The Dance Off

She finished with a soft sigh, a wistful and faraway gaze in her eyes. Then she looked around, seemed to realise where she was—or more precisely where she wasn’t.

Her laughter was glib as she said, “I’m sorry. What was the question again?”

“I think you answered it.” And then some. “I have just one more question. About your mother actually.”

A flash of warning licked behind her eyes.

“She still pole dancing today?”

Nadia’s laugh burst from her with such suddenness, such vivacious luxury, she near fell off her chair. “Ryder, if you knew her, you’d know how funny—I mean how far off the mark that was. A big Aussie mining magnate saw her on stage not long after I left New York, swept her off her pointy-toed feet and took her back home with him. She’s retired. This time I’m the one who came home in disgrace.”

“Back up a step now, Miss Nadia. Now we’re getting to the good stuff. What did you do to disgrace yourself? Rob a bank? Sell state secrets? Arabesque when you were meant to...anti-arabesque?”

Her lush mouth quirked into a sensuous smile, before her face scrunched up in what looked like embarrassment. This was turning out to be a day of revelations. “It’s nothing nearly so dramatic or exciting.”

He waved a hand for her to go on.

“I broke up with my boyfriend, quit my job, and fled.”

And somehow the idea of a boyfriend, a man, being this close, closer, to her, ever, made Ryder’s hackles rise more than the thought of her making off with an armoured car. “Poor boyfriend.”

Her cheeks pinked even as she smiled that sexy, exuberant smile of hers. “Missing out on all this? You bet poor boyfriend. But you know what? In all honesty?”

His eyes roved over her, the beautiful bone structure, the sultry dark eyes, the sensual way she moved. “Hit me.”

“I’ve spent the past year convinced I left because of a relationship that went embarrassingly south. But I’ve been dancing professionally without a break since I was sixteen. I wonder if it wasn’t really a blessing in disguise, if my body told me this was my chance to get away from it all for a while so that it could recuperate. If my ego saw the chance to eke out some time to just grow up.”

She shrugged and sat back in her chair, her nose buried in the empty wineglass in her hand.

While Ryder couldn’t quite feel his centre on the chair any more.

Because somehow things had...shifted. As if in the daylight, in her unassuming little flat, the normality of it all, having an actual honest conversation, caught at him, raw and arresting. Here sat a beautiful woman, slightly broken, but rich with substance and grit. And with his feet no longer pressing into the cracked old floor, there was nothing stopping him from perusing what his instincts had long since been screaming for him to do.

“Nadia.”

“Yes, Ryder.”

“You look plenty grown up to me.”

The faraway gaze came back into sharp focus and her mouth curled into a smile. “I can assure you I am. All the way grown up.”

And in the way that mattered most to Ryder, she was. What you saw was what you got with Nadia Kent. And there’d never been any question that what he saw he wanted.

“You missed some sauce,” he said, eyes honed in on her lush mouth.

Her tongue flicked out to swipe the corner of her mouth. “Better?”

Better than what? “Still there,” he lied, then lifted himself from his chair and leant over the table.

Her eyes darkened. “Ryder Fitzgerald. Not two hours ago you promised to be a good boy.”

“And inside the dance studio, I’m yours to do with as you please. But I never made any promises about my behaviour elsewhere. And you never asked me to.”

With a flare in her eyes that told him all he needed to know, Nadia hopped onto her knees on her chair, and bent forward, met him halfway. “Care to help?”

“Hell yeah,” he said, leaning the last inch to cover her mouth with his.

He knew she’d be warm, knew she knew what she was doing; what he didn’t expect was the complete shock of pleasure that knocked against his insides like a pinball gone rogue.

Her hand lifted to his cheek, her fingernails scraping his unshaven chin, and he had to grip the table edges to keep himself from taking them both down in a heap.

She pulled away, leant her forehead against his a moment, then lifted her head to look into his eyes, her irises swallowed by the pupils. “All fixed?”

He breathed in deep, out hard and said, “Not even close.”

With that, she was on the table, crawling across the thing as it shook beneath her, the plates and cutlery bouncing to the floor with a crash. If she didn’t care, neither did he.