Love Is a Dangerous Dance novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Signing
Portia signs a one-year engagement contract in front of the board for a soloist place, then finds a bleeding stranger holding her copy.
The contract was eleven pages long, and I read every one of them with the board watching.
Victor Ashworth sat at the head of the table with both hands folded over his gold-knobbed cane.
He had asked me to sign in front of everyone so there would be no doubt I had chosen it.
I was twenty-six years old, and I had spent seven years in the back row of a ballet company.
The pen he gave me weighed more than any pen I had held.
"Page nine," I said. "It says the engagement lasts twelve months and ends on a date I don't pick."
"It ends when the board says so," Victor said.
"Then I want the role in writing on page ten, not in a promise."
The room went quiet.
Nine people in dark suits looked at the girl from the corps who wanted to renegotiate.
Beside me, Geoffrey Ashworth let out a short breath that was almost a laugh.
He was Victor's son, thirty years old, tired around the eyes, and he was the man I was supposed to pretend to love.
He had told me in the hallway that he wouldn't touch me and wouldn't ask me to.
"Add it," Geoffrey said to the lawyer. "Giselle, opening night, soloist contract, in ink."
Victor looked at his son for a long moment.
Then he nodded at the lawyer.
The lawyer wrote the line in by hand and initialed it.
I signed my name at the bottom of page eleven.
Portia Marceau.
It looked small on that thick paper.
My father had worked fifteen years as a stagehand in the theater downstairs, and he had never once been invited into this room.
He had died eleven months ago, falling from the fly gallery forty feet above the stage.
The police called it an accident.
I had never believed them, but I had no proof, and I had a rent bill.
"Welcome to the family, Miss Marceau," Victor said.
His smile reached nowhere near his eyes.
The door opened before anyone could say another word.
Lena Garnier stood there in her rehearsal wrap, with her blonde hair pulled so tight it lifted her eyebrows.
She was the company's principal dancer, twenty-seven, and she had been told for two years that Giselle was hers.
"Is it true?" she said. "Is she dancing it?"
"Lena," Victor said gently. "This is a board meeting."
"She can't do the mad scene. She can't even do the hops in Act Two without wobbling."
I stood up from the table.
My hands were shaking, so I put them flat on the wood.
"I wobble because I've danced on a broken heel for three months," I said.
"Come watch me tomorrow at ten and tell me what you see."
Lena stared at me.
Nobody had ever answered her out loud before.
Geoffrey slid the ring over my finger while the board watched.
It was a square emerald, heavy and cold, and it fit.
"Smile," he murmured. "They're looking."
I smiled.
Then I walked out of that room on my own two feet, which was all I had ever wanted from any of them.
I took the back stairs down to the dressing rooms, because the front hall was full of photographers.
The Marlowe Theater smelled like dust, hot lights and old rosin.
My dressing room was at the end of the corridor.
It was narrow, with a mirror, a radiator and a rack of tutus I had never worn on a real stage.
I pushed the door open with my shoulder.
The light was off.
I reached for the switch.
"Don't," a man said from the dark.
A hand closed over mine on the wall, and it was warm and wet.
I smelled blood before I saw it.
He pulled me one step into the room and kicked the door shut behind me.
The lamp over the mirror clicked on.
He stood very close, tall and lean, with dark blond hair and a grey wool coat soaked black along the left side.
The tip of his ring finger was missing.
In his other hand he held my own contract, the carbon copy, pinned flat against his chest.
"Eleven pages," he said, and his voice was low and calm. "You read them all, and you still signed."
I looked at the pistol lying on my makeup table, between the powder and the bobby pins.
Then I looked at the red stain spreading down his coat.
"Alec Kerrigan," he said. "You'll want the name for later."
"Miss Marceau, you and I are going to talk about your fiance."
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