Hot Moves Read online

“I can’t believe you’ve lived here your whole life and you’ve never been to Powell’s. It’s an institution,” she said, walking through the store’s main room. “I thought you Portlanders were supposed to be bookworms. What do you do with yourself all winter while it’s raining?”

  “I brew beer. Or I go outside and get wet,” he added. “I don’t melt. Speaking of which, I thought we were hiking.”

  “Just give me five minutes. I need to pick up a couple of tango and theater books they’re holding for me. After that, we can go.”

  She turned to head down a little staircase that led from the main room into the space beyond.

  Brady followed her into the cramped room. “This isn’t one of those places where the stairs keep going down and down until you wind up in a dark cellar where the Morlochs live, is it?”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Go back to the main room. They’ve got windows. And a whole aisle on hiking and outdoors stuff.”

  “I’d rather do it than read about it.”

  “Then look up brewing.”

  “I’d rather do it than read about it.”

  She kissed him. “Then look up sex and find something new for us to try.”

  “I’d rather—”

  She propped one fist on her hip. “Don’t try to tell me you don’t read. I’ve been to your house. I’ve seen the books.”

  “True.” It wasn’t that he didn’t read. He’d pick up an outdoor magazine, nonfiction, maybe a mystery or thriller. He usually frequented the small bookstore in his neighborhood, where he didn’t have to worry that one of the stacks was going to come tumbling down on him.

  “So go browse.” She gave him a push and turned away.

  Thea had been doing that a lot of late.

  Something felt off. He couldn’t put his finger on it, couldn’t say when things had changed, but something between them wasn’t right.

  And it was driving him crazy. The thing was, he couldn’t exactly ask her a lot about it without sounding paranoid or crowding her. It was probably nothing. She had to be concerned about her mother, even if she did try to pass it off as no big deal. Or refuse to talk about it, if he were honest.

  Maybe she was just preoccupied. Maybe she really was just busy. He sure was. The further along they got with things at the theater, the more…idiosyncrasies cropped up. If he wasn’t at the theater, he was brewing, if he wasn’t there, he was trying to help Michael run the other pubs or watch Michael’s kids to give their parents a break.

  Was it any wonder their schedules didn’t mesh?

  Oh yeah, he could come up with all kinds of arguments for how things were probably fine and dandy.

  He didn’t believe a single one of them.

  To take his mind off it, he looked around the bookstore. The problem was, there were too many choices vying for his attention. It was paralyzing. He drifted around a table groaning with those glossy, oversize books people liked to leave out on their coffee tables. The Complete Fisherman’s Guide to Wide-Mouth Bass. Yeah. There was some excitement. The one on caving was a little more interesting. Cool pictures, but being trapped underground in the dark wasn’t really his thing. Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall. Now, that was his thing. He was reaching for it when he saw the book behind it.

  Runway Confidential screamed the bright pink title in jagged-edged letters. The dust jacket bore a collage of photos of beautiful, stick-thin women prancing around in bizarre-looking clothes. He’d never gotten the anorexic model look—to him, they appeared too weak to even walk across the street. What was sexy about that?

  Still, he glanced at it in a sort of repelled fascination. Mannequins, he’d once heard them called and it was true—they looked like those stiff, inhuman figures that stood in store windows. He preferred a woman with a strong, tough body like Thea’s. A body that could do things, he thought, his mouth curving at the memory. A body that was downright extraordinary, with a face to match. A mouth that he couldn’t get enough of. Eyes that made him want to dive in so he could see right down into her soul, eyes that were—

  Staring up at him from the cover.

  He blinked and shook his head. It couldn’t be. But he still picked up the book to look closer. And Thea’s face, he swore it was her face, looked out at him with pale lips, shadowed eyes. Younger, with inches worth of makeup, but recognizably her. She wore a…dress, maybe, that appeared to be made of paper napkins, her hair twisted up somehow and frizzed.

  It had to be a mistake. The table of contents listed stories, not people, so he leafed through the pages, flipping past the drug scandals, the sex scandals, the stories of jail time and nervous breakdowns.

  And then he stopped.

  Derek’s Party Girls, the headline read. This time the picture wasn’t from a tabloid. It was real. Taken in a nightclub, he thought, the background crowded with a confusion of bodies and neon and brushed metal. She stood amid a cluster of other equally cadaverous women, a scrap of a black mesh miniskirt showing off those mile-long legs, her lips slicked with red, eyes ringed with black.

  She hung on the neck of a man who stood in the middle of the group, a man with eyes so pale they looked like ice and about as cold. He had a proprietary hand tucked inside her skimpy wrap shirt and another on her ass. She acted like she didn’t notice.

  There was more, though, a wrongness about her face, somehow, an unnatural brightness to the eyes, a brittleness, a slack confusion to the mouth.

  Thea?

  He looked, he saw, he tried to get his head around it.

  Coincidence, he told himself, it had to be. They said everyone had a double, maybe this was Thea’s. But he knew even as he searched for a caption that he was wrong.

  Brady moved his head. He wasn’t wrong, this was wrong. This wasn’t the person he knew, it wasn’t the woman he was in love with.

  But it was her. Somehow, impossibly, it was her.

  SO MAYBE IF she concentrated on the small stuff, it would be all right, Thea thought, mounting the stairs into the main room to see Brady ahead. Like the way seeing him never failed to give her a pulse of excitement. For all the anxiety, there was something about him that made her heart light whenever she saw him. She knew she’d laugh, she knew that whatever happened, she’d have fun. She didn’t have to look for warning signs because it didn’t matter. It was a temporary gig and she needed to remind herself of that.

  For all of his complaining about being in a bookstore, he’d managed to find something to read, she noticed. An endearing seriousness firmed his mouth as he flipped through the book he held. Time to go home, she decided. Forget hiking. Time to go home and jump Brady’s bones. Whatever else wasn’t working for her right then, that still did.

  Quietly, she stole up behind him. “I’m thinking we need to blow this Popsicle stand and go boink our brains out,” she murmured in his ear.

  When he turned to look at her blankly, her smile slipped. “What’s wrong?”

  Then she saw the book he held. She saw herself, a person she hardly recognized, a person she’d never wanted to be. A person who’d done things she’d never wanted to do. With Derek, standing behind her.

  She dimly heard the book in her hand drop to the floor. “What is that?” she whispered.

  He studied her, his eyes unfathomable. “Some supermodel’s tell-all book, with ‘Derek’s Party Girls.’ Is this you? I can’t find the caption.” He glanced from the glossy page to her as though he still couldn’t quite believe it.

  And she felt sick, as though she were dropping from a great height.

  “I mean, it is you, isn’t it?” he said slowly, his eyes moving back to the photo. “I knew there was stuff you weren’t telling me. I just never figured it was a whole other life.”

  “Oh, Brady, it’s…it was…” It was a past that would never stop haunting her. The parties, the lifestyle, the fast lane turned to nightmare treadmill that she could never escape. Not then and not now, not when it could rise up out of the pages of a book and wrap its cold, relent
less fingers around her throat and her life.

  Things were only temporary between them, she reminded herself. But somewhere along the line she’d stopped believing that. Somewhere along the line she’d handed him her heart.

  As she’d once handed it to Derek.

  Hurrying, she headed for the door without a backward glance, unable to breathe.

  BRADY SKIDDED OUT onto the sidewalk after her. “Wait.” He took a few quick steps. “Hold it, will you wait? What’s going on?”

  “I want to get out of here,” she blurted, something almost hunted in her eyes. “Where’s the car?”

  “Look, calm down and tell me what’s going on.”

  “I just want to go home,” she repeated, her voice high and thin. “Where’s the car?”

  “Over here. Come on, it’ll be okay,” he said, moving to put his arm around her, but she flinched away. She’d gone somewhere else in her memories, somewhere far from him, somewhere in those pictures, those parties where the smiles were desperate and the laughter looked too loud.

  He was almost bursting on the drive back to Robyn’s, wanting to know everything. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask. She’d have to tell him.

  When he pulled up in front of the house, Thea sat silently for a moment. “It was a long time ago,” she said finally, without looking at him. And then she got out of the car without looking back.

  Brady jumped out and ran after her. “Hey,” he said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.”

  “I will be.” But her hands shook and she couldn’t manage to get her keys in the lock. Finally, he took them from her and opened the door.

  “Hey, you want space, that’s cool. I’m going to take Darlene out for a walk. We can talk when I get back.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “It’ll be a long walk. Don’t worry about it. But leave the door open so I can get in, okay?”

  She said nothing, walking into Robyn’s place. And he took Darlene out into the quiet afternoon, not paying attention to where he was going, trying to figure out what could have happened to Thea in New York that was so bad she would bury it. And what the wasted person in that photo, wrapped around some guy named Derek, had to do with the woman he loved, the woman who had seemed to shatter in front of him.

  The woman he wasn’t sure he knew how to piece back together.

  Finally Darlene’s leash pulled taut and Brady realized that he had walked the pug into exhaustion. “Okay, soldier,” he said, scooping her up, “let’s go see what Aunt Thea’s got cooking for us at home.”

  The front door was unlocked, he was relieved to find. Inside, he put Darlene down carefully.

  “Thea?” he called softly.

  The house was silent. He called her name again, more loudly, but there was no response. So he went down the hall. The bathroom mirror was still fogged, from a shower, he assumed. Her bedroom door stood ajar. He gently pushed it open and went in.

  On the bed, she lay on her side, wearing her robe, hair still wet. He sat beside her and took up one of her hands. It was ice cold. “Talk to me.” His voice broke the hush. “What happened to you?”

  “I made over two million dollars is what happened,” she said tiredly.

  She was serious, he realized. “How?”

  “You saw the pictures. How do you think? Modeling.”

  “Two million?”

  “I was very popular.”

  He shook his head. “What about L.A. and teaching dance? What was all that about?”

  She sat up abruptly. “I never said that. You thought what you wanted to.”

  “What I thought was that there was a whole lot going on with you that you weren’t telling me.” She had Thea’s face, Thea’s voice but her gaze was flat, her voice hard. He was in love with her and yet how he wondered if he even knew her at all.

  “I’m sorry if I can’t be what you want,” she said colorlessly.

  Then he saw it, the flicker of desperation in her eyes.

  “You’re what I want.” And he was damned if he was going to walk away, no matter how hard she was pushing him. “What happened back there? What happened to you in New York?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t kid yourself.” Frustration rose in his voice. “It’s still with you, whatever it is. I watch you sometimes, you go away in your head and I don’t have a clue where.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Because, dammit, you matter.”

  Her eyes flashed. “What, are you looking for chapter and verse?” She strode out of the room, a movement that looked too much like flight.

  Brady followed her. “There’s something between us, Thea. Something more than screwing around, and you know it.”

  She was trapped in the kitchen, a quarry at bay. “What if there is? It’s just temporary.”

  And it was just another attempt to push him away. “Then why are you so scared to talk to me?”

  “Fine,” she snapped. “You want to know? I’ll tell you. I modeled. I did bad things. Bad things happened to me. I made over two million dollars. I left. End of story.” She walked out into the living room, sank down on the couch. Out of instinct, he sat beside her. “Oh, what, you’re looking for more details?” she asked brightly. “Let’s see…I was born. I grew up. Derek found me in a restaurant when I was nineteen.”

  Derek’s Party Girls. “The photographer. The book said he was a hotshot.”

  “He wanted me for a photo shoot he was doing. Had to have me, and when Derek Edes wants something, Derek Edes gets it.” Her smile held no humor. “In this case, he wanted me.”

  “To go to New York?”

  She nodded, still not looking at him. “It seemed like the perfect opportunity—Broadway’s where you go if you want to dance and here someone was offering to set me up in New York. I figured I could focus on dance, model on the side.” She smiled mockingly, at herself, not him, he realized. “I was more naive than I had any right to be.”

  “I almost didn’t recognize you in those pictures. They made you look like someone else.”

  “With the right hair and makeup and photographer, anyone can look beautiful.”

  “I didn’t like it,” he said flatly. “The way you look now, that’s beautiful. Not like that. That was, I don’t know, weird and fake.”

  “Well, the fashion houses liked it. Derek did some fairly innovative stuff with that first spread and it made a name for me. The offers started rolling in. Cover shoots, fashion pages, runway work…” She shook her head helplessly. “There was so much money.”

  “What about dance?”

  “I still took classes. It was the only life I had outside of the fashion industry. I think it was what saved me. That’s where I met Robyn.” She rose to cross to the window. “He didn’t like that I did it, but it was the one thing I held out for.”

  “He?”

  “Derek.”

  Brady remembered the eyes.

  “The day after I got to New York, I was in his studio. The day after that I was in his bed, and the day after that I’d moved in. It was like sliding down a slope of ice.”

  Barely nineteen, he remembered. And he saw that she was shaking.

  “Derek had a rep for making careers—or latching on to the next hot thing. Maybe that’s why the other girls were so nasty to me. They wouldn’t have been if they’d known what it was like.” She stared sightlessly through the glass, at another place, another time. “He controlled everything—what I wore, where I went, what jobs I took, who I talked to. It was like I was some kind of a zombie. I couldn’t say no to him. He was, well…overwhelming and I’d been trained pretty well by a father just like him. And he took…everything.”

  “Your money?”

  She made a dismissive noise. “What I made was a pittance compared to Derek. He wasn’t after my money, except controlling it. He was after something more…intangible. Anyway, Rita Fletcher, my agent, had gone through a couple of ugly divo
rces. She insisted that all the money stay in my name. That was the first time he got really angry at me…”

  Brady felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck. “Did he hit you?” he asked carefully.

  “No. I wonder sometimes if it might have been easier if he had. Maybe it would have snapped me out of it. I doubt it, though.”

  “What finally did?”

  She gave way and looked at him. “Haven’t you heard enough? Do you have to have every gory detail?” Her voice trembled.

  It was here, whatever it was. Whatever had happened, it was this that haunted her. “What was it, Thea?” He stepped up behind her.

  “Why do you need to know?”

  “I don’t need to know but you damned well need to tell someone. You need to get it out of your head before it destroys you. And if we’re to have any kind of chance, then yeah, you need to tell me.”

  “Always a reason, isn’t there, Brady? Always an argument, always pushing.” She rounded on him. “It’s my life.”

  “It’s our life,” he countered. “Tell me what happened to you.”

  “You want to know what happened?” she demanded. “We were at a party. I was talking to a producer I’d met at dance class about choreography. Derek was all smiles and I was so stupid I didn’t even realize anything was wrong until we got home. That was when he started ranting. I’d been flirting, he said, making a fool of myself and of him.”

  She took a shuddering breath. “What I didn’t know at the time was that he’d been doing a lot of cocaine and it was making him paranoid. I tried to tell him it was just an opportunity for me to get some dance work. Maybe that was what did it. He went ballistic. And then…” Her mouth opened but for a moment no words came out. “And then he proceeded to show me who was on top in the relationship in the most graphic, fundamental way he could.” Her voice was arid, barely audible. “I think you can figure that one out.”

  If he could have found Derek Edes at that moment, Brady would have wrapped his hands around the man’s neck and squeezed the life out of him. He wanted to destroy him, to erase the past, get rid of the shadows in Thea’s eyes. But he couldn’t. So he did the only thing he could and reached for her.