“Your past—” he began, but I refused to let him get a word in edgewise.
“I need to look after my grandmother. She needs me here.” I shook my head, wanting him to understand this wasn’t going to happen no matter how hard he tried. “I look after her twenty-four seven. I can’t take on any other responsibilities. Not now. So, hop back in your car, and go find yourself another ballerina.”
I turned my back to him and started to walk around the trunk of his car, but he wasn’t about to be deterred. He called out behind me regardless, “If you change your mind, you should come over to dance with the others at the theater in your free time. One free month as my treat. You might actually find Volkov Ballet to be a cool place. Welcoming. And, starting the day after tomorrow, we are holding auditions to fill some holes. I would really like to see what you still have. I have a feeling even though you may be a bit rusty, that dancer is still in you.” That little smirk of his returned. “I could be wrong though. Maybe you are too out of shape to bother. One of the younger women may dance rings around you.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? But it’s up to you if you want to prove you are still the prima ballerina you were destined to be before you threw it all away.”
Not wanting to fall for his trap of goading me, I stalked back inside. Resisting the urge to look back and be hypnotized by his mesmerizing good looks, I slammed the door behind me, making my feelings on the subject very clear.2ClaraOf course I wanted to get back on stage. I’d been born to dance. That was why I allowed that little tidbit of information to slip into my interview recently. But that didn’t mean it could actually happen. I’d changed too much, and I really did need to take care of the woman who’d raised me after my mother died and my father had no desire to take on the baby of a woman he hadn’t even seen fit to wed. I owed this woman everything. It had been she who’d put the love of ballet into my very soul. The answer was no… but I remained by the door, with my back pressed against it, struggling to breathe without pain until I heard the sound of the engine of Alexei’s car fade as he pulled away.
How dare he come up to my home, blowing my mind by looking like he’d stepped off the cover of a GQ magazine, then offer me a glimpse of a life I once knew? He’d claimed not to be a practical joker, but he’d pulled the cruelest tease ever.
“Clara?” I heard my grandmother call out. “Can you come in here for a moment?”
I sighed deeply and wandered into the kitchen where my grandmother slumped slightly over the table, clearly suffering from a lot of pain. I hated seeing her this way. I had always known her to be a really strong, powerful woman. But as soon as the osteoarthritis started its insidious degeneration of the cartilage and tissues surrounding her joints, she’d begun to crumble.
Once Olga Simyoneva had been the most beautiful and skilled dancer in the small Russian village of her birth. She’d never made it to the Bolshoi Ballet as Nadia Volkova had, but I’d sat at her feet listening to her spin tales of a world that had sounded so full of magic it took one’s breath away. Where ugly ducklings turned into the most beautiful swans and where princesses were swept away by the charming princes. I’d known since I could talk that I’d been named Clara after the little girl whose dance told the wonderous fairy tale of enchantment in The Nutcracker.
My babushka had instilled in me a love of ballet before I’d ever slipped into my first pair of pink satin flats. Now the disease was crippling her a little more every day, and it absolutely shattered me to see her knuckles and feet so swollen and twisted it was a huge effort to hold a cup of tea or walk more than a few steps. Though she tried to disguise her pain, I could see it in her eyes. I needed to be here for her, as much as she didn’t want to be a burden to me, but I was more than happy to do it.
“What was that about?” she asked me curiously, pushing to stand as straight as she could as she gestured toward the window above the kitchen sink. “I thought I heard a man talking outside.”
“Oh, that was nothing.”
I did my best to brush it off, but it was too late for that. From the way the lacy curtains were blowing with the draft, I knew the window was open. I had no doubt that my grandmother had been eavesdropping on my entire conversation with Alek Volkov. My grandmother had been trying to convince me to get back into ballet since I returned home from rehab, and this was only going to make it so much worse.