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“Thank you,” she said, glancing at the ticket stubs as he passed them back to Artem.
Artem kept his hand planted on the small of her back as he led her to the lobby bar. It took every ounce of self-control he possessed not to keep that hand from sliding down, over the dainty, delectable curve of her behind, in plain view of everyone.
Get ahold of yourself.
His hand had no business on her bottom. Not here, nor anyplace else. Things were so much simpler when he could stick to the confines of his office.
Just as Artem realized he’d begun to think of the corner office as his rather than his father’s, Ophelia turned to face him. Tulle billowed beneath his fingertips. He really needed to take his hands off her altogether. He would. Soon.
“I haven’t even asked what we’re seeing this evening. What’s the repertoire?” She frowned slightly, as if trying to remember something. Like she had a catalog of ballets somewhere in her pretty head.
Artem hadn’t the vaguest idea. Mrs. Burns had handed him an envelope containing the tickets as he’d walked out the door at five o’clock. He examined the ticket stubs and his jaw clenched involuntarily.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
“Artem?” Ophelia blinked up at him.
“Petite Mort,” he said flatly.
“Petite Mort,” she echoed, her cheeks going instantly pink. “Really?”
“Really.” He held up the ticket stubs for inspection.
She stared at them. “Okay, then. That’s certainly...interesting.”
He lifted a brow.
“Petite mort means ‘little death’ in French,” Ophelia said, with the seriousness of a reference librarian. She’d decided to tackle the awkwardness of the situation head-on, apparently. Much to Artem’s chagrin, he found this attitude immensely sexy. “It’s a euphemism for...”
“Orgasm.” Artem was uncomfortably hard. In the champagne line at the ballet. Marvelous. “I’m aware.”
What had he done to deserve this? Fate must be seriously pissed to have dealt him this kind of torturous hand. Of all the ballets...
Petite Mort.
He’d never seen this performance. In fact, he knew nothing about it. Perhaps it wasn’t as provocative as it sounded.
It didn’t matter. Not really. His thoughts had already barreled right where they didn’t belong. Now there was no stopping them. Not when he could feel the tender warmth of Ophelia’s body beneath the palm of his hand. Not when she was right there, close enough to touch. To kiss.
He looked at her, and his gaze lingered on the diamonds decorating the base of her throat. That’s where he wanted to kiss her. Right there, where he could feel the beat of her pulse under his tongue. There. And elsewhere.
Everywhere.
His jaw clenched again. Harder this time. Petite Mort. How was he supposed to sit in the dark beside Ophelia all night and not think about touching her? Stroking her. Entering her. How could he help but envision what she looked like when she came? Or imagine the sounds she made. Cries in the dark.
How could he not dream of the myriad ways in which he might bring about her little death? Her petite mort.
“Sir?” Somewhere in the periphery of Artem’s consciousness he was aware of a voice, followed by the clearing of a throat. “Mr. Drake?”
He blinked against the image in his head—Ophelia, beneath him, bare breasted in the moonlight, coming apart in his arms—and forced himself to focus on the bartender. They’d somehow already made it to the front of the line.
He forced a smile. “My apologies. My mind was elsewhere.”
“Can I get you anything, sir?” The bartender slid a pair of cocktail napkins across the counter, which was strewn with items for sale. Ballet shoes, posters, programs.
Artem glanced at the Petite Mort program and the photograph on its cover, featuring a pair of dancers in flesh-colored bodysuits, their eyes closed and limbs entwined. His brows rose, and he glanced at Ophelia to gauge her reaction, but her gaze was focused elsewhere. She wore a dreamlike expression, as if she’d gone someplace faraway.
Artem could only wonder where.
* * *
Ophelia had to be seeing things.
The pointe shoes on display alongside the Petite Mort programs and collectible posters couldn’t possibly be hers. Being back in the theater was messing with her head. She was suffering from some sort of nostalgia-induced delusion.
She forced herself to look away from them and focus instead on the bartender.
“I hope you enjoy the ballet this evening.” He smiled at her.
He looked vaguely familiar. What if he recognized her?
She smiled in return and held her breath, hoping against hope he didn’t know who she was.
“Mr. Drake?” The bartender didn’t give her a second glance as he directed his attention toward Artem.
Good. He hadn’t recognized her. She didn’t want her past colliding with her present. It was better to make a clean break. Besides, if anyone from Drake Diamonds learned who she was, they’d also find out exactly why she’d stopped dancing. She couldn’t take walking into the Fifth Avenue store and having everyone there look at her with pity.
Everyone or a certain someone?
She pushed that unwelcome question right out of her head. She shouldn’t be thinking that way about Artem. She shouldn’t be caressing his face in the back of limousines, and she shouldn’t be standing beside him at the ballet with his hand on the small of her back, wanting nothing more than to feel the warmth of that hand on her bare skin.
And the repertoire. Petite Mort.
My God.
She sneaked another glance at the pointe shoes, mainly to avoid meeting her date’s penetrating gaze. And because they were there. Demanding her attention. One shoe tucked into the other like a neat satin package, wound with pink ribbon.
They could have been anyone’s pointe shoes, and most probably were. The company always sold shoes that had been worn by the ballerinas. Pointe shoes that had belonged to the principal dancers sometimes went for as much as two-fifty or three hundred dollars, which provided a nice fund-raising boost for the company.
She told herself they weren’t hers. Why would her shoes be offered for sale when she was no longer performing, anyway?
Still. There was something so familiar about them. And she couldn’t help noticing they were the only pair that didn’t have an autograph scrawled across the toe.
Beside her, Artem placed their order. “Two glasses of Veuve Clicquot Rosé, please.”
He removed his hand from her back to reach for his wallet, and she knew it had to be her imagination, but Ophelia felt strangely unmoored by the sudden loss of his touch.
He looked at her, and as always it felt as though he could see straight inside her. Could he tell how fractured she felt? How being here almost made it seem like she was becoming the old Ophelia? Ophelia Baronova. “Anything else, darling?”
Darling.
He shouldn’t be calling her darling. It was almost as bad as princess, and she hated it. She hated it so much that she sort of loved it.
“The pointe shoes.” With a shaky hand, she gestured toward the pastel ballet shoes. “Can I see them please?”
“Of course, miss.” The bartender passed them to her while Artem watched.
If he found it odd that she wanted to hold them, he didn’t let it show. His expression was cool, impassive. As always, she had no idea what he was thinking.
And for once, Ophelia didn’t care. Because the moment she touched those shoes, she knew. She knew. If flesh had a memory, remembrance lived in the brush of her fingertips against the soft pink satin, the familiar heaviness of the shoe’s box—its stiff square toe—in the palm of her hand and the white powder that stull clung to the soles from the backstage rosin box.
Ophelia had worn these shoes.
The ones she now held were custom-made by a shoemaker at Freed of London, as all her shoes had been. A maker who knew Ophelia’s feet more intimately than she knew them herself. She remembered peeling back the tissue paper from the box the shoes had come in. She’d sewn the ribbons on them with her own hands. She’d pirouetted, done arabesques in them. She’d danced in them. She’d dreamed in them. They were hers.
She glanced at Artem, who was now busy paying for the champagne, and then fixed her gaze once again on the shoes clutched to her chest. She wanted to see. She needed to be sure.
Maybe she was imagining things. Or maybe she just wanted so badly to believe, she was spinning stories out of satin. Heart pounding, she unspooled the ribbons from around the shoes. Her hands shook as she gently parted the pink material and peered inside. Penned in black ink on the insole, as secret as a diary entry, were the words she most wanted to see:
Giselle, June 1. Ophelia Baronova’s final performance.
The pointe shoes in her hands were the last pair of ballet slippers she’d ever worn.
“What have you got there?” Artem leaned closer, and Ophelia was so full of joy at her fortuitous discovery that she forgot to move away.
“Something wonderful.” Not until she beamed up at him did she notice the intimacy of the space between them. But even then she didn’t take a backward step. She was too happy to worry about self-preservation.
For once, she wanted to live in the moment. Like she used to live.
“I’d ask you to elaborate, but I’m already convinced. Anything that puts such a dazzling smile on your face is priceless as far as I’m concerned.” Without breaking eye contact, Artem slid two one-hundred-dollar bills out of his slim leather wallet and handed them to the man behind the counter. “We’ll take the shoes, too.”
Unlike the kitten incident, Ophelia didn’t utter a word of protest. “Thank you, Artem. Thank you very much.”
He pocketed his wallet, lifted a brow and glanced curiously at the pointe shoes, still pressed lovingly to Ophelia’s heart. “No arguments about how you can’t accept them? My, my. I’m intrigued.”
“Would you like me to argue with you, Mr. Drake?”
“Never,” he said. “And somehow, always.”
She shrugged, feigning nonchalance, while her heart beat wildly in her chest. Part of her, the same part that still yearned to kiss him with utter abandon, wanted to tell him the truth. But how could she possibly explain that the satin clutched to her chest was every bit as priceless as the Drake Diamond itself? Maybe even more so.
The pointe shoes her grandmother had worn for her final performance lived in a glass case at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, alongside the shoes of other ballet greats like Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina. Ballerinas went through hundreds of pointe shoes during the course of their career. Usually more than a hundred pairs in a single dance season. But none was ever as special as the last pair. The pair that marked the end.
Until this moment, Ophelia hadn’t even known what had become of them. She remembered weeping as a nurse at the hospital removed them from her feet the night she’d fallen onstage. Then there’d been the MRIs, the blood tests, the spinal tap. And then the most devastating blow of all. The diagnosis. In all the heartbreak, her pointe shoes had been lost.
Like so much else.
Jeremy must have taken them. And now by some twist of fate, she’d found them again. Artem had bought them for her, and somehow it felt as though he’d given her back a missing part of her heart. Holding the shoes, she felt dangerously whole again.
The massive chandeliers hanging from the lobby ceiling flickered three times, indicating the start of the performance was imminent.
“Shall we?” Artem gestured toward the auditorium with one of the champagne flutes.
Ophelia took a deep breath, suddenly feeling as light and airy as one of the tiny bubbles floating to the top of the glass in his hand. “Lead the way.”
They were seated on the first ring in private box seats, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but somehow did. Ophelia had never come anywhere near such prestigious seating in the theater. When she’d been with the ballet, she always watched performances from the audience on her nights off. But like the other dancers, she’d sat in the fourth ring, at the very tip-top of the balcony. The nosebleed section. Those seats sold for twenty dollars each. She couldn’t even fathom what the Drake Diamond seats must have cost. No doubt it was more money than all the dancers combined got paid in a year.
What exactly did tens of thousands of dollars get you on the first ring of the theater? For one, it got you privacy.
The box was closed in all sides, save for the glorious view of the stage. Ophelia sank into her chair with the ballet shoes still pressed to her heart, and her stomach fluttered as she looked around at the gold crown molding and thick crimson carpet. This was intimacy swathed in rich red velvet.
The lights went black as Artem handed her one of the glasses of champagne. His fingertips brushed hers, and she swallowed. Hard.
But as soon as the strains of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 filled the air, Ophelia was swept away.
The music seemed filled with a delicate ache, and the dancers were exquisite. Gorgeous and bare, in their nude bodysuits. There was no hiding in a ballet like Petite Mort. There were no fluffy tutus or elaborate costumes. Just the beauty and grace of the human body.
Ophelia had never danced Petite Mort. She’d never thought she had what it took to dance such a provocative ballet. It was raw. Powerful. All-consuming. In the way perfect sex should be.
Not that Ophelia knew anything about perfect sex. Or ever would.
No wonder she’d never danced this ballet. How could she dance something called Petite Mort when she’d never had an orgasm? Things with Jeremy hadn’t been like that. He’d been more interested in the height of her arabesque than the height of passion. She’d never been in touch with her own sensuality. She’d done too much dancing and not enough living. And now it was too late.
She watched the couple performing the pas de deux onstage turn in one another’s embrace, legs and arms intertwined, and she’d never envied anyone more in her entire life. Somehow, some way...if she had the chance, she’d dance the hell out of that ballet now.
If only she could.
She felt different about her body than she had before. More appreciative. Maybe it was knowing that she’d never dance, never make love, that made her realize what gifts those things were. Or maybe it was the way the man sitting beside her made her feel...
Like a dancer.
Like a woman.
Like a lover.
Artem shifted in his chair, and his thigh pressed against hers. Just the simple brush of his tuxedo pants against her leg made her go liquid inside. She slid her gaze toward him in the dark and found him watching her rather than the dancers onstage. Had he been looking at her like that the entire time?
Her breath caught in her throat, and the ache between her legs grew almost too torturous to bear. What was happening to her? The feeling that she’d had in the limo was coming back—the desire, the need. Only this time, she didn’t think she had the power to resist it. It was the shoes. They’d unearthed a boldness in her. Ophelia Baronova was struggling to break through, like cream rising to the top of a decadent dessert.
The shoes in her hands felt like a sign. A sign that she could have everything she wanted.
Just this once.
One last time.
Another dance. Another chance.
Intermission came too soon. Ophelia’s head was still filled with Mozart and dark decadence when the lights went up. She turned to face Artem and found him watching her again.
