The Dance Off. Ally Blake

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      TWO

      “So how was it? Was it amazing? Aren’t you glad I made you go?”

      Ryder pressed the phone harder to one ear to better hear Sam, and plugged a finger in his other ear to ward off the sounds of the construction site. “It was...” Excruciating. Hot. A lesson in extreme—patience. He tugged his hard hat lower over his forehead, and growled, “It was fine.”

      “Told you. And how cool is the studio? And the ceilings. I knew you’d love the ceilings.”

      No need to fudge the truth there. The beams were stunning. Old school. The exact kind of feature he’d once upon a time have sold his soul to study. He glanced about the modern web of metal spikes and cold concrete slabs around him, the foundations of what would in many months be a sleek, silver, skyscraping tower—as far from the slumped thick red-brick building as architecturally possible.

      His foreman waved a torch in his direction, letting him know the group he was there to meet—and who were about to make his day go from long to interminable—had arrived. Ryder tilted his chin in acknowledgement, holding up his finger to say he’d be a minute.

      “She was a dancer,” Sam was saying. “A real one. A Sky High one.”

      Struggling to picture sultry Nadia Kent in a pink tutu and a bun, Ryder asked, “Nadia’s a ballerina?”

      A pause, then, “No-o-o. I told you. Sky High.”

      “Sam, just for a moment, treat me as if I am an Australian human male and speak plain English.”

      “Man, you need to get out more. Sky High is huge. A dance extravaganza. A kind of burlesque meets Burn the Floor meets Cirque du Soleil; all superb special effects and crazy-talented dancers. In Vegas!”

      Ryder’s focus converged until it was entirely on his sister’s voice. “Sam, do you have a showgirl teaching your wedding party how to dance?”

      “Oh, calm down. She wasn’t working some dive bar off the strip.”

      And yet, picturing Nadia in fishnets, towering high heels and cleverly positioned peacock feathers wasn’t difficult at all. Her pale skin glowing in the dim light, dishevelled waves trailing down her bare back, those lean calves kicking, twirling, hooking... Ryder closed his eyes and pressed his thumb into his temple.

      “She’s so graceful. And flexible,” Sam continued, clearly oblivious to his internal struggle. “She was warming up the other night when we came in and she can pull her leg up so far behind her she can touch her nose!”

      Ryder’s eyes snapped open to search for a speedy exit from the conversation at hand. He had every intention of shrugging off the spark between them for Sam’s sake, but the kid sure wasn’t helping any.

      Sam sighed down the line. “If I had half her talent, half her confidence, half her sex appeal—”

      “Okay then,” Ryder said, loud enough to turn heads. A few of his tradies laughed before getting back to nailing, laying pipe, measuring, chatting about the previous night’s TV. “You like her. That’s great. I’m taking lessons, as you wanted. Let’s leave it there.”

      Sam might have missed his earlier silence, but he read Sam’s loud and clear. He swore beneath his breath as the hairs on the back of his neck sprang up in self-defence.

      Sam’s voice was an octave lower as she said, “She’s single, you know.”

      “Got to go,” Ryder growled. “My foreman’s jabbing a finger at his watch so vigorously he’s going to pull a muscle.”

      With that he rang off. And stared at his phone as if he couldn’t for the life of him remember which pocket he kept it in.

      There was no misreading what had just happened there. The kid was trying to set him up. That wasn’t the way things were meant to go.

      He was Sam’s rock. Her cornerstone. Which was why he’d been so careful to keep his private life separate from his life with her; so she didn’t go through life thinking all men were self-centred brutes like the father who’d failed them both.

      Damn. Things were changing. Faster than he was keeping up. Faster than he liked.

      For if he was Sam’s cornerstone, she was his touchstone. His earth. As the raw ingenuity he’d inherited from his mother had been progressively engulfed by his own well-honed single-mindedness, and the crushing need to succeed that his father had roused in him, being there for Sam, no matter what, had been his saving grace. It had proven he was different from the old man in the way that mattered most.

      Without Sam to look out for what would his measuring stick be?

      To ground himself, he glanced up at the twenty-feet-high rock-and-dirt walls surrounding him, and imagined what would one day be a soaring tower; a work of art with clean lines, perfect symmetry, and a hint to the fantastical that pierced the Melbourne sky. It was the exact kind of project he’d spent more than a decade aiming towards.

      Not that it had always been his aim to draw buildings that split the clouds. His first internship had been a fantastical summer spent in beachside Sorrento with a renovation specialist by the name of Tom Campbell, bringing the grand homes of the Peninsula back to their former glories. The gig had been hard, back-breaking labour, but the heady scents of reclaimed materials had also made him dream more of his mother, and her sculpting of lost things, than he had since he’d been a kid.

      Until the day his father sauntered in with the owner of the home Campbell was working on at the time. Fitz couldn’t even pretend it was accidental; the sneer was already on his face before he’d spied the hammer in Ryder’s hand.

      No ambition, he’d muttered to his friend, not bothering to say hello to the son he hadn’t seen in two years. Kid’s always been a soft touch. Idealistic. Artistic mother, so what chance did I have?

      Damn those bloody beams for stirring this all up again. Because no matter how he’d come to it, the very different work Ryder did now was vital and important. And as for the woman who’d stirred other parts of him, hooking into his darker nature, begging it be allowed out to play? All elements of the same slippery path.

      No. No matter how his life might be changing, his crusade had not. So he’d have to be more vigilant in harnessing his baser nature than ever.

      With that firmly fixed at the front of his mind, he went off in search of the project manager, foreman, head engineer, the council rep, union rep, and the jolly band of clients, perversely hoping for a problem he could really sink his teeth into.

      * * *

      It was nearing the СКАЧАТЬ