The Dance Off. Элли Блейк

was when the strains of a Kylie song filtered down the stairs and as one Sam’s friends shot to their feet, babbling about the song and the school formal and somebody falling off the stage, before they were all gone up the stairs in the search of the dance floor.

      Ben remained, stoic in his charge of the bags and chairs, and not about to get his new suede jacket anywhere near the sweaty dancers upstairs. Then with the couch all to himself he shuffled deeper, and spread out with a sigh.

      “Want to get some air?” Ryder asked, not having moved an inch.

      She looked back up at him, and up, and up. Did she? Hell, yeah. “You okay, Ben?”

      “As a lark.”

      “Then air it is.” Nadia put her cocktail back on the table and stood, running her damp hands down the thighs of her jeans.

      She pointed the way to a balcony populated with beer drinkers and followed as Ryder made a way through the throng and to a quiet patch of railing. Music pulsed through the windows above. Soft chatter spread from the star-gazers outside. While Nadia breathed deep of the cool night air, the busy street below, the Prahran railway station peeking between the nearby buildings.

      Then, without preface, Ryder asked, “When I asked you out for coffee, why didn’t you tell me you had plans with Sam?” and with a darkness in his voice that Nadia hadn’t seen coming.

      Completely foxed by the direction of his conversation, her incredulity was ripe as she blurted, “Why? Do you have a problem with that?”

      He stayed silent, but the twitch in his cheek gave her the answer.

      “You do!” She jabbed his forearm with a finger; when it hit solid muscle it bounced right back. “What do you think I’m going to do, corrupt her? Buddy, that venomous green potion masquerading as a drink back there was all hers.”

      Ryder’s hands curled around the railing, the frown marring his forehead easing some. “She’s...open-hearted. She’s never been very good at protecting herself. That’s long since fallen to me.”

      Okay, then. Not so much an indictment on her. This was about him. Nadia lowered her mental dukes. “I’d say Ben back there has you covered on that score.”

      Ryder scoffed, his frown back with a vengeance.

      “What? Ben’s smart, solid, and he’s clearly smitten with her. I’m totally jealous.”

      “Jealous?” Well, that wiped the frown from his face. He turned to lean his elbows against the railing as he stared through the crowd at the young man scooched low in the soft seat, the collar of his jacket bunched up about his ears.

      Nadia rolled her eyes. “Not of Sam, you goose. Of how much Ben adores her. I’ve never even been close to so adored.”

      Ryder’s eyes slid back to hers, an eyebrow raised in raging disbelief.

      “Admired by audiences, sure,” she said, floating a who cares hand between them. “Envied by other dancers, oh yeah. Enjoyed by men, you can count on it. But adored?” She shook her head as Ryder continued to stare at her as if she’d grown an extra head. “Don’t panic, Ryder. I’m not about to huddle in a corner and cry. A dancer’s life is an endless series of rejections with just enough triumphs thrown in to keep us hungry. We’re a tough breed, Kent women and dancers both. And it’s hard to be tough and adorable at the same time.”

      “Puppies are adorable,” said Ryder, his eyes now roving over her face, her hair, her shimmering silver top that she’d not all that long ago imagined slid over her skin with his touch. When his eyes roved back to hers she felt a good degree hotter. “Baby bunnies too.”

      “And your sister.”

      “Alas, my sister has a tendency to be that, to my constant disadvantage. As for you...” Nadia fought the urge to twist and turn under his heady gaze. “Adorable you may not be. But only because you’re something else entirely.”

      The urge to ask what he thought was so acute she only just managed to swallow it down. If she went there, there’d be no going back.

      Instead she leant on the railing and looked out into the night.

      “My adorable sister is really marrying the twerp, isn’t she?” Ryder asked at long last.

      “Yeah,” Nadia said on a relieved laugh. “Did you think it was all pretend?”

      “No. Maybe.” He ran a hand over his face, then through his hair, leaving it in spikes. And upon witnessing the first spark of vulnerability she’d ever seen in the man, Nadia felt her heart kick hard against her ribs.

      In punishment, she bumped her hip against the railing hard enough to leave a bruise, and said, “I see what’s going on here. It’s like something out of a Jane Austen novel. The big sister—or in this case brother—overlooked, left on the shelf, while the younger sister shines.”

      As hoped, the ridiculousness smacked the vulnerability from his eyes. Then he grinned, his teeth flashing white in the moonlight. “Alas, I am a confirmed bachelor.”

      “Confirmed by whom?”

      “Every woman I’ve ever been with.”

      Not dated. Not known. Been with. Nadia breathed deep.

      “I’m a determined man when motivated, Miss Kent. And my motivations lead me to work eighty hours a week in a job I take seriously. I am less motivated to give up my standing holiday in Belize every Australian winter, one ticket return. Or full rights to the remote control. And at the end of the day I go home to the bachelor pad to end all bachelor pads.”

      “Posters of women in bikinis straddling large...motorbikes all over your walls?”