blow of all. The diagnosis. In all the heartbreak, her pointe shoes had been lost.
Like so much else.
Jeremy must have taken them. And now by some twist of fate, she’d found them again. Artem had bought them for her, and somehow it felt as though he’d given her back a missing part of her heart. Holding the shoes, she felt dangerously whole again.
The massive chandeliers hanging from the lobby ceiling flickered three times, indicating the start of the performance was imminent.
“Shall we?” Artem gestured toward the auditorium with one of the champagne flutes.
Ophelia took a deep breath, suddenly feeling as light and airy as one of the tiny bubbles floating to the top of the glass in his hand. “Lead the way.”
They were seated on the first ring in private box seats, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but somehow did. Ophelia had never come anywhere near such prestigious seating in the theater. When she’d been with the ballet, she always watched performances from the audience on her nights off. But like the other dancers, she’d sat in the fourth ring, at the very tip-top of the balcony. The nosebleed section. Those seats sold for twenty dollars each. She couldn’t even fathom what the Drake Diamond seats must have cost. No doubt it was more money than all the dancers combined got paid in a year.
What exactly did tens of thousands of dollars get you on the first ring of the theater? For one, it got you privacy.
The box was closed in all sides, save for the glorious view of the stage. Ophelia sank into her chair with the ballet shoes still pressed to her heart, and her stomach fluttered as she looked around at the gold crown molding and thick crimson carpet. This was intimacy swathed in rich red velvet.
The lights went black as Artem handed her one of the glasses of champagne. His fingertips brushed hers, and she swallowed. Hard.
But as soon as the strains of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 filled the air, Ophelia was swept away.
The music seemed filled with a delicate ache, and the dancers were exquisite. Gorgeous and bare, in their nude bodysuits. There was no hiding in a ballet like Petite Mort. There were no fluffy tutus or elaborate costumes. Just the beauty and grace of the human body.
Ophelia had never danced Petite Mort. She’d never thought she had what it took to dance such a provocative ballet. It was raw. Powerful. All-consuming. In the way perfect sex should be.
Not that Ophelia knew anything about perfect sex. Or ever would.
No wonder she’d never danced this ballet. How could she dance something called Petite Mort when she’d never had an orgasm? Things with Jeremy hadn’t been like that. He’d been more interested in the height of her arabesque than the height of passion. She’d never been in touch with her own sensuality. She’d done too much dancing and not enough living. And now it was too late.
She watched the couple performing the pas de deux onstage turn in one another’s embrace, legs and arms intertwined, and she’d never envied anyone more in her entire life. Somehow, some way...if she had the chance, she’d dance the hell out of that ballet now.
If only she could.
She felt different about her body than she had before. More appreciative. Maybe it was knowing that she’d never dance, never make love, that made her realize what gifts those things were. Or maybe it was the way the man sitting beside her made her feel...
Like a dancer.
Like a woman.
Like a lover.
Artem shifted in his chair, and his thigh pressed against hers. Just the simple brush of his tuxedo pants against her leg made her go liquid inside. She slid her gaze toward him in the dark and found him watching her rather than the dancers onstage. Had he been looking at her like that the entire time?
Her breath caught in her throat, and the ache between her legs grew almost too torturous to bear. What was happening to her? The feeling that she’d had in the limo was coming back—the desire, the need. Only this time, she didn’t think she had the power to resist it. It was the shoes. They’d unearthed a boldness in her. Ophelia Baronova was struggling to break through, like cream rising to the top of a decadent dessert.
The shoes in her hands felt like a sign. A sign that she could have everything she wanted.
Just this once.
One last time.
Another dance. Another chance.
Intermission came too soon. Ophelia’s head was still filled with Mozart and dark decadence when the lights went up. She turned to face Artem and found him watching her again.
“What do you think?” he whispered, and the atypical hoarseness in his voice scraped her insides with shameless longing.
Just this once.
“I think when this is over—” she leaned closer, like a ballerina bending toward her partner “—I want to dance for you.”
A better man would have stopped her.
A better man would have asked the limo driver to take her back to her apartment instead of sitting beside her in silent, provocative consent as the car sped through the snowy Manhattan streets toward the Plaza. A better man wouldn’t have selected Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 once they’d reached the penthouse and she’d asked him to turn on some music.
But Artem wasn’t a better man. And he couldn’t have done things differently even if his overindulgent life had depended on it.
Instead he sat in the darkened suite watching as she slipped on the ballet shoes she’d chosen at Lincoln Center, and wound the long pink ribbons around her slender ankles. He could feel the music pulsing dead center in his chest. Or maybe that rhythmic ache was simply a physical embodiment of the anticipation that had taken hold of him since she’d leaned into him at intermission, eyes ablaze, face flushed with barely contained passion.
I want to dance for you.
Artem would hear those words in his darkest fantasies until the day he died.
“Are you ready, Mr. Drake?” Ophelia asked, settling in the center of the room with her heels together, toes pointing outward and willowy arms softly rounded.
So damned ready.
He nodded. “Proceed, Miss Rose.”
The lights of Fifth Avenue drifted through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting colorful shadows between them. When Ophelia began to move, gliding with slow, sweeping footsteps, she looked almost like she was waltzing through the rainbow facets of a brilliant cut gemstone. Outside the windows, snow swirled against the glass in a hushed assault. But a slow-burning simmer had settled in Artem’s veins that the fiercest blizzard couldn’t have cooled. His penthouse in the sky had never seemed so far removed from the real world. Here, now, it was only the two of them. He and Ophelia. Nothing else.
No other people. No ghosts. No rules.
I want to dance for you.
The moment Ophelia rose up on tiptoe, Artem knew that whatever was transpiring before him wasn’t about ballet. This was more than dance. So much more. It was passion and heat and life. It was sex. Maybe even more than that.
The only thing Artem knew with absolute certainty was that sitting in the dark watching the adagio grace of Ophelia dancing for him was the single most erotic moment he’d ever experienced.
It was almost too much. The sultry swish of her ballerina dress, the exquisite bend of her back, the dizzying pink motion of her pointed feet—all of it. Artem had to fight against every impulse he possessed in order to stay put, to let her finish, when all he wanted was to rise out of his chair, crush his lips to hers and make love to her to the timeless strains of