The Dance Off

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.