He wasn’t sure he’d be able to stick with that in this case.
There was a sound at the door and Michael walked in. “Hey, guys.”
“Daddy!” Cory raced over to him.
“Daddy,” Drew cried, waving his arms.
With profound relief, Brady walked up to Michael and handed Drew over.
“What happened here?” Michael asked, glancing at the tearstained cheeks.
“He tripped on the carpet. The scars shouldn’t show much once he’s grown.”
“Thanks for the good news.” Michael bounced Drew a little and rubbed Cory’s hair, but strain hovered around his mouth and eyes. “So what have you been up to?” His gaze drifted to the cards on the coffee table.
“Counting,” Cory informed him, jumping up and down. “Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king.”
Michael gave Brady a hard look. “What have you been teaching them?”
“Got any money?” Cory asked.
“I can explain,” Brady said quickly.
“I hope so.”
“Look, how’s Lindsay?”
“They’re keeping her overnight for observation.” Michael let Drew slip down. “Thanks for taking over.”
“Not a problem. Any time, you should know that.”
Michael scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Mom and Dad are visiting Keeley this weekend. I didn’t know who else to call.”
“So, do you know what’s going on?”
“Well, she’s going to be okay. The babies are okay, too.”
Brady let out a breath and more tension than he knew he’d been holding onto. “Good news.”
“Yeah, good news. I didn’t know what to think this morning. There was blood everywhere, it seemed like. Wigged me out.”
It was enough to make a guy swear off the wife and family thing altogether, Brady thought. Bad enough to deal with the labor part of it, but the panic and powerlessness of knowing something was deeply wrong with the person you cared about most and you couldn’t do a thing about it? He’d stick with kayaking, he decided. “Want coffee?”
“No. I’ve been sucking it down for the last couple of hours, waiting for the doctors and the tests.” Michael shook his head and went into the kitchen. “Nerve-racking as hell.”
“So what’s the story? What’s wrong?”
“The short version is placental abruption.”
“Oh, well, hell, I could have told you that.”
“Funny.” He tossed Brady a Coke and took one for himself, and then as an afterthought grabbed juice boxes for the boys. “Her placenta’s detaching from the uterus. Fortunately not too much or we’d have lost the babies and maybe her. As it is, things’ll be okay, they think. They want to keep her a couple of days to make sure it’s fine but after that she can come home.”
“Well, that’s good,” Brady said, cracking open his Coke.
Michael poked the straw in Drew’s juicebox and handed it to him. “I do,” Cory demanded, reaching for his. Michael shrugged and passed it down. “That’s not all. They want her on bed rest until the delivery.”
“Bummer.”
“Life’s going to be different.”
“I guess. That’s what, four months she’s got left?”
“Five.”
“Yeah. You don’t take a woman who just ran the Portland marathon and tell her to lie around for five months. Better lay in a supply of DVDs,” Brady advised.
“She’ll get through it. She’s scared enough for the twins that she’ll do whatever they tell her to.”
Brady nodded and glanced down. “Hey, you need some help?” He crouched down to help Cory, who was trying with great concentration and without much success to get his straw to puncture his juicebox.
“Me,” Cory said stubbornly.
“Got to get the straw out of the wrapper, my man,” Brady said, slipping off the plastic and handing the tube to Cory.
“Get ready for some changes. For starters, we’re going to have to jettison the theater.”
Brady stared up at Michael. “What?”
“Total bed rest for five months, Brady. I mean everything. No cooking, no cleaning, no taking care of the kids, no nothing.”
“No sex?”
“You’re not funny.”
“Sorry. Maybe you should get a nanny. Delegate.”
“This is my family,” Michael said. “I don’t delegate. I’m barely going to be able to keep up with the properties we’ve got. No way am I going to be able to take on developing the theater, as well.”
Brady rose. “But I’ve got the concept, Michael, and it’s killer. Tango. We do it as a dance theater. You know, performances, lessons.”
“Line dancing at eight?”
Brady shot him a withering look. “You know what I mean.”
“It’s not going to happen. C’mon, guys,” Michael said to the boys, and headed out of the kitchen.
Brady followed him. “So, what, you’re going to let it sit there for five months? Can we afford that?”
“No way, we can’t afford that.” Michael continued down to his bedroom. “It’ll eat up half the money we’ve earmarked for construction. By the end of five months, we won’t be able to finish it anyway. We’re going to have to pull out.”
“We can’t pull out.” Not when he could already see it taking shape in his mind’s eye. Not when he knew it would be a success. “We’ll never get a property like this again,” he protested.
“Brady, I can’t do it. I don’t have the bandwidth.” He ducked into the closet.
“Delegate. Hire subcontractors.”
Michael came out with an overnight bag, glowering. “I’ve got a better idea, smart guy. You want it so much, you hire the subcontractors.”
Brady blinked. He could feel the breeze blowing into his open mouth. “Me?”
“Yeah, you.” Michael gave a sardonic smile. “Pulling out looks a whole lot better now, doesn’t it?”
Brady narrowed his eyes. “No, it doesn’t.” He watched as Michael opened a couple of drawers before coming up with a nightgown. Pulling out was out of the question. Not going to happen. And if Michael couldn’t do it, then that meant…“I’ll do it.”
“Yeah, right.”
His tone was enough to make Brady bristle. “Hell yeah, right. Why not? How hard can it be, if I get the right people?”
“Dude, you have no idea.” Michael crossed back to the closet to toss in Lindsay’s robe and slippers. He headed to the bathroom to rifle through drawers, unearthing a brush and squinting at bottles of lotion. “Moisturizer, cleanser,” he muttered. “I don’t know what this stuff is.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to figure it out. Like I will,” Brady added. “I make beer for four different places. I ought to be able to handle a renovation.”
Giving up, Michael tossed all of the bottles into the overnight bag and zipped it up. He turned to the hall. “Look, I’ve got to get back to the hospital. You want to do this, then do it. Just don’t screw up, because I’m not going to have time to bail you out.”
“I’m not going to need you to bail me out,” Brady insisted.
“Good. Then we’re all set.” He bent down to give the boys hugs. “Daddy’s got to go for a while but I’ll be back and then we’ll go to the park. Meantime, your uncle will be here.”
He rose and looked at Brady. “And do me a favor, huh? Don’t teach ’em to draw to an inside straight.”
5
SHE LOVED TEACHING. Not that she didn’t love the dance—of course she loved the dance—but there was something about watching a student go from staring blankly to mastering a figure that Thea found incredibly satisfying.
There had been a time she’d expected to dance for a living. That had been before she’d grown to nearly six feet and before she’d found out how much of a battle the life of a professional dancer was: the relentless auditions, the frenzied scuffle for work, the desperately low pay. And the long, long odds against success.
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But then her dance instructor challenged her to choreograph a showcase and teach it to a performance team, and it was like coming home. Suddenly she knew her future—she would teach, she would choreograph. She’d be the driving force behind the performances.
Even when the lightning bolt had hit and she’d moved to New York, she’d continued taking daily classes to hone her craft. Back then, Robyn had been just another classmate with ambitions of Broadway glamour. Thea had been the one who’d wanted to teach.
Ironic that Robyn was the one who’d wound up with this, the dance studio, while Thea had quit modern and jazz dance entirely, all of it too bound up with what had happened in New York. She’d turned to tango and the milongas to satisfy what had once been her passion. She’d turned to tango and the milongas to satisfy her longing for the human touch.
Now, somehow, it felt as if she’d come full circle, as if she was back where she belonged. Stepping through the gap in the chest-high counter that separated the entry area from the ballroom was about more than stepping onto the pale, sprung wood floor. It was about returning to a life she thought she’d abandoned.
And it felt good.
Carla Petrocelli and Chuck Crocker weren’t dance aficionados; they were there because Carla had a dream of waltzing in white at their wedding. And from the way Chuck looked at her, whatever Carla wanted, he’d do his damnedest to get, including private dance lessons. Beefy and a little awkward, Chuck stood in his U of O T-shirt, scrubbing at his cropped reddish hair. Carla was small and pinch-faced, but when she glanced at him, something about her glowed.
It made Thea smile. “All right. Let’s put some music on and you can warm up. That’ll give me an idea of what you know and we can go from there.” And with a push of a button, the strains of “Moon River” filled the room.
Frowning with concentration, Chuck led Carla through the steps of a basic, lips moving as he counted for them both. Thea had to give him credit, he was keeping to something approximating waltz time—it just had nothing to do with the actual music playing. And yet they both looked happy, laughing when Chuck stumbled over Carla’s toes, the reflections of their grinning selves replicated hundredfold as they moved into the mirrored corner.
“Okay, let me give you the count. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three,” she said, clapping every count of one. Chuck, she was gratified to see, managed to get on the beat as they made the turn. Thea followed along with them. “Good, Chuck, that’s great,” she said as they headed back to the front and she turned after them. “One-two-three, one-two-three, one…”
And the words died in her throat.
Chuck and Carla moved blithely on, even as Thea stopped in the center of the ballroom floor, staring at the man she’d never expected to see again.
Brady.
He stood there watching her, arms folded on the white counter at the edge of the ballroom. She fought the urge to press her hands to her cheeks to cool them. With his disheveled blond hair and his crooked grin, he was more than enough to have her pulse speeding. And without warning she had a sudden, vivid flash of lying under him in bed, feeling his back muscles flex under her fingers as he stroked his—
Thea moved her head to ward off the memory. She’d left without a word. If positions had been reversed, she and her friends would have considered him the prince of jerks. What did that make her, and was he there to tell her that?
For that matter, how had he found her? The milonga, of course, she realized immediately. The name of Robyn’s studio. And tracking down Robyn’s studio meant tracking down her. In this web-enabled day and age, getting lost and staying that way wasn’t as easy as it had once been.
He saw her looking and extended his index and middle finger in a peace sign. And grinned in enjoyment at her frown.
Flushing, Thea turned back to Chuck and Carla. Okay, so rudeness aside, couldn’t the guy take a hint? There had been a reason she’d gone. She didn’t want him here. She didn’t want to see him again, to deal with what she felt. It was too much, too soon.
And if he thought she was going to break off from her lesson to talk to him, he thought wrong. Robyn’s students had paid for her time and her time they were going to get. “Okay,” she said briskly. “Let’s learn a new figure.”
Drilling Chuck and Carla on first the man’s part, then the woman’s part individually until they got it took some time. Dancing through the steps with each one of them took more. And Brady stayed. A normal man would have gotten bored, or at the very least, tired. A normal man would have left long since.
Brady stood and watched.
Thea could feel the heat of his gaze on the back of her neck as she ran through the steps with Carla. Dancing with a woman didn’t bother her. She’d long ago perfected the ability to hold her frame, arms rigid to keep their spacing, gaze aimed resolutely over the shoulder of her partner so that she could dance the step without eye contact. It came in handy when dealing with anyone she wanted to maintain a professional distance with, particularly students.
Of course, it wasn’t Carla she was worried about.
Three quick steps in succession and a spin, then a pivot to promenade and presto, they’d made a left turn. Thea led it again and suddenly the figure began to flow.
“I think I’ve got it,” Carla said in excitement.
“One more time,” Thea suggested. Getting it was one thing; it was important to cement it. Three quick steps and turn, then pivot to promenade. Three quick steps and turn, then pivot and presto!
She was staring straight at Brady.
Who raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, fanning himself like he was overheated.
She refused to be amused, Thea thought as she finished the step. “Okay, you two ready to give it a go?” she asked Chuck and Carla instead.
“We’ll try,” Chuck said.
Try being the operative word. Still, by the end of the lesson, they were running through it reasonably well. Thea fought the temptation to ask them to stay longer. “Good job,” she told them. “A couple more weeks of this and you’ll be ready to wow everyone.”
Laughing, they walked off the floor to the entry area. And though she was tempted to stall and dry mop the floor with baby powder, she followed them. Granted, it was justifiable maintenance but she’d be putting off the inevitable, which was lame. Best to deal with Brady now and get it over with.
He watched her as she walked up, making her conscious of every step she took. She wore high-heeled dance shoes and a blue-violet wraparound skirt with a stretchy black tank top. Serviceable, especially in a ballroom that never managed to stay cool enough. It was her typical lesson outfit. She’d never thought much about the fact that the skirt stopped a couple of inches above her knees.
Until now.
“You’re quite a teacher,” he said as she drew near.
“Enjoying yourself?” She stopped, keeping the counter in between them, a nice, safe solid barrier.
“Yeah. Especially the hot girl-on-girl dancing.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing here?”
“You disappeared. Figured I had to do something to find you. Was it something I said?” The corner of his mouth quirked.
Thea pressed her palms down on the white countertop and tried not to think about how good that mouth had tasted. “With that phone call, it looked to me like you had plenty going on. I decided I’d get out of your hair.”
“You forgot to say goodbye.”
The shift of her shoulder wasn’t quite a shrug. “We were pretty well done.”
“I don’t think so.” He ran his fingertips over the back of her hand. Instantly, all her nerve endings went to the alert. When she moved her hand, he grinned. “So what is it with you? I thought we had a good time. I did, anyway.” He gave her a wicked look. “And I’m pretty sure you did, too, unless you’re really good at faking.”
“I don’t fake.”
“I remember that.”
There was the low bong of t
he downstairs door as the students for the next class began to arrive. Perfect. All she needed was an audience.
“Look, Brady, the other night was great but I don’t usually do that kind of thing.”
His smile widened. “I thought you did it pretty well.”
She could feel her cheeks heat. “That’s not what I meant. I don’t usually sleep with strangers.”
“All the more reason we should get to know one another.”
The last thing she needed to do was to dive into one of her trademark bad relationships. She’d meant what she’d said to Robyn—if she was going to get involved, she was going to do it right, and not with a guy who already demonstrably didn’t know how to take no for an answer. She’d been there too many times already. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—let herself go there again. “Look, you seem like a really nice person but I’m not looking to get involved in something right now.”
“Why not? Is there a guy?” He caught up her left hand and inspected it.
She worked hard not to react even as he studied her. His eyes were very green as he raised his brows.
“No ring. No husband, I guess. Boyfriend?” he asked.
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
She scowled. “Of course not.”
“That makes two of us. So then what’s the problem?”
She heard the door to the back studio at the far side of the ballroom open. It would be Robyn and one of her students coming out from their private lesson. In the entry area, the dancers for the next class chatted as they put on their suede soled shoes. Time to end this quickly, Thea decided.
“There’s not a problem, Brady. I’m simply not interested.”
“Really?” He toyed with her fingers. “I don’t think I believe that.” When he leaned forward, watching her eyes closely, her pulse began to speed. He couldn’t kiss her, not here, not in front of everyone.
And she shouldn’t want him to.
“Nope,” he said softly. “I definitely don’t believe that.”
Thea wet her lips. “Look, I don’t have time to deal with this. The next class is starting in about five minutes. You shouldn’t have shown up here.”
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