Sexy in the City

by Alexia Adams, Galen Rose, Samantha Anne, Carolann Camillo, Nicole Flockton, Iris Leach, Olivia Logan, Nancy Loyan, Stephanie Cage (epub)

  “So we’ve been together for a week?” Lisa hoped she didn’t sound wistful.

  “I don’t know. That doesn’t really make us sound much of a couple. Maybe we should say it’s a bit longer.”

  “That would be hard when we were in different countries. I suppose we don’t have to tell them you’ve only just come back to England, but it wouldn’t be hard for them to check up on.”

  “What about if we got back in touch recently and I came back because we decided we wanted to be together?”

  The marketer in Lisa recognised a good selling story, and that was definitely one.

  “I like it.” She nodded approval. “How did we get back in touch?”

  “Internet? That’s common enough to be believable.”

  “Not bad. Childhood friends reunited on Internet find love. It has mileage.” Lisa thought for a moment. “So who contacted whom?”

  “Oh, I know. I saw you on FriendsReunited. Something about your job. You didn’t even mention dancing. I only knew you were still dancing because I saw your bio on the teachers’ page of Mark and Elaine’s site.”

  Lisa was childishly pleased that Redmond had been taking notice of her career. Although how come he hadn’t been in touch? Surely it wouldn’t have been too hard to find her email address or get her phone number off Elaine. Mind you, it wasn’t as if she’d made much effort to get in touch with him since college. After he hadn’t answered any of her letters that first year, she’d written it off and tried to move on. Only now he was back did she realise how little it had actually worked.

  That wasn’t something she wanted to think about now. Better to concentrate on the details of the story.

  “So, you found me on the web and got back in touch. By email?”

  “How about by letter and phone? Less traceable.”

  “I’d still have letters.”

  “You’d have kept them? How sweet. Well, we can always write some now.”

  “They won’t be postmarked with the right date.”

  “So you threw the envelopes away.”

  “Anyone who knows me would believe that?”

  “You save envelopes?” Redmond stared at her as if she’d just admitted to being abducted by Martians.

  In answer, Lisa got up and went to the bureau. Tucked in between the Little House on the Prairie books and The Technique of Ballroom Dancing was a shoe box. She shuffled it carefully out and carried it over to the sofa, setting it down with all the reverence you would accord to a holy relic.

  Redmond came over to look as she lifted the lid.

  Inside was a pile of paper and a thin stack of envelopes. She lifted out the envelopes and read off the postmarks. “5th May, Prague. 6th July, Malta. 20th August, Sicily. 30th September, Tenerife. That was the last one.”

  Redmond looked at her intently as if seeing her for the first time. She found her heart was beating fast as she waited to see what he would say about the letters which told the story of his first summer away from her – the only summer when she’d truly believed he meant to return. She’d intended to ask him whether he recognised the place-names, but his expression told her what she needed to know.

  She felt as if she was walking on ice, the ground cracking perilously around her.

  “What else have you got in that box?” he asked eventually. The cracking stopped. Safe from confrontation, she felt weak-kneed with relief, yet obscurely disappointed. Maybe she’d been trying to stir things up, get everything out into the open, ask why he’d left as he had, and why the letters had suddenly stopped.

  Instead, she’d opened herself up a little, and got nothing in return.

  That was the way it always was with Redmond. He gave when you were least expecting it, but when you wanted something you got nothing, or else a wholly unexpected response. Sometimes she wondered if he was doing it on purpose. Did he know what she was looking for and take pleasure in frustrating her?

  As she mused, her fingers had been riffling through the pile of papers. Competition programmes, newspaper cuttings and photographs, carefully preserved in date order. She’d reached the one she was looking for, and pulled it gently out of the stack and placed it on the chair arm for Redmond to see.

  “The President’s Cup,” he said, recognising the line-up that had been photographed for the local paper. Redmond and Lisa, looking much younger but not so very much different, beamed at a point just to the right of the camera. Redmond’s mother had taken this picture, sneaking up behind the official event photographer. It was the first time his parents had been to watch him in a competition and Lisa had never been sure whether their presence had spurred him on to his first truly brilliant performance, or whether it had just somehow been his day.

  “Remember the mad German couple?” he asked now, and Lisa nodded, laughing.

  “Do you really think they were trying to sabotage us?” she asked, remembering how they’d repeatedly found themselves being halted or redirected as the tall blonde couple paused in the most inconvenient places or swept into a corner where Redmond and Lisa were posing.

  She could still remember the sheer venom in Redmond’s voice when he spoke of them after leaving the floor. It had frightened her a little. The memory of it still did. He was not a man to cross lightly, which might be part of the reason she trod so lightly around the subject of his desertion.

  Redmond gave a dismissive shrug. “Probably not. It was just a lousy routine which happened to conflict with ours, and mysteriously reinvented itself whenever I changed ours to avoid them. Anyway, so what? We still won.”

  The crazy Germans had gone out in the quarter finals.

  Of the other couples in the photo, four had stayed on the circuit for some time. Two of them were still around, and one of the girls (now with a different partner) was rumoured to be in the running for the Couples trophy.

  The fifth had vanished not long after the competition. That happened to some dancers. Life got in the way. Jobs, kids. You gave up a lot to take the competition seriously. Lisa had never regretted doing it for the few years she had. She wished she could have carried on for longer.

  “Have you ever regretted becoming a dancer?” Lisa asked impulsively.

  “What do you mean? Why would I?”

  “I don’t know.” Now she’d asked the question, she wasn’t sure why she had. What was there to regret? She considered. “The time. The work.”

  “It’s not really work, though, is it?”

  That made Lisa smile. Of course, she realised. That was why Redmond was so different from her other partners. Even fun-loving Jerry took dancing seriously. Redmond liked to win, but he loved to dance. Even on a bad day, he never quite lost the effervescence that came from dancing for the sheer joy of it. In a funny way, when you were doing it for love, mistakes mattered less, but excellence mattered more. Doing things right just felt so much more satisfying.

  “What?” Redmond had noticed her smile.

  “Nothing,” she said, smiling even more. In spite of all the complications of the situation, it was good to have her favourite partner back. She must remember to appreciate it, because who knew how long it would last?

  “Why does nothing make you smile?” His exaggerated expression of bewilderment made her laugh still more.

  “Why should anything make me smile?” she threw back through her laughter.

  “Why shouldn’t it?”

  She had no answer to that, so she gave up and went back to leafing through the cuttings.

  Soon they were engrossed in memories of the different competitions they’d entered. The easy wins, the unexpected triumphs, and the occasional ignominious disasters. She still cringed at the recollection of the time her dress had split almost to the waist partway through a jive final. Although Redmond had maintained that the extra glimpse of thigh had distracted
one of the middle-aged male judges away from the particularly perfect finale given by another couple, and moved Lisa and Redmond up a place in the final.

  Then there was the time they’d ducked outside to avoid the heat of a stuffy sports hall without air conditioning on a summer evening, and almost missed the prize-giving. They’d realised their mistake halfway through a rumba in the car park, and raced back in, panting, as the judge was calling their number for the third time.

  And the time that, after an unexceptional performance in the Tango, they’d scraped into the final, and the music had started, unexpectedly blaring a pop single that Lisa had listened to a million times that summer. Knowing the song, they’d both sprung into life and danced better than ever before, working in such perfect tandem that Redmond had felt confident enough to adjust their routine a little, fitting it to the phrasing of the music and throwing in a bit of acting to suit the lyrics. On its own, that wouldn’t have cut any ice with the judges, but the audience loved it, and their applause spurred Lisa and Redmond onto an even more perfect performance.

  It was after that evening that Redmond had been approached by a dancer from London with the invitation to spend a summer on the cruise ships. A summer from which he’d only returned eight years later …

  They’d spent so little time together, it seemed impossible that there could be so many memories.

  The conversation lulled for a moment and Lisa made the mistake of looking up to meet Redmond’s eyes. It was something that happened a lot on the dance floor, from a distance, where the magnetic force of his gaze could draw her towards him without any deliberate effort on his part. At this close range, it was overwhelming. She could see the perfection of every lash, and the slight unlikely flecks of grey that softened the blue irises like mist over the sea on an autumn morning.

  She looked away, but not before she’d seen the slight smile forming on his lips.

  Now it was her turn to ask. “What?”

  “If we carry on like this, we won’t have any trouble convincing the TV crew we’re a real couple.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked numbly. She’d been a fool to think there was anything going on, other than the effort to claim a place in the competition and a chance to walk away with the money. Her friends at work would say she should take advantage of it anyway. A fling was better than nothing, wasn’t it? But Lisa knew it would make things worse in the long run. A taste of those full lips, a night beside that warm, strong body, and her life would seem even more bland and bare than it did already. She’d already had happiness given to her and snatched away, and she couldn’t bear it to happen a second time.

  Safe. It was a crazy concept, applied to someone as darkly, dangerously sexy as Redmond. Yet, somehow, impossibly, she did feel safe with him. Time and time again she’d let down her defences, began enjoying his company and their shared memories. And then, just when she was relaxing and enjoying the view, the cliff edge would crumble under her feet and she’d find herself leaping back from the abyss.

  “Shared memories. Isn’t that the essence of a good relationship?”

  “It is?” Lisa looked at him blankly. She wasn’t sure it was, but she definitely wasn’t capable of articulating why that was wrong, or what was the perfect basis for a relationship if that was not.

  “So I read in some trashy women’s magazine.”

  “You were reading a women’s magazine?”

  Redmond grinned at her shock. She had the impression he enjoyed confounding her expectations. “Hospital waiting rooms are fascinating places.”

  “You were in hospital? You were ill?”

  Somehow the idea of Redmond, with his robust healthy glow, in the sterile environment of a hospital, seemed wrong. She belatedly registered that she should have sounded more sympathetic, and was about to try to counter her blunder, but Redmond was already answering.

  “I was at the hospital. I wasn’t ill. A friend had some health problems and I took her in a few times for tests, so I got to sit and read until the doctors had finished with her. Sometimes it took a while.”

  Lisa suppressed a surge of jealousy for the woman who’d had Redmond sitting waiting for her when she emerged from the ward, jubilant or distraught. Lisa had always driven herself to and from hospital appointments, and she’d long since given up trying to share her few scares. People worried, or didn’t know what to say, or brought the subject up later when you least wanted to be reminded of it. It was easier to do it alone. So why did she envy Redmond’s friend so fiercely?

  “That was kind of you,” she said blandly, forcing her mouth to smile in denial of the storm that was raging inside. How come other people got someone to support them and she’d had to do everything alone? After her father’s death in an accident, and even more during her mother’s long illness and decline, there had never been anyone to look after Lisa. If anything, she’d been the one to do the looking after. Maybe that was why she’d kept her own collection of joys and successes so diligently. There was no one else to do it for her.

  She put the lid back on the shoe box and set it down beside the sofa.

  Redmond nodded. “That’s plenty for one night. Don’t you think?”

  “I guess so. We can worry about the details later. At least we’re agreed on a story.”

  “I’m almost looking forward to the auditions,” Redmond said brightly. “It should be quite a show, not just taking on Fritz and Kathrin and all the rest, but pretending to be a couple for the benefit of the TV crew.”

  Lisa raised her eyebrows. He’d echoed her own thought from the first time they danced together after his return. They were performers, both of them. They loved a show. She supposed that was why, in spite of all the tension, they got on so well.

  Lisa never knew why she said what she said next.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if we didn’t have to pretend?”

  Chapter 4

  Redmond stared at Lisa for a long moment and she couldn’t read his expression. She wished she could swallow the words back, but they were spoken and a lump of tension was forming in her throat. Then he began lifting his hand slowly. She watched, mesmerised, almost feeling the heat of his hand before it reached her cheek. Her mind ran ahead of the reality, seeing his strong fingers cupping her face and drawing her into the kiss she’d found herself daydreaming about earlier.

  Even as she imagined his hungry lips on hers and the familiar warmth of his body close against her, the cautious, hurt part of her mind was warning her not to believe it. There was no future. With his job in America and his footloose, fancy-free ways, she was bound to get hurt. Still, she did nothing to stop him as he ran his fingers gently down from her cheekbone to her chin and turned her face towards him. Despite the heat of his touch, it sent a shiver through her.

  She looked up at him then, and the seriousness she saw in his eyes threw a cloud across the sunlight of her imagined happiness. How had she ever thought he would even consider her suggestion? This wasn’t a real romance, a fairy-tale ending for her. It was a cynical business ploy, a sham and a lie, and if she took part in it, she deserved every bit of misery it brought her. And yet, she’d known from the first moment that she couldn’t refuse, if it bought her another chance to dance with her perfect, infuriating dream of a partner from long ago.

  “Lisa,” he said slowly, and even though there was a distance in his voice as he prepared himself to let her down, her name on his lips sounded sweet and sensuous, shaped slowly like a caress.

  “I hate to turn a beautiful woman down, but life is going to be complicated enough as it is. Rushing into things for real wouldn’t make it any easier in the long run.”

  As rejections went, it was a kind one, but it still stung.

  “Rushing into things?” Lisa’s voice wobbled dangerously. She swallowed hard, past the lump in her throat, and began again. “I’d hardly call i
t that. How long have we known each other?”

  “Nearly ten years,” he answered, and for some reason the fact that he knew the answer without thinking reassured Lisa a little. “But we haven’t been in touch for most of that time. I think we’ve got some catching up to do before we get into anything serious.”

  Lisa already regretted her rash suggestion, and now that she saw an opportunity to backtrack, she grabbed it with both hands.

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything serious,” she hastened to correct his impression. “More a … what do you call it … relationship of convenience. That’s it.” Surely that was something the worldly women he’d been used to wouldn’t have a problem with.

  “A relationship of convenience?” Redmond rolled the words around in his mouth with an expression that looked suspiciously like amusement. “Something to think about,” he conceded. “But not tonight — it’s getting late and we need to be fresh for the auditions tomorrow.”

  “Auditions?” Lisa squeaked, feeling sillier by the minute. Why had she assumed they’d just walk into a place on the show? There were dozens of other great couples on the scene at the moment, and some of them were even husband-and-wife partnerships. Lisa had never envied them before, but she did now. They’d have it so easy — no lies, no stories to keep straight, just being themselves and getting on with their lives. Not only that, but she envied them their lives. The evening with Redmond had given her a taste of how pleasant domesticity could be, when you were with someone who understood.

  Brandon had never understood her dancing. He’d always said he thought it was a nice hobby for her to have, but behind that he’d been jealous and suspicious, too, of the time she spent with her dancing partners. If Jerry hadn’t been gay, she suspected that her relationship with Brandon would have been even more shortlived. After Brandon, she’d vowed she’d only ever date dancers. Preferably good ones. It narrowed the pool somewhat, though, which was why she’d been single for a while now. Single and bored. At least the bored part was changing.