Dance for Me (Fenbrook Academy #1) - New Adult Romance Read Free

me, even though it wasn’t her fault. “Let’s go again.” She cued up the music.
    I returned to center. I was physically shaking, both from the shock of stopping so suddenly and what was rushing through my mind. I felt weak, almost light-headed and the air burned in my lungs. Where there should have been calm and serenity and the next few steps, there was a swirling, hot wind with him at its core. I glanced at him. He was sitting down, the smooth muscles of his arms bunching and flexing under his shirt as he moved. Then his eyes were straight back on me, watching expectantly.
    “Ready?” the choreographer said, her finger hovering over the button.
    I nodded, but I wasn’t—not even close. I was frazzled and off-balance and scared. He was in my mind, pushing everything else out of the way. I’d never felt anything like it before. I couldn’t dance.
    He was easily the hottest guy I’d ever seen. And he’d just made me blow the biggest audition of my life.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Two
     
    Darrell
    Twelve hours earlier
     
    A blazing spark arced off the weld and hit my bare forearm. I jumped back and cursed, but my words were barely audible over the pounding music and that took all the satisfaction out of it. I ripped off the welding mask and slammed down the welding torch, then kicked the waste paper basket across the room for good measure. The night was not going well.
    I stretched my back as I walked down to the other end of the workshop. I’d been hauling around hunks of metal and bending them into shape all evening and now I was starting to ache. I stared at the equations on the whiteboards, as if I could will them to give me a different answer, but they were starkly clear in their dismissal. I could work away welding the casing all I liked, but I was avoiding the real problem. I still had no way of making the damn thing fly the way it needed to.
    I looked at the prototype missile, eight feet long and six months in the making. I’d done everything I’d set out to do, except get it to dodge—change direction, mid-flight, to avoid anything trying to intercept it.
    I had a relationship with my work. Some would have called it a dysfunctional one—even an abusive one—but it had worked for me, for the last four years. Each project consumed me, but it also fed me, giving me the energy to keep going. The trick was to finish the project before it ate me up completely. This one was already a month overdue, and there was no end in sight. The project was winning.
    I’d planned on it being a late one—maybe even an all-nighter. One of the advantages of having no boss is being able to set your own hours, and I often worked pretty weird ones, into the early hours and then sleeping until lunch—if I slept at all. But raw effort wasn’t going to fix this problem.
    What I needed was inspiration.
    I killed the music, and the workshop went quiet as a tomb. Three floors underground, there was no traffic noise, no birdsong, no nothing. Within seconds, the silence was driving me crazy. Memories started floating up to fill the void—things I didn’t want to think about.
    I popped the top on a Dr. Pepper, fell into a chair and switched the big desk monitor from a blueprint to the TV cable feed. Movies I’d seen before. News I already knew. A documentary on Bigfoot. I went through my usual channels and headed into deep, uncharted cable territory. Food channels. Home makeover channels. Art—
    A freeze frame of a ballerina hanging in mid-air. No, she wasn’t frozen, she was moving—just moving so gracefully it looked like she was floating at the top of her jump. My thumb hovered over the button, ready to move on, but something stopped me.
    She landed, twirled—what did they call that, a pirouette?—and took off again, energy coming from nowhere. I sat forward, transfixed. I’d only known ballet in a very abstract way: fat kids in pink tutus falling over and old rich couples