A Dance For Christmas (The Ornamental Match Maker Book 6) Read online

  She didn’t know what to say to that. She really wished she did.

  “One moment you were there with me and smiling and the next you were out cold,” she heard a rough scratch in his voice, “I was really afraid that we’d lost you, Laura. I know I told Juliet that she had to go to school, but you need to know that I’m coming back after I drop her off.” The slightest hint of a smile touched his lips. “You don’t have to entertain me, or anything like that. I just want to be able to look in and know that you’re okay.”

  Laura nodded. “Okay.”

  He gestured to the tray. “I’ll come in and get it when I come back home. Get some rest.”

  She knew she should tell him thank you, but she just didn’t have enough courage to speak. She was afraid if she did, she might say something that would scare him away.

  He took a couple of steps backwards. “I’ll see you soon.”

  * * *

  Juliet came home with a friend.

  Rather, she came home with someone who was like family to the Bensons.

  “Laura, this is Brigid. She’s my dad’s partner at his law firm.”

  Brigid stood in the door, hesitating as if she was afraid to enter.

  Looking at the older woman leaning against the door frame, Laura wondered how bad she looked. She hadn’t really looked in the mirror earlier when Matthew helped her to the door of the bathroom, she knew her cheeks would be blazing red from the injustice of having a handsome man have to help her into the bathroom and then wait outside while she... well, used the bathroom.

  Laura reached up a hand to touch her face. “How bad do I look?”

  The question seemed to shock Brigid who stepped away from the doorway like it burned her. “No! Goodness, no. You look amazing. I’m just a little awed.”

  That made Laura feel really uncomfortable. “I’m laid up in bed wearing someone’s extra scrubs because they cut up my favorite jeans and sweater, with a serious case of bedhead and you’re awed.”

  Brigid stepped closer and waved off Laura’s concerns. “Oh, stop. You’re beautiful. And you’ve hardly aged since I saw you perform in Giselle.”

  Juliet scooted closer. “You’ve seen her dance for real?”

  Brigid nodded and Juliet dragged a chair from the wall closer to the side of the bed and motioned for Brigid to sit down, then Juliet carefully sat down beside Laura.

  Laura wrapped an arm around Juliet and settled her carefully against her side.

  “What was it like?”

  Brigid went on to describe not just the plot of the ballet, but her memories of seeing Laura on stage. As the older woman recounted the performance Laura could almost hear the music in her ears and feel the cold kiss of the air conditioning against her skin and the delicious ache of her muscles as she moved through the dances on stage.

  She struggled to ward off the old feelings of loss, but she wasn’t as good at it as she’d wanted to believe. Juliet dabbed at her cheeks with a tissue. “Don’t cry,” she crooned as she pressed a kiss to Laura’s temple and again, Laura’s heart melted for this sweet girl who would be forever a part of her heart.

  “Are you sad because of your injury?”

  Laura froze for a moment and then she remembered that Juliet had been at her side as she’d answered the questions from the EMTs about her prior injury.

  “A little,” she forced her voice to work and her lips curled up into a tentative smile, “it’s why I always told my students to be careful. Ballet is beautiful and it can make you jump high enough to reach your dreams, but-”

  “You need to be mindful of those around you and their safety.”

  Laura smiled. “You remember.”

  “What happened, Miss Laura?”

  “Juliet.”

  Laura looked up and saw Matthew standing in the doorway, his gaze directed at his daughter.

  “What did we talk about?”

  “Matthew,” he turned to look at her and she felt a tremor roll through her body at the concern she saw in his eyes, “if it’s okay, I’d like to tell her. It’s not a secret. There was so much news coverage of it at the time that she’s likely to come across the story someday anyway and it might be better to hear it from me. The articles were full of speculation. Some of it was completely made up.”

  He nodded slowly. “As long as you want to tell her, it’s fine with me.” He looked at Brigid and then met Laura’s eyes again. “Do you want us to go?”

  She shook her head. “I have a feeling Brigid knows if she remembers me performing.”

  Brigid agreed with her guess.

  “I was chosen to perform with a male dancer who had recently defected to the United States from the USSR. He didn’t want to remain in their country and thought that in America, he’d be a bigger star.

  “When we began rehearsals, he was a nice enough guy. He was eager to show off his skill and artistry. I understood that. He was in a new place and while everyone was eager to know him, he didn’t feel like he was ‘home,’ at least not yet. So he did his best to be ‘seen.’ And that meant that he went out to dance clubs and he went to fancy parties and met a lot of pretty women.

  “The closer we came to the performance, the way he behaved changed. He was angry a lot. He was tired even more. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to dance with him anymore. The director of the company sat him down and scolded him. Told him to get his act together or they’d cancel the performance.”

  Juliet stared at Laura with eyes as big as saucers. “Wow. That would make me so scared!”

  “Well, I thought the same thing. And for the next few days he was better. He came to rehearse on time. He wasn’t angry. He even apologized to me.

  “But the night of the opening, he came to the theater late and he missed the company warm up, and when he did come to the theater I was getting dressed and didn’t have time to run through what he wanted to practice.” A wave of nausea passed through her belly as she collected her thoughts to finish the story. “When he joined me in the wings for our first entrance, I admit that I was really upset with him, but I wanted this to work out for both of us. A performance like that would have put the dance world on notice. A little girl like me from Arcadia, California was going to make it big.” She turned and smoothed her hand over Juliet’s hair and then combed her fingers through the dark locks. “It wasn’t until we were on stage, halfway through the first pas de deux, when I leaned in for the first ‘kiss’ between our characters, that I smelled alcohol on his breath.”

  Brigid muttered something and covered her mouth with her hand. “You didn’t hear that. Sorry.”

  But Juliet hadn’t heard it, thank goodness.

  “While he was doing his solo, I went into the wings and said I wanted to stop the performance. The Director of the Adler Ballet told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn’t go back out and finish that I’d never dance in Chicago ever again.”

  Juliet sobbed beside her and Laura pressed a kiss to her forehead.

  “I was young and stupid and I thought I didn’t have any options. All I’d ever wanted to do was dance. So I went back onstage and we continued to dance.

  “And just when I thought we’d be okay, that we could make it work, he swept me up into a lift.”

  Silence fell in the room around her, but for that moment Laura felt as if she’d gone back in time and felt herself struggling to balance on a shifting base and then she was falling.

  “It felt like I was falling forever, like one of those magic tricks where they levitate and hover off the ground and I hoped that by some stroke of luck that he’d catch me before I hit the ground.”

  “I saw it on TV,” Brigid murmured, “he stepped back and didn’t even try to help you.”

  Laura let out a shaking breath. “I didn’t see anything at the time. One minute I was up almost eight feet in the air and I remember pain before the world went dark.”

  Juliet was tucked into her shoulder, her tears wetting Laura’s top.

  “But I’m okay,
sweetie.” She rubbed a hand up and down Juliet’s back. “It was some kind of a miracle the doctors’ told me. I broke two discs in my back, but there was minimal damage to my spinal cord.”

  “That’s why you don’t dance anymore.”

  She heard the scratch in Matthew’s voice and saw the redness in his eyes. Nodding, she tried to smile at him.

  “I dance, but I’ll never be the dancer I was… or that I was meant to be. But I choose to remember every day that I can walk. And I can teach. I can give other girls a chance to dance the way they want to in their souls. I’m grateful for all of that.”

  She leaned back, careful to keep a smile on her face as she looked down into Juliet’s tear-filled eyes.

  “And because of that I met you. I got to know your mother. And now,” she looked over Juliet’s shoulder for a moment, “your dad. I’d say I’m blessed in all kinds of ways.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Laura heard the anger in Matthew’s voice.

  “He was actually arrested for some kind of endangerment charge. I don’t remember much of the trial because I spent most of the time in Physical Therapy.

  “Those people were my lifesavers. The doctors were great but it was my therapists that wouldn’t let me give up on myself no matter how much pain I was in.”

  Matthew was at her side then, gently brushing her hair back from her face and hopefully fixing some of her bedhead. “Is that why you became a physical therapist?”

  “Yeah,” she yawned and felt Juliet ease off the edge of the bed to stand beside her father, “I wanted to help people not just see the light at the end of that painful tunnel, I wanted to help them dance in that light. Giving back seemed the only fitting tribute to the miracle they gave me.”

  Laura barely heard Brigid’s quiet farewell, but she tried to smile at the lovely woman. And when Juliet bent to kiss her on her cheek, Laura let herself enjoy the sensation and try to tuck it away in her memories for later, but it was Matthew’s eyes that she searched for and found.

  It was the soft strength in those eyes that she took with her into her heavy slumber.

  Chapter 10

  It didn’t take long to get Laura back on her feet and at rehearsals. As they stood across the room from each other for their final fitting for their costumes, he had to keep apologizing to the costumer’s assistant. “Sir, would you please turn this way?”

  His attention was focused on Laura across the room. Her smaller stature called for some alterations and he’d learned words that he’d never had a use for, like ‘short-waisted,’ ‘bodice,’ ‘closure,’ and ‘décolletage.’ The last one was always going to make him blush.

  But there was something about seeing Laura in a gown from another era, her long neck and gently sloped shoulders were shown off by the neckline of the gown as if she was carved from marble and about to be put on display in an art museum.

  She’d told him the name of the color about half a dozen times and still he couldn’t seem to summon the word into his head, not when she turned in a graceful circle before the three-way mirror on the far side of the room.

  “Um, sir?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  The assistant hung his head for a moment, but when he looked back up, he was smiling. “Maybe we should have done your fittings separately?”

  Matthew nodded. “Maybe. Again, I’m sorry.”

  Tugging at the tape measure around his neck and reaching into his vest pocket for the little piece of blue tailor’s chalk. “If I had a dollar for every time you’ve said that in the last,” he took a quick look at the clock on the wall, “I’d be able to take myself out for steak tonight.”

  Matthew opened his mouth and the assistant held up his index finger. “Don’t, please don’t apologize again.” Then he turned his hand to point his finger to Matthew’s left. “That way, please.”

  As he turned, he caught Laura’s gaze in his mirror and she shook her head at him, smiling enough that he knew she had to be laughing in her head.

  He didn’t mind.

  He loved seeing her smiles.

  He loved having her fall asleep on his shoulder. Especially when Juliet was on the other side, squishing him in the middle of the couch.

  And if he was being truly honest with himself, he would admit that there wasn’t anything about Laura Chun that he didn’t love.

  He knew Juliet felt the same way. He hadn’t needed to ask her. Nearly every conversation had some kind of mention of her.

  Okay, maybe quite a few mentions of her.

  Lost in his thoughts he barely heard the laughter approaching, or the long-suffering sigh that accompanied it.

  “You look ‘quite put out,’ Felix.”

  Matthew turned to see Laura standing at the edge of his mirror, already back in her rehearsal clothes, including the heavy hoop-skirt all of the party mothers wore to get used to them. ‘Hoop-skirt,’ another term he could add to his growing vocabulary.

  “Well, Laura,” the assistant sighed, “he’s new... so I’ll give him a break, but,” the man stood from his crouched position near the floor and gave Laura a fond look, “if you would be so kind as to stand directly within his eye-sight, I think we can get this fitting done so you both can actually make it to rehearsal on time.”

  “Oh,” she cast a look at him and Matthew shook his head, “I’m not that bad.”

  Laura and Felix shared identical owlish stares before Felix leaned in and shook his head. “At one point you were so busy staring across the room, I stuck you with a pin and you didn’t even notice.” He turned back to Laura. “You have mesmerized him, girlfriend.”

  He should have blushed. He should have said something to brush off the other man’s words, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t need to.

  Mesmerized?

  It fit.

  And Felix wasn’t the only one to notice.

  Iris’ Spotify Holiday Channel had started with the opening of the Nutcracker and he’d actually walked out of his office and danced with her. The receptionist had only stepped on his feet a few times and stammered out a half-dozen apologizes, but he hadn’t noticed.

  Again, his attention was somewhere else.

  Laura edged past Felix, taking hold of a hoop from her skirt and tilting it up so that she didn’t knock him over with her added circumference.

  And as she scooted by, she pointed down toward her feet. “Look, Felix! My ankles are showing.”

  “Ah, the old societal mores. Thank goodness fashion has evolved from that point.”

  “But,” Laura interjected, “was it fashion that changed, or our perceptions?”

  Felix worked at the hem on Matthew’s left leg. “Ah, we have a philosopher in our midst, Mr. Benson.”

  Matthew was surprised at how much of Felix’s comments he could understand while the man had a bunch of wickedly long pins pinched tight at the corner of his mouth.

  “She certainly keeps me on my toes.”

  “Oh, really,” came Felix’s arched response, “careful, Laura, he’ll be stealing your old pointe shoes next.”

  Laura’s good mood seemed to dim and Matthew worried that Felix had brought up some bad memories for Laura.

  And then she surprised him again, giving him a smile instead of a frown. “If you fit my old toe-shoes, I’ll kill myself.”

  Matthew knew he was missing something, but looking between the two people at his side he knew they hadn’t.

  Felix took pity on him. “She’s using a line from ‘While You Were Sleeping.’”

  Still nothing.

  Felix cast a look over his shoulder. “You need to correct this.”

  Matthew swallowed. Hard. “What?”

  “What Felix means is that we’re going to have to watch the movie. I think it’s safe for Juliet to watch. I was just taking a line from the show where Bill Pullman’s character Jack rips his jeans open in the back and he asks Sandra Bullock’s character Lucy if she has any spare jeans in her apartment.”

 
; “And,” Felix looked up, with one less pin between his lips, “she tells him ‘If you fit my jeans, I’ll kill myself. See? Nothing scary. Relax, Matthew.”

  * * *

  And relax was what they did. The next day before their final dress rehearsal, they picked up what amounted to be a picnic and sat in the car watching the movie on Matthew’s laptop. It was kind of a drive-in theater with a smaller screen and much better sound once they’d connected the Bluetooth to the car’s stereo.

  It was the perfect way to start the final dress rehearsal. When they all parted ways at the door leaning down to the dressing rooms, Matthew gave his daughter a gentle kiss on her forehead.

  “Okay, what’s up?”

  He looked down at his daughter. “About?”

  She gave him a shrewd look that reminded him a little too much of himself to ease his mind. “You’ve got a secret and you’re not sharing.”

  Okay.

  “Well, it’s not so much a secret as a surprise.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You say potato, and I say whatever.”

  He wasn’t going to correct the phrase, not unless he wanted to dig himself a deeper hole with his too-smart daughter. “You will find out tonight at our ‘After Dress Rehearsal’ celebration dinner. You’ll like it. I promise.”

  “Hmph.” She folded her arms across her chest, but there was a smile on her lips. “I better.”

  She flounced off toward her dressing room and he rolled his own eyes this time. Finally having a reason to.

  That night, after rehearsal, at what was likely their thirtieth ‘celebratory’ dinner, because he and Juliet seemed to find any little reason to invite Laura out to eat with them. When it was just a meal, it seemed easier for her to turn them down. So far, they’d been batting a thousand on celebration invites, but tonight was hopefully going to be a real celebration.

  Tonight, he was going to ask her if they could date. Not just casually. There was nothing casual with what he felt for Laura. He wanted to date her seriously. Something he’d only done once before in his life and he’d married that woman.