The Dance Off Read Online Free

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    Nadia had all that going for her and more. Yet if she didn’t nail the fast-approaching chance to get her life back in a few weeks’ time, she’d have deserved that contempt as she’d made the same mistake her mother did before her.
    Well, not the exact same mistake—at least Nadia hadn’t fallen pregnant.
    With that wicked little kick of ascendancy fuelling her, she reached into her bedside table and found her notebook. For the next few minutes she pushed everything else from her mind and sketched out the moves she’d added to her routine that night before Ryder Fitzgerald had arrived.
    In her early twenties she’d lived on natural talent, on chutzpah, and maybe even on her mother’s name. A year out of the spotlight and that momentum was gone, and every day away younger, fitter, hungrier dancers were pouring into the void, eager and ready to take her spot. But what those hungry little dancers didn’t know was that this time Nadia had an edge—she didn’t simply want their jobs; this time she really had something to prove.
    Sketches done, she slumped back to the bed. She’d shower in the morning. And since she didn’t start work till two the next day, she’d have time to attend a couple of classes of her own—maybe a contemporary class in South Yarra, or trapeze in that converted warehouse in Notting Hill. Either way she’d kill it. Because look out, world, Nadia Kent was back, baby.
    Despite the late hour, the last whispers of adrenalin still pulsed through her system, so she grabbed her TV remote and scrolled through the movies on her hard drive till she found what she was looking for.
    The strains of Be My Baby buzzed from the dodgy speakers in her second-hand TV, and grainy black and white dancers writhed on the screen. When Patrick Swayze’s name loomed in that sexy pink font, Nadia tucked herself under her covers and sighed.
    Yep, things were still on track. So long as she didn’t do anything stupid. Again.
    Sliding into sleep, she couldn’t be sure if it was her mother’s voice she’d heard at the last, or her own.

TWO
    “So how was it? Was it amazing? Aren’t you glad I made you go?”
    Ryder pressed the phone harder to one ear to better hear Sam, and plugged a finger in his other ear to ward off the sounds of the construction site. “It was...” Excruciating. Hot. A lesson in extreme—patience . He tugged his hard hat lower over his forehead, and growled, “It was fine.”
    “Told you. And how cool is the studio? And the ceilings. I knew you’d love the ceilings.”
    No need to fudge the truth there. The beams were stunning. Old school. The exact kind of feature he’d once upon a time have sold his soul to study. He glanced about the modern web of metal spikes and cold concrete slabs around him, the foundations of what would in many months be a sleek, silver, skyscraping tower—as far from the slumped thick red-brick building as architecturally possible.
    His foreman waved a torch in his direction, letting him know the group he was there to meet—and who were about to make his day go from long to interminable—had arrived. Ryder tilted his chin in acknowledgement, holding up his finger to say he’d be a minute.
    “She was a dancer,” Sam was saying. “A real one. A Sky High one.”
    Struggling to picture sultry Nadia Kent in a pink tutu and a bun, Ryder asked, “Nadia’s a ballerina?”
    A pause, then, “No-o-o. I told you. Sky High .”
    “Sam, just for a moment, treat me as if I am an Australian human male and speak plain English.”
    “Man, you need to get out more. Sky High is huge. A dance extravaganza. A kind of burlesque meets Burn the Floor meets Cirque du Soleil; all superb special effects and crazy-talented dancers. In Vegas!”
    Ryder’s focus converged until it was entirely on his sister’s voice. “Sam, do you have a showgirl teaching your wedding party how to dance?”
    “Oh, calm down. She wasn’t working some dive bar off the strip.”
    And yet,