Offensive Behavior

The sight she saw was that half-naked bitch rub herself against Reid.

“So many.” She took a mouthful of champagne, it burned going down.

“You see something you do not like, luscious Lux.”

She saw Reid’s woman put a finger to his chin, turn his head and kiss him on the lips. She saw Reid’s hands and they weren’t pushing the woman away.

Master snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Tell me and I’ll make it all go away.”

She took another mouthful of champagne, that’s what she needed, something to make her feel numb. Otherwise she was going to blow this for a man who didn’t know what saying I love you meant. She hadn’t thought she’d needed to give Reid a rule for not touching other women. Her own fault. She’d trusted him. But he was a boundary pusher and a rule breaker and a maverick and she’d known that.

She should’ve been more explicit.

She’d be more explicit when she told him to fuck off.

She turned her attention back to Master and told him about her training and didn’t look at Reid again. When Madame Amour arrived wearing a tailored man’s evening suit that looked sensational, Zarley repeated the story of her training. She told Madame how she’d planned on receiving gold for her floor routine, how her team were game favorites, and how she’d wrecked her chances for love.

She’d never make that mistake again, but she’d come very close.

Madame sipped champagne. Her makeup was delicate and not at pains to camouflage her age, only enhance her features. She wore large diamonds at her ears and on her fingers, and seven-inch heels like the ones Zarley wore on stage, only a hundred times more expensive. She was slender and still wore her hair long, but in an elegant twist. It was hard to imagine that her daily surgeon’s uniform would be scrubs.

Zarley told Madame about her studies, about Lucky’s and how she wished there was a place like Madame Amour back home.

“You should make the place. It’s what I did,” Madame said.

“That can’t have been easy to do? I’m in awe of you.”

“You are a champion. You know about struggle. What is easy is often worth very little in the end, don’t you find?”

Zarley had never done easy. But loving Reid had been easy, so easy it had slipped under her skin without her noticing.

“My coach used to say easy is for lazy and lazy is for going home a loser.” Costin had said it to gymnasts whose heads got too big, who stopped pushing themselves.

Madame laughed. “I like the sound of your coach. You could dance here professionally. We provide a salary and housing, but I don’t think that is what you want.”

For a second it was everything. She looked up at the dancer on the stage now, another talented performer. To live in Paris, to work here. But dancing was never what she’d wanted, it was simply the only way she’d been able to hold on to the definition of herself as a gymnast.

“How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a surgeon?”

“La.” Madame laughed. “I was not so smart as you think. My family was very poor. I simply wanted to be rich.”

“But—”

“It is no shame to be uncertain. The shame is in never making your own chances.”

Madame Amour was a smart woman and Zarley knew good advice when she heard it and some chances simply weren’t worth the shame.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Zarley had been naked. Reid had trouble looking at her. Not naked, but that thing she wore, there was nothing of it, a swirl of black pattern on her skin like ink to emphasize her gorgeous little body and muscle-packed legs.

Desire and anxiety went to war in his head. The woman on stage was impossibly hot. She was a blur of scorching sex, dangerous and untouchable, but achingly beautiful and all the more threatening because of it.

She put his central nervous system on the defensive, pins of heat attacked his body and formed up across his chest, but it didn’t make him ready for the assault of her. There wasn’t a man in the room who didn’t want to touch her, feel her silk heat in his hands. Own her. But that woman on the stage flew higher than the sun, and she could conquer anything.

She’d conquered him.

He’d been holding her hand two hours ago. How did he get to be the man who got that privilege? He’d licked ice cream off her chin and kissed caramel off her lips when they’d played tourist in the park, but on stage she made his heart crawl out of his chest cavity and lodge in his throat.