on the charm even in his absence.
Smile for the gathered strangers, pretend you know them intimately, let them brush their cheek against yours as you greet each other with the fake air kisses that make your stomach curdle.
Smile, there’s another camera. Smile as you nurse your glass of champagne.
Smile at the waiting staff circling the great ballroom with silver trays of delicious-smelling canapés but do not—not—be so gauche as to eat one.
Just. Smile.
And she did. Freya smiled so much her face ached, and then she smiled some more.
Being promoted to Principal Dancer at Compania de Ballet de Casillas came with responsibilities that involved more than pure dance. Freya was now the official face of the ballet company and at this, its most exciting time. The new state-of-the-art theatre the Casillas brothers were building for the company opened in a couple of months and it was her face on all the billboards and advertisements for it. She was the lead in the opening production.
Her, Freya Clements, an East London girl from a family so poor that winters were often a choice between heating and food, a Principal Dancer. It was a dream. She was living her dream. Marriage to Javier Casillas, joint owner of the ballet company, would be the...she almost thought icing on the cake but realised it was the wrong metaphor. Or was it the wrong simile? She couldn’t remember, had always struggled to differentiate between them. Either way, she couldn’t think of an appropriate metaphor or simile to describe her feelings about marrying Javier.
Javier was rich. Very, very rich. No one knew how much he and his twin Luis were worth but it was rare for their names to be mentioned in the press without the prefix billionaire. He was also handsome. He had chosen her to be, as he had put it, his life partner. When she looked at him she imagined him as her Prince Charming but without the title. Or the charm.
It didn’t matter that he was morose and generally unavailable. It was better that way. Marrying him gave her deteriorating mother a fighting chance.
In exactly one week he would be her husband.
The entire ballet company was, as of that day, on a two-week shutdown so the new state-of-the-art training facilities and ballet school that went hand in hand with the new theatre could be completed. Javier had decreed they would fit their nuptials in then so as not to disturb her training routine.
Where was he? He should have been here an hour ago. She’d snuck away to the Ladies to call him but found her phone not working. She couldn’t think what was wrong with it but she had no signal and no Internet connection. She would try again as soon as she had a minute to herself.
The media were out in force tonight, ready for their first public glimpse of the couple, beside themselves that Javier, son of the ballet dancers Clara Casillas and Yuri Abramova, a union that had ended in tragedy and infamy, was to marry ‘a ballerina with the potential for a career as stratospheric as his mother’s had been’. That had been an actual quote in a highbrow Spanish magazine, translated by her best friend, fellow ballerina and flatmate, Sophie, who had mastered the Spanish language with an ease that made Freya ashamed of her own inadequacies. In the two years she had lived and worked in Madrid she had hardly picked up the basics of the language.
Many of the company’s corps de ballet were in attendance that night, window dressing for the attending patrons of the arts whose money and patronage were wanted. Sophie had begged off with a migraine, something she’d been suffering with more frequently in recent weeks. Freya wished she were there. Just having Sophie in the same room soothed the nauseous panic nibbling in her stomach.
Just smile.
So she stretched her lips as wide and as high as she could and accepted yet another fake air kiss from another of Europe’s richest women and tried not to choke on the cloud of perfume she inhaled with it.
A tall figure stepped into the ballroom of the hotel the fundraiser was being held in.
Her stomach swooped.
It was him. The man from her engagement party.
Benjamin Guillem.
The name floated in her head before she could stamp it out.
It was a name that she had thought of far too often since the party two months ago. His face had found itself floating into her daydreams too many times for comfort too. And in her night dreams...
Suddenly aware of the danger she was placing herself in, she shifted her stance so he was no longer in her eyeline and smiled at an approaching elderly man.
She must not stare at him again. If he came over to speak to her she would smile gracefully exactly as she had to the other guests and this time she would find her tongue to speak in the clear voice she had cultivated through the years; chiselling the East London accent out of herself so no one in this moneyed world ever doubted she belonged.
She’d never been so tongue-tied before as she had the first time she’d seen him. She had literally been unable to say a word, just stared at him like some kind of goofball.
Her senses were on red alert, though, and as hard as she tried to concentrate on what the elderly man was saying—something about his granddaughter being a keen dancer—her skin prickled with electricity.
And then he was there, a step behind the old man, waiting his turn to speak to her.
She didn’t look directly at him as she laughed politely at a joke the old man said. She hoped it was a joke. She could barely hear her own words let alone his. Blood pounded hot and hard in her head, a burning where Benjamin’s gaze rested on her.
He was well mannered enough to wait for a natural pause in the conversation before stepping forward. ‘Mademoiselle Clements?’
To her horror she found her vocal cords frozen again and could only nod her acknowledgement at the simple question.
‘We met at your engagement party. I am Benjamin Guillem, an old friend of your fiancé.’
He had the thickest, richest French accent she had ever heard. It felt like set honey to her senses.
Unlike the other guests she’d met that evening he made no effort to pull her into an embrace, just stared at her with the eyes she’d found so unnervingly beautiful at her engagement party. Olive skinned, he had messy thick black hair and thick black eyebrows, a rough scar above the top lip of his firm mouth and a sloping nose. He reminded her of a film noir star, his dark handsome features carrying a disturbingly dangerous air. Where the other guests wore traditional tuxedos, Benjamin wore a black suit and black shirt with a skinny silver tie. If he were to produce a black fedora it wouldn’t look out of place.
The only spot of colour on him were his eyes. Those devastating eyes. A clear, vivid green, they pierced through the skin. They were eyes that didn’t miss a thing.
‘I remember,’ she said in as light a tone as she could muster, fighting through the thumping beats of her heart. ‘You stole him away from me.’ She’d been thankful for it. Javier had put his hand to her waist. His touch, a touch any other woman would no doubt delight in, had left her cold.
She prayed fervently that by the time they exchanged
