* *
Ophelia hadn’t planned on stopping by the animal shelter on the way home from work. She had, after all, already volunteered three times this week. Possibly four. She’d lost count.
She couldn’t go home yet, though. Not after the day she’d had. Dealing with all the happily engaged couples was bad enough, but she was growing accustomed to it. She didn’t have much of a choice, did she? But the unexpected encounter with Artem Drake had somehow thrown her completely off-kilter.
It wasn’t only the embarrassment of getting caught inhaling one of the fifteen dollar petits fours that had gotten her so rattled. It was him. Artem.
Mr. Drake. Not Artem. He’s your boss, not your friend. Or anything else.
He wasn’t even her boss anymore, she supposed. Which was for the best. Obviously. She hadn’t exactly made a glowing first impression. Now she could start over with whoever took his place. So really, there was no logical reason for the acute tug of disappointment she’d felt when he’d told her about his plans to resign. None whatsoever.
There was also no logical reason that she’d kept looking around all afternoon for a glimpse of him as he exited the building. Nor for the way she’d gone all fluttery when she’d caught a flash of tuxedoed pant leg beyond the closing elevator doors after her shift had ended. It hadn’t been Artem, anyway. Just another, less dashing man dressed to the nines.
What was her problem, anyway? She was acting as though she’d never met a handsome man before. Artem Drake wasn’t merely handsome, though. He was charming.
Too charming. Dangerously so.
Ophelia had felt uncharacteristically vulnerable in the presence of all that charm. Raw. Empty. And acutely aware of all that she’d lost, all that she’d never have.
She couldn’t go home to the apartment she’d inherited from her grandmother. She couldn’t spend another evening sifting through her grandmother’s things—the grainy black-and-white photographs, her tattered pointe shoes. Her grandmother had been the only family that Ophelia had known since the tender age of two, when a car accident claimed the lives of her parents. Natalia Baronova had been more than a grandparent. She’d been Ophelia’s world. Her mother figure, her best friend and her ballet teacher.
She’d died a week before Ophelia’s diagnosis. As much as Ophelia had needed someone to lean on in those first dark days, she’d been grateful that the great Natalia Baronova, star ballerina of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1940s and ’50s, died without the knowledge that her beloved granddaughter would never dance again.
“Ophelia?” Beth, the shelter manager, shook her head and planted her hands on her hips as Ophelia slipped off her coat and hung it on one of the pegs by the door. “Again? I didn’t see your name on the volunteer schedule for this evening.”
“It’s not. But I thought you could use an extra pair of hands.” Ophelia flipped through the notebook that contained the animals’ daily feeding schedule.
“You know better than anybody we always need help around here, but surely you have somewhere else to be on a Friday night.”
Nowhere, actually. “You know how much I enjoy spending time with the animals.” Plus, the shelter was now caring for a litter of eight three-week-old kittens that had to be bottle-fed every three hours. The skimpy volunteer staff could barely keep up, especially now that the city was blanketed with snow. People liked to stay home when it snowed. And that meant at any given moment, one of the kittens was hungry.
Beth nodded. “I know, love. Just be careful. I’d hate for you to ruin that pretty dress you’re wearing.”
The dress had belonged to Ophelia’s grandmother. In addition to mountains of dance memorabilia, she’d left behind a gorgeous collection of vintage clothing. Like the apartment, it had been a godsend. When she’d been dancing, Ophelia had lived in a leotard and tights. Most days, she’d even worn her dance clothes to school, since she’d typically had to go straight from rehearsal to class at the New York School of Design. She couldn’t very well show up to work at Drake Diamonds dressed in a wraparound sweater, pink tights and leg warmers.
Neither could she simply go out and buy a whole new work wardrobe. Between her student loan bills and the exorbitant cost of the biweekly injections to manage her MS, she barely made ends meet. Plus there were the medical bills from that first, awful attack, before she’d even known why the vision out of her left eye sometimes went blurry or why her fingers occasionally felt numb. Sometimes she left rehearsal with such crippling fatigue she felt as if she were walking through Jell-O. She’d blamed it on the stress of dealing with her grandmother’s recent illness. She’d blamed it on the rigorous physical demands of her solo role in the company production of Giselle. Mostly, though, she’d simply ignored her symptoms because she couldn’t quite face the prospect that something was seriously wrong. Then one night she’d fallen out of a pirouette. Onstage, midperformance. The fact that she’d been unable to peel herself off the floor had only made matters worse.
And now she’d never perform again.
Sometimes, in her most unguarded moments, Ophelia found herself pointing her toes and moving her foot in the familiar, sweeping motion of a rond de jambe. Then she’d close her eyes and remember the sickening thud as she’d come down on the wooden stage floor. She’d remember the pitying expressions on the faces of her fellow dancers and the way the crimson stage curtains had drawn closed on the spectacle with a solemn hush. Her career, her life, everything she’d worked for, had ended with that whisper of red velvet.
She had every reason to be grateful, though. She had a nice apartment in Manhattan. She had clothes on her back and a job. She’d even had the forethought to enroll in school while she’d been dancing, because she’d known that the day would come when she’d be unable to dance for a living. She just hadn’t realized that day would come so soon. She’d thought she’d had time. So much time. Time to dance, time to love, time to dream.
She’d never planned on spending her Friday nights feeding kittens at an animal shelter, but it wasn’t such a bad place to be. She actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
“I’ll be careful, Beth. I promise.” Ophelia draped a towel over the front of her dress and reached into the cabinet above a row of cat enclosures for a bottle and a fresh can of kitten formula.
As she cracked the can open and positioned it over the tiny bottle, her gaze flitted to the cage in the corner. Her hand paused midpour when she realized the wire pen was empty.
“Where’s the little white kitten?” she asked, fighting against the rapidly forming lump in her throat.
“She hasn’t been adopted, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Beth cast her a knowing glance. “She’s getting her picture taken for some charity thing.”
“Oh.” Ophelia hated herself for the swell of relief that washed over her. The shelter’s mission was to find homes for all their animals, after all. Everyone deserved a home. And love. And affection.
The lump in her throat grew tenfold. “That’s too bad.”
“Is it?” Beth lifted a sardonic brow.
Ophelia busied herself with securing the top on the bottle and lifting one of the squirming kittens out of the pen lined with a heating pad that served as a makeshift incubator. “Of course it is.”
She steadfastly
