by Mindy Klasky
“Really?” Rye lowered his voice and stepped closer to Kat. He practically nuzzled her neck as he said, “Any woman?” She shivered, a delicious trembling that made him think truly evil thoughts. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some fresh air.”
“I can’t leave Amanda!”
He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “Hey, Amanda!” When the woman looked up from the dance floor, he pointed once to Kat, once to himself, and once to the door. Amanda laughed and nodded, waving goodbye to both of them. Rye settled one hand on the small of Kat’s back as he guided her through the crowd.
A cool evening breeze hit them like an Arctic blast. “Come here,” he said, pulling her around the corner of the building. They were sheltered from the wind there, and from the prying eyes of new arrivals to the bar. A bench was pushed up against the rough wooden wall. He gestured toward it and waited for Kat to take a seat. Before she had fully settled, he sat beside her, closer than was strictly necessary.
She wore some sort of sleek black top, one that revealed every bit as much of her figure as it covered, even with its long sleeves. The neckline swooped down, way down, reminding him of the sensitive hollow at the base of her throat. That patch of vulnerable flesh was now marked by a sparkling ruby pendant—as if he could forget it. His fingers twitched, and he resisted the urge to pull at the matching crimson scarf around her waist.
Shivering in the twilight air, Kat rubbed her hands against her arms. “I bet this is where you take all your women.” She surprised him for the second time that night, squirming closer to his side, as if she wanted to soak up every ounce of his body heat.
“Just the ones I want to hear talk,” he said, yawning a little in a useless attempt to clear the dullness from his ears. Andy’s joint was always fun on Friday nights, but the band was far too loud.
“Talk,” Kat purred, placing a hand on his thigh. “Is that why you asked me outside?”
This was a Kat he hadn’t seen before. Sure, she’d let him kiss her in Rachel’s kitchen. And it had seemed second nature to take her hand when she was so worried about Niffer. He’d enjoyed that feeling, that closeness, that sense of protecting her, and he hadn’t let go as he walked her back to Susan and Mike’s house.
He’d spent the week up in Richmond, though. A week of business. Of remembering his priorities. With his contractor’s license properly filed and a dozen business meetings completed, he was newly charged with determination to make Harmon Contracting a success.
Except… Now that he was away from the office? Back in Eden Falls? And breathing in Kat’s intoxicating scent…?
Her fingers started to move in distracting patterns, tracing the double-stitched seam on his jeans as if she’d glimpsed his dreams all week long. His body leaped to immediate attention, and he barely swallowed a groan. He leaned forward and found her face already tilted toward him, her lips eagerly parted for his kiss. Heat rolled through him as he breathed in the honey apricot of her hair. He tangled one hand in the lush strands, using the other to trace the shape of that incredible, clinging black top.
He outlined her lower lip with the tip of his tongue, grinning as he heard a needy moan gather at the back of her throat. Her hands were working their own magic, one fiddling with the top button of his shirt, the other continuing its exploration of his increasingly tented jeans. “Kat,” he breathed, and then he sealed their kiss.
Heat, and slick velvet, and a pounding, urgent need. But behind that, under her sweet cry, he tasted the sharp bite of hops. Beer. He was shocked to realize that she’d been drinking. Sure, she was an adult; she was allowed to drink alcohol. But his mind refused to reconcile the notion of Kat, the ice princess, cutting loose. Kat, the tightly bound queen of control, tossing back a couple.
All of a sudden he understood the boldness in her hands, the brazen teasing in her words.
He shifted his hand from the back of her head, stopped crushing her close. Instead, he brought his palm around to cup the line of her jaw, using the motion to soften the end of his plunging kiss. She pulled back, just enough for him to look into her platinum eyes. He asked, “How much have you had to drink?”
She looked confused. “Just a couple of beers.”
A couple of beers. With her frame? And he was willing to bet that she didn’t have any tolerance at all—she couldn’t possibly make a practice of hanging out at bars, pounding down a few brewskis on a Friday night.
He leaned in for another kiss, this one quick. Chaste.
“What?” she protested. “I’m an adult. I’m allowed to have a couple of beers.”
“Of course you are. But I’m not going to take advantage of you like this.”
“It’s not taking advantage if I want it, too.”
Her blustering response made him certain he was making the right decision. The Kat he knew would never throw herself at him like that. What had she told him, one of those days when he was hanging out at the dance studio? She had goals and strategies and rules.
He clenched his jaw and pulled away from her. “Come on,” he said, keeping his voice as light as possible. “Let’s get something to eat.”
Kat shivered, freezing now that Rye had pulled away from her. She plucked at the scarf around her waist, suddenly ashamed. Two lousy beers. How much could that have impaired her judgment?
But the world was just starting to swirl around the edges—not enough to make her dizzy, but more than enough to tell her she was over her limit. She thought about what she had done, about where her hands had just been, and she was overwhelmed with a scarlet wash of embarrassment.
“Kat?” Rye’s voice was gentle. “Let’s go get some dinner at the Garden Diner.”
“I don’t want dinner,” she whispered.
“What? You’re going to tell me that dinner goes against your dancer rules?”
More than fooling around on a bench outside a backroads bar? he meant. Her eyes shot up at the amusement in his voice, and her shame started to morph into anger. “What about you?” she challenged him. “Did it take you a couple of shots to come over and talk to me, just like Brandon? I bet you shouldn’t be driving around Eden Falls right now.”
“I don’t need liquor to help me do what I want to do,” Rye said. She heard the passion behind his words, the absolute certainty that he had wanted to talk to her, to be with her. Even if he’d been gone for the entire week. Even if he’d been the one to pull back just now. His voice was only marginally less fierce as he said, “I stuck to soda water tonight. I have an early day tomorrow, back up in Richmond. A site visit for a prospective client.”
Ashamed of her actions all over again, she shook her head and hugged herself, trying to ignore the incipient spinning of the world around her.
“Come on, Kat. You’re the one who said you’re an adult. Let’s be adults together.” She flashed him a mortified glance. “Let’s go get something to eat,” he clarified.
She sighed and let him pull her to her feet. One single step, though, on the gravel footpath, and she found that her balance was compromised by the damn walking boot. What had she been thinking, betting Amanda about the band, drinking that second beer?
She let Rye slip an arm around her waist, helping her to his truck. At least there was no question of his demanding that she drive tonight. That was one reason that she could actually thank Amanda. She closed her eyes in mortification as Rye reached across her to work her seat belt.
He made small talk as he drove to the diner. She couldn’t be sure what he was saying, something about his father finding a new seed-line of heirloom carrots to plant on the family’s organic farm, and Rye’s sister Jordana developing a series of recipes based on the vegetables, something for a restaurant she was planning to start.
The more Rye talked, the hungrier Kat realized she was. By the time they got
to the diner, she was fantasizing about home-cooked food—turkey dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy, meat loaf with peas and carrots. Rye helped her out of the truck, and he kept a protective hand beneath her elbow as he guided her into the diner, but she was already feeling much steadier on her feet.
She studied the entire menu, front to back, but ultimately, she followed Rye’s lead. A bacon cheeseburger, slathered with blue cheese, thick with lettuce and juicy tomato. Fries on the side, with a single sizzling onion ring to top it all off.
Rye watched Kat tackle her meal with the single-minded determination that she devoted to everything. He’d half expected her to chicken out at the last moment, to order a side salad with a slice of lemon or some other girlie excuse for a meal.
But he had to hand it to her—she matched him bite for bite, washing down burger and fries with generous amounts of sweet tea. Maybe it was the beers that Amanda had conned her into drinking, maybe it was simple craving for a single ridiculous splurge of a meal, but Kat dug in with a gusto that astonished him.
Okay. Maybe not “astonished.” He’d felt the illicit energy coiled inside her on the bench outside of Andy’s. He’d felt a little of the wicked damage she could do when she let herself go unleashed.
But he’d never imagined that she would wreak so much havoc on a Smoky Blue Burger Platter. And he was damned pleased to see that she could.
“So,” he said when they both finally came up for air. “The floorboards should be ready for installation next week. It’ll take two days to get them down. Another day to set the ceiling tiles, and then a couple of days for painting. We’ll be done in a week.”
Seven days, Kat thought. Seven days, and then all the damage would be repaired. Rye would be finished at the studio, free to stay up in Richmond forever.
“Wonderful!” she said, forcing every ounce of fake cheerfulness that she could summon into the word. Oops. She must have poured it on a little too thick. Rye was looking at her funny. She cleared her throat. “I worked with Niffer’s teacher, and I’ve sent home flyers with all the kids in the elementary school. We’ve already got two summer sessions of Beginning Ballet filled, and one of Intermediate.”
“That’s great! But I thought that you didn’t have anyone to teach.”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you. I found an old recital program in the back room on Tuesday. It was from last summer’s performance, so I could still track down most of the teachers listed there. Three of them agreed to come back.”
“I knew you could do it.” There. That was the way enthusiasm really sounded.
Kat took another long swig of sweet tea. It was impossible to find the stuff in New York—not that she would have indulged at any point in the past ten years. Stirring artificial sweetener into iced tea didn’t come anywhere close to savoring the supersaturated syrup of her childhood.
Feeling a little rebellious, she tried to imagine what her dance colleagues would say about her Eden Falls night out on the town—beer, burgers and enough sweet tea to float a luxury yacht. What did it matter, though? She couldn’t remember the last time she had laughed as hard as she’d laughed with Amanda. And there were a lot worse ways to spend an evening than sitting across from a man as gorgeous as Rye Harmon.
Even if her fellow dancers would vow to eat nothing but lemon juice on iceberg lettuce for an entire week, if they had indulged like Kat.
“Hey,” Rye prompted. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She smiled. And she was. She was more than fine. She was relaxed and happy. “I was just thinking about what everyone is doing in New York. It’s Friday night, so there’s a lot of scrambling. The company does matinees on Saturday and Sunday, so everyone is probably a bit crazy.”
He heard the fondness in her voice, the easy familiarity with routine. Sure, she might call them “crazy”, but it was a craziness she knew and loved. “You must really miss it,” he said.
“I do,” she answered, but he caught the pause before she went on. As if she were looking for words. Searching for a memory. “I miss the feeling of testing myself, of pushing myself to do the most my body can do. I miss the feeling of becoming another person, someone totally different from me.” She sighed. “I miss…” She trailed off, swirling an orphaned fry in ketchup.
“What, Kat?”
“Sometimes I’m not sure that I can do it.” The admission seemed to unlock something in her, to free her to rush on with more words, more confessions. “The big parts, the principal dancer roles…I need to impress the company director, to prove I have what it takes. That’s why I pushed myself so hard before I got hurt—extra rehearsals, extra sessions at the barre. And all I ended up with was this stupid boot and a forced month off.”
He knew what she wanted him to say. He knew that she wanted to hear that she would succeed, that she would conquer her injury, that she would come back stronger than ever.
But he couldn’t be certain of that. He didn’t know enough about her world, about the demands of ballet life in distant New York City. No matter what he thought of her, how great he thought she was, he couldn’t say that she had the pure strength, the unalloyed physical power to master her chosen profession’s greatest challenges.
“You’ll do the best that you can,” he said. “And if the people who make the decisions are too foolish to take every last drop of devotion that you can give them, then you’ll figure out the next step. And you’ll master that. Goals, strategies and rules, right? That’s what someone told me once.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whoever said anything that stupid?”
“Not stupid.” He shook his head. “Not stupid at all.”
She flinched under the intensity of his gaze. Now that she had finished eating, the last tendrils of her tipsiness had floated away. She was sober, but her body still remembered the way that she had used it. She felt tired, raw. And with Rye staring at her that way, she felt totally exposed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “That stupid formula helped me when I was fourteen years old. It’s probably not good for anything anymore. Not ten years later.”
“It’s good enough for me,” Rye affirmed. “Up in Richmond this week, I applied your ‘stupid formula.’ I got more done in five days than I had in five weeks before that.” Of course, that was the first time that he’d spent five consecutive days in his new office. The first time that he hadn’t let a so-called emergency drag him back to Eden Falls.
“I’m glad I was able to help you,” Kat said, trying to ignore the fact that her smile was a little wobbly around the edges.
It was funny, really. It was almost like there was a limited amount of “get up and go” to go around. Rye had listened to her, and he was moving forward with his career plan, full steam ahead. Kat, meanwhile, caught herself repeatedly musing on what life would be like if she stayed in Eden Falls.
How would it feel to teach at Morehouse Dance Academy? To stand in the center of the room, clapping out a rhythm for aspiring ballerinas, for good girls who wanted to be graceful and pretty and never, ever dance professionally on any stage, anywhere? How would it feel to stop by Susan and Mike’s home every day, to watch her father continue to gain back his strength, to sit at her mother’s kitchen table and drink tea using her grandmother’s china? How would it feel to greet Niffer every afternoon as she got off her school bus, chattering about art projects, and reading class, and learning the capitals of all the states?
Wonderful, Kat realized, even as she was astonished to recognize that truth. Absolutely, unqualifiedly wonderful. In two weeks of living in Eden Falls, Kat had already had more fun than she had in the past two years in New York.
And what did that say about her chosen home? Her chosen career?
“Hey,” Rye said, interrupting her thoughts. “Ready to get out of here?”
She nodded, sliding out
of the fake leather booth. Rye paid at the cash register, waving away her attempt to reach her wallet. He held the door for her, and he ushered her into the truck, but this time she fastened her own seat belt. He smiled and stroked a single finger across her cheek before he closed the door. She shivered at the unspoken promise of that touch.
It took less time than she expected to drive to Rachel’s house. Rye put the truck in Park and killed the engine. “Where’s Niffer tonight?”
“Sleeping over at Mama and Daddy’s. She has them wrapped around her little finger.”
“Kids have a way of doing that.”
She knew that it was her turn to say something, to make a joke about Niffer, about family, about something light and easy and funny. For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine what she could possibly say. “Want to come in for a drink?” she finally settled on. “Of tea,” she hastened to add. “Or, er, water. That’s all we have inside.”
“That’ll be enough.” Kat watched as he took the keys from the ignition, carelessly tossing them by his feet. That was yet another aspect of life in Eden Falls that she’d never see in New York. If anyone were foolish enough to own a pickup in New York, they’d keep it secured under lock and key—maybe with a mad Doberman in the cab to deter potential thieves. Somehow, it made Kat’s heart sing to think of a place that was safe enough to leave car keys on the floor mat.
Inside Rachel’s home, Kat headed toward the kitchen. “Let me get you a drink.”
Rye caught her before she could cross the foyer, folding his hand across her flame-red scarf. “I have a confession. I’m not really thirsty.”
A frisson of excitement raced across her scalp as she registered the rumble of his words. She let him turn her around, felt his other hand settle on her waist.
She was a dancer. She was used to being held by men. She was accustomed to the feeling of strong fingers on her flesh, gripping her tightly, holding her upright.