Chapter 5
Laura choked on her wine. It went down the wrong pipe and she coughed until the people around them stared at her. Charlie got up and rounded the table, patting her back and rubbing—a gesture both soothing and menacing given what he’d just said to her.
“I’m fine.”
He stopped the rubbing, but he didn’t move his hand. “Are you sure?”
Not really, but she said, “Sit down. You’re mortifying me.”
That made him move his hand, immediately. “I just wanted to be sure that you were okay.”
“So that you could maybe fuck me?”
He smiled and she scowled in return. “I’ve got you thinking of the possibilities, then?”
“No.”
“How much do you remember from the night of the wedding?”
More than she’d ever admit out loud. After seeing the video, a lot more about the rest of the night had bubbled up. She remembered kissing, touching, asking for more. Frustration that he wouldn’t go all the way. She’d embarrassed herself trying to push him further. And the memory now flooded her with heat and longing for something it would be stupid to ask for.
Even if he wanted it, too.
“I remember enough to know that we don’t need to go any further.”
“I disagree.”
“Do you ever take no for an answer?”
“No.” He swirled the last of his one glass of wine before downing it. “Do you ever say yes to anything that isn’t already in your life plan?”
“No.” At least not before now, when she desperately wanted to say yes to an affair with Charlie. Despite the fact that they didn’t have much to say to each other, he was gorgeous. And his touch against her skin made her nerves dance. It wasn’t love, but it was lust. It was connecting to a feeling when she hadn’t been sure she hadn’t lost the capacity to feel long ago.
“Listen, I think there’s a reason you sought me out at the wedding. And there’s a reason you drank too much.” He lowered his voice to a course whisper that rasped along her skin like a lover’s touch. “And there’s a reason you married me.”
She leaned back in her chair. “What do you think that reason is?”
“You’re not sure about your path.”
Even though deep inside she knew he might be right about that, she wasn’t going to admit it out loud. “What makes you think that?”
“I know that when I want something, I’m not going to risk fucking it up by losing control.” That statement made her curious to see what Charlie would be like if he ever truly lost control. “And I think we’re the same that way.”
“And you think us fucking will clear my mind? Convince me to stay here in Miami?” To live out the rest of her career—which was growing shorter by the day. And then what? Teach classes at local studios? What would she do with herself without the discipline of pushing herself ever further? Turn into her mother, and that was maybe the scariest thought to ever cross her mind.
“No.” His face changed; his whole energy shifted from a man trying to convince a woman of something to a man who knew he had a woman convinced. “But I think it will be fun, and you deserve some fun.”
“But if we do this.” She motioned between them. “Then, we can’t get an annulment.”
“The way I see it, the papers are signed.” He reached across the table and took the butter knife she hadn’t realized that she’d been clutching out of her hand. “And neither of us is dumb enough to tell a judge that we actually consummated the marriage. This wouldn’t be part of the marriage that never happened. This will be part of the affair we should have instead.”
He sounded so fucking reasonable. And him touching her was convincing. Maybe she had hit on him and plied him with alcohol because she wanted to let loose. She’d never done anything like that before. Her entire late adolescence and early adulthood had kept her wrapped up tight. Even if she hadn’t left home to stay at the academy during her high school years, she doubted her parents would have put up with any public misbehavior.
Charlie was presenting an opportunity to live a portion of her life that she’d skipped. This incredibly gorgeous, enticing man wanted her. She wasn’t a stranger to being an object of desire, but this was something else. Behind whatever image he cultivated, there was an intensity that pulled her in, even as she feared that his attention would pull her under and make her dreams of reaching the pinnacle of her career less compelling.
It would be a dumb move to get along, but she couldn’t quite get herself to say no. “So, we go home from this frankly mediocre date and have sex?”
“I was thinking we could try the whole date thing again.”
“Why do you want to date me?” It didn’t make any sense. “Or, are you just an entitled asshole who can’t stand taking ‘no’ for an answer?”
“I am an entitled asshole, but I can accept rejection.”
“Then why won’t you let this go?” She was irritated, yes. But it was more curiosity at this point that was keeping her from leaving the restaurant and hailing a car. “What is it about me in particular that you can’t accept a no from?”
He shocked her by running a finger over the back of the hand she had laid on the table. It sent waves of something through her body that seemed too big for her to call lust. “Do you need me to tell you how gorgeous you are?”
She didn’t need that and just raised her eyebrows in response.
“You don’t need me to tell you that. People tell you how beautiful you are all the time. The issue is that you’re more than beautiful. You’re compelling and a little bit mean. It makes my dick hard when you lift that aristocratic nose at me.”
“So, you’re saying I’m a challenge?”
“Not just a challenge.”
“What then?” She could barely breathe waiting for him to say the next thing. He seemed so angry about having to articulate why he wanted her, as though he didn’t want to want her as much as she hated the heavy fog of lust he pushed her in to whenever he touched her.
“You’re just different from any other woman I’ve ever met. I hate the idea of you leaving Miami, but I get your ambition. I understand the need to get away from your family and everything you’ve ever known. I think we’re a whole lot more alike than we are different. And I just—I want to explore that.”
“I haven’t felt this way about someone else either.” She hadn’t wanted to say that, hadn’t intended to, but she couldn’t help herself.
“How do you feel?”
She took a sip of wine, squaring herself up. By nature, she was not an effusive person. She was calm and calculated, disciplined. Ever since she’d started dancing, she hadn’t been prone to outsized emotions; she’d channeled all of it into her art. Feeling overpowering lust for a person rather than a piece of choreography was new to her.
“I feel like you see me when you look at me.” She took a deep breath. “You don’t see the dancer, and you don’t accept that I’m as cold as I try to make people think I am.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Because it’s better than the alternative.”
He leaned forward, and even across the table she could feel the space around her closing in. “I’ll keep your secrets about the non-marriage. And I won’t let anyone know that you aren’t the hard-assed bitch that people think you are.”
“Then I guess I owe you another date.”
* * * *
Laura’s second date with Charlie hung over her head like a sword of Damocles for the next week. The only good thing about that worry was that it took her mind off how poorly rehearsals for Carmen were going. She’d danced this ballet numerous times, but this time something was off. And she couldn’t even discern the problem, much less figure out how to fix it.
She and her partner were rehearsing the climax of the ballet, and they’d been at it for hours. Every time they ran through the steps, a hand would slip or be in the wrong place, the lines of their bodies would be off. She was lucky that he hadn’t dropped her multiple times.
Finally, the choreographer for this new version of the ballet stopped them and told them to take a break. He said there was a sponsor coming in that he needed to greet, but she knew it was an excuse not to have to look at them any longer.
Disgust with herself flowed through her veins like a familiar drug. She had a tolerance for it, given her perfectionism and profession. And she fought mightily to keep it from pulling her into full-on self-hate. A lot of younger dancers ended up with serious eating disorders because of the demon-drug of perfectionism that they all imbibed. She’d never been one of them, and she’d always viewed her body as a machine that needed fuel. Her dancing had never improved through a diet—only more practice.
And now, it wasn’t helping. She and her partner sat with their backs against the wall under the barre, breathing heavily and gulping water. Her leotard was sticky against her skin and soaked through with sweat. She smoothed back tendrils of hair that had escaped the severe bobby pins and bands that kept her hair in place.
“What’s going on with you?” John, her partner, asked. She wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly. She didn’t really have many friends other than her cousins, but they were friendly acquaintances.
“Not sure.” John pressed his lips together. She was usually a reliable partner, and he was clearly getting frustrated with her. Guilt for fucking this piece up surfaced.
“How’s your groin? Still aching?”
Yes. The answer was always yes, but she would never say that out loud. “It’s fine. Completely healed.”
“You know, you don’t have to pretend it doesn’t hurt.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and it felt comforting. Also patronizing, but comforting just the same. “We all hurt.”
The door to the studio opened again, and Charlie walked in with Matthieu. Everything became sharper, the sweaty leotard, John’s heavy hand, and the air against her skin. When Charlie looked at her, all the blood in her body seemed to pool at the apex of her legs and her nipples. She wasn’t sure why seeing him here—having him walk into this room—made her feel so aware of him. Perhaps it was the shock of seeing him on her turf. Or maybe it was just Charlie.
He was just as devastating in today’s suit as he’d been at dinner. Today, the shirt was crisp white and the suit was black. It hugged his shoulders like a lover. His unbuttoned jacket revealed his flat stomach. She couldn’t help herself but look lower from her vantage point on the floor. And apparently, he was free balling. Her skin flushed and she looked up just in time to see his reaction to her.
His gaze narrowed when he registered John’s hand touching her bare skin. Instinctively, Laura moved away, standing up, less gracefully than she normally would.
She was unsteady on her toe shoes, and it was only when he leveled a panty-melting glare at her that she squared her shoulders and approached him.
The choreographer, a man who she’d worked with multiple times, put his arm around her. She thought Charlie’s eyes would bug straight out of his head. And she didn’t miss his fist bunching when Matthieu kissed her cheek.
“Mr. Laughlin tells me that you two have met.”
Good thing she hadn’t eaten anything in several hours. She would have choked.
“Yes. Briefly.”
Charlie finally took his gaze off of where Matthieu touched her. “I’d say it was more than brief.” She opened her mouth to issue a denial, but he cut her off. “I’m a friend of the family. We met at a wedding.”
Matthieu, having no clue what was going on and that the two people having a conversation around him were plotting ways to kill each other slowly in their heads. At least, that was what Laura was doing. Charlie was probably still trying to figure out how to sleep with her.
“What are you doing here, Charlie?” She tried to keep her voice light, but her gritted teeth probably gave away her consternation.
“I’m sponsoring the ballet.”
Her stomach dropped out of her body and the room started to spin. He thought he could buy her? If he did, he had another think coming and coming fast. He didn’t know her, didn’t know that the idea of a man owning any piece of her was a soft spot born of the family she’d grown up in, but he was going to know this soon.
But not now because they had an audience.
She managed not to fly across the few feet between them and wring his neck. She even managed a semi-polite response. “I didn’t know you had any interest in the arts.”
One side of his mouth quirked up, as though he knew that she was about to strike out at him like a viper. Maybe she had a vein popping out of her forehead that she couldn’t control. “Interest in the arts? I work in the arts.”
“I wouldn’t call what you do art.”
She felt Matthieu’s shock in the way he squeezed her shoulder. “She doesn’t mean that.”
“Of course I mean it.” Laura shook off her friend’s touch, and Charlie’s posture loosened immediately. “We’re friends, and we’ve already discussed how I don’t like what he does.” She stopped, her gut twisting into knots at the terrible notion that Charlie wasn’t sponsoring the piece out of the goodness of his heart, but a desire for access to the behind-the-scenes world of ballet. “He’s not going to start taping rehearsals, is he?”
“We hadn’t discussed that.” Charlie’s answer didn’t make her feel any better.
Laura turned to Matthieu. “Will you excuse us for a moment?”
Her friend opened his mouth, probably to say no for the good of his employment and his piece. But Charlie cut him off. “I get a private audience?” He put his hand over his heart, and it reminded her of how even incidental touches from this man set her whole body afire. Being alone with him was a bad idea. He was her new patron saint of bad ideas. “I would be so honored.”
His sarcastic tone burst the bubble of lust in her belly, and she grabbed him by the biceps and dragged him out of the room. She wouldn’t have been able to do it if he had resisted, and he should have resisted for the sake of his balls.
Once they got into the hallway, she rounded on him. “What the fuck are you thinking?”
“Why are you yell-whispering?” He was purely amused.
“Because anyone... Anyone could walk by, and I don’t want them knowing that I committed murder to keep you quiet.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“This is how you keep our—association—on the down low?” That one came out as a shriek.
He shrugged and smiled. The smug bastard. “I figure that this is a good cover.”
“No. It’s not.” She pointed a finger in his face, and he grabbed her whole fist in his hand.
“Watch it, gorgeous.”
“Don’t tell me what to watch.” That didn’t make any sense, but it was emphatic and got her displeasure across, which was the point right now. “You need to leave. Take it back. And I don’t want to see you again.”
“Until we have dinner with Carla and Jonah next week?”
She yanked her finger back, and tendrils of frustration disguised as rage worked their way through her. “You’re not invited to that.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Consider yourself uninvited.”
“No.”
This man was going to be the end of her. “Go grab beers with Jonah some other night.”
“No. I’m not going to see Jonah. I’m going to hang out with the baby.”
“She goes to sleep at seven. Dinner’s at eight.”
“I’m going over early.”
“Well, leave before I get there.”
“No.” He leaned down and put his mouth close to her ear. Her body, already flushed from rehearsal, nearly overheated at having him so close. “And if you put up any more of a fuss, I’m going to tell your buddy Matthieu that he needs to keep his hands off my wife.”
“You wouldn’t.”
He cocked his head in response. Before she could get any choice curses out, he ran his hand over her bare arm and cupped her elbow. It was chaste, friendly even. Nothing overtly sexual about it. But it was as though he’d run that hand between her legs and wiggled it under her leotard. Goose bumps rose all over her skin, and heat pooled in her belly so fast, she probably needed to change leotards.
“Have you even filed the papers yet?”
The answer was no. She should have sent them over to her grandfather the day after Charlie had signed them, but something kept her from doing it. Standing here, facing off against him, made her realize that this energy between them wasn’t going to go away. This heat that flared up whenever he was in her space was something more powerful than she could wrap her mind around. It was so compelling that she couldn’t bring herself to make the final step and push him away for good.
She’d never had a hard time making the logical decisions that would get her where she wanted to go. No one who knew her would guess that she ever hesitated about making the logical choice about anything. But damn her, standing here looking at Charlie and the way he filled out a suit, smelling the soap he showered with, and feeling his gaze raking over her as though she turned him on twice as much as she pissed him off, it didn’t seem logical to not want to be married to this man at all.
But she couldn’t tell Charlie that. Couldn’t let on that he had the upper hand with her, especially now that he literally had the upper hand by sponsoring the ballet.
She never wanted to see Charlie again—it was bad for her sanity—but it didn’t appear that she was going to be able to avoid it at least one last time. Unless she ovaried up and gave the papers to her grandfather.
“I hate you.”
Then, in a move likely designed to make her head blow up, he kissed her cheek. His fresh spice smell and warm dry lips were custom-made to make her nuts. As impactful as his touch was, it was gone just as quickly as it had come.
She was left standing in the hallway, shivering now that her sweat had dried and Charlie’s heat was gone, staring after him.
And, damn him, the view was just as good going as it had been coming.