In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) (11 page)

She wasn’t just some woman I wanted to hook up with for a night and help her to get over some shit her ex had planted in her head. Brie was a real, live, in-the-flesh woman who seemed to have completely lost herself. I wanted to help her find herself again. Maybe in the process, she could help me find myself. Or find the man I was trying to become, at least.

I grabbed Pepper’s collar and herded her through the entry hall. “Come on, boys,” I said to the other two, and I urged them all into the kitchen so I could make them go out the side door. There was a fence, so they’d be fine, and getting Pepper to run off a bit of her excess energy right now could only help.

“Sorry,” I said again once all three had gone out and I could hear them barking happily in their open space. “She gets excited when she meets new people.”

I wouldn’t be able to let them stay out too long or the neighbors would start complaining again. It usually only happened when I had one of my parties and it got a little out of control, but one of them seemed to love calling in noise complaints when the dogs got worked up at night. I suppose that was something I had to deal with since I’d chosen to buy a house in such an expensive, uppity area. But I couldn’t pass this house up when it came on the market. It was built right into the bank of the river. I had a balcony on the lower level that was great for watching the sunrise or sunset, listening to the sound of the water lapping as it drifted by.

Brie laughed. “So she wasn’t so excited just because it was me? Way to deflate my ego. I’m disappointed.” She had followed me in a little ways, but she was hanging back some, her eyes roving all over the place. She wrapped her arms over her chest. It seemed to be a habit of hers, as though she could possibly hide her curves. I doubted she realized that when she did it, it only pushed her breasts up higher, making them even more enticing than they already were. I bet if she knew her action was having such an effect, she’d make a concerted effort to stop.

That meant I was going to keep my mouth shut about it—at least for now—because I enjoyed the view. Someday, when she felt more confident, she would stop trying to hide herself that way. But then maybe she wouldn’t be hiding her body with drab, ill-fitting clothes, so I could still have a nice view. A man could hope, at least. I couldn’t help but think how amazing she would look in bold colors, something that hugged all of her curves the way I wanted to.

“This is some place,” she said.

“It’s big, I know. It can be a little overwhelming.”

“A little? I think my whole apartment building could fit in here.”

She might be right about that. I tried to shrug it off.

“Not just
my
apartment,” she said, as though I hadn’t fully understood her the first time. “The whole building.”

“You haven’t even seen the basement.” Not that I considered it a basement. There was twice as much square footage below ground level than above it because of the way they’d built it into the riverbank.

She gave me a look that I couldn’t interpret, and I decided I’d had enough of talking about the enormity of my house.

“Let me put your coat in the closet,” I said, crossing over to take it from her. She shrugged out of it, and I carried it away. When I returned, she’d wandered into the living room and was looking at the pictures I had on the walls. Shit. Pictures of my family. I really didn’t want to talk about them right now. I’d brought her back to my place because we were both crazy attracted to each other and I wanted to do something about that. “Want some wine to help you warm up? Or coffee?” I asked, hoping to distract her from the pictures. I grabbed a beer from the fridge for myself.

“You weren’t kidding,” she said, and I spun around to see what she was looking at. Right in front of her were all the pictures of Garrett.

Fucking hell.

“Kidding about what?” I popped open my beer bottle and gulped down a quarter of it in a heartbeat.

“Your brother dancing. You didn’t say he was a ballroom dancer.” She moved in closer to one, and then she picked it up off the mantle, holding it closer to her eyes. “What did you say his name is? He looks familiar to me.”

“Garrett,” I forced out, my mouth dry. “Garrett Burns. You couldn’t have known hi—”

“Garrett Burns? And his partner was Monica Simpson?” She spun around to stare at me, her eyes dark with some unnamed emotion that couldn’t possibly come close to everything roiling within me. “You’d said his name earlier, but it didn’t register with me then. Not until I saw this. I competed against them in tons of competitions over the years…until he died. I still run into Monica sometimes. Or I did when I was still dancing.”

I didn’t know what to do. What to say. All I wanted was to disappear and never have to think about all the shit I’d done wrong in this life, but Brie was still holding that picture of my dead brother and staring at me, and I had most of a beer in my hands.

I downed the rest of it in a single swallow and went back to the fridge for another.

G
ARRETT
B
URNS’S DEATH
had washed over the competitive ballroom dancing community like a tsunami pummeling the shore. The intense magnitude of our reactions wasn’t simply because someone so young and talented and promising had died too young, but because he’d taken his own life. They’d said that his brother had found him hanging from a rafter in the garage one day, that Garrett hadn’t shown up to practice with Monica, and he hadn’t answered his phone, so she’d put in a call to have one of his brothers check on him.

It happened about a year or so before I’d become partners with Val. I’d been competing against Garrett and Monica for half my life, it seemed, with the various guys I’d been paired with before Val had come along. The two of them had been my age, so once we’d reached a certain level in our dancing abilities, we’d always been in the same competitive class. I hadn’t
known
Garrett, exactly. We’d probably had a few brief conversations in passing at various competitions, and I’d offered halfhearted congratulations when he and Monica had bested my partner and me from time to time. I recalled sitting across from him at a meal once, but we had never been close.

His death had crushed me, though. I’d felt as if I was suddenly carrying an extra twenty pounds of dismay with me everywhere I went. Once you get up into the upper echelons of competitive ballroom dance, it’s a pretty small world. Everyone knows everyone else. We were all up in one another’s business all the time. Those of us he had left behind all felt as if we’d lost a good friend, and no one had understood why it had happened.

Garrett Burns had been one of the best ballroom dancers out of Canada to hit the international competitive circuit in eons. He’d been on track to become the best in the world. He and Monica were being offered professional work—paying work—on films and stage and in countless other avenues. He’d had it all. Or at least it had seemed that way on the surface.

And then he’d ended everything.

They’d said there wasn’t a letter, that he hadn’t left any explanation for doing what he’d done. He’d hanged himself and left all the people who loved him to try to wrestle with their grief and shock and questions on their own. Which, of course, they would have had to do whether he’d left a letter or not, I supposed. But there’d been nothing at all.

And now I was standing in his brother’s living room, holding a photo of him. Keith might have been the one who’d found him in the garage that day. Surely the grief I still carried couldn’t begin to compare to his.

Keith popped the top off another beer bottle and started chugging it almost as quickly as he’d finished off the first one. Apparently I’d discovered the reason he tended to shut down and change the subject whenever I tried to get him to talk about his family.

I carefully set the photo frame back on his mantle and made sure I’d left it just as I’d found it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize…”

He took another long draw from the bottle. “I really don’t want to talk about this right now.”

I got the impression that he really didn’t want to talk about it
ever
. Clearly he needed to, but pushing him to go there likely wasn’t the best course of action I could take at the moment. I decided to let it go.

I headed over to join him in the kitchen. “Is that glass of wine still an option?” He was drinking, after all, so I might as well join him. That might make it easier to move us away from that moment of pain and into something easier.

He eyed me for a long moment, amber fire in his gaze, and then took a glass down from a rack hanging under a cabinet. “Red again?”

“Sure. Why not?”

He uncorked a new bottle of Chianti and poured some for me, then handed me the glass. “So you’ve been dancing a long time?”

Back to safer subjects. “Yeah, I started when I was about ten, I think. Mom and Dad still have some video of my first ever recital. It was awful even though I thought I was doing well. I didn’t trust my partner to lead back then, and so I was pushing him all around the dance floor and anticipating every move too much. How long have you been playing hockey?”

“My mother tells me I started skating before I could walk. I don’t remember ever not playing hockey.” He took his beer and headed into the living room, so I followed. I took a seat on a big, plush couch near him but not quite touching. He edged closer. “She’s got pictures of me when I couldn’t have been more than two years old, decked out in full hockey gear. My father flooded the backyard every winter to make a rink for us, and I’d go out there and skate until it got too cold to stay out any longer.”

“Sounds familiar. I used to dance until my feet were covered in blisters, maybe even bleeding, but I couldn’t make myself stop.”

“When you really love something like that,” he said, “it’s hard not to let it turn into an obsession. I wouldn’t change it. That’s how I got into the NHL.”

I took a sip of my wine and studied him. He was starting to relax a little, no longer as tense as he’d been after we’d talked about Garrett. He wasn’t drinking his beer as fast anymore, either—a sip here and there.

“So why did you come to my class with Cole?” I asked, hoping his teammate was a safe subject. At least it wasn’t anything to do with his family.

“Colesy?” Keith grinned. He leaned back against the cushions and tucked one of his legs up under him, his foot dangling over the edge of the cushion. “He’s new to the team this year. Doesn’t really hang out with a lot of the guys much. I don’t want him to feel left out, so I try to do things with him one-on-one.”

“That’s it? Nothing to do with dance? Just because you want to hang out with Cole?”

“Yeah. I don’t want anyone to feel left out. It’s not good for team bonding and morale, and I’m one of the assistant captains. I have to be sure we’re all working together as a team, not simply a bunch of disparate parts that the GM threw together.”

“That was really nice of you, coming to class with him. I can’t imagine how the rest of your teammates might react if they knew. Cole seems to think it’s better to keep it private, based on what he’s told me.” Plus, I couldn’t imagine it had been easy for Keith to come to the studio, considering it had to have brought up all sorts of memories that we both knew he’d rather not face.

“I’m a nice guy,” he said, winking at me. Yeah, he was definitely starting to loosen up again, going back to his flirtatious ways. “I do nice things.”

“Never said you weren’t.”

“Tell me about the asshole who told you that you weren’t good enough for him. How’d you end up with him?”

I sighed, wishing I knew a way to ease him into talking to me the way he wanted me to talk to him. But I didn’t have anything to hide. “Val started out as my partner. We had insane chemistry on the dance floor right from the start, and it kind of naturally evolved into something more.”

“Val,” Keith murmured, sipping from his beer. “Russian? Like Valentin or Valeri?”

“Valentin Nazarov. And yes, he’s Russian.”

“I used to have a Russian teammate in college, Sergei Moskvin, who treated all of his girlfriends like shit, like he was better than them. Granted, that was a coincidence, but I had a hard time not busting him in the balls one time when he crossed the line, yelling at one of them.” One of Keith’s hands drifted closer to me, and he let his fingertips tickle the top of my knee and lower thigh. “I called the cops on his ass. I was worried he was going to hit her. That girl deserved so much better. No one deserves to be treated that way.”