open and touched by a man twice her age. Like fantasizing that he was making her do it or else he’d tell her father everything.

  God, she was fucked up. But she already knew that. What she didn’t guess was that there was a man like Cal around who would see it so clearly.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me the kinds of wrong you are thinking about right now.”

  She squirmed in his lap but couldn’t make the words come out.

  “Don’t worry,” he said gently in her ear. A pair of blunt fingertips skated up her center, skimming across the fabric stretched over her pussy, and she tried to move closer to them, closer to the pressure, but they moved back to her thigh. “I’m going to take care of you, sweetheart. I promise. But first I need to know exactly the kinds of bad, wrong things my little ballerina is wanting.”

  So she told him. About the age difference and how it turned her on. Her blackmail fantasies. And more things too—how she wanted to be forced to crawl across the floor like a pet, how she wanted to look down and see a man’s bare feet next to the pale pink of her ballet slippers, how much she wanted to watch him fuck her friends, every single cheap and tawdry way she wanted to be used and see others used around her. When she finished, she became aware of how much harder he was underneath her now, how the probes of her breasts and cunt had gotten harder, more insistent.

  “You are so brave telling me such bad things,” Cal whispered in her ear. “And brave girls get rewarded.”

  His fingers nudged along the crotch of her leotard, pushing underneath, and she almost came, she was that worked up, but then his fingers moved to her soaking wet folds, and she knew for sure she wasn’t going to last long. His other hand moved to her breast, kneading the small curve of flesh as his other hand began exploring her in earnest now, dipping just inside her wet hole, rubbing up to her clit, which was swollen and hard.

  “Oh, little ballerina,” he groaned in her ear. “It’s been so long since someone’s taken care of you, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” It came out as something like a whine.

  His voice was soft when he asked, “How long, princess? Since you’ve had what you need?”

  She tried to think. “I’ve fucked a couple people here at the club—”r />
  “But that’s not what we’re talking about and you know it,” he cut in. “How long since someone has given you what you need?”

  And the honest answer to that was never. “They haven’t,” she said, her voice sounding unaccountably sad.

  Cal tsked, big fingers starting to gently twist their way up inside her now. “What a fucking shame. But I’m almost grateful because—” his fingers slid in even deeper and she squirmed in his lap “—it means—” He slid up to the second knuckles and curled his fingers, driving pressure against her soft front wall. She gasped, her head dropping back onto his shoulder “—that you are starving for it right now.”

  And she was, oh fuck, yes she was. Starving like she hadn’t eaten in days, empty like she’d been hollowed out and filled with air instead. “Please,” she whimpered. “Please love me.”

  She didn’t have to explain herself to him, she knew from the growl behind her and the way his hand cupped her possessively that he understood. He knew she didn’t mean love like a feeling, like a commitment to a future, like red roses and musical greeting cards and dinners full of small talk. She meant love like a verb, a very specific verb. She meant care for me, make me feel good, stay with me tonight. She meant come inside me, hold me so tight I can’t breathe, touch me, touch me, touch me.

  “I’m gonna,” he said into her ear. He twisted her nipple sharply through the leotard and she cried out. “And I’m not a fancy guy, sweetheart. You want me to stop, you say ‘stop.’ You want me to wait, say ‘wait.’ Got it?”

  She nodded eagerly, ready to move past whatever barriers were keeping him from possessing her right now, and he seemed to feel the same way, because he shifted and his hand abandoned her breast. She wanted to pout at the lack of contact, but all attempts at pouting fled the moment she saw what he was reaching for in his back pocket.

  A small folding knife.