Then he dropped right in front of me, boots striking the floor, his warm breath fanning over my face. “I’ve never had a home. Never anything sure. Yet there’s something sure in you. Something aglow and so very ... real. Sometimes I wish I had it too.”
His gaze held me captive even as my mind ran haywire. He moved nearer, his hands taking mine, drawing me close, past the point of no return.
“I saw it in your eyes the moment we met, and it creeps back out when you dance sometimes. Especially when you think no one’s watching. From that first glimpse, I wanted to know what it was. To touch it. To ... taste it.”
I ran my tongue across my lips. There was a bet. And he was about to win it.
The windows rattled in their loose panes. Wind howled, and a chill crept around the room. He brushed his thumb over my lips first, and when I did not push away, he leaned down and he had his taste, drinking deeply. My eyelids fluttered.
Everything I thought I knew fell away in a shocking instant. That kiss was unspoiled and tender, silkily vulnerable with a tang of fear. That rogue, the world-weary lady’s man, lingered in that simple intimacy, framing my face with gentleness and savoring the moment as if he couldn’t get enough of the sweetness he’d discovered.
I reached up and put my arms around his neck, pulling him closer. Had kisses always been like this? I should havetried one sooner. It was so good. So honest. A natural extension of everything lovely and delightful that had occurred between us.
He stepped back, stroking my cheek with his thumb, and I hardly recognized that face—it was almost youthful in its raw vulnerability. Hopeful. The glow of his features had turned to burnished affection that shone like copper, and it made me shiver. I could still taste his lips, a heady deliciousness that lingered. But as he released me and the unwelcome cool air swirled up between us, my senses returned.
This was Jack Dorian. I had kissed Jack Dorian, and betrayed Mama, Philippe, and the God in whom Jack had no interest.
I looked to the floor that was too dark to see. “I do feel better now.”
This is exactly what it had been for them, hadn’t it? Secret kisses, encounters veiled in the romantic darkness, swelling doubts in the face of so much disapproval. My heart pounded with the awareness of their tragedy threading through my entire life—inescapable, potent.
But this was different. I was not choosing the principal dancer but the theater trifler. The flirt. The known scoundrel. If Mama’s story with a fine man ended in fiery tragedy, what would become of mine with a man like Jack? I gripped a post on my left, nails digging into wood. “Perhaps we should make our way back. It must be late.”
Jack paused, something flickering across his face, then he disappeared into the dark. He clunked up a ladder and back down, then returned with my cloak. “As you wish.”
As he stood there holding out my wrap in the long shadows, I faced the realization that Jack wasn’t the trifler everyoneimagined him to be. He simply wasn’t. No trifler spent half the night and much of his free time teaching a stubborn, plain-looking dancer. No trifler swept an old beggar woman into an enthusiastic dance. No trifler kissed with such exquisite restraint.
32
Imanaged to keep myself together in the solitude of my room that night, but the moment I arrived at the theater in the morning the unraveling began. Dancers whirled about the long dressing room, a dovecote of flurried activity and excitement, and I sat before the long dressing table with my hair trailing wildly about my back and shoulders, and not one hairpin lay about. Not one.
I blinked. How could this be? I looked around to all the other coiffed heads and estimated the number of pins holding each set of tresses in place—and none were left for me. This is what came of remaining in my room until the final moments. Every last set of paste jewels were firmly secured around the necks and heads of other dancers, with only a handful of broken strands lying abandoned on the marble dressing surface. A thumping panic set in. All those spins—how would I carry them out with long, wild hair whipping across my face?
And I was plain. So very plain. Didn’t they know that? Those jewels gave me all the color I ever had.
I put on my costume, ran out into the wings, and headed for the stairs to the cellar, hoping to find a few rusty pins in the oldabandoned dressing rooms below. I collided with a solid body, and something tore.
“Watch where you’re going!” It was a stagehand. A delicate frond for the scenery had ripped in his hands. I leaped back and apologized, my scattered brain trying to think of hairpins and jewels and calmness and self-forgetfulness, then Jack was there, reaching me in two long strides and putting his hands on my shoulders with that deep gaze that mined through the fear and trembling to reach the core of me. “You are well?”
Nothing about how late I was, bless him.
“I need pins and jewels and so many things...” I was stammering. Like a fool—stammering.
His firm grip on my shoulder turned me toward the wings and the shared dressing room just beyond the greenroom. “We’ll make do. There must be something left.” He grabbed a bunch of silk flowers and twisted their stems into my hair with a bit of thin wire lying about from the set design. “You’ll have to accept my attempts at hairdressing.”
Relief cooled my body in long, quick sweeps. “Of course. Will that be enough?”
“Seeing as it’s all we have...”
I sat obediently before the long mirror and watched his face. He frowned, the tip of his tongue protruding as he worked with my mane of hair, twisting and shaping it into something manageable and quite elegant. The warmth of his fingertips against my scalp calmed me deeply, and I gave myself over to his ministrations. I smiled. “You’re also a hairdresser?”
“I’ve been a lot of things. Including a monkey.” He straightened, and each twist lay securely against my head, wrapped around the wire and stems and decorated with lovely white flowers.
“A monkey?”
He jumped, kicking his heels together. “Every circus needs one. There, now.” He bent and twisted together a quick belt of white flowers to match, securing it around my waist. “One needn’t be extravagantly costumed, only exceedingly talented. These look more natural with your face anyway.”
“And jewels? I’ve nothing.”
