Dance for Me (Fenbrook Academy #1) - New Adult Romance (6 page)

Before I could type anything, though, another message arrived.

“Dance for me, Natasha.”

I can’t explain why, but seeing him use my name sent a thrill through me, rising and soaring in my chest. And there was something else, too. I remembered his voice, and now I imagined it saying my name. Growling it, almost. The thought of him doing that, of his hot whisper against my neck, sent a dark heat twisting down between my thighs.

“He just asked me,” I told Clarissa and Jasmine.

“Check it’s not a lap dance, before you do it,” Clarissa said.

“Or check it
is
a lap dance, and do it anyway,” Jasmine offered. Behind those big, innocent eyes lay a truly filthy mind.

“What would I have to do?”
I typed.

“Just dance. Here at my house.”

“What sort of dancing?”

“Ballet. Why, what did you have in mind?”

I flushed. “It’s ballet,” I told the others.

“Just checking,”
I typed.

“Check it’s not nude,” Clarissa told me.

I was taking a sip of coffee and spluttered it halfway across the table.
“What?!”

“Just in case. He
is
paying you to dance at his house.” She looked like she was half serious.

“You don’t mean nude or anything, do you?”
I typed back. And immediately regretted it.

“No. Why, would you like to dance nude?”
It was impossible to judge his mood from the messages...so how come I just
knew
he was smirking?

“It’s not nude,” I told the other two tightly.

“Ask how much,” Jasmine told me.

“How much?”
I typed.

“How much would you like?”
he replied.

Jasmine and Clarissa had moved around behind me now. I knew it was useless to try to stop them reading. They were right—this
was
the most exciting thing to happen to me all year.

“Say, like, $500 an hour,” said Clarissa.

“I can’t say that! That’s nuts!”

“Opening bid,” she told me.

“$500 per hour,”
I typed, hesitating before I finally hit the button to send.

Almost immediately:
“Fine. Is that a yes?”

The world seemed to narrow down to a tunnel, everything but the screen of my phone fading out. I barely heard Clarissa and Jasmine gasp. And yet I didn’t feel like things were sliding out of control, somehow. This complete stranger, with his crazy demand for a muse, felt
solid
. In fact, it felt like the only truly solid thing around me, besides the exercise bike and the sweet escape nestling inside the cigarette case.

What was this, really? On one level, it seemed legit—he didn’t
seem
like some creep who really wanted a lap dance. But he was rich—
seriously
rich. Why had he pursued me, when he could have called any casting agency and found a dancer for a fraction of that price?

I remembered the way he’d looked at me, when he’d burst in. The way his eyes kept going to me, even when the others were dancing. Could he really be interested in
me?
My stomach lurched. Had I put on that good a show, convinced him that I was normal? Could I keep it up, and dance for him without him ever knowing the real me?

And was it just dancing he wanted, or was there the possibility of something more? The idea of getting close to someone, of risking them finding out the truth, should have terrified me. With him, the fear was being countered by raw desire at least as strong, and I didn’t know which one was going to win.

I stared at the screen for a long moment. What was the alternative—carry on as I was? A year ago, I’d been cutting maybe once a week. Now I was up to once a day, and the exercise bike in the evenings. How long before that wasn’t enough, and I broke down in class?

I had to take a chance.

I typed
“Yes,”
and then let out a long breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

Almost immediately, he came back with
“Could you dance for me today?”

What have I done?
“Could you drive me—this afternoon?” I asked Clarissa without looking at her.

Her eyes were locked on the screen too. “I’ll drive you anywhere you want. I have to meet this guy,” she told me.

“3pm?”
I typed back.

“See you then,”
he replied, and sent an address. Somehow, in the space of ten minutes, I’d become his muse.

Now what?

Chapter Seven

Natasha

Clarissa slowed the car until it was barely crawling along, then let it coast to a stop in a scrunch of gravel.

“This is
not
the place,” she said disbelievingly.

I double-checked the address. It was.

We were thirty minutes out of the city and had turned off a quiet, tree-lined road onto a private driveway, iron gates swinging open in invitation. Now we were looking at—there was no other word to describe it—a mansion.

It was three stories high, built from huge stone blocks and looked like it’d been there a hundred years. A water feature stood in the center of the sweeping gravel driveway, a stone bowl big enough to swim in with white water spraying high into the air before arcing down to cascade over the sides. Parked in front of the house was a bright yellow sports bike with
Ducatti
stenciled on the side. Clarissa and I exchanged a look.

Darrell came out to meet us just as we were getting out of the car. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, the faded red fabric tight over his biceps. I watched his eyes take in me, then Clarissa. Then back to me. A little frisson of excitement went through me. I wasn’t used to being the one a guy focused on.

“I’m Clarissa,” she told him. “Natasha’s friend.”
And bodyguard who will knee you in the balls if you so much as touch her,
her smile seemed to say.

Darrell gave her a solemn nod and led us inside. I hadn’t known exactly what to wear or what to bring, so I’d put on what I’d worn for the audition with my street clothes over the top, and pinned my hair up. I’d spent about five times longer on my make-up than usual, which hadn’t gone unnoticed by Clarissa.

Inside it was even more intimidating, if that was possible. The hallway seemed bigger than our apartment, black and white tiles of shining marble stretching away into the distance. A chandelier the size of a small car hung overhead. Clarissa grabbed my arm and pulled me to her, so we could whisper to each other.

“
Do you believe this?”
she hissed.

“I know.” I’d never been anywhere like it. At least Clarissa, with her rich folks and her trust fund, would feel at home. “We’re in your world now,” I told her.

Clarissa shook her head. “This is
not
my world. This is a long, long way from my world.”

“Clarissa,” Darrell asked, “Are you going to wait? It might be a few hours.”

Hearing him say her name, I was suddenly jealous. I wanted to hear that deep, bass rumble wrap itself around “Natasha.”

“Yes.” Clarissa was keeping a very careful eye on him, as if he might pull out a ski mask and a hunting knife at any moment. “I’ll wait.”

“Great.” He showed us into a breakfast kitchen. Everything was either spotless white tile or gleaming stainless steel. I wondered if he actually lived in the house, or just rented it out for photos.

On the tabletop were three catering pots of gourmet coffee and a basket—an actual wicker basket straight out of
Red Riding Hood
—crammed full of pastries. There were three different newspapers, a
Vogue
, a
Time
and a
People
.

“You knew she’d bring someone?” Clarissa asked.

“I thought she might,” he told her. “We’ll be downstairs.”

“Downstairs?” My voice was almost a squeak. Three stories, and there was a downstairs, too?

“In my workshop.”

I looked at Clarissa, but she gave me a nod. Whatever vibes she was getting from him, they were good ones. “I’ll be right here,” she told me.

She sat down, already reaching for the
Vogue
, and Darrell led me back through the hallway to a door at the back. It looked like a normal, white-painted wooden door, but when he opened it, we were looking into the bare steel walls of an elevator. He pressed the button at the very bottom: we were going three floors underground.

***

I wasn’t ready for the sense of space.

I guess I’d prepared myself for some small, dark, claustrophobic room, maybe with a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was one huge, cavernous space. I realized that the cellar must run the entire length of the mansion, maybe even beyond. The ceiling must have been a good fifteen feet high, but because the lights hung down from it, the ceiling itself just disappeared into blackness. The floor was smooth, flawless concrete.

The elevator had deposited us midway down the room’s length. To my right was heavy engineering gear: huge machines whose function I could only guess at, big tanks of compressed gas and a crane’s hook hanging down on a chain.

Right in front of me seemed to be where he did most of his work, and I could see immediately where his muscles had come from. There were workbenches littered with hunks of metal almost as big as me, and tools for pounding, cutting and welding it into shape. Farther on, there was a big, open space and then a sort of office area with a chair and desk and several large monitors. Was that where he’d sat and messaged me on Facebook? Directly over the desk, there was a poster for a local band I’d vaguely heard of called the Curious Weasels. I could see whiteboards full of math, too, and a coffee pot. I remembered the spotless kitchen upstairs. How much of his life did he spend down here?

This was no hobbyist’s garage. This was a workplace, the modern equivalent of a blacksmith’s forge. He must have spent millions building this place, constructing his perfect environment in which to build...what, exactly? I’d never heard of Sabre Technologies. Planes? Cars?

He didn’t rush me, letting me take it all in. Then he led me over to the large open space.

“I figured...here. If that’s okay.” He looked around, as if checking there was enough space.

At the back of the room, I saw a big, wheeled cart some eight feet long. He’d draped whatever was on top—his latest creation, presumably—in a white sheet, and then pushed it aside to make room for me.

I looked down at the bare concrete floor and traced the surface with the toe of my sneaker. “It’s fine. Floor’s going to be a little hard.”

There was absolutely nothing sexual in that. Not until I glanced up. Suddenly I was looking straight into his eyes and something there made me catch my breath. It had been a perfectly innocent remark...so why was
I
the one flushing?

“For
dancing
,” I explained. “Normally the floor’s sprung, so that we get some bounce.”

He looked at the concrete and nodded sagely, as if filing that away.

“It’s fine, though,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter.” And I started to unbutton my jeans.

He started, and sort of half-looked away.

“I’ve got dancing gear on underneath,” I told him.

He nodded. Disappointed? I couldn’t tell. There was a part of me that wished I
had
needed to get changed. Would he have turned his back? Would he have tried to sneak a peek?

Would I have wanted him to?

I felt that dark twist again, spiraling downwards between my thighs. For once, I didn’t feel like things were slipping away from me. Here, in this crazy, rich man’s world, three floors below a mansion, I actually felt grounded. I wasn’t in the past or slipping towards it; for once, I was right there, in the moment. And it wasn’t the place or even what I was doing that was making me feel that way...it was him
.
It was the way his attention was so completely focused on me, like I was the only thing in the world—I’d never been looked at so hard in my life. And underneath that cool, professional gaze, I could sense something else, something raw and sexual that made me heady and weak. Suddenly, the thin sweater and jeans I was wearing seemed insubstantial. What was it going to feel like in a leotard?

Time to find out.

I pulled off my sweater. Light from above cascaded down my body, making the black leotard shine. There was something weird about it—it wasn’t like the harsh flicker of a fluorescent light. I looked up, squinting.