Chapter 1

"Disguise ev'n tenderness, if thou art wise;

Brisk confidence still best with women copes;

Pique her and soothe in turn, soon Passion crowns thy hopes"

Lord Byron—Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto II

****

She dared him to do it.

I would never marry you, Chuck. I'd be insane to even think of it. Suicidal. Homicidal! I'd kill you before the ink dried on the fucking license.

She meant the words, he knew that. Just like he knew she meant it when she packed up her Louis luggage in a sloppy-ponytailed frenzy and stormed out of the Palace suite for the last time, chucking a broken Laboutin at his head for good measure. The shoe left a scuffmark on the wall that was the exact shape of Winston Churchill's head. It stared him down every morning over breakfast with serious, gimlet-eyed intent, stalwart and resolute.

She meant every word she said.

But she dared him to prove her wrong.

*

Chuck hadn't seen Blair in two months. Hadn't spoken to her in four. Hadn't had her undressed and in his bed in nine.

When she finally returned to the Palace—her mouth a sad crescent, the varnished oak bar in front of her a burial ground marked by the glassy tombstones of dirty martinis—he felt like she'd been there all along, a phantom on a barstool waiting to take form. He walked across the lobby to her side. His fingers found her bare arm, stroked the unbearably soft skin from her elbow to the wisp of lace covering her shoulder. He felt the tiny hairs rise under his thumb. He felt his prick harden in response. Jesus Christ, it's been so long.

She didn't turn around.

He leaned in and placed his lips mere inches from the diamond stud that marked her ear as (he thought to himself) Property of Chuck Bass—Still, and Don't You Forget It, Because He Doesn't Hand Out Three Carats for the Whoop-de-Fucking-Doo of It.

"Drinking alone, Waldorf?"

"Trying to, Bass. So why don't you scurry back under your rock?" She turned her head infinitesimally towards him, cast him a sidewise glance containing enough hostility to singe the lust right out of a lesser man's cock—and to flip his fantasy-switch firmly into hate-sex mode. Yanking her right arm out of his grasp, she drained the glass in her left hand and set it carefully down in front of her. She gestured to Steven behind the bar to bring her another.

One, two, three, four, five.

Chuck counted the meticulously arranged empty glasses, then made eye contact with his employee. Steven hesitated, a hand poised over a bottle of olive juice, an eyebrow cocked questioningly in Chuck's direction.

Chuck could practically hear his thoughts:

Shouldn't I cut her off now, Mr. Bass?

Chuck's own eyebrow answered:

Give the lady what she wants, Steven.

But five drinks…and she's a small woman…

Give the lady what she wants, Steven.

But you told me never to let her get like that again.

"Give the lady what she wants, Steven." Chuck abandoned the language of eyebrows in favor of something more direct.

Steven did too, reluctantly turning his back to Chuck as he mixed Blair's sixth cocktail. He tossed in an extra olive and set the drink on the coaster in front of her. She stared at it for five full seconds.

"Oh!" Her head snapped up, her voice full of innocent surprise, like a little girl who just figured out how to walk in her mother's heels. "Thank you, Steven."

Her fingers—delicate but strong—curled around the stem. She raised the glass to her lips, sloshing martini over the rim. It left a wet spot on her wrist.

Fingers and mouth. Fingers and mouth. Chuck gripped the bar as he remembered the ways she could use them. The vodka coated her lips—still bright red despite the numerous lipstick stains on the empty glasses—and she slurped down half the drink in one continuous gulp.

This was not Blair. This booze-swilling siren of loose, tousled hair and matte-crimson lips (and glazed unfocused eyes—but he didn't let himself dwell on that fact) was not the Emily-Post-in-training he'd dated for two and a half years. She was just some girl in a bar. Just some sad, drunk little girl who'd had more than she could handle and wandered across the path of the biggest womanizer between the Hudson and the East River. Chuck knew what to do with girls like that. He hadn't resorted to it since high school, but he still knew what to do. That kind of muscle memory didn't unlearn itself.

She finished the martini, tipping her head back to let the last drops dribble into her waiting mouth, her tongue peeking out from behind her teeth to catch them. Chuck took the empty glass from her and kept hold of her hand while he passed it off to Steven. He rubbed his thumb over the knob of her wrist, felt the splash of martini dried sticky on her skin. He raised her hand and pressed his lips to the blue vein coursing down her inner arm from her palm, felt the blood pulse beneath his mouth.

Her breath changed—one harsh inhalation interrupting the even rhythm. Casting her a glance from under his brows, Chuck saw her eyelids flutter closed. Her lower lip dropped open just a little. She looked both pensive and restless, waiting for his next move, longing for it. He licked the salt from the dried olive juice, breathed in her sweet scent, and nearly forgot in the pleasure of feeling, touching, sensing her again why he bothered in the first place.

She let out the tiniest whimper and pressed her wrist to his lips. But only for a fraction of a second. Then her eyes opened. He watched the dark, dilated pupils refocus as she took in his bent head, his nibbling mouth. She pulled her hand back sharply, twisted away from him, and nearly tumbled off the barstool.

"Careful, Blair." Chuck grabbed one arm and roughly yanked her upright. She was sloppy drunk. But she had winced at his touch and he wasn't enough of a gentleman to let that pass without some punishment.

She batted him away, slipping forward on the stool this time, forced to brace her hands against his chest or to fall on her face. Self-preservation dictated the former.

"You're so gross, Chuck! You're like…some really, really, gross guy."

Further evidence that this was not Blair. When Blair was pissed off, she used words Chuck had to look up after the fact, words like obstreperous, and cisibeo, and pusillanimous. This girl's drunken mind had reeled into oblivion somewhere between the first "gross" and her concluding hiccup.

Her fingers clutching his shirt felt a lot like Blair's fingers, though. And her brown eyes looked exactly like Blair's when she looked up at him sadly, a layer of tears dewing her lower lashes.

"That's not why I came here. Not to see you. So don't touch me." She sniffled.

"If Humpty Dumpty could stay on her barstool, I wouldn't have to."

He moved her hands from his chest to the bar, helping her hold herself steady on her seat. He heard a thump below, and when he felt confident that she wouldn't tip over if he let go, he ducked down by the stool to see that her shoes had fallen off.

Red soles. Fucking Laboutins.

"Thank you." Blair's watery, weepy voice greeted him from above. "I'm fine. You can go now."

There were a lot of things Chuck could have said in response. I'm not leaving you alone drunk off your ass in the middle of Midtown. Or I'm calling George to take you home now. Or Goddammit, just forgive me already and stop putting us both through this. Or even, Nice to see you again, B.

But with the memory of those red-soled implements of heartbreak and destruction lodged in his mind, there was really only one possible response for Chuck to make.

"Come on, Blair. We both know you came here hoping I'd fuck you again."

"What?" Her voice rose five octaves, anger allowing a moment of slightly sober reaction. "How dare you? You're as crude as you are delusional."

"Spare me the outraged virgin act." Chuck leaned back casually, elbows against the bar, smirking in a way calculated to tense every muscle in her neck. "The last time you walked through those doors, I had your ankles behind your ears two hours later. Or do you really think I'll believe that you forgot I live here?"

"I wanted a dirty martini and Steven makes the best ones!" Blair shouted. The handful of wealthy, older guests murmuring quietly in their booths and at tables for two looked up in distress. This was not the scene they expected to find at the Palace Hotel on a Tuesday night.

Blair ignored the white-haired women in Chanel suits, protected from their disgust by a cloak of alcohol and rage. "And I don't need to come to you for sex. There are dozens of men that I could sleep with if I wanted. They throw themselves at me. Carter's been begging me to sleep with him since he and Serena broke up. You're an easy lay, Chuck, but that's not good enough for me anymore."

She started to shift her bottom off the high stool, her black lace dress riding up her legs, her bare feet searching for the floor. "Now if you'll excuse me…"

Chuck grabbed her by the waist and thrust her back into her seat. "I'm the best goddamn lay you've ever had and you know it," he whispered. "And Carter Baizen's not going to come near you. If anyone fucks you tonight, Blair, it's me."

Blair threw her hands in the air, sweeping Carter Baizen and Chuck Bass and all the dozens of potential fucks to the side in one broad gesture. "Fine! Fuck away, Chuck! See if I care. Getting fucked by you will be the perfect end to a day of getting fucked all around."

She hung her head suddenly and wobbled under his hands, swaying a little on the stool. He tightened his grip. "What the hell are you talking about, Waldorf?"

"Fucked up, fucked over, fucking…" She bit her lip and sniffled, but she wouldn't raise her head to look at him. "Just plain fucked. I've completely ruined my life."

The sniffles sounded dangerously close to sobs, gunfire quick and each one accompanied by an awkward hitch of her shoulders. Chuck took her pointed little chin between his thumb and forefinger and tipped her head up to look at him.

She started to cry, and not that perfectly pretty one-crystal-tear-falls-down-the-lady's-damask-cheek kind of crying she deployed to win arguments. Real tears, thick and messy, coating her nose and chin, dripping to the dark silk of her lap. The soggy, sloppy tears of a girl with six dirty martinis running through her blood. "I'm a cheater," she whimpered. Then her face crumpled like a wadded up tissue and she laid her head against the bar, sobbing into the circle of her arms.

A boyfriend. He hadn't heard anything about it. He couldn't figure out if he was angry she'd moved on, or happy the asshole wasn't enough for her, or worried that his intel sources were slipping. Before he could ask, so who's the unlucky guy? she lifted her head and—cheeks gleaming with tears— stared at the row of premium vodkas on the second shelf.

"I've been thrown out of NYU for academic dishonesty. I'm a twenty-one-year-old college dropout."

Chuck laughed. Just once, just one sharp bark of laughter. But it was loud, and she heard it, and she looked at him with so much mingled anger and despair he wanted to slice open his intestines and bleed out at her feet.

But really, the whole thing was ridiculous. How could he help it?

"That's impossible Blair. Cyrus is a huge donor. They'd never kick out his stepdaughter. He wouldn't let that happen."

"He doesn't know. I didn't tell them. You're the only one who knows."

"Then I'll fix it." He didn't consider his words, just answered. "I'll put my best people on it, the legal staff. We'll appeal."

She shook her head, shaking harder the more he said. "No. This was the appeal. There aren't any left. No more recourse, they said. They just told me to leave."

"How long have you been dealing with this?"

Blair wiped at her face, smearing her mascara and eyeliner toward her hairline. Her eyes closed sleepily and she laid her head on the bar again, pillowed by her hands.

"March," she mumbled. "I wrote the paper in March. I bought it online."

March. The month she left him. The month she found him flirting with his new VP of media relations, his hand on her thigh, her skirt four inches higher than God and Coco Chanel had intended. The month he started to wonder if a life of sober fidelity to a college-student girlfriend was worthy of an almost twenty-year-old billionaire CEO whose face—his VP promised—would soon be in every newspaper and magazine in the country.

Jesus Christ, this is my fault. I did this to her.

She was sleeping, the carved lip of the bar jutting into her face and pushing against her puckered lips. If he left her there any longer it would leave a mark.

"Steven, see that Miss Waldorf's shoes make it to my suite."

As Steven nodded, mixing a Singapore Sling for a grey-haired, suit-clad executive type—and trying to deflect the man's attention from his boss's girlfriend slumped in the corner—Chuck put an arm against Blair's back and an arm behind her knees and hoisted her drunk, sleeping weight into his arms. She curled against him, head under his chin, nose nuzzling his neck, fingers clutching his shirtfront.

"Do you have a purse Blair?" He didn't see one—it was probably in some cabby's collection by now.

She shook her head, but not in answer to his question. "I'm not gonna sleep with you, Chuck." Her eyes never opened as he carried her to the elevators.

"That's okay, Waldorf. I prefer my sex partners conscious." As he waited for the elevator, eyes fixed on the glowing circular button surrounded by filigreed brass, he couldn't resist pressing a kiss to the top of her head.

She snuggled closer and let out a snore, so he kissed her head again. And since she'd never remember it in the morning, he whispered in her ear, "You didn't come for the martinis, Blair. Everyone knows the St Regis makes them best."