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

“Getting changed with Cole.” She let out a dreamy sigh and leaned back in her seat. Her eyes took on a wistful expression. “You do realize I’m going to be a jealous witch all day now, right? Because you’ll be in there dancing with those amazingly hot guys, and I’m going to be stuck out here answering the phones.”

As if on cue, the phone rang and Tanya had to get back to work. I rolled my eyes at her on my way out the door.

Charlie, Madge, and the other retirees were making their way out of the dance studio when I returned. Charlie stopped to place a kiss on my cheek while his wife planted her hands on her hips and laughed. “He never gives up once he’s got his mind set on something, Brie,” she said. “And I think he’s got his mind set on charming you.”

“But it’s you I go home with,” he said, linking his arm with hers.

“For forty-six years and counting.” Madge was beaming at him as they sauntered out the door, grinning at me over her shoulder as they left.

I headed over to the sound system to change the music for the class of younger students about to come in. A couple of deep, rumbling male voices echoed in the studio a minute later, and I looked up. Cole had come in with his friend. They were facing the far wall, setting their gym bags down where they’d be out of the way. The new guy—Keith—had the same muscular build as Cole, and his tight jeans and form-fitting T-shirt only emphasized it. Big, firm butt, massive thighs, trim waist.

He was probably a hockey player, too, then, or at least a skater of some sort. Cole had told me they were all built that way, that anyone who spent that much time on the ice would have the same big thighs and bum. Speed skaters, figure skaters, all of them. That had started me thinking about Jacob, too, because he’d been built the same way. He’d said he worked out a lot, but I had a feeling it went beyond that.

In one of the early classes Cole had come to, I’d asked him how he’d come to develop such muscle in those specific areas because it caused him problems in keeping his posture correct for ballroom dance. I was constantly having to remind him to tuck his bottom under, telling him it shouldn’t be sticking out, and then he would joke that there wasn’t anywhere else for it to go unless someone was going to cut it off. His posture was definitely improving, though. He had been working hard at it.

I started crossing over to meet my new student, but I nearly stumbled halfway there when he turned around and I saw Jacob staring back at me.

The
Jacob.

The one-night stand guy.

The man who had made me feel desirable again—sexy and feminine and beautiful—even if it had only been for one night. The man I wasn’t supposed to ever see again. The man I’d been trying to forget for months because thinking about him only made me long for things I could never have.

I’d convinced myself he was part of a fairy tale, and fairy tales don’t come true. At least they never did for me. My life had consisted of a series of setbacks and disappointments, at least lately, and even though my heart was pounding and my breath felt fluttery, the fact that he was here right now could only mean I was being set up for an even bigger disappointment than ever before.

Guys like him didn’t happen to me.

“I hope it’s all right that I brought someone with me,” Cole said, closing the distance between us. Jacob—no, Keith—came with him, the gold flecks in his amber-brown eyes blazing like fire and practically burning a hole through my flesh. “You always tell us that they’re open classes, though, that anyone can come as long as they pay, so I figured it would be okay. Brie, this is Keith Burns, one of my teammates. Burnzie, this is Brie Hayden. She’s my ballroom instructor.”

I struggled to keep my tongue in my mouth where it belonged because I kept thinking back to that night, to the way his hands had felt on my skin, the rich, salty taste of his skin, the way he’d looked at me—all of me—as though I was worth looking at. In fact, he was looking at me in exactly that same way right now, searing me. If I wasn’t careful, I might melt into the floor from the heat in his eyes.

He held out his hand. “Brie, huh? That’s odd. You look more like an Allison to me.”

That left no doubt, no possible chance, that he was merely a look-alike for my Jacob. He’d never said he was a professional hockey player. He’d only told me he worked out a lot. Granted, that was because I’d asked him for half-truths. I’d told him I was a teacher—which I was—but I wasn’t the kind of teacher I knew he’d been imagining.

Vibrating like a tattoo gun, I reached for his hand. His fingers closed around my wrist. His hand was as big and strong and hot as I remembered everything about him being.

“That is odd. I’ve been Brie my whole life.”

“Maybe you should try Allison on sometime and see how it feels. I think it would suit you.” His grip on my hand was loose, yet I couldn’t move it to save my life. He grinned, a Cheshire cat sort of expression. “I’ve always wondered what it might be like to go by Jacob. Just for kicks. We could try it out together.”

The studio door opened and half the class streamed in, and I jerked my hand away from him as fast as if he had scalded me.

“Excuse me. I have to teach a class,” I mumbled, rushing to put some distance between us so I could shove all my marbles back into my head where they belonged. Somehow, some way, I was going to have to hold it together well enough to teach a class with him in it. I couldn’t fathom how I would manage it, though.

I greeted the other students coming in, smiling and making small talk and all the things I usually did at the beginning of a session. But the whole time I felt Keith Burns’s gaze branding my body with his mark.

“
W
HAT WAS THAT
about?” Colesy asked after Allison-slash-Brie walked away. He gave me a sideways glance. “Trying on new names? What the fuck?”

“It was nothing,” I said offhandedly. I couldn’t decide if I wanted him to know that I’d already met her, and I sincerely doubted she would want
anyone
to know the circumstances of how we’d met. I couldn’t forget the way she’d hurried into my room after checking over her shoulder, giving me the sense that she was a very private person in general. I wasn’t sure I was ready to spill those beans, myself, and I usually didn’t care who knew what about me, unless it was something that had the potential to threaten my career. Hookups and one-night stands didn’t generally fall into that category. Athletes seemed to be given a lot of free rein in the public eye, at least in terms of that sort of behavior.

Colesy raised a brow, taking on a dubious expression. “It didn’t look like nothing. More like a whole lot of something.”

“Nothing
you
need to worry about,” I said a lot more defensively than I should have. Getting defensive about it would only pique his curiosity more than it already was, and then he’d be asking me questions. I wanted our relationship to be more of the opposite of that—me picking his brain, figuring out what made him tick—so that left me feeling extremely uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to talking about my own shit. I liked to keep it to myself.

Hell, I could hardly talk about it with my own family. There were a lot of hurt feelings, and I got the silent treatment from them more often than not. I’d earned every bit of that scorn, too.

Luckily for me, the room started to fill in before Colesy could pry any more, and Brie was calling for our attention. She already had all of mine, anyway. She had on those same chunky glasses she’d been wearing that night, but her hair was pulled back in a ponytail away from her face, revealing her long neck. She was in a long skirt made from some sort of soft, T-shirtlike material—similar to what she’d worn that night to the hotel—plus a baggy sweatshirt that had to be two sizes too big. Even though she was doing everything possible—at least in terms of how she dressed—to hide her figure, I doubted I’d be able to take my eyes off her the whole time we were here.

I knew what curves she was hiding underneath all that fabric. I’d held them in my hands, licked them, sucked them…reveled in them. I knew the toned muscle beneath the curves, too. If she was a dancer that explained so much about her body, things that had left me insanely curious for months. And it made me even more furious with her ex for all he’d done to her. Her health issues had probably forced her to stop dancing, pushed her into teaching instead. And he’d told her she was fat and left her for someone skinnier, at the same time she was losing her livelihood? I might be jumping to conclusions, but still…those conclusions were begging to be reached.

I hadn’t been able to get her off my mind in the months since that night. I hadn’t even been in her presence for five minutes today, and I was already trying to sort out how I could get her alone for two minutes at the end of this class so I could get her number.

If she was living here, in Portland, I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to help her find her confidence again, doing more than I could ever have accomplished in a single night.

I wanted to kiss her again. And more. I wanted a fucking hell of a lot more.

“Let’s everyone pair off, please, so we can get started,” she said over the general din in the room. “Gentleman, select a partner and spread out. Be sure you have plenty of space on all sides.”

Colesy took one step out toward the middle of the studio, and three of the women rushed toward him. Based on the way they were looking at him, all googly-eyed, I was fairly certain it was because he was pretty to look at and not necessarily because of his expert dancing skills that they were trying to run each other over to partner with him. Of course, he might yet surprise me and have a few moves. Anything was possible. Too bad for those women he was far more likely to be interested in one of the other guys in the room for anything beyond a dance partner. He took one of the ladies by the hand, and the other two practically ran over each other again in an effort to be the first to get in front of me, only further confirming my earlier assumption.

I held out a hand to one of them, a blonde, and she smirked at the brunette she’d been racing. Then we took our positions.

“I’m Jenni,” she said breathlessly.

I barely spared her a glance. I couldn’t seem to rip my gaze away from Brie since she was here, in the flesh, and I’d never expected to lay eyes on her again. “Keith,” I finally replied.

Standing in the center of the room, Brie clapped her hands for our attention. “We’re going to be working on the waltz again today,” she said once we’d quieted down. “Why don’t we start off with just a basic box step so we can refresh our memories, all right? And since we have a few people who are new to the class, let’s have a couple demonstrate what the box step is. Cole and Alexis?”

Colesy and his partner took up a hold and waited for Brie to count them off to the music being piped in.

“Keep going until I ask you to stop, please. All right, and one, two, three, one, ready, go,” she said. “Gentlemen, watch Cole’s feet, and ladies, watch Alexis’s. Note the way their weight shifts from foot to foot. When you move forward, use a heel lead. Moving backward, your toe should hit the floor first. You see how it’s a rocking motion, going from foot to foot?” After a couple of times through the box, Brie stepped up behind Colesy, adjusted his hold a bit, and whispered something in his ear.

As soon as she did that, he straightened his posture and seemed to bring his hips up under his shoulders better. Yeah, if he had to think about things like that, these classes would definitely help his core strength. Maybe Bergy was onto something with telling him to take dance. Who would have thought it?

“All right. Any questions?” Brie asked while she moved behind Alexis and made similar adjustments to her posture and hold.

A few murmurs spread throughout the room, but no one spoke up and asked anything.

“Okay, you two can stop then. Everyone get into closed hold with your partners. We’re all going to try it together before we move on to something more complicated.”

Even though I’d watched Garrett dance for years, I’d never done it myself. Still, I knew enough to have a pretty basic idea of how to get into hold. I put my left hand up for Jenni to take and settled my right hand on her shoulder blade. Then I let my gaze travel around the room again.