LITMIR.BIZ

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all day long. Sometimes she went as long as a week without even dancing en pointe.

      Then again, this was no ordinary week. The Manhattan Ballet was holding auditions for the next three days, in preparation for a brand-new ballet. Not just any ballet, but an original piece, choreographed by the legendary dancer-turned-choreographer Alexei Ivanov, the biggest dance star to come out of Russia since Mikhail Baryshnikov. He’d only been choreographing for two years, and already critics were comparing him to George Balanchine.

      And he was coming here. To Manhattan. Just a few subway stops away from the very studio where Tessa had been dancing since she was three years old.

      Ivanov was the reason for the new shoes. Tessa knew her chances of being selected for one of his ballets were slim to none. But she couldn’t give up. What kind of dancer would she be if she didn’t even try?

       The kind of dancer who no longer performed, but only taught classes. That’s what kind.

      She didn’t want to be that kind of dancer. Not anymore. The odds were stacked against her, but she couldn’t give up.

      Not yet.

      She pulled her sewing kit out of the side pocket of her dance bag and managed to get the needle properly threaded on the first try, despite the jostling of the subway car. She’d sewn ribbons on so many pointe shoes that she could probably do it in her sleep. She might have even done just that a few times during Nutcracker season, when back-to-back performances at the Wilde School left the dancers so exhausted, they could barely hold their heads up.

      Playing seamstress on a moving train, before the car lurched into her station, would be no problem. With the chore behind her, once she got home, she could ice her feet, take an Epsom-salt bath and head straight to bed.

       Because, again, who needs social interaction?

      Enough with the self-pity. Tomorrow was important enough that the company dancers at the Manhattan Ballet were probably all planning to get to bed early, too. Even Chance Gabel. Granted, the bed he planned on climbing into likely wasn’t his. But still.

      Needle threaded, she anchored it into the cuff of her sweater while she untied the drawstring of the slender bag containing her new shoes. She pulled one out, along with a carefully spooled coil of pale pink ribbon. As she positioned the edge of the ribbon alongside the outer seam of the shoes, Mr. B pawed at her hand.

      The shoe fell into her lap. Tessa looked up but didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

      “What is it?” she mouthed.

      The little dog cocked his head and swiveled his russet ears forward. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was trying to alert her to a sound. Some unheard melody that was calling her name.

      She glanced at the pregnant woman, who was sitting opposite her, and the pair of Wall Street types, who were standing near the door. No one seemed alarmed, which meant the fire alarm hadn’t gone off or anything.

      Tessa ran a soothing hand over Mr. B’s narrow back. Maybe he was tired. She’d leave him at home tomorrow. She obviously wouldn’t be able to drag him along on her audition. The last thing she wanted was to draw more attention to her hearing loss.

      But that was okay. She could handle a day in the city without him. She’d have to. It wasn’t as though she had a choice in the matter.

      She’d be just fine on her own. In her quiet little world. Alone.

      Wasn’t she always?

      * * *

      Before he even set foot in the subway station, Julian had been less than thrilled by his present circumstances—those circumstances being his growing need for a source of income, despite his fervent lack of interest in leaving his uptown apartment. He’d also just suffered the humiliation of his first job interview in a decade.

      Not an interview, technically. Worse. An audition.

      For a gig he didn’t even want.

      The job started tomorrow, and he still didn’t know if he’d gotten it. But he would. Chance would see to it that he did, and then, as much as he dreaded the idea, Julian would have no choice but to give it a shot.

      Not that he had anything against working. He preferred it, actually, to the nothingness that had slowly taken over his days. He’d just thought that when he finally reached the point where the money from his glory days ran dry, he’d do something else. Anything other than music.

      Stumbling upon the trumpet player had nudged Julian’s irritation firmly into pissed territory. It was a territory he knew, like a favorite song. He spent a lot of time being pissed lately. A couple of years, in fact. But it was better than the alternative. Julian much preferred being thought of as a bitter, cranky prick than as an object of pity. And if no one ever thought of him at all anymore, all the better.

      He cursed himself for letting the trumpet player get to him as he climbed on the 1 train. The guy was just an old man. A nobody.

       A nobody who can still play the horn.

      Right.

      He sank into the last open seat in the subway car, which happened to be directly behind the woman who’d dropped a dollar in the old man’s bucket. No, not one dollar. Two. And unless Julian had been imagining things, she’d only pulled out the second dollar bill after she’d noticed his disapproval of the musician’s performance.

      “He wasn’t that good, you know.” Julian aimed his comment at the back of her head.

      Hers was a quite lovely head, actually. Piled with waves of strawberry blond hair, pinned up to expose the curve of her graceful neck. She was pretty. There was something poetic about the way she moved. Lyrical, almost. He’d noticed it straightaway on the train platform. And Julian wasn’t prone to noticing such things lately.

      His gaze lingered for a moment on a silky, wayward curl winding its way down her back, and he suppressed the urge to twirl it around one of his fingers.

      God, what was wrong with him? Had he been shut up in his penthouse for so long that he’d forgotten the rules of simple social interaction? Yeah. He supposed he had.

      He cleared his throat and spoke to her again. “I mean, it was nice of you to tip the man. Very nice. All the same, his sense of rhythm was severely lacking.”

      Why, oh, why was he explaining himself to a woman he didn’t even know? A woman who didn’t care to know him, apparently.

      She didn’t budge. She just sat, staring down at something in her lap, while her dog fixed its gaze at Julian over her shoulder. Cute little dog. Copper and white, with plumed ears that seemed almost comically large in proportion to its dainty head. The dog blinked at Julian, cocked its head and swiveled its huge ears forward so they looked even bigger.

      “Anyway.” Julian sighed. “Like I said, it was nice of you to help the guy out.”

      He waited a beat, and when she didn’t respond—again—he turned back around. The two of them spent the rest of their journey back-to-back, mere inches apart.

      In silence.

       Chapter Two

      The sound erupted at rehearsal the next day, and it was nothing like Tessa remembered.

      She remembered soft, lilting melodies. The winsome whisper of violins. She remembered the patter of balletic feet and the rhythm of her own labored breath during allegro work at center. In, out. In, out. In, out.

      She remembered what the swish of a velvet curtain sounded like on recital night, the deafening roar of a standing ovation and the way roses being tossed onto a stage floor sounded so much like heavy snowfall against a windowpane.

      And she remembered music. Of course she did. Even now, she could still hum

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