The Dance Off

So he’d gone home, only to end up back to the building housing the Amelia Brandt Dance Academy so often it was practically a second home. All to no avail.

Now he’d reached the end of his patience. If it took for him to stage a sit-in in order for Amelia Brandt herself to tell him where Nadia was, then that was what he’d do.

Then a flutter of movement appeared at the window. A flicker of dark hair, a press of a pale hand. It was doubtless all in his head, some desperate manifestation of his desire, but he was through the cracked front doors and up the rickety stairs before he even knew he was moving.

It was too late before he remembered that at some point on Tuesdays the studio took seniors pole-dancing—and that he might be about to witness something no man in his prime ever should—because he’d already pushed through the studio doors.

Music filled his ears. Music and giggles and the sound of a hundred elephants thundering across the floor. But the daylight pouring through the windows had hit him right in the eyes. A hand as a shield, he blinked away the spots, and then promptly forgot how to breathe.

For there she was, chatting and laughing with a tall lean woman in black while a bunch of little girls in ridiculous pink tutus went mad in the background.

Nadia.

He was sure he hadn’t said her name, that his thought had been enough to capture her attention. As her ever-dancing hands stilled, her pointing toes lay flat against the floor. And she turned.

Ryder might as well have been slammed across the head with a plank as in the next moment his life flashed before his eyes. Only it wasn’t his past. Not his father, or Sam, or the business that had taken him so far off course from his original dream as to make it unrecognisable.

It’s you, Ryder thought, his future hovering in front of him like a juicy red apple just waiting to be plucked. You’re it. You’re the one who makes my heart race and my bed warm and I’ll take that for ever thank you very much.

And when she began to walk his way, he felt the same way he had the first time, stunned by the instant impact of her earthy beauty, the awareness that sprinted up and down his arms, the eyes that looked past the all the nonsense and consequential career and fancy wheels and right into his soul. A place he’d avoided for a very long time, a place he’d rediscovered because of her.

“Ryder,” she said, licking her lips as if his name were as sweet as honey. “I was just about to come and find you. Bearing gifts.”

At which point she glanced beside him. He followed her gaze to the pink velvet chaise longue, where beside her patchwork handbag sat a massive net bag filled with apples.

He coughed out a laugh, surprise and desire gathering within him like a perfect storm. When he turned back to her, his smile had a dangerous edge. There was only one gift he’d take from her, and it didn’t come in a bag.

It started with a touch. Although worried about for ever damaging the psyches of a plethora of sparkly, pink three-year-olds, Ryder held out a hand. Nadia took it. When he ran his thumb down the centre of her palm and she sighed, desire morphed into need. Need to have, to know, to keep.

“You’re back,” he said, his voice barely a hum.

She nodded.

“For good this time?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Well, I quit my job when I left, and then I quit my next job to come back here. And then the airline went and lost my luggage. So I am currently homeless and unemployed and without stuff. If there’s a way I can get those things sorted, then I’m home free.”

Feeling as if the pieces of his life were floating about his head, just waiting to settle into perfect place, Ryder said, “I may have the solution.”

“Really?”

“I always keep a spare toothbrush on hand, and you already look better in my shirts than I do.”

Nadia let out a breath and Ryder wondered how long she’d been holding it. Unable to hold back any more, he pulled her closer, close enough to see the sparks of hope and swirls of shifting desire in her dark eyes.

He spared a glance over her shoulder where a dance teacher—possibly even Amelia Brandt herself—was watching with one hand to her heart and another to her cheek.

“She’s the best dancer you’ll ever see, and you know it. Give her a job!” he barked.

The dance teacher jumped, nodded, and proceeded to herd the tutu brigade into some sort of line away from the big grumpy man.

But Ryder needed more privacy than that in order to do what he intended to do. He grabbed Nadia’s gear and tugged her out the door. Noise spilled from the floor below for the first time since he’d ever set foot in the joint, as what seemed like a never-ending stream of uni-student types in too-skinny jeans and ironically labelled T-shirts bundled into the dubious writers’ centre space on the second floor.