The Dance Off (8 page)

At that Ryder’s granite gaze skewed back to hers. Behind the surface she saw such a deep river of concern it made her thumping heart twist.

“She didn’t call him,” said Ryder. “She only called me.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. Pretty much my first thought too.”

After a few loaded beats, they both began walking again, close enough they were as good as bumping shoulders. The ground was hot and steaming beneath their feet, the rest of the world a blur as they remained lost in their thoughts.

After a good minute, Nadia asked the one question that had been left unanswered. “Where does your mother fit into the picture?”

A flare of something warmer pierced the granite. “My mother was...something else. A sculptor of found objects. A champion for the beauty redolent in bits and pieces others had cast aside. She could make something inspired out of detritus the rest of us wouldn’t even notice.” Then, as if he’d been working up to it, “She was sick for some time. I was eleven when she died. It took my father mere months to marry Sam’s mother. And Sam was born weeks after that.”

Nadia didn’t ask how long after. She didn’t need to. It was there in the set of his big shoulders, the tension of his beautiful mouth. His father hadn’t waited for his ill wife to pass before knocking up wife number two.

Nadia couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for a kid to go through that. Her relationship with her own mother was complicated, to say the least, but, even when she hadn’t been around, she’d always been
there
. Even if “there” was the other side of the world.

In the end it hadn’t taken a flashlight, a map, or a millennium. This big strong man had just given her a most unexpected glimpse behind the iron curtain. A glimpse at hidden depths, at the moral struggles that had been waged beneath that slick exterior. And even while she tried telling herself it didn’t mean anything, that it didn’t change anything, it felt like a precious gift.

Feeling a sudden urge to even out the score, Nadia picked the path of least resistance. “I never knew my dad.”

Ryder’s dark eyes flicked to hers.

“He was someone in the dance world, I gather. My mother was a dancer too. From bits and piece I gleaned over the years I think he was one of the owners of the ballet, or on the board.” From the incessant mutterings of her sober grandmother, Nadia had also gleaned her mother had slept with the man in order to get ahead, and it had backfired spectacularly. No solos for a prima ballerina up the duff.

“Are you close to your mother?” Ryder asked.

“She lives in Toorak.”

It wasn’t what he’d meant, of course, and the clever glint in his eye, and hook to the side of his mouth, told her he was well aware of her prevarication. But he didn’t push. Didn’t ask for more than she was willing to give. This man holding her groceries. The same man who’d given her his jacket to keep her warm. The man who after every lesson—bar the one he’d fled to take care of his sister—had walked her out to make sure she stayed safe.

Emotions a little tender, a little raw, Nadia moved to the crossing lights, pressing the button to alert the machine she was there. When Ryder moved beside her, close enough now she could feel the shift of his body as he breathed, and goose bumps followed every time he breathed out.

“Hungry?” she said, before she’d even felt the words coming.

His gaze shot to hers, hot, dark, way too smart for his own good. Or hers.

But it was done now. Out there. The invitation for more. “Nothing fancy on the menu. Spare ribs and salad. Home-made cheesecake made in someone else’s home. A bottle of really fine red.”

He didn’t answer straight away, and Nadia felt herself squirming in some deep, hot, hopeful place inside.

“I’m game,” he said, his face creasing into the kind of smile that could down an army of women in one fell swoop. Then he started walking backwards, back towards the car park. “You cook, I’ll drive. If you can bear to be taken about in my not so flash car.”

She took a moment, as if mulling it over, all the while her still raw and tender emotions indulged in the provocative smile that spread across his face.

Then she fell all too easily into step beside him.

* * *

Ryder sat on the opposite side of the wobbly kitchen table watching Nadia slide the last pork rib between her lips, her eyes shut as she sucked the last of the meat from the bone.

Either the woman had no idea he was pressing his feet hard enough into the cracked vinyl floor to leave dual dents so as not to make good on the urge to tip the table over and kiss that sweetness right from her lush mouth, or she knew exactly what she was doing to him and loved every second of it.

He figured it about a ninety-five per cent chance it was the latter.

In an effort to save himself from doing damage, Ryder took in his surroundings instead. Turned out her place was as much of a mystery as she was. He would have imagined lots of rich earthy colours and unusual bolts of light, perhaps even a secret passageway or two. Instead her apartment was small, neutral, and undecorated apart from the basics. In fact, apart from a few photos of dancers on the mantel over an incongruously blank wall, it was devoid of any personal touches at all.

And yet sitting in the shabby kitchenette of the tiny apartment above the abandoned Laundromat below, sunlight pouring through the grubby old windows, he felt himself relaxing for the first time in days.

And from nowhere it occurred to him that his colourful mother would have liked her. Would have been drawn to her spirit, her pluck, the way she seemed to fit in anywhere, yet not much care what anyone thought.

As for what he thought? From the first moment she’d walked towards him in the dance studio, all dark and mysterious and brazen, he’d thought her a creature of the night.

But in the bright, warm, quiet room he felt himself take that assumption apart and put it back together again.

In daylight her skin was beautiful, pale, and smooth. Threads of chestnut and auburn strung through her dark hair, which she’d twisted off her face showing off the most graceful neck he’d ever seen. With one bare foot tucked up onto her chair, her supple body curved over her food, she looked casual, content. And smaller somehow, softer without the va va voom and invisible whip that was such a part of her in teacher mode.

Which made it all the harder to remember why he’d spent the past few days carefully, determinedly distancing himself from thoughts of her. Disentangling himself from the desire that had wound itself around him like a straightjacket.

She licked her lips, and her eyes fluttered open. When she caught him watching her, she gave a husky laugh. The desire returned with all the force and ferocity of a rogue wave.

“Enjoying yourself?” he asked, his voice rough as rocks.

“Yes,” she said on a long slow sigh. She flicked a glance towards the battered fridge-freezer in the corner of the room. “Dessert?”

He shook his head. Dessert wasn’t close to what he wanted. “I’m not sure where you could fit dessert.”

Her leg splayed to one side as she patted her flat belly and he had to hold back the groan that started right in his crotch.

Blinking innocently, she said, “Dancing is a damn fine workout, Ace. Which you’d know if you worked half as hard as I tell you to. I need all the energy I can get.”

Ryder shifted on his seat, and struggled to find an innocuous change of subject so that he might get himself back under some semblance of control.

“Were you always a dancer?”

“Since the moment I came out of my mamma’s womb,” she said. “Family business.”

Ryder stretched out the hand he’d bruised on the roof of his father’s car and wondered at the kind of relationship where a child
wanted
to follow in a parent’s footsteps. He nudged his chin towards the oldest photograph on the mantel—the image of a rake-thin dancer in full ballet regalia, her delicate face twisted in some tragic countenance. “That’s her?”

“That was her. Before I was born. I’ve seen old videos,” she qualified with a wry smile. “She danced like a whisper, soft, smooth, so quiet you’d never hear her land.”

Nadia looked at the picture a little longer, blinked and sank her chin into her palm.

“Were you ever a ballerina too?”

She bolted upright at that, hand on her belly, mouth agape. “Good Lord, no! Do I look like a ballerina?”

What she looked was downright fit and lush and good enough to eat.

She let her stomach go, not that it went anywhere. “It takes a very particular kind of tenacity to make it in ballet, to have that level of control over your body. Over your whole life. Which is why Mum’s ballet career was over the moment she fell pregnant with me. As for me, I like food too much.”

Nadia waggled her eyebrows as she took a gulp of her wine.

Ryder quietly pieced together a relationship that might not have been so close after all. A mother and daughter living in the same city, yet not seemingly in touch. A mother who’d never revealed paternity. A mother who tangled the ending of her career and the birth of her daughter. And he shifted the conversation sideways.

“So if not ballet, what’s your...speciality? Is that the right term?”

Nadia’s mouth quirked and this time when she sank her chin onto her upturned palm the move was silken, slippery, sexy as hell. “I’m...well rounded.”

“Learnt from Mum’s mistake, then.”

Nadia’s laughter was scandalised. But she sank back into her chair with wicked wonder in her eyes. “I guess so. I’ve never been typecast, never been tied down to one style. I worked clubs in LA. A few stage shows in Dallas. My first solos were in a burlesque company off Broadway that was sold out for months.”

Her gaze went to the mantel. Ryder’s followed. “Seems a long way from ballet.”

“You don’t have to tell me. Especially considering Mum was working there at the time.”

Ryder’s eyebrows nudged up his forehead. “Well, I’ll be.”

While Nadia’s eyes remained glued to the photo. “She’d always worked in America, but she had to leave her ballet company when she was pregnant with me and she came back to Melbourne. To my grandmother—picture Mum but humourless and grim.”

Glancing at the photograph of Nadia’s mother, Ryder thought it didn’t take much picturing at all.

“Mum tried to stick it out once I was born. But when the dance calls...” Her fingers fluttered upwards in a move that seemed more of an impression than a natural movement of her own. “Then the life of a showgirl became too good to turn her back on. The hotel living. The rich men. The partying that reminded her she was still young, and helped her forget what she’d left behind...” Her eyes glazed for a second before she hauled herself back. “So I danced, and trained, worked my ass off and made it overseas. And then I got the call to work the burlesque club Mum had made her home. It was the first time we’d ever worked together, and I couldn’t have cared if I was dancing Bollywood if it meant I was spending time with her. As for actually dancing with her?” She let go a long slow whistle. “It was amazing. For a little while. I was my own mother’s protégé. We even had one act together, The Kent Sisters.”

Ryder raised an eyebrow. But Nadia just grinned.

“I know. Hilarious, right? But despite
that
it was everything I’d ever dreamed of being since I first stuck my hands in the air and did a twirl.”

“Since you’re here, as is she, I take it things didn’t last.”

Nadia’s gaze swung back to him as if coming from a long way away. She leant forward and cradled the glass of wine with both hands. “I got my first solo.”

“Ah.”

The wine was gone in a gulp. “And that was when she made it clear every job I’d ever been offered had only been after a phone call from her. That my name,
her
name, was the only reason I was anything at all.”

Her mouth kicked into a wry smile, but Ryder caught the flash of hurt behind it. The disappointment. The disenchantment. He recognised the moment when you realised the parent you looked up to your whole life turned out to be, oh, so flawed.

“Anyway,” she said, shaking out the funk that had settled over her, “after a particularly punishing day, I secretly auditioned for Sky High—at the last second using my grandmother’s maiden name—and lo and behold got a place. Within the week I’d moved to Vegas, to the first real job that I’d ever been sure I’d got on my own. Not only that, it changed my life. Like I’d been dancing in shoes a size too small all my life and never known it. I’d found my bliss.”

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?”