Anything for Her - By Janice Kay Johnson Page 0,35

and adjusted his goggles. “I need to get back to work now.”

Sean watched him for a minute even as he donned the ear protection again and picked up the circular saw with the electroplated diamond blade, necessary to cut granite.

With a good grip on the handle, Nolan gently began, letting the blade do the cutting. When his mind tried to summon the picture of Allie sprawled on her bed, her slender, lithe body naked, he ruthlessly shut it down. This work was too dangerous to allow himself to daydream.

He kept going until later than usual, trying to make up for the midday interlude. Even so, he was far from satisfied with what he’d accomplished when he finished. Usually he’d have been frustrated, but today... Nope, no regrets. Cleaning the guts of the saw with compressed air, then running it briefly to release more debris, he was grinning foolishly and damn glad Sean wasn’t here to see.

* * *

CHLOE KICKED AT the sand with her bare feet. The soles of her feet were baking, so she veered toward the incoming waves, grateful for the cool, wet, hard-packed sand left behind by swirls of foam. She didn’t want to be here. Resentment sizzled. Her parents could have left her in New York. Nobody cared if she was here. She couldn’t afford to miss two whole weeks of dance classes and rehearsals. While she was plodding along, the other girls were soaring.

And there they were, first dashing away from a wave then soaring above the beach and foamy fingers of water, bodies perfectly positioned. Jessica doing an exquisite cabriole, Rachel a grand jeté. They were both making harsh, cawing sounds, which seemed normal even as Chloe glowered at them. What made her maddest was that they didn’t fall back to earth as they should have.

And...there was Hunter, too, the absolute hottest male dancer who was once in a while called in to demonstrate lifts to the younger girls. He was performing the tour en l’air, leaping straight into the air and making not only one complete turn, but two, three, four, an impossible five, and still he didn’t come down, either, even though part of the jump was the finish in the fifth position.

Chloe refused to look at them anymore, although as she stalked away, she could still hear them calling to each other in those harsh voices, as if they’d found something disgusting to eat, like a dead fish or something. Or maybe they were laughing at her.

Madder and madder, she broke into a trot then started to run. She kicked one leg in the air and leaped into a jeté, then another and another, ending in the grand jeté that required her to do the splits in the air. But she couldn’t defy gravity, no matter how high she leaped. It tugged her down, and she landed hard on the wet sand.

I hate Mom and Dad. I hate them. If all they’d wanted to do was argue about...whatever it was Mom had to decide, why had they insisted she and Jason come?

Hate them, hate them, hate them... Her rage beat like every stomp of her feet, getting harsher and harsher until it became the unmusical cries of the seagulls, and, disoriented, she rolled over in bed and hammered at her alarm clock.

Even once Allie had silenced it, she kept hearing the ugly sound. Caw, caw, hate them, caw, hate them. With a moan, she covered her face with her hands.

Dreams usually faded the moment she opened her eyes, leaving behind wisps of mood that could color her day, but not images so clear they hurt. She’d never seen Rachel or Jessica again. Or Hunter, for whom she’d nursed a thirteen-year-old’s desperate crush.

She had never truly danced again, either, because that was how people were traced, she and her family had been told. To be safe, they couldn’t hold the same kind of jobs, or pursue hobbies that were too unusual or that had resulted in any of them being in the public eye. Nobody had quite looked at her when the U.S. Marshal said that, although he was talking about her, and they all knew it.

Already there had been half a dozen newspaper articles about her as a rising young dancer. Even among the many talented girls in the American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School program, Chloe Marr had stood out. The Daily News had done a big spread, the reporter having followed her through a typical week. A role