The Dance Off

At the pink chair she pulled the band from her hair and shook it out, running her hands through it until it was a tumble of shaggy waves. As if she’d sensed him watching she looked over her shoulder as she bound herself in a wrap-around cardigan, and looped a long silver scarf around her neck. “Next time dress in loose pants, a T-shirt, and bring something warm for after. Even though it’s crazy hot outside, your body will cool down dramatically after a workout like this.”

Ryder didn’t make any promises—he figured a fast cool-down was exactly what he needed. “I’ll walk you down.”

Her eyebrows disappeared beneath a wave of her hair. “Not necessary. I can handle myself. I’m a child of the mean streets.”

Richmond was hardly mean, but, growing up with a little sister with a knack for climbing out of bedroom windows, Ryder had a protective instinct that was well honed. “It’s eleven at night. I’m walking you down.”

She gave him a level stare from those gypsy eyes of hers, then with a smile and a shrug she said, “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

“There’s that too.”

He nabbed his jacket and tie and held them over his elbow rather than rugging up. She noticed, but said nothing, clearly considering herself off the clock.

She moved to an ancient bank of light switches and flipped the place into darkness, leaving only patches of cloud-shrouded moonlight teeming through the big arched windows, and Ryder’s gaze was once again drawn to the soaring ceilings, the dusty chandeliers, the obnoxious industrial fans, and last but not least the fantastic criss-cross of exposed beams above, the kind people paid top dollar to reproduce.

Nadia cleared her throat and motioned him out, then with a yank of the door, a bump of the hip and a kick to the skirting board, locked up behind them.

He followed her down the stairs, the green glow of the old lights creating sickly shadows on the wallpaper peeling from the walls. But from topside looking down, the way the stairs curled around the shaft was actually great design. If the lift actually worked—

Irrelevant, he thought, with a flare of irritation. In fact the place should probably be condemned.

But Ryder didn’t need a team of crack psychologists to tell him why the building continued to charm. It was just the kind of place his creative mother would have adored. Her legacy to the world was her wonderful sculptures made from things found, abandoned, forgotten, lost. Her legacy to her son was the knowledge that following your heart led only to heartache.

Pressing the memories far deeper, he redirected his gaze to the exit.

“Will I see you next week?” Nadia asked as they spilled out of the door.

“I fear you will,” said Ryder as he turned on the cracked grey footpath to face her.

A step higher than he, she swayed sensually, hypnotically, from one foot to the other, as if moving to a rhythm only she could hear. Then she tipped up onto her toes bringing her face level with his. “Sam really has you wrapped around her little finger, doesn’t she? I liked her before, but now I have a new-found respect for the woman.”

Ryder sniffed out a laugh.

Then when she moved past him, jogging lightly down the stairs, he shoved his hands in his trouser pockets to keep himself from doing anything dangerous, like finding that slice of hot skin at her hips again and using it to drag her against him. Like losing his fingers in those crazy waves. Like ravaging that smart, soft, tilting mouth till she stopped smiling at him as if she were one up on the scoreboard.

But Ryder held fast.

Because, delightful as she was, his only objective for the next few weeks was to survive until Sam’s wedding without hiding her away in the top of a large tower where no man could hurt her. Getting all twisted up with the wilful and wily dance teacher, who he was fast gathering had become his sister’s friend, would not help his cause one bit.

So instead of drowning in her dark eyes, her lush lips, all that dark sensuality so close within reach, he looked up at the building, past the big red door and up to the big sleeping windows on the third floor. “Do you know who owns this place?”

“Why?” she asked.

Because he was changing the subject.

“Something about the beams,” he said, then glanced back to find Nadia halfway down the block.

“Don’t ask me,” she said over her shoulder. “I just work here.”

Ryder watched her until she was swallowed by darkness, leaving him alone on the cracked pavement with his car, his skin cooling quickly in the night air.

* * *

Nadia fell into bed a few minutes before midnight. Literally. Standing at the end she let herself flop, fully clothed, face first onto the crumple of unmade sheets.

And the darkness behind her eyelids became a blank canvas as her memories began to play.

She could hear the creak of the stairs cutting through the song she’d been free-styling to. Could feel the disorientation of being caught out, leaving her breathless, sweaty, off kilter. Back on solid ground, wiping away the worst of her glow—men sweat, women perspire, ladies glow, her austere grandmother had always said—she’d peeked through the curtains.

Expecting a male version of Sam—tall, big grin, two left feet, handsome, sure, but slightly goofy with it—she’d been critically mistaken.

Ryder Fitzgerald was tall but that was where the similarities ended. Handsome had nothing on the guy—he was simply stunning. In that midnight suit, snowy white shirt, not a hair out of place, not a scuff on his beautiful shoes, he was big, dark, sleek, and razor-sharp. And to top it off, shimmering at the edges of all that relentless perfection was an aura of rough and raw sex appeal, as if the guy left behind an unapologetic testosterone wake.

When she’d ducked back behind the curtain her hands had been shaking. Shaking! Her breaths had shortened. Her stomach had curled tight and hot while her blood had thwacked against the walls of her veins. And all she had been able to think was, Oh, no.

With the grace of hindsight she could hardly blame herself. It had been over a year since she’d broken up with her ex after all. And if she was honest, longer again since she’d felt anything near that kind of all out, sweet, sinful, wonderful, carnal reaction to a man. For a woman whose entire life had been spent learning her body, knowing her body, celebrating her body, the fact that her body had become some sort of neutral zone had been damn near unnatural.

So much so, in her more wavery moments she’d wondered if something more than a two-year relationship had been damaged during the whole sordid mess. Even more than a bruised ego and a crumpled career.

But no, she was a Kent, and Kent women didn’t cry over broken relationships—or broken bones for that matter. They got over it. Which she had admirably, thank you very much.

And then—right when she was doing so great, when she was dancing better than she had in her entire life, when she was mere weeks away from having the chance to reclaim all that she’d given up—right then was when the old flame had to flicker back to life?

Groaning, she rolled over and pulled a pillow tight over the thumping in her chest. It didn’t help. Even with her eyes wide open she could still feel the play of muscle beneath the man’s prosaic white shirt—hard, strong, a surprise. As had been his latent heat. All she’d had to do was touch him and she’d felt it pulsing beneath his skin. The exact same heat that had thudded incessantly through her for the entire hour straight.

Let it go, she thought. The man’s immaterial. And heard her mother’s voice.

Her mother who’d taken one look at Nadia when she’d turned up on her doorstep a year before with nothing but a suitcase and a sad story...and smiled. Not because she was glad to see her only child, oh, no. Claudia Kent’s own ballet career had been ruined over a guy, and, seeing the product of that mistake in the same sorry position, she’d found herself looking down the blissful barrel of karmic payback.

Nadia gripped the pillow tighter, this time to stifle the woozy sensation in her belly.

Her mother might be completely devoid of any maternal genes, but at least Nadia had learnt early on how to cope with rejection, which for a jobbing hoofer was pure gold. One couldn’t be precious and be a dancer. It was the tough and the damned. Ethel Barrymore had once said to be a success as an actress a woman had to have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros. Working dancers needed all that and to be able to do the splits on cue.

Nadia had all that going for her and more. Yet if she didn’t nail the fast-approaching chance to get her life back in a few weeks’ time, she’d have deserved that contempt as she’d made the same mistake her mother did before her.

Well, not the exact same mistake—at least Nadia hadn’t fallen pregnant.

With that wicked little kick of ascendancy fuelling her, she reached into her bedside table and found her notebook. For the next few minutes she pushed everything else from her mind and sketched out the moves she’d added to her routine that night before Ryder Fitzgerald had arrived.

In her early twenties she’d lived on natural talent, on chutzpah, and maybe even on her mother’s name. A year out of the spotlight and that momentum was gone, and every day away younger, fitter, hungrier dancers were pouring into the void, eager and ready to take her spot. But what those hungry little dancers didn’t know was that this time Nadia had an edge—she didn’t simply want their jobs; this time she really had something to prove.

Sketches done, she slumped back to the bed. She’d shower in the morning. And since she didn’t start work till two the next day, she’d have time to attend a couple of classes of her own—maybe a contemporary class in South Yarra, or trapeze in that converted warehouse in Notting Hill. Either way she’d kill it. Because look out, world, Nadia Kent was back, baby.

Despite the late hour, the last whispers of adrenalin still pulsed through her system, so she grabbed her TV remote and scrolled through the movies on her hard drive till she found what she was looking for.

The strains of Be My Baby buzzed from the dodgy speakers in her second-hand TV, and grainy black and white dancers writhed on the screen. When Patrick Swayze’s name loomed in that sexy pink font, Nadia tucked herself under her covers and sighed.

Yep, things were still on track. So long as she didn’t do anything stupid. Again.

Sliding into sleep, she couldn’t be sure if it was her mother’s voice she’d heard at the last, or her own.

TWO

“So how was it? Was it amazing? Aren’t you glad I made you go?”

Ryder pressed the phone harder to one ear to better hear Sam, and plugged a finger in his other ear to ward off the sounds of the construction site. “It was...” Excruciating. Hot. A lesson in extreme—patience. He tugged his hard hat lower over his forehead, and growled, “It was fine.”

“Told you. And how cool is the studio? And the ceilings. I knew you’d love the ceilings.”

No need to fudge the truth there. The beams were stunning. Old school. The exact kind of feature he’d once upon a time have sold his soul to study. He glanced about the modern web of metal spikes and cold concrete slabs around him, the foundations of what would in many months be a sleek, silver, skyscraping tower—as far from the slumped thick red-brick building as architecturally possible.

His foreman waved a torch in his direction, letting him know the group he was there to meet—and who were about to make his day go from long to interminable—had arrived. Ryder tilted his chin in acknowledgement, holding up his finger to say he’d be a minute.

“She was a dancer,” Sam was saying. “A real one. A Sky High one.”

Struggling to picture sultry Nadia Kent in a pink tutu and a bun, Ryder asked, “Nadia’s a ballerina?”

A pause, then, “No-o-o. I told you. Sky High.”

“Sam, just for a moment, treat me as if I am an Australian human male and speak plain English.”

“Man, you need to get out more. Sky High is huge. A dance extravaganza. A kind of burlesque meets Burn the Floor meets Cirque du Soleil; all superb special effects and crazy-talented dancers. In Vegas!”

Ryder’s focus converged until it was entirely on his sister’s voice. “Sam, do you have a showgirl teaching your wedding party how to dance?”

“Oh, calm down. She wasn’t working some dive bar off the strip.”

And yet, picturing Nadia in fishnets, towering high heels and cleverly positioned peacock feathers wasn’t difficult at all. Her pale skin glowing in the dim light, dishevelled waves trailing down her bare back, those lean calves kicking, twirling, hooking... Ryder closed his eyes and pressed his thumb into his temple.

“She’s so graceful. And flexible,” Sam continued, clearly oblivious to his internal struggle. “She was warming up the other night when we came in and she can pull her leg up so far behind her she can touch her nose!”

Ryder’s eyes snapped open to search for a speedy exit from the conversation at hand. He had every intention of shrugging off the spark between them for Sam’s sake, but the kid sure wasn’t helping any.

Sam sighed down the line. “If I had half her talent, half her confidence, half her sex appeal—”

“Okay then,” Ryder said, loud enough to turn heads. A few of his tradies laughed before getting back to nailing, laying pipe, measuring, chatting about the previous night’s TV. “You like her. That’s great. I’m taking lessons, as you wanted. Let’s leave it there.”

Sam might have missed his earlier silence, but he read Sam’s loud and clear. He swore beneath his breath as the hairs on the back of his neck sprang up in self-defence.

Sam’s voice was an octave lower as she said, “She’s single, you know.”

“Got to go,” Ryder growled. “My foreman’s jabbing a finger at his watch so vigorously he’s going to pull a muscle.”

With that he rang off. And stared at his phone as if he couldn’t for the life of him remember which pocket he kept it in.

There was no misreading what had just happened there. The kid was trying to set him up. That wasn’t the way things were meant to go.

He was Sam’s rock. Her cornerstone. Which was why he’d been so careful to keep his private life separate from his life with her; so she didn’t go through life thinking all men were self-centred brutes like the father who’d failed them both.

Damn. Things were changing. Faster than he was keeping up. Faster than he liked.

For if he was Sam’s cornerstone, she was his touchstone. His earth. As the raw ingenuity he’d inherited from his mother had been progressively engulfed by his own well-honed single-mindedness, and the crushing need to succeed that his father had roused in him, being there for Sam, no matter what, had been his saving grace. It had proven he was different from the old man in the way that mattered most.

Without Sam to look out for what would his measuring stick be?

To ground himself, he glanced up at the twenty-feet-high rock-and-dirt walls surrounding him, and imagined what would one day be a soaring tower; a work of art with clean lines, perfect symmetry, and a hint to the fantastical that pierced the Melbourne sky. It was the exact kind of project he’d spent more than a decade aiming towards.

Not that it had always been his aim to draw buildings that split the clouds. His first internship had been a fantastical summer spent in beachside Sorrento with a renovation specialist by the name of Tom Campbell, bringing the grand homes of the Peninsula back to their former glories. The gig had been hard, back-breaking labour, but the heady scents of reclaimed materials had also made him dream more of his mother, and her sculpting of lost things, than he had since he’d been a kid.

Until the day his father sauntered in with the owner of the home Campbell was working on at the time. Fitz couldn’t even pretend it was accidental; the sneer was already on his face before he’d spied the hammer in Ryder’s hand.

No ambition, he’d muttered to his friend, not bothering to say hello to the son he hadn’t seen in two years. Kid’s always been a soft touch. Idealistic. Artistic mother, so what chance did I have?

Damn those bloody beams for stirring this all up again. Because no matter how he’d come to it, the very different work Ryder did now was vital and important. And as for the woman who’d stirred other parts of him, hooking into his darker nature, begging it be allowed out to play? All elements of the same slippery path.

No. No matter how his life might be changing, his crusade had not. So he’d have to be more vigilant in harnessing his baser nature than ever.

With that firmly fixed at the front of his mind, he went off in search of the project manager, foreman, head engineer, the council rep, union rep, and the jolly band of clients, perversely hoping for a problem he could really sink his teeth into.

* * *

It was nearing the end of a long day—Tiny Tots lessons all morning, Seniors Acrobatics after lunch, Intermediate Salsa in the evening, so Nadia happily took the chance for a break.

She sat in the window seat of the dance studio, absent-mindedly running a heavy-duty hula hoop through her fingers. Rain sluiced down the window making the dark street below look prettier than usual, like something out of an old French film.

Unfortunately, the day’s constant downpour hadn’t taken the edge off the lingering heat. Nadia’s clothes stuck to her skin, perspiration dripped down her back, and she could feel her hair curling at her neck.

And it wasn’t doing much for her joints either. She stretched out her ankle, which had started giving her problems during her earlier weights training at the gym. It got the aches at times—when it was too hot, or too cold, or sometimes just because. As did her knees, her wrists, her hips. Not that it had ever stopped her. Her mother had famously been quoted as saying, “If a dancer doesn’t go home limping she hasn’t worked hard enough.”

But it wasn’t her body that had spun her out of the dance world. That would have been way more impressive, tragic even—a sparkling young dancer cut down before her time by a body pushed to the edge...

Looking back, she wished she’d handled things differently. That, after discovering her dance partner boyfriend had dumped her, hooked up with another dancer in the show and moved the girl into his apartment—leaving Nadia without an act, without a guy, and without a home all in one rough hit—she’d acted with grace and aplomb and simply gone on. Perhaps after kicking him where it hurt most. But whether it was embarrassment, or shock, or just plain mental and physical exhaustion, she’d fled.

The only right decision she’d made was in going straight to her mother. Oh, Claudia’s gratification at finding her only kid tearful and dejected on her doorstep had been its usual version of total rubbish, but when her mother had told her to get over it and get back to work, it was exactly what Nadia had needed to hear.

Nadia went to work on the other ankle with a groan that was half pleasure, half pain. It meant she was dancing again. Meant she was getting closer to rekindling her life’s dream.

But for now, she had one more class to go before she could ice up—her duet with Ryder Fitzgerald. She figured it was about fifty-fifty he’d show up at all.

And then, with a minute to spare, his curvaceous black car eased around the corner and into her rain-soaked view to pull to a neat stop a tidy foot from the gutter. Ryder stepped from the car, decked out once again in a debonair suit. Nice, she thought. He’d ignored her advice completely.

And then he looked up.

Nadia sank into the shadows. Dammit. Had she been quick enough? Last thing she needed was for Mr Testosterone to think she’d been waiting for him, all bated breath and trembling anticipation. She nudged forward an inch, then another, till through the rain-slicked window she saw he’d already disappeared inside.

With a sigh she slid from the window seat and padded over to the door. She twirled the hoop away and back, caught it in one finger and tossed it in the air before turning a simple pirouette and catching the ring on the way down.

She tossed it lazily onto the pile on the floor, plucked dance heels and a long black skirt from the back of the pink velvet chaise, and stepped into it so as to make the slinky black leotard and fishnet tights with the feet chopped off more befitting of the job ahead. Wouldn’t want the guy to get the wrong idea.

Though if there was any man she’d met since coming home who she’d like to give the wrong idea... A week on and she could still remember exactly how good it had felt having the heavy weight of his hands on her hips. How lovely the strength in those arms, the hardness of his chest, the sure, slow, sardonic curl of his smile that made her lady parts wake up and sigh—

“Gak!” she said, shaking her head. Her hands. Stamping her feet. Anything to rid herself of the ominous cravings skittering through her veins. It didn’t matter that she was a worshipper of the brilliance of the human body and all it could achieve en pointe, upside down, and most definitely horizontal; she’d be playing with fire if she went down that path. Her entire career hinged on what she did the next couple of months and that was not a gamble she was willing to take.

The beat of another set of stomping shoes syncopated against her own as the sound of a man’s footsteps on the stairs echoed through the studio.

With a deep breath, she pulled herself upright, shoulders back, feet in first. She ran a quick hand over her ponytail, and then plastered an innocuous smile on her face as the door creaked open and the man of the hour stomped inside.

“Why if it isn’t Mr Fitzgerald. I’d made a bet with myself you’d not show. Seems I won.”

He glanced up, skin gleaming, wet hair the colour of night, the rain and heat having added a kink. A drop of rainwater slid from a dark curl on his forehead then slowly, sensuously down the length of his straight nose.

She swallowed before saying, “Get a tad wet, did we?”

He shook his hair like a wet dog, rainwater flying all over place. “This is Melbourne, for Pete’s sake. It’s tropical out there.”

When Nadia was hit with a splat she called out, “Whoa, there! Ever tried dancing on a wet floor? Doable, but chances are high you’ll come off second best.”

She moved a ways around him, doing her all to avoid the puddles littering the floor, to grab a towel from the cupboard by the front door. Then turned and draped it from the crook of her finger.

His smile was wry as he realised he had to come and get it. Only he didn’t look down as he took the three steps to take it, before rubbing the thing over his face and hair, all rough and random, in that way men did.

When he moved the towel to the back of his neck, eyes closed, muscles in his throat straining, Nadia gripped her hands together in front of her and pinched the soft skin at the base of her thumb to stop herself from moaning.

She must have made a noise anyway, as Ryder stopped rubbing and looked at her, hazel eyes dark over the white towel. Knowing eyes, hot and hard. Then he slowly, deliberately, held out the towel, meaning this time she had to go to him.

Eyebrow cocked, she barely got close enough to whip the thing out of his hand, only to be hit with a waft of his natural scent. Hot and spicy, it curled over Nadia’s tongue until her mouth actually began to water. She dropped the towel to the ground and used her shoe to vigorously wipe the floor.

As if he knew exactly what was going on inside her head, Ryder laughed softly.

Nadia blamed the rain. Rain made people crazy. The last of the Tiny Tots that morning had literally gone wild, hanging from the barre like monkeys.

She hooked the towel over the heel of her shoe and flicked it up into her hands. “Now that’s sorted, I think we need to take a step back.”