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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?”
