Fated An Alpha Male Romance - K. Alex Walker Page 0,46
us spending a day around the house doing everything except talking to each other. This weekend, after my two-hour drive back from Eli’s ribbon cutting in Baton Rouge, I’d planned to tell him about me and Ethan. Yet, the minute I walked through the front door, he announced that he wanted to learn how to samba.
Roderick was a Viennese Waltz and maybe Argentine Tango type of guy, but he’d walked into the foyer with a smile on his face and saying that he had a surprise for me in the living room. The surprise turned out to be a dark-haired, olive-skinned woman from Colombia with a smile like Sofia Vergara and hips like Shakira. She was dressed in a tight-fitting single-strapped red dress with curves that could give anyone vertigo. Her heels were high, her calves taut, and her disposition warm and inviting. Her name was Claudia, and she was a professional ballroom dance instructor.
“Are you surprised?” he asked with a look in his eyes that I’d never seen before. “Do you like my surprise?”
“What are we doing, exactly?” I asked.
“We’re going to learn how to samba.” He did a small movement with his hips that could have helped out a lot in the bedroom years ago. “Then the cha-cha, the paso doble, and the…rumba. Right Claudia?”
“Right,” she answered with a melodic, Spanish accent.
A nervous and slightly uneasy titter escaped my lips. “Yes, but why?”
He glided over to me and leaned close to where only I could hear. “You’ve been different, Alexandra. You have been going missing, working late many nights, and we haven’t made love in ages. I was upset, thinking that you were pulling away from me, but then I realized that it was because of my campaign. I was putting so much time and energy into it that I forgot that you hold the number one position in my life. So,” he motioned to Claudia, “I figured that we could have some fun for once.”
Ever have one of those moments where you feel even lower than the first rung on a step ladder? That was how I felt. I could spin it any way I wanted to, even add in the way I felt about Ethan, but that didn’t excuse the fact that I was a cheater. I’d stepped outside of my relationship, time and time again, and had even gone as far as to fall in love with someone that was not the man with whom I’d shared a home and life for the past two years.
“Rick, we have to talk ab—”
“Later.” He grabbed me by the arm, twirled me around, and pulled me into his chest. “First, let’s dance. She charges by the hour and doesn’t come cheap.”
Then he smiled in a way that I’d also never seen — a teenaged-boyish lopsided grin — and I gave in. Truth be told, I wasn’t ready to have the Ethan conversation anyhow. Ethan had offered to be with me when I made my “announcement,” to Roderick, but I’d reassured him that this was something that I had to do on my own. Now, ending things with Roderick no longer seemed as simple as they’d appeared in my head.
We spent the rest of the afternoon learning footwork, how to move our hips in time to the motion of our feet, the difference between samba steps for men and women, and she even threw in some sexy arm styling for me that she’d claimed was sure to “relight” the fire in our bedroom. Roderick had looked at me, winked, and then sent me a Groucho Marx eyebrow wiggle. He was a completely different person.
“So, last one,” Claudia said, stealing my attention from Roderick’s sudden onset of playfulness. “Your turn, Alexandra.”
I looked down at my feet as though expecting them to begin moving on their own. “My turn to…?”
Roderick smiled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling slightly. He walked over, drew my body to his, and took my hands. “It’s our turn to show her what we’ve learned.”
Claudia turned on an upbeat rhythm and we danced around the living room with enough footwork to potentially scuff the old hardwood floors. Roderick laughed and dipped his hands to my hips. I found myself laughing along and straddling the dangerous line between faking my enjoyment and having a genuinely good time.
When we were done with our set, Claudia left amidst a barrage of hugs and thank yous, and Roderick scheduled for her to return the following week. He then retreated to the