In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) (16 page)

R
ICHIE AND
BC were both snuggled up against me in their usual spots—BC stealing half my pillow with one paw resting on my cheek in a sweetly possessive kitty embrace, Richie under the blankets and curled in a tight ball next to my hip, his tail draped up over my body and tickling me with gentle movements. They were both purring contentedly when my phone rang.

I didn’t even have to look to know that it would be Keith. No one in my family would call me at this time of night, considering they were all halfway across the country and likely had been in bed for hours at this point. Most of my friends were on the East Coast somewhere, so they were equally as unlikely. There was Tanya, of course, but if Tanya needed anything she’d wait until tomorrow. She was the only person on the West Coast who I’d really become friends with as of yet. I’d been too busy trying to settle in to my new position, getting the lay of the land in this new city, and sorting out what this next phase of my life would be to go out and meet people.

I blinked in the dark as my eyes came open to find Richie’s green cat eyes glowering at me in the moonlight because someone had dared to disturb his snuggle time. As if I had any control over when someone else would call me. Silly cat.

“Sorry, buddy,” I murmured as I rolled over to grab the phone off my nightstand. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.

“I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

He even sounded
like sex on a stick, damn him, his voice all deep and husky, and a little gravelly, as though maybe
he
had been the one to just wake up. All it took to get my lady parts thrumming was a simple sentence uttered in that voice.

“Not me,” I managed to say, forcing my thoughts back to the here and now, where Keith Burns definitely was not. “Just my cats.”

“Cats? As in plural? I only met the one.”

“Yeah, you met BC. You might never see Richie. He’s scared of his own shadow, or at least he would be if someone gave him the idea.” Hence the curling up beneath the blankets, so if anyone else were to come upon us, he would be well masked as nothing other than a large cat-sized lump under the quilt.

“You sleep with them?”

He sounded merely curious, not bothered by the idea. He hadn’t let his dogs sleep with us last night, but I got the distinct impression that they were used to being with him all the time. Especially the little dog. She acted like she wanted to be with him constantly, no matter what. I had to wonder how she reacted when he had to travel. She might be one of those dogs that acted out on separation anxiety by tearing things up.

“You try telling a cat that they can’t be where they want to be,” I said, laughing and pushing all my worries about his dogs and their behavior out of my mind. It didn’t matter how she reacted. Not really. When I laughed, BC stretched his head over and licked my cheek, close to my ear. I laughed harder and pushed him away, not that it did any good. He got up, moved even closer than he was before, put both his front paws on my face as though to hold me still, and licked me more insistently.

“I like the sound of your laugh,” Keith said. “It’s rich. Husky. Sexy as all hell.”

Damn. So he was thinking along those lines, too. The way he said it made me flush with heat, all my thoughts racing back to last night. I needed to redirect the conversation, and fast.

“Did you have a good game?” I finally forced out.

“Good enough. We won.” His tone was low, like someone whose team had just
lost
a game.

“Winning should be good. You make it sound like it was bad.”

“Colesy and I had a rough go early in the game. We got better as it went on, though.”

“You and Cole are partners or something?” I really didn’t know the first thing about hockey or how it worked, beyond the fact that it was played on ice and in teams. I doubted I’d ever seen a game, and if I had it was so long ago that I couldn’t remember anything about it.

“We’re a defensive pairing, or at least we are for now. When one of us is on the ice, usually both of us are.”

“Defense. Okay, so like in football? You only go out when the other team has the ball…er, puck?”

Now it was his turn to laugh. “No, not like in football. In hockey, both teams always have a goaltender, defensemen, and forwards on the ice.” A couple of sharp barks sounded in the background, and he shushed his dogs. “I’ve got tomorrow night off,” he said after a minute. “You could come over and we could watch a game together on TV. I could explain it to you, and we could go shopping and have dinner, and…” He let his voice trail off in obvious invitation.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he was thinking about a lot more than just having a meal and explaining the finer intricacies of how hockey was played, and I cringed at the idea of shopping with him. Nonetheless, there wasn’t any point in denying that the thought of spending another night with him filled me with a tingling, yearning sensation that I was going to have a heck of a time getting rid of. If he
was
going to have an opportunity to open up to me, then we would have to get together some more. The prospect of another night in his bed was enough that I was willing to give him at least that opportunity.

“If you don’t have to teach a class,” he added when I was too busy mulling everything over to answer him right away.

“I’m done with all my classes by four tomorrow,” I said. Actually, I was done with my last class by two, but then I had a private session scheduled with Devin Shreeve after my students left for the day. Keith didn’t need to know all that, though. He didn’t need to get too far into my personal life until he was willing to let me into his, at least a little bit.

“Can I pick you up at the studio, or should I come to your apartment? And do you like Irish food? There’s this pub downtown that I love. I could take you there for dinner. Great corned beef and cabbage, or shepherd’s pie, and the chocolate cake—”

“Keith?” I figured I’d better interrupt him now so I could answer these first questions before he added a dozen more. And the last thing I needed to hear about was chocolate cake. That only made me start to crave some, and I couldn’t afford to give in to those cravings right now. Not when I was going to be performing again soon.

Yeah, it was only one performance. But still. One job could lead to more. I needed to keep a closer eye on my diet than I already had been.

“Yeah?” he said after a moment, laughter evident in his tone.

“Pick me up at my apartment at five. I need to take care of my cats before I go out.” Especially if I wasn’t going to make it back until sometime the next day. “And Irish food is fine,” I added. I came from an Irish family, even if we were several generations removed from living in that country. When my siblings and I had been kids, Mom had loved to break out the old family recipes that had been passed down through the years, at least every now and then. You could say I had grown up on corned beef and cabbage.

“All right. And I’ll be sure to bring you home again so you don’t have to take the trolley.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

“Sounds to me like a
date
.”

Yeah. It sounded like that, too. It sounded a
lot
like a date, and I couldn’t help but feel both nervous and excited. Now I would never be able to get to sleep tonight, thinking about all the things that tomorrow held in store.

“
W
AIT!”
T
ANYA’S SHOUT
came from the office as I was about to head back into the studio for my session with Devin. “Come back here for a minute. I need you to do a fitting with the costume as it is now, so they can make adjustments or whatever.”

I rolled my eyes, hating the idea of having someone poking and prodding and trying to make me look good in something I had no chance of looking good in, but still I changed course and headed into the office.

Even though I’d been
sure
I wouldn’t get any work out of that class I’d gone to with Devin, I’d been wrong. There was a big show he was putting together in a couple of weeks. Dancers from all over the city, coming from every dance background imaginable, were going to be involved—and he’d asked me to work with him on a specific piece, just the two of us. He wanted to pair his contemporary background with Latin ballroom to make something new and exciting, something different than you would normally see, and after he’d discovered what I could do in his class, he’d said there was no one better to do it with than me.

I wasn’t so sure about all that, but I was willing to give it a try. The simple fact of the matter was that however much I might enjoy teaching dance, there was nothing that could compare with actually dancing, using my body to do the things I’d spent so many years training it to do. Try as I might to convince myself that I wasn’t equally thrilled and anxious about being on stage again, I couldn’t push the jitters aside. I felt like jumping beans were filling my belly, and they didn’t seem likely to go away until the show actually happened.

Being properly costumed was simply one step on the path to meeting that end, and it wasn’t Tanya’s fault.

“Let’s hurry up and do it then,” I said to her with a forced smile, tossing my gym bag in the corner. “Where is it?”

A woman I recognized as the costumer who’d taken my measurements a few days ago stood up from her seat near the window, a garment in her hands. “Let’s go to the changing room.”

I nodded and indicated that she should follow me, and I headed for the hall. She grabbed a bag full of pins and other torturous-looking implements and hurried along behind me.

“Strip,” she said unceremoniously once we were behind the closed door.

I tugged the baggy tank over my head and let my jersey practice skirt drop to the floor, trying to be nonchalant about letting anyone see me in my underwear, even though I was anything but. She pulled the material of the costume—made of a shimmery, stretchy blue fabric that was way flashier than I was comfortable wearing these days—over my head, carefully adjusting it around my arms so I wouldn’t undo any of her work to this point. It came down over my body and she jerked it into place. And I just about had a conniption fit when I saw myself in the mirror.

I immediately grabbed the hem and started pulling the thing off, but she stopped me.

It had an asymmetrical hem that hung to mid-calf on one side but was cut to above mid-thigh on the other. Way too high. The last thing I wanted was to be up on a stage with that much thigh showing. They’d be able to see my cellulite and stretch marks. And if it edged higher because of the movements? No one needed to see that. It was going to be hard enough for me to try to forget about my body while I performed, but to know that the whole world could see so much of what should stay hidden? No way. I couldn’t do it.

“Hold still while I pin a few adjustments into place so I don’t stick you accidentally,” the seamstress said.

“How about I hold still while you pin an extra panel into place to cover that leg a little better?”

She didn’t respond, bending her head to the task at hand as she made a few adjustments to the neckline.

That, of course, brought my attention up higher, and I wanted more than ever to cover up. There was way too much cleavage visible. Which, yes, I realized it was not only common but somewhat expected to have some leg and cleavage and whatnot showing when you danced Latin ballroom, but most people who danced Latin ballroom didn’t look like me.

I had to fight down the urge to rip myself away from her and tear that stupid dress off.

“You need to get a better bra before the performance,” she muttered through the six stick-pins she was holding between her lips. Her gaze was focused on my boobs in a way that I couldn’t recall anyone ever looking at them before, almost clinically. “One that fits you properly. This one’s clearly the wrong size.”

“And where do you suggest I look for that unicorn?” Not once, since the day when I’d gained the first twenty pounds and couldn’t fit into my old clothes any longer, had I been able to find a bra that actually
fit
me. I’d been up and down and up and down in size so many times that I didn’t even know where to begin. Worse yet, I had yet to find a store that carried bras in sizes that would fit, so I had to order them online and take wild stab-in-the-dark guesses as to my size, based on some random measurements I took of myself and the posted charts. Those charts were next to useless, though. No matter how accurately I’d thought I’d measured myself, the bras never fit. The best I could do was find one that wasn’t painful and didn’t leave my boobs sagging too badly.

She gave me an exasperated look, tugged on my arm to get me back into the position she wanted me in, and rolled her eyes. “There are plenty of women much bigger than you who’ve managed to find properly fitted bras.” She didn’t give me any indication as to where they’d found them, though.

We didn’t talk much after that. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for chitchat, particularly after her lack of suggestions as to where to begin my unicorn search. Once she’d finished putting all her pins in place, I hurriedly removed the dress with distaste, put my own clothes back on, and rushed into the studio to meet with Devin.