Romance: Dance with Me (California Belly Dance Romance Book 2) (8 page)

“Watching your girlish figure?” he said as they made their way down the staircase.

She laughed. “Well, if I don’t, no one else will either.”

“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “Your curves are in all the right places.”

“Oh, my,” she said with exaggeration. “A compliment from Taz the Romancer himself. Imagine that.”

He spun around with a sharp look. “Taz the what?”

She tapped him playfully on the arm again. “The Romancer. Don’t tell me you’ve never heard that before.”

He shook his head.

“You know, because you like the ladies?” She drawled out the last word and wiggled her fingers. He was obviously not seeing the humor in it, though. With more caution, she said, “No one says it in a bad way. It’s just supposed to be funny. You know, a joke.” She regretted saying anything, but it was too late to take it back. “I’m not saying you’re a joke. I didn’t mean—”

He turned away abruptly and took the remaining steps in twos. “Can we just drop it?”

The words felt like a slap in the face.

He ran his hand through his hair again and looked at his watch. “You know, I forgot I have an appointment. Help yourself to anything you find in the kitchen, unpack, do whatever.” He turned back to her as she reached the last stair step. “I emptied half the dresser and half the closet. If you need more space, we’ll work it out when I get back.”

She watched his back because he was already halfway to the foyer. He grabbed a set of keys from a table and was standing in the open door. “Think you can handle it?”

She nodded. What else was she going to do? “I’ll be fine.” The words nearly choked her.

She heard the door shut and latch, and a moment later the roar of his Porsche. Then silence again. Just her, this massive house, and then a distinct and insistent sound of scratching coming from behind the kitchen door.

|
12

Melanie froze where she stood. What was that sound? She waited, every nerve, every muscle focused on the door. Now that she was alone, Taz’s house didn’t seem bright and open. It was stark. And white. And strange. Like a hospital. Or a laboratory.

There it was again.
Scratch-scratch. Scratch-scratch.

Then a moan. Or was it a whimper?

She stared at the door and tried to breathe. Should she leave? Should she scream? The last thing she wanted to do was wind up on the eleven o’clock news—some horrible corpse found lying in a pool of blood on this ridiculously clean, white-tiled floor. She could already hear the neighbors being interviewed: “Never saw her before. Must have been a prowler. Must have been her own fault.”

Scratch-scratch. Whimper.

Oh, for Pete’s sake. She was not going out that way. She marched to the marble fireplace on the far side of the room and grabbed an iron poker as long as her leg. She sure as hell wasn’t going out without a fight.

“Who’s there?” she shouted at the closed door.

Silence.

“I’m warning you, I’m armed. You should just leave while you can.”

Another scratch. Another moan.

It wasn’t on the other side of this door. The sound was too distant. She pushed through the swinging door and heard it again. She stopped and listened. Another scratch. It was behind a door across the room. A closet?

Slowly, she stepped again. Closer.

Another scratch, then a jingle and a yip.

She dropped the baseball-batter stance and waited to be sure. She inched closer to the door and held her ear to it.

Another yip. More jingling. More scratching.

She smiled at her own stupidity and set the poker on the counter. She unlocked the door and cracked it open. Instantly, a tiny black nose pushed its way through.

She opened the door wider to find a small Yorkie with a black ribbon holding a spray of hair like a tiny fountain atop its head.

“Look at you,” Melanie cooed as the toy-sized canine jumped to her knees. She bent and tried to pick him up, but the dog wanted nothing to do with her. He ran around Melanie’s legs and across the kitchen floor to a corner, where there was a bowl of water and another with kibble. The dog slurped greedily at the water.

“Slow down there, little guy, you’re going to drown yourself.”

The mat beneath the bowls read “Spike.”

“Spike, huh? Awfully menacing for a cutie-pie like you.”

The dog lifted his head and stared.

“Sorry. You’re right. I should learn to keep my big mouth shut. How about we start over? I’m Melanie, and it looks like I’m your new roommate.”

|
13

The seat beneath Taz rumbled. He tightened his grip on the Porsche’s steering wheel and stared at the black-asphalt ribbon of Pacific Coast Highway passing beneath him.

“Left turn ahead,” said a feminine, slightly British voice.

The car’s navigation system—he’d dubbed her Sheila—was trying to steer him toward the Sultan’s Tent. It was a route he’d set days ago, and he’d been letting it run, as he usually did, just to hear her voice. She didn’t have everything KITT from
Knight
Rider
had, but she was close enough for him. He’d saved every penny from that first year touring with the Divas to buy her. On his own, with no bank or loan from his sister. Sheila was his. So far, she’d proved herself to be the most dependable thing in his life.

Right now, however, even her reassuring voice wasn’t making him feel better.

He tapped the cancel button on the navigation screen embedded in the dashboard. “Sorry, Sheila,” he muttered and revved the engine.

He focused on the road, letting the restaurants, art galleries, and multimillion-dollar estates blur into the landscape.

Slowly, the things Melanie had said—the painful reminder that he hadn’t always made the smartest choices—they burned away, too. Pushed farther into the crystal-clear horizon with every passing mile. Pushed until there was nothing but him, the car and the feeling of leaving it all behind.

The feeling carried him nearly to the San Diego County line, where the highway merged with the freeway. It was impossible to see the horizon now, swallowed by the blackness that hung over the Pacific. He knew he should go back and face her. He should have just been a man about it and said, “I’ve heard the name, so what?”

But he hadn’t. He couldn’t.

The truth was, he hated that name. Taz the Romancer, like he was some kind of gigolo, not just a guy who happened to date a lot. There was no crime in that. And what else was he supposed to do after Tamara left? Sit around and sulk? Hole up somewhere like a monk?

No way. At first he’d gone out so she’d know he wasn’t pining. He’d never give her that satisfaction. But then it became easy, even natural. As simple as it had been to be with her, it became just as simple to be with lots of hers. There was also the side benefit of never having to worry that one day he might walk in on a business meeting that really had nothing to do with business at all. At least not his business.

He winced, remembering that day. Walking in on Tamara and that sleazy show promoter in their hotel room. That was the day he realized Tamara didn’t love him—probably never had loved him. She loved the idea of being famous, and he was just a way to get there.

But Melanie didn’t know any of that, and it had been stupid to leave tonight so suddenly. She hadn’t meant to ridicule him. He knew that. Why did it matter what she thought anyway? They weren’t dating. They weren’t even friends, not really.

But for some reason it still bothered him.

He pulled off the highway, onto a small dirt road overlooking the shore. He couldn’t see much of the surf, but he could hear the rhythm of the waves. The roaring and the crashing, over and over again. The repetition soothed him in the way the ocean always soothed him. It made him feel like any problem he had was nothing more than one grain of sand among the billions and trillions along the shore.

He should go back home. Maybe he should apologize. Maybe he should ask if they could start again.

Maybe, but not now.

He parked in a deserted lot overlooking the beach and sat, looking out over the steering wheel. He lowered the window to let the cool breeze blow in from the surf. It whipped his hair about his face, and he breathed in the cold, salty air as he listened to the surf. The roar and the crash… the roar and the crash... the roar and the crash.

That was the thing he loved best about the ocean. It made him think there was time for anything. There was all the time in the world.

|
14

When Melanie’s alarm on her smartphone went off at seven in the morning, she’d meant to tap the snooze button. It came as a startling surprise to discover those luxurious eight extra minutes of sleep had somehow become two hours. She leaped from the guest-room bed and scrambled to find her suitcase and something to wear to work.

Spike didn’t move from her cozy spot in the bed. She watched Melanie hop around the floor, trying to tug a pencil skirt up over her hips.

“What are you lookin’ at?” Melanie grumbled. “It’s his fault, you know.”

She was already in bed and asleep when the sound of distant drumming had awoken her around midnight. It had taken a few disoriented moments to remember where she was and that the drumming was coming from the music room down the hall. Her first instinct was to get up and apologize for her earlier, careless insult. But what should she say?

She mentally played through a few apologies and rejected each one. Wouldn’t it just make things worse to bring it up again? Instead, she’d lain there, listening to him play. It was easy to do because the music was good. Actually, it was great, like nothing she’d ever heard before.

She’d been happy to stay awake and listen—at least she had been until the alarm went off at seven. Then she didn’t want anything more than to remain under the incredibly comfortable, incredibly warm covers.

Hitting the wrong button just made her morning a whole lot worse.

Once the skirt was up and a shirt was on, she yanked a brush through her hair and pulled it back in a ponytail. The easiest and quickest remedy for a terrible case of bed head.

When she emerged from the guest room with her purse slung over her shoulder, she paused in front of the door to the music room, stunned by the sight of him in the chair in front of the mixing board and computer screen.

“When you pull an all-nighter, you really pull—”

A soft, gentle snore interrupted her.

“Taz?” she said as she inched into the room. His elbows were on the table, and his chin was cradled in his hands. His chest rose and fell with each breath, but otherwise he was completely still. “You awake?”

She took another step. He snored softly again.

She bent her head to see his face, his eyes closed, his dark lashes resting against the rise of his cheeks. He looked… peaceful.

She smiled to herself and backed out of the room.

The first thing she saw when she stepped off the elevator at the office was her boss going through her inbox.

“Good morning,” she said warily. It wasn’t often that she found him thumbing through her things. “Are you looking for something?”

“Well, of course I’m looking for something,” Carl Deffner blasted back. His face was flushed around his temples, and his nostrils flared.

“Okay,” she said more cautiously as she set her purse down on the desk corner. “If you tell me what it is, maybe I can help.”

He’d already tugged a stapled stack of white papers out of the pile. “This is it. The budget forecast. I forgot we have a department review today. I need the report by one.”

She stared at the stack. “That’ll take hours. It’ll take all day, at least a day.”

He shrugged and walked back to his office. “I have to have it for the meeting. I know you’ll make it work. You always do.”

You always do.
Yeah, because she worked her butt off. She came in early, worked through lunch, and stayed late. All so Deffner could look good to his boss. Sure, he’d saved her a few times from the layoff list, but lately she was beginning to wonder if it was even worth it.

Four hours later, her eyeballs felt like they were covered in starch from staring at the computer so long, but at least Deffner was happy. He’d been so relieved when she handed him the finished report, he hadn’t even balked when she said she was going to take the afternoon off.

“Not feeling well, Drake?” he asked, pulling on his worn brown blazer, his typical attire for an executive-floor meeting.

When she didn’t answer right away, he added, “It’s not one of those female complaints, is it? Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

That wasn’t exactly the excuse she’d come up with, but it would do. She sucked in her lips and stayed silent.

“Just forward my phone to voice mail before you leave.” And he was gone.