forced himself to focus on the bartender. They’d somehow already made it to the front of the line.
He forced a smile. “My apologies. My mind was elsewhere.”
“Can I get you anything, sir?” The bartender slid a pair of cocktail napkins across the counter, which was strewn with items for sale. Ballet shoes, posters, programs.
Artem glanced at the Petite Mort program and the photograph on its cover, featuring a pair of dancers in flesh-colored bodysuits, their eyes closed and limbs entwined. His brows rose, and he glanced at Ophelia to gauge her reaction, but her gaze was focused elsewhere. She wore a dreamlike expression, as if she’d gone someplace faraway.
Artem could only wonder where.
* * *
Ophelia had to be seeing things.
The pointe shoes on display alongside the Petite Mort programs and collectible posters couldn’t possibly be hers. Being back in the theater was messing with her head. She was suffering from some sort of nostalgia-induced delusion.
She forced herself to look away from them and focus instead on the bartender.
“I hope you enjoy the ballet this evening.” He smiled at her.
He looked vaguely familiar. What if he recognized her?
She smiled in return and held her breath, hoping against hope he didn’t know who she was.
“Mr. Drake?” The bartender didn’t give her a second glance as he directed his attention toward Artem.
Good. He hadn’t recognized her. She didn’t want her past colliding with her present. It was better to make a clean break. Besides, if anyone from Drake Diamonds learned who she was, they’d also find out exactly why she’d stopped dancing. She couldn’t take walking into the Fifth Avenue store and having everyone there look at her with pity.
Everyone or a certain someone?
She pushed that unwelcome question right out of her head. She shouldn’t be thinking that way about Artem. She shouldn’t be caressing his face in the back of limousines, and she shouldn’t be standing beside him at the ballet with his hand on the small of her back, wanting nothing more than to feel the warmth of that hand on her bare skin.
And the repertoire. Petite Mort.
My God.
She sneaked another glance at the pointe shoes, mainly to avoid meeting her date’s penetrating gaze. And because they were there. Demanding her attention. One shoe tucked into the other like a neat satin package, wound with pink ribbon.
They could have been anyone’s pointe shoes, and most probably were. The company always sold shoes that had been worn by the ballerinas. Pointe shoes that had belonged to the principal dancers sometimes went for as much as two-fifty or three hundred dollars, which provided a nice fund-raising boost for the company.
She told herself they weren’t hers. Why would her shoes be offered for sale when she was no longer performing, anyway?
Still. There was something so familiar about them. And she couldn’t help noticing they were the only pair that didn’t have an autograph scrawled across the toe.
Beside her, Artem placed their order. “Two glasses of Veuve Clicquot Rosé, please.”
He removed his hand from her back to reach for his wallet, and she knew it had to be her imagination, but Ophelia felt strangely unmoored by the sudden loss of his touch.
He looked at her, and as always it felt as though he could see straight inside her. Could he tell how fractured she felt? How being here almost made it seem like she was becoming the old Ophelia? Ophelia Baronova. “Anything else, darling?”
Darling.
He shouldn’t be calling her darling. It was almost as bad as princess, and she hated it. She hated it so much that she sort of loved it.
“The pointe shoes.” With a shaky hand, she gestured toward the pastel ballet shoes. “Can I see them please?”
“Of course, miss.” The bartender passed them to her while Artem watched.
If he found it odd that she wanted to hold them, he didn’t let it show. His expression was cool, impassive. As always, she had no idea what he was thinking.
And for once, Ophelia didn’t care. Because the moment she touched those shoes, she knew. She knew. If flesh had a memory, remembrance lived in the brush of her fingertips against the soft pink satin, the familiar heaviness of the shoe’s box—its stiff square toe—in the palm of her hand and the white powder that stull clung to the soles from the backstage rosin box.
Ophelia had worn these shoes.
The ones she now held were custom-made by a shoemaker at Freed of London, as all her shoes had been. A maker who knew Ophelia’s feet more intimately than she knew them herself. She remembered peeling back the tissue paper from the box the shoes had come in. She’d sewn the ribbons on them with her own hands. She’d pirouetted, done arabesques in them. She’d danced in them. She’d dreamed in them. They were hers.
She glanced at Artem, who was now busy paying for the champagne, and then fixed her gaze once again on the shoes clutched to her chest. She wanted to see. She needed to be sure.
Maybe she was imagining things. Or maybe she just wanted so badly to believe, she was spinning stories out of satin. Heart pounding, she unspooled the ribbons from around the shoes. Her hands shook as she gently parted the pink material and peered inside. Penned in black ink on the insole, as secret as a diary entry, were the words she most wanted to see:
Giselle, June 1. Ophelia Baronova’s final performance.
The pointe shoes in her hands were the last pair of ballet slippers she’d ever worn.
“What have you got there?” Artem leaned closer, and Ophelia was so full of joy at her fortuitous discovery that she forgot to move away.
“Something wonderful.” Not until she beamed up at him did she notice the intimacy of the space between them. But even then she didn’t take a backward step. She was too happy to worry about self-preservation.
For once, she wanted to live in the moment. Like she used to live.
“I’d ask you to elaborate, but I’m already convinced. Anything that puts such a dazzling smile on your face is priceless as far as I’m concerned.” Without breaking eye contact, Artem slid two one-hundred-dollar bills out of his slim leather wallet and handed them to the man behind the counter. “We’ll take the shoes, too.”
Unlike the kitten incident, Ophelia didn’t utter a word of protest. “Thank you, Artem. Thank you very much.”
He pocketed his wallet, lifted a brow and glanced curiously at the pointe shoes, still pressed lovingly to Ophelia’s heart. “No arguments about how you can’t accept them? My, my. I’m intrigued.”
“Would you like me to argue with you, Mr. Drake?”
“Never,” he said. “And somehow, always.”
She
