“Everyone falls.” He pushed off the doorframe and ambled in. “The question is, what will you do about it?”
Philippe’s footsteps still echoed, coming down the hall now, and I stiffened like a child with a pilfered treat. “I’m not like the other dancers. Why don’t you leave me—”
“What, to fall alone?” He assessed me, arms still crossed.
I moved to walk past him, but as I neared him, the footsteps stopped at the door.
“Oh.” Philippe stood framed there. His look of awkward shock strangled me. “I beg your pardon. I thought you were alone again, Miss Blythe. I saw the light and assumed...”
“I was, actually. I—”
“Quite all right, Rousseau.” Jack Dorian’s bold smile flashed, his commanding words barreling over my own. “I’ll escort the lady on my way home.”
Philippe hesitated, their gazes sparring for a moment, then the finest gentleman I knew gave a single nod of assent and backed away. “Very well, then.”
But it wasn’t very well. Not at all. I opened my mouth, but the words were stuck again. Philippe did that to me, nearly every time.
“I’ll wish you good day then, Miss Blythe.”
Before I could untangle my voice, he was gone, the shadows swallowing his lithe figure. So much for not letting things merely “happen.” What had become of me? I was not myself. I was like ... In an odd moment of vertigo, I felt that I had transposed my life for Mama’s, living out her passivity and meekness, trapped by her vices.
Hurtling toward the same end.
I caught my breath, sucking air in quick gasps, and spun on the self-satisfied weasel who still watched me with that maddening grin. “Why in heaven’s name do you do that? Why are you always about, leering and flirting as if I’d given you the slightest encouragement?” None of his flashy smiles, the bold stance or invasive charm, held a candle to the solemn, scruffy, deeply poeticface of Philippe Rousseau.
He narrowed his eyes with another of his smiles. “Fancy the man, do you?”
My flesh heated, top to bottom. “More than I fancy you.” The words tasted succulent on my lips, but he seemed unmoved by the rejection.
He squinted, hands in his pockets. “Did I ever tell you of the time I wrestled a tiger to save a woman’s life? Brawny thing he was, and full of fighting spirit.”
“Philippe Rousseau is no tiger.”
But he wasn’t listening. He swooped down on the invisible animal and pretended to slam it to the floor. “I wrestled that beast down and held him by the throat, yelling at the woman to get away, and she escaped. Barely. Then I was alone with that mongrel and we had it out, and eventually ... well, I ended up making friends with him.” He folded his arms and stepped nearer. “You remind me of that tiger.”
I turned away and rolled my eyes. He took to heart Shakespeare’s line about all the world being a stage. Yet I couldn’t understand how he expected anyone would believe those grandiose tales, let alone feel attraction to the narcissistic flirt who had, unfortunately, attached himself to me like a leech. Did women truly take to him for more than thirty seconds? He was always there, hanging about, ready to siphon my dreams away from me.
He moved toward me, looking me up and down. “What sort of role are you hoping to land with all this practice? I’m arranging the production, you know. I do have some say.”
Desires battled within my heart. “So I’ve heard.”
“I could make you into a lovely butterfly in the next production. Or perhaps a bird. Yes, I do like that.”
I pressed my lips together—I must play nice, at least, for thatwas the cost of remaining. Of survival. Mama Jo’s words came back to me.“You needn’t letthe other girls know you’ve come here for free.”I sat with a grumble and peeled the slippers off my raw feet. “‘Free’ indeed.”
“What’s that, a tree? That can be arranged. You’d make a fine birch, with those long, white arms. How tall are you, anyway—more than five and a half?”
I brushed the slippers aside and wrapped my blistered feet in rags before forcing them into my day shoes and rising to face the man. “I refuse to let you target me this way, simply because I’ve not come under your spell. Not every woman wishes to fall at your feet.”
“I see no circles on you. Thorns perhaps, but no target.”
I glared, but he held out his arm to escort me.
“I’ve a promise to keep, I believe,” he said.
I took his arm with reluctance. It struck me as we left that perhaps he was the sort of man an escort should protect me against. I didn’t speak again until the frigid night air struck our faces out the side door and we strode down the alley toward Craven Street.
He spoke first. “You remind me of someone, actually.”
