Their voices quieted, trickling dry. After a moment, Philip called out, “Rose, you’re back.”
A smile curved my lips. He’d known I was there. He was almost impossible to fool, which was another reason I could never do anything secret with Drew. The results, if Philip found out, would be disastrous. And Philip would definitely find out.
I slipped into the room. Both men had their jackets off and sleeves rolled up. They both stood briefly before I sat down, an old-world gesture that fit them well. Philip was old-fashioned, but in his own way, so was Drew.
Drew was kind, courteous, professional. A perfect gentleman everywhere but his eyes. There he wrote me dirty poetry, doing every wicked thing I craved, promising satisfaction, retribution, if only, if only…
If only I could give in.
He watched me now, predatory. I swallowed hard and turned away. “Hey, big brother. How was your day?”
Philip stretched. “Busy. Tiring, but better now that you’re here. Drew and I have been working since seven.”
I frowned. “Is everything okay?”
Long days were customary, but Philip seemed worn down.
“More than okay,” he said. “We’re about to score a major win. You remember that sanitation company that was giving me trouble?”
Philip owned several aboveboard businesses. In fact, most of them were legit—they just occasionally wrote outside the lines of the law to get things done better, faster, cheaper. One of his first companies did cleaning for office buildings. Whether the economy was up or down, companies needed their trash emptied and toilets cleaned.
I thought back. “I remember you said something about them undercutting your bids.”
“Just barely. Enough to prove that someone was leaking information, but I didn’t know who.”
I sneaked a glance at Drew, who stood looking out the window. “So did you figure it out?”
“No, but in two weeks, the company’s going to get busted for their illegal and predatory hiring practices. They won’t be in any position to take on more jobs…or fulfill the contracts they stole from me.”
I winced.
“Sometimes it’s easier to blast through a wall than climb it,” Philip said.
“Hmm. Tell me they can’t turn around and do the same to you.”
“I’m airtight,” Philip said, “thanks to this guy and his constant nagging that we keep things legal.”
Drew shrugged. “It’s in the job description.”
“Don’t undersell yourself, man. I’ve got the best legal advisor in the city, and everyone fucking knows it.”
I grinned. “Aww, it’s like Hallmark in here.”
Philip sent me a droll look. “The only words of thanks he needs are the ones on his bonus check.”
“Yeah, and it better be a good one,” Drew said lightly. “I just turned down a big raise with a sanitation company in dire need of legal counsel. Something to do with their hiring practices, I understand.”
Philip’s gaze sharpened. “They called you?”
Drew shrugged, strolling back to the chairs. “Met me at my condo, actually. They’re desperate, and this proves it.”
Philip frowned for a minute, looking unwilling to let it go. He liked to be in control—he needed to be. Someone else poaching on his territory was a big offense.
“Well,” I said, trying to put him at ease, “these guys are about to get their asses handed to them either way, right? Don’t worry about it.”
“Bastards. I ought to…” He sighed. With visible effort, he relaxed his muscles and unclenched his fists. The lopsided smile he gave me was too reminiscent of a softer, more helpless fifteen-year-old Philip. “Okay, distract me. How was practice?”
“Good. You know, it’s getting harder for me to keep up.”
I’d never told him about the chronic tendonitis or the recommended surgery. He’d insist I quit dancing, even in a teaching capacity. He was so binary. Dance professionally or not at all. People were either with him or against him.
Philip lifted his whiskey glass in dry salute. “Ah yes. You’re getting old, I remember.”
“Almost as old as you.”
“Never that,” he quipped, and my heart warmed to see a smile flicker on his tired face.
He didn’t understand the allure of ballet, why I would rip up my body just to perform for a bunch of old guys in penguin suits—his words, of course. But he appreciated the purity of it, the sanctity of art. Pale pink leotards and white tights. They were a costume as much as those damn suits were, designed to keep people out. This was art. This was business. Don’t touch.
I turned to Drew, unsurprised to find his gaze trained on me. The heat was carefully banked while we put on a show for my brother, he in a suit and me in my sweats. I couldn’t see it; I felt it—more like knowledge, like recognition.
I want you. I burn for you. I come alive when you’re in the same room.
“How are you?” I asked, schooling my tone to bored politeness.
“Also old,” he said wryly. He cocked his head. “But good. Thanks for asking.”
Philip’s phone rang, and he excused himself to leave the room. My throat went dry. There were so few times I got to be alone with Drew.
The room was quiet as we regarded each other. I searched his face for some other clue that he wanted more, a breadcrumb to lead me to him. Instead of invitation, I saw sternness, intensity. The arousal might have been my own wishful thinking. He was a cipher—a handsome, finely clad cipher. Even with his shirt rumpled and sleeves rolled up, he looked dignified. And delicious.
How long until the next time I’d get him alone? Too long.
A certain amount of caution was a good thing, and considering certain events of my past, inevitable for me. But like opening my studio, like moving out, I had waited too long, so long that my knees were shattered and my heart was aching and my body was pulsing with need unfulfilled.
A ballerina learned early how to live under glass, but I hadn’t known it was ice, distorting the world outside to be scary and grotesque, thickening with every season until I feared it would never thaw.
Gathering up my courage, I approached him. Not climbing the wall, blasting through it. Every slow, even step sent needles into my strained knees. The ache only amplified the arousal he inspired in me. My whole body was a raw nerve, pulled a little tighter with every year of celibacy, stretched a little farther with every painful pirouette until I thought I would snap.
His fair skin was lightly freckled and sprinkled with golden hairs a little darker than the tamed mop of blond on his head. I didn’t know how that would translate in the darker, more private places, but I longed to find out. This close I could see the bronze of his five o’clock shadow. The little lines around his mouth creased in a frown.
“Is this all we’re going to do?” I asked. “Look but don’t touch?”
One eyebrow lifted. “You tell me. Was there something more you wanted?”
His reticence sank in my gut, a brick of disappointment in a swirling sea of indecision. It was one thing to feign disinterest in front of my brother, another to play dumb in private.
“Right,” I said flatly. “It’s okay if your job is worth more than a few nights with me.”
“So it’s a few nights now, not just one.”
I frowned. “Don’t play games.”
“I’m always serious when I’m negotiating. How many nights are you going to give me, Rose?”
He was mocking me, or at the very least, playing hard to get. As if I was going to bust out my day planner and pencil him in for Tuesday through Thursday. “Look, if you don’t want anything to happen, it won’t. You don’t have to pretend.”
He grinned, the tilt of his lips somehow boyish on his lined face. “So I’m pretending now. You’ve gone from shy to aggressive in the blink of an eye, but I’m the one being disingenuous?”
Point taken. I scoffed anyway. “I’m not shy.”
“I don’t think so,” he agreed in a musing tone. “But you sure do a good impression.”
“Oh, I see. You think you know me.” Just like my brother thought he had me figured out.
She’s frightened. She’s fragile. Let’s cover her in plaster and set her on the mantel beside the other unfeeling artwork.
Drew shook his head slowly, his expression thoughtful. “Probably not.”
He leaned forward, closer than I was expecting until I had to restrain myself from jerking back—or latching on to him. His heat caressed my cheek, his breath brushed against my neck. We touched nowhere at all, but I felt him on every taut nerve of my skin.
“But I want to know you,” he murmured.
“Then why?” I closed my eyes, adrift in his nearness. “Why haven’t you done anything?”
“I don’t make a habit of harassing women in their homes, especially when…”
My indignation rose. “Especially when their brother is paying you enough money to keep your hands to yourself.”
His voice was softer when he said, “When I’m not sure she would welcome it.”
My retort caught in my throat. Would I have welcomed him? Not at first, certainly. He would have been just like every other man who wanted to sneak behind Philip’s back, too stupid to know what was good for him.
Maybe I had needed this, his restraint like an incubator for my burgeoning lust. Like he said, I’d gone from shy to aggressive, only it hadn’t happened in a second, it had been minutes, days, years of waiting for a moment when it would be safe to reach out.
“So you do want me,” I said, and despite my assertiveness earlier, it came out uncertain.
He regarded me for a moment, impassive.
Finally he said, “You would run from me screaming if you knew all the ways I want you.”
Shock raced down my spine, followed by a wave of pure lust. Part of me wanted just that—to know everything, to feel him everywhere until I was so wrapped up that I never suffered the chill of loneliness again. The other part of me was exactly as naive as his slightly amused expression proclaimed me to be.
Philip strolled back into the room, tossing his phone on the desk.
“Jesus,” he said. “Does no one have any fucking loyalty anymore?”
My stomach flipped over. Could he see the tension between us? Of course he could. Drew was a daunting cloud of wicked intent, and I was a puddle at his feet. I raised my eyes.
“Maybe you should go,” Drew murmured.
“Yes,” Philip agreed absently, thumbing through a stack of papers on the side table. “I’m sorry, Rose, but it looks like it will be a long night. Don’t wait up for me for dinner.”
Philip hadn’t been talking about us, I realized. How he was blind to the situation, I had no idea, but I would take the reprieve with both hands. From my brother and his anger. From Drew and the unknown things he inspired me to do.
Just like he’d said I would, I fled the room—and ran from him.
Ran upstairs to where my familiar ballerina slippers hung on my bed. A grown-up size but a childish comfort. Once upon a time, my only comfort.
The classes at the YMCA had been guises to keep us off the streets, the teachers merely minimum-wage babysitters. Ms. Anastasia thought she was the lost Russian princess, despite the fact that the ages never lined up. But she had been classically trained in her country, and she was willing to teach me in her off hours. Each night my thighs were bruised yellow and black from her whipcord pointer as she corrected my posture, but damn, I learned. In that dimly lit gymnasium with the basketball hoop with no net, I got a dance education upper-crust families paid thousands for.
Teaching ballet was more than a retirement plan for my career with the company. It was paying back a debt. Paying it forward. That mattered more than a possible fling with my brother’s lawyer. Even if that fling felt like everything when I was near him.
* * * *
True to his word, my brother kept Drew shut in the office late into the night. I walked by the closed study doors on the way to steal a bowl of oatmeal for dinner. The window in my room overlooked the garage and courtyard, so I could see Drew’s car and keep tabs on him that way.
I pulled the plush armchair to the window and read up on the different types of business structures. Sole proprietor, S-Corp, C-Corp.
Philip would already know all this. He would be a fantastic business advisor if I just ignored the immoral suggestions, but then I would have to tell him about my plan. I’d have to tell him about my plan to move out—and then he would flip out. So I read in secret, which was probably for the best anyway. I had relied on him for too long.
I needed to be more independent, but did that also include a secret affair with my brother’s lawyer? The fear of Philip finding out my plans was eclipsed by the fear of failure.
I didn’t know how this casual, sophisticated sex worked beyond the vulgar jokes bandied at black-tie parties. And what if Drew wanted something more than regular sex? He’d already hinted as much. My only experience was too fast, too deep, and
let him, let him finish
.
Typical for high school fumblings, I supposed, but nothing to help guide me now.
The black text blurred before me, and I might have dozed off, but a gentle disturbance through the walls alerted me to the front door opening and closing. White light spread over the cobblestone driveway as motion sensors flipped it on.
Drew stepped into the spotlight, casting a long shadow over the silver-white side of his car. He opened his door and tossed his briefcase on the passenger seat. But instead of getting in and driving away, he paused. He turned back, looking directly at my window—at me. I froze, my throat going dry.
He must have known it was my room, though he’d never been upstairs. I didn’t think he could see me. At least not clearly. We were twenty feet away, separated by double-paned glass, and the glare from the floodlights would overwhelm the thin light from my lamp. Impulsively, I pressed my palm to the cool glass. Could he make that out, the shape of my hand, the color of my flesh?
I leaned forward, painting my own reflection in the window. Wide, dark eyes set in the pale moon of my face, all framed with thick curtains of black hair. I looked like a ghost, something ephemeral and weightless.
That was how I felt sometimes too—not really there. I wanted to feel something, to see what it was like to participate, even if it was only a glimpse. He was waiting for me, leaning against his car.