Lead and Follow(50)

Lizzie leaned forward and splayed her hands on the glossy table. “Do you have a problem, Dima?” she asked, her voice so low it neared a growl.

“That display, in the park.” He narrowed his eyes. “And yesterday, using me to show off for Remy. You danced with more passion and vitality than in the last two years on tour. You’ll dance like that for fun, but not when it could mean a second career for us?”

“We have a career, as soon as my therapy is done.”

The waitress snapped her notebook shut. “I’ll just come back in a few,” she said before she scuttled away.

Paul sighed, but only put his arm across the back of Lizzie’s seat as if settling in for a long wait.

“Your therapy could be done if you weren’t scared.” From what must be the deepest recesses of his brain, he spilled out heated words. “You’re scared I’ll let you down again. That I’m not as invested as you are.”

“You’re full of crap.” Her eyes flashed with the most passion he’d seen from her during daylight hours. “You’re the one who wants to stay in that dive. I’d have expected more ambition from you!”

This. This was what he’d missed. Not the fighting, but the engagement. The feeling that they were connected. Only feeling it while his cock was in her mouth made him realize how much they’d lost. Even sniping at each other in a grease-laden diner felt better than two months of frozen hell.

He fisted his hands on his knees beneath the table. She’d withdrawn her foot. “Do you have any idea what I’ve given up for you?”

“Nothing.” Her mouth turned down into a genuine pout. “You slid right into Devant as if you didn’t even miss dancing with me. So yeah, thanks for visiting me at my parents’ house. Believe me, I appreciated the distraction from mom hovering. But that isn’t the same and you know it. How could you decide to just…quit? Quit us?”

He reached out, snagging her hands between both of his. Her fingers were cold, which made sense because he was a rock in a midwinter field. Everything had been colder in these months living a half-life. “I missed you. You are my partner. But I won’t have my decisions thrown in my face as if I’ve done something wrong.”

Just as he’d expected, she tried to pull away. Paul put a hand behind her back. Though the other man was rubbing softly, the sympathetic look he threw Dima said he was also keeping her put.

Lizzie pursed her lips, her posture aggressive. “What decisions? To throw away your training? To give up on our partnership?”

“No, to give up on Svetlana.”

“Not my fault you broke up with that cow.”

He turned the words over in his head once, twice. He’d held few secrets from Lizzie. He hadn’t liked keeping this one, but it had been his burden. It had been his call. She’d needed all her strength to recover without hearing his dilemmas.

“Sveta offered me the lead in her new show.”

She pulled on her hand again, but he wasn’t letting go. Instead, her eyes drifted shut—as close to hiding as she could get without physical movement. “The one on Broadway?”

“Yes.”

“I…” The lovely dark green of her eyes had clouded with confusion. “What happened? Tell me.”

“Word about what had happened to your knee didn’t take long to get around. You know how fast bad news travels.”

He stared down at the glossy red polish on her fingernails. Maybe earlier that morning he would’ve found pleasure in the thought of her nails on his flesh, as her stinging need urged him on. At that moment, however, he would’ve looked at anything. Anything to distance himself from what he needed to admit.

“I sat in the ER waiting room. They wouldn’t let me see you yet.” The diner’s savory scents mingled with that sharp memory, twisting his stomach. “Svetlana called me. She made her offer. Tried to convince me to become partners on stage as well as off. Broadway was what she dangled. Our own show.”

Lizzie’s brow wrinkled. “You passed it up?”

He flicked a glance at Paul. How strange to think they were playing out such intimacies both with and before him. “I did, and I ended it with her on the day of your first surgery.”

“You’d been with her for two years. I didn’t like her, but…” More confusion, with something near to sadness. “Why would you do that?”

“Don’t you understand yet, little one?” His heart pinched. They were lost. Both of them. He only knew one thing. “I will never go anywhere you aren’t eventually willing to follow.”