Caught in His Gilded World

‘Funny ha-ha, or funny crazy?’ she asked, her voice a little raw.

He glanced up at her, as if she’d said something odd, his dark eyes making her tummy flip.

‘Funny sexy,’ he said, as if it was obvious, and she believed him. He set the towel aside.

Sexy? Offstage sexy? Really?

He opened what was clearly a first aid kit and took out cotton wool, antiseptic and plasters.

She bit her lip. ‘They’re not pretty,’ she said in a low voice.

She hated this—hated it that she felt obliged to point it out, hated laying herself bare. She’d rather just strip off all her clothes and distract him with what she knew worked for an audience of seven hundred every night.

‘You’re a dancer. You’ve got a dancer’s feet.’

‘I know, but the other girls don’t have half my damage.’

He raised his eyes to hers and she saw a lot of questions, most of which Gigi really didn’t want to answer. But at the same time she didn’t want to make them too much of a big deal.

‘When I was in my early teens I was in a highwire act and it involved twisting cords around my feet. My papa said the scarring would go away, but it never did.’

‘Your father? How was he involved?’

‘He managed the circus—Valente’s International.’ She couldn’t help lifting her chin a little. In spite of everything she remained proud of that heritage. ‘Valente’s had been a family concern for almost a hundred years when my father was bankrupted.’

‘You were an acrobat?’

‘Not a very good one,’ she admitted. ‘But it cured me of any residual fear of heights.’

Being driven up a rope with your father yelling that you were holding up rehearsal had effectively removed that fear.

‘This is criminal,’ he said, running his thumb over a welt. ‘What kind of a father allows this to happen to his daughter?’

Her heart was pounding. His questions were grazing too close to some painful truths in her past.

‘That’s not for you to judge,’ she answered stiffly. ‘You weren’t there. It’s a hard life—you have to be seasoned to perform every night. The pain is a part of it.’ She could hear her father’s voice, lecturing her on this.

‘Yet you’re ashamed?’

Gigi hesitated. ‘I—’

‘You have nothing to be ashamed of, Red.’

‘I know that,’ she said quickly.

She stared at her feet, wondering why she was even telling him all this. ‘Do you think you could stop calling me Red?’ She looked up. ‘I’m Gigi...or Gisele—’

‘Gisele.’

Gigi’s breath caught at the way his dark Russian accent turned her name into something quite beguiling.

Feminine.

‘It’s beautiful.’

His sincerity was a lot to take in. She blinked. Looked down and flexed her toes. ‘Unlike my feet.’

He looked at her seriously for a moment from those dark assessing eyes, and then straightened and whisked his T-shirt up and off.

Gigi was almost blinded by all that gorgeous golden skin suddenly on display, pulled taut over slabs of muscle and not an ounce of fat that she could see.

His physique wasn’t fine and lightweight, like the boys she danced with. Although lean, it was heavy with broad bones and muscle, his chest covered in fine dark hair. Gigi’s fingers stirred restlessly with the urge to tangle her fingers in it.

He was most definitely a different breed from the men she was used to. It wasn’t quite fanciful to say looking at him half stripped was like being introduced to the male sex for the first time.

‘Take a look at this,’ he said, in that deep gruff voice.

He presented her with his gloriously defined back, reaching up to place his fingertips above a nasty scar on his left shoulder. ‘This one was caused by a bullet—it lodged in bone, shattered my scapula—and here...’ He took her much smaller hand and put it on his lean waist, where something had left a seven-inch incision that had healed badly and left a raised white scar. ‘Knife wound.’

He turned around.

‘The discolouration here...’ He pulled his waistband away from the line of his lean muscled hip, revealing a taut pelvic cradle and dark hair arrowing down to his sex and a splash of darker pigmentation where some of the skin, obviously puckered, indicated burns. He spoke calmly but in a low voice. ‘That was an explosion on a road that was supposed to have been cleared.’