Naked Angel Read Free Page B

doubt, the first act of the night had made it very clear.
    The crowd cheered when Nadia bent over suggestively as she unstrapped her shoe. That was another thing that so unsettled Max: The relationship between audience and performer in this club was so different from the respectful applause in ballet.
    Now that Nadia’s gloves and shoes were off, and the song was more than halfway over, it was only logical that the performance should do a rapid gearshift into nudity. She clearly had control of the crowd—the onlookers were enraptured with her every move, and Max could feel the buzz of anticipation for her to remove her dress. But just when Nadia should have been cashing in her best chips of the night, she froze: She awkwardly reverted back to earlier motions from the performance that now made no sense since she had already removed her gloves and shoes. The audience laughed, thinking her dance was taking a comedic turn—which apparently these things were known to do—but it soon became clear that Nadia was not trying to be funny.
    “Oh, my God. She can’t go through with it,” Anna said.
    “Glad to see common sense prevail,” said Max.
    “No, it’s not good! She must be so humiliated,” Anna said. Nadia wandered around the stage in a fruitless attempt to improvise an end to her performance that did not involve removing her clothes. Mercifully, the curtain closed almost before the song finished. The confused audience clapped, but with markedly less enthusiasm than before.
    “This isn’t a bad thing, you know,” said Max. “Maybe she’s got this out of her system, and now she can think of another outlet for herself.”
    “Do you think there’s something she could do at Ballet Arts?”
    “I don’t know,” Max said. He hated to admit it, but what he was really thinking was that he would like to do
her
. If she had taken off her clothes, he would have lost interest. But since she hadn’t, he had the nagging urge to get her to finish the job. In private.
    “I’m going to go talk to her,” Anna said. “Meet me out front?”
    “We should get going,” Max said, looking at his watch.
    “I need to make sure she’s okay. And then I need
you
to come back to my place, and make sure
I’m
okay,” she said, putting his hand on her leg.
    “I have an early rehearsal tomorrow. I’m going to head home,” Max said.
    “No! Don’t be lame. At least come with me to say hi to Nadia.”
    Seated at the table closest to the stage, costume designer Gemma Kole wondered what else could go wrong tonight. First, the proposal: Alec’s dramatic move had completely upstaged the costumes. If there were any photos of the show that were going to make it into tomorrow’s papers, it was the ones taken with Alec down on his knee in front of Mallory. And out of all the gorgeous costumes she had worked on for the past few months, The Painted Lady was going to be publicized with Mallory Dale in a silk robe that looked no more special than anything on the rack at Victoria’s Secret.
    Gemma hoped this wasn’t a sign. She’d spent all her savings on the move from England to New York City. This was the fashion capitol of the world, after all. She didn’t care what anyone said about Paris. It was New York. Of course, every aspiring designer knew this, so she was making a run on a very crowded field.
    She nervously poked her tongue against the gap between her two front teeth. Growing up in Gloucester, she’d hated her teeth. Now, thanks to the Dutch model Lara Stone, her gap was super trendy, and guys told her it was hot.
    “At least the audience can’t complain they didn’t get their money’s worth tonight,” Justin Baxter had said when Alec had proposed to Mallory onstage. As one of the owners of the club, he was also seated at the A-list table. Next to him, his unattractive wife, Martha, had slapped her knee and guffawed at the comment, which Gemma didn’t find particularly funny.
    She wondered if Martha had noticed that her