Just Say Yes (Escape to New Zealand Book 10)

by Rosalind James

  “But I don’t care,” Noelle said miserably. “I don’t care if she’s first or I’m first. First in what, anyway? She’s my twin. She’s my sister. I just want us to be like we were before. I miss her. We shared a room at home our whole lives, and now, it seems like she barely wants to talk to me. Like she’s impatient all the time.”

  The carpark was too crowded and noisy to have this conversation, with cars driving slowly by, drivers searching for a spot, mums pushing trollies filled with groceries and kids, a busker playing guitar and singing by the front doors. But this was when it was happening, and you had to seize your moments. Chloe said, “You can’t change Holly. You can only change yourself. You can work on your own life so you’re not desperate, so what she says doesn’t affect you so much, because the way you feel about yourself comes from yourself. Having it come from what Holly thinks, what anybody else thinks—those are shifting sands. You can’t stand on that. If you feel better about yourself, you’ll react less to Holly, or you’ll react differently, and the whole relationship will … it’ll change.” For good or bad, she didn’t say. It wouldn’t necessarily get better, but Noelle wouldn’t be as vulnerable to it.

  “So what do I do?” Noelle asked. “How do you do that—feel better about yourself?”

  “By tackling hard things and seeing them through,” Chloe said at once. “That’s the only way I know. Ballet, Uni, whatever. By measuring against what you could do last week, last month, and how far you’ve come. By worrying less about what the scale says and focusing on what you can do. Which you’re already doing. You’re so far along already, even if you can’t see it. By cooking better food because it fuels you, and when you want to eat something you shouldn’t, practicing dance for five minutes instead.”

  “Right.” Noelle wasn’t looking trembly and teary anymore. She was looking skeptical. “Between lectures, instead of going to the vending machine, I’m doing pliés.”

  “Why not?” Chloe said. “That’s what I do. It’s what all dancers do. When we’re nervous, when we’re stressed, when we’re afraid, when we’re angry—we don’t eat. We dance. Nobody’s watching you. Nobody cares nearly as much about you as you think. They care about themselves. They’re wondering what everybody thinks of them. Anyway, what do you have to lose? Nothing but kg’s and fear. And come on, let’s go buy some of that better food. Your brother’s got a rugby game in an hour and a half, and I want to watch it.”

  “You can come downstairs and watch with me, if you like,” Noelle suggested as they entered the store at last. “Kevin’s got the biggest screen TV you’ve ever seen. We could cook dinner together, maybe. You could show me how, and then we could watch.”

  “Do you watch, then?” Chloe pulled a trolley free, waited for Noelle to grab hers, and headed into the produce aisle. “Here’s a lesson for you,” she told Noelle. “No diets. Just shop the edges first. Fruit and veg, meat, eggs, milk, wholemeal bread. If it comes in a box or a freezer case or the bakery section, you don’t want it. You want simple, quick, and basic. I’ll show you.”

  She began tossing vegetables into the trolley with abandon, and Noelle said, “I don’t exactly watch. Rugby, I mean. I just have it on, and if they say Kevin’s name, I look.”

  Chloe had to laugh. “Me too. That’s me exactly.”

  That was all very well and good, but watching Kevin on TV, when he wasn’t there with her? Watching him carry the ball and churn through the tacklers with that much power? Seeing him doing some tackling himself, running an opposing player down with the blazing speed that was such a revelation in his big body, then dragging him to the ground?

  It was … frustrating.

  Oh, baby, he’d texted her. Neither can I.

  Having you up against the wall.

  It took her a long, long time to get to sleep that night, with no Zavy to distract her from the memory of Kevin’s hard mouth at her neck, his hand at the back of her head. How solid his body had been against hers, like nobody’s she’d ever felt. How much he’d wanted it, and how much he’d made her want it, too.

  By Sunday morning, she was restless. You could put it like that. Or you could say that she was jumping out of her skin.

  She had a coffee, and then she had another one. Zavy, who’d enjoyed his outing to the museum to the point of incoherence, was staying with his grandparents until tonight. Normally, she’d have left him until Monday morning and collected him after class, but she wasn’t taking that chance, not today.

  Rich hadn’t come around, though. She’d asked. She’d asked her mum, and then she’d asked Zavy. And still, she was collecting him tonight. Meanwhile, her apartment was clean, her pantry was stocked, she and Noelle had made two kinds of soup the night before, and containers of both were sitting in her fridge.

  Kevin would be home sometime today, and they were going out to dinner, with Noelle babysitting—willing, she’d said airily, “to stay as long as you want me.” All night, she hadn’t needed to say. Chloe knew what she’d meant.

  Just now, Kevin was somewhere over the Tasman Sea. On his way. Expecting everything.

  It had been so long since she’d had anybody’s hands but her own on her body, though. What if she’d trained herself to respond only to her own touch? What if Kevin wasn’t the lover she’d imagined—generous, patient, and willing to take his time? What if he was an entitled rugby star in bed, because that was all he’d ever had to be and nobody had ever even told him different? Or more likely—what if he was too nice, too ... all right, she’d think it. Boring?

  That wasn’t even the worst. What if she wasn’t what he was expecting? What if none of it really worked after all, and they had to make the awkward journey back to friendship?

  Her breath was shallow, and that wasn’t going to work. She grabbed her dance bag, and five minutes later, she was heading down the stairs.

  She had just opened her car door when the little Subaru that Holly and Noelle shared pulled into the drive with Holly behind the wheel.

  “Hi,” the girl said when she climbed out. “I missed the grocery shopping yesterday, I guess. Sorry.”

  “No worries,” Chloe said. “Did you have a good evening?”

  Holly was looking a bit white. “Oh, you know. Party. You know those Uni parties.”

  “Not really,” Chloe said. “I didn’t go to Uni, and dancers don’t tend to do many parties anyway.”

  “You sound like Noelle. Or Kevin. Or my mum and dad, for that matter.” Holly had a little color in her cheeks now. “Like having a drink or going to a party or even having a boyfriend gets in the way of the Serious Business of Life.”

  Chloe kept her tone mild. “I wasn’t lecturing. Why would I? How would I know? Like I said—I didn’t go to Uni. I only know my life, not yours.”

  “Oh.” Holly looked discomfited. “Sorry. I’m not feeling too flash, to tell you the truth.”

  “Noelle and I made soup,” Chloe said. “That might help.”

  Holly turned faintly green at the suggestion. “Or not. At least Kevin isn’t home yet. Where’s Zavy?”

  “At my mum and dad’s.” Chloe did her best to turn the conversation to a more neutral topic. It wouldn’t help Holly any to feel like she had another judgmental quasi-parental figure living here, telling her what to do. “Which gives me the chance to go to the studio and get in a couple good hours. Free time, eh.”

  “I’d think you’d just want a rest. Veg out or whatever.”

  Chloe smiled. “Ah. But you see—when you love what you do, it isn’t work.” She threw her bag in the car. “And I’m off to do it. See you.”

  She thought about Holly for a minute, then put her out of her mind. She was moving out in—well, in as few weeks as she could manage, Holly’s life choices truly weren’t her business, and there wasn’t much she could do about them anyway. She had heaps to keep her mind occupied all by itself, which was probably why she’d been thinking about somebody else instead. And absolutely none of those thoughts was getting her anywhe
re.

  She drove through the relative quiet of Sunday morning to the Arts Centre and let herself in. The studio space was only leased for her class times, but nobody used the big studio on Sunday mornings, so why not?

  Down the corridor, then, walking fast, not drawing attention to herself. Past the quiet concentration of a drawing class, the clatter and rattle of a tap class—Hugh’s brother Charlie was in that one—all the way to the end, to the shadowy room at the back.

  When we’re nervous, we dance.

  She thought about turning the lights on, but she didn’t, just took off her track pants and tied her dance skirt around her waist, pulled on her leg warmers and her ballet slippers, started her barre music, and began to warm up. And watched her unruly, chaotic thoughts settle.

  Nothing but the music and her body. Four walls of mirrors reflecting her ghostly figure, her black leotard and skirt blending into the shadows, her legs in their pink tights, her arms in her cropped pink ballet sweater moving through space, taking each position absolutely precisely and flowing into the next.

  Half an hour in, she sat on the floor and changed into her pointe shoes. The act of tying the ribbons around her ankles, tucking the ends out of sight as she had so many thousands of times before, flipped the switch all the way on. She stood up, leaned down to change the music, and that was it. That was better.

  Another half hour, and her hand wasn’t resting lightly on the barre anymore. She was in the middle of the floor, doing grand jetés, then pirouettes and fouetté turns around the room, finding her focus point and holding it through every dizzying revolution. Again and again, until, thoroughly warm, she stripped off the leg warmers and sweater. Until she was working at her full flexibility and power.

  But it wasn’t enough. The chaotic blend of emotions wouldn’t settle all the way, no matter what she did. She was going through her music, then, searching for what she needed, for the piece that would satisfy her, would let her express everything inside. The variation that would let her walk into it tonight, whatever it turned out to be.

  She found it. La Bayadère. Gamzatti in the temple, a witch of a princess and seductress showing off for the man she desired above anything. Letting him know how much she wanted to marry him, and what she was offering. Promising absolutely everything.

  She hadn’t danced this piece in a long, long time.

  It was perfect.

  Relax, Kevin told himself, shifting his left leg, trying to get it more comfortable in the driver’s seat. A deep thigh bruise, relic of a Waratahs player’s knee beneath his quad as he’d crashed over the try line the night before, kept trying to make its presence known.

  Sunday was for recovery. For ice and massage and, at most, golfing or swimming some of the soreness off. But he wasn’t thinking about any of those things.

  Chloe was going to dinner with him tonight, but tonight wasn’t soon enough. Not after those texts. He needed to see her now. At least to say hello. To her and Zavy, of course. Not just because he needed his hands on her body again.

  When he got home, though, her car wasn’t in the drive. He did his best to ignore the stab of disappointment and took his bag into the house, where he found Holly lying on the couch watching TV.

  “Schoolwork all done, then?” he asked her. He may never have experienced it himself, but he was a veteran of university students’ weekends—and their procrastination strategies—after housing both his brothers through their degrees.

  Holly said, without turning her head, “It’s Sunday morning, Kevin. And hello to you too.”

  Noelle wandered in and said, “Well done last night. Chloe and I watched you. And by the way?” She gave him a teasing smile, looking more cheerful than Holly, anyway. “Chloe watched more than me. She watched you. Also, we made soup, and there’s heaps extra if you want some. Two kinds. Not even burnt.”

  “Good on ya,” Kevin said. “She didn’t happen to say where she was going today, did she? I noticed her car’s gone.” He tried to keep it casual.

  She watched you. He wanted to watch her, too. Right now.

  “Zavy’s with his grandparents,” Noelle said.

  Kevin was digesting the implications of that when Holly said absently, one eye still on her program, “She said something about her studio, but it was a while ago.”

  “Oh.” He stood there for a second, and then he pulled out his phone and texted Chloe. His sisters watched him do it, and he didn’t care.

  No answer.

  He carried his bag into his bedroom, had his hands on his top button, starting to get out of his dress shirt and trousers, and his fingers stopped moving of their own accord.

  He didn’t stop to think whether it was stupid, whether it would work. He was picking up his car keys from the bedside table again and heading through the lounge. He didn’t tell Holly where he was going. He just left.

  He didn’t let himself think on the way to the Arts Centre, either, not even when he pulled into the three-quarters-empty carpark and saw the white Toyota. All he did was pull up beside her car, then run up the steps and into the building.

  Same dust motes floating in shafts of sunlight. Same murmur of voices from an art class in the first studio he passed. His leather soles sounding too loud against the wood floor of the passage as he walked by room after empty room. One dance class, barely-teenage girls in the now-familiar skirts and tights. But Chloe wasn’t teaching it.

  By the time he got to the end of the passage, his heart, which had begun beating harder as soon as he’d stepped out of the car, had picked up the pace to an uncomfortable extent. And then he looked in that last door and saw her.

  She didn’t see him.

  He was about to step inside the room when she stood up from where she’d been bent over the boom box in the corner. A fraught couple seconds, and the music began.

  Haunting and hypnotic, all strings and minor key. And Chloe, standing poised in the corner of the room, lifting one arm slowly overhead, then starting to move.

  Black leotard cut low, three thin straps crisscrossing over her slim back. Black skirt and pink tights. Light and darkness, an ethereal figure in the shadows. Dancing heat and sensuality, pulling a man down into the darkest places, luring him into her web. Making him know that there was no way out, and that he wouldn’t care, because he’d never want to shake those coils loose. All he’d want was to possess her, and if she ended up possessing him as well? That was a price he’d be willing to pay.

  It was ballet, and it was good. He could tell. But mostly, it was sex.

  He should have paid attention to the skill it took, to her strength and flexibility as she stood poised on the toes of one foot with the other foot nearly reaching her head and somehow, impossibly, balanced there. But he didn’t care. She was crossing the room like a cat, like a wraith, like the most dangerous, seductive vision. Spinning and turning, stretching and bending and beckoning, every step, every placement of her arms telling you that she desired, and she yearned, and if you wondered whether she actually loved, or whether it was an illusion? That was the danger of it. That was the sharp-toothed edge to the obsession that wanted to swallow you whole.

  She danced the music with all her grace and power, with passion and longing and aching need. The need to feel her lover’s hands sliding over her body, to feel him sliding into her, and the way she’d gasp when he did it. The need to yield, no matter what the consequences would be. The need to surrender everything.

  It was two minutes, or maybe it was three. And he could have sworn he didn’t take a breath the entire time.

  A final series of dizzying spins, and she was poised with one graceful foot stretching behind her, her long arms flung overhead, her back arched, her head thrown back. Passion and triumph, because she’d won. Because the man watching would do anything. Anything at all.

  It’s just a dance. He thought it, but it wasn’t true, and as much as he’d had to stand still and watch before—now, he had to move. He stepped inside the room, and there wasn�
��t enough space in his chest for his beating heart.

  She looked up.

  He didn’t say anything, and neither did she. Her eyes went wide, her lips parted, and she placed her arms out to the side with all her precision and hesitated for one bare half-second. And then she ran.

  She ran to him, and when she was less than a meter from him, she bent her knees the smallest bit and leaped.

  It was a leap of faith. He knew it even before she took off. And in that split second, his hands went out to catch her as she’d trusted they would, and they held her tight. Safe, and caught. Both. Absolutely. Both. He gripped her waist, and then he was lifting her straight over his head, watching in the shadowy reflection of the mirror opposite as her back arched, one leg bent, and her arms curved behind her.

  A white swan, carried over his head, her wings spread wide. Succumbing to her desire, and to his. Surrendering to love.

  The music was still playing, the strings carrying their aching message. He was lowering Chloe, and she was straightening. Slowly, slowly, her body sliding down his, touching every bit of him that had needed to feel her against him this entire week, reminding him of how hard that wait had been. Her graceful arms encircling his neck, twining around him. Accepting him, and claiming him.