In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) by Catherine Gayle Read Free Book Online

of the characters moving perfectly in time with one another. I supposed that made me Jennifer Grey in this situation.
    Only we weren’t perfectly together because my head wouldn’t stay focused on the task at hand. I couldn’t help it. All I could think about was where Brie was touching me, and where I wanted her to be touching me.
    Sure enough, I stomped on Jenni’s toes again. It was even the same foot. And I was a big guy, so I knew that had to hurt her.
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” she shouted at me, dropping her hands and backing away. “I’ve had enough.”
    She spun around and headed for the wall where we’d all left our gym bags and other shit.
    “You don’t have to leave,” Brie called after her. “We can switch partners.”
    “I’m going to go put ice on my toes,” Jenni replied. She grabbed her bag and headed through the door, letting it slam shut behind her.
    “Sorry,” I said to Brie once it was clear Jenni was well and truly gone.
    She looked around the studio at the other pairs, but there wasn’t anyone else she could put with me. She took a breath and straightened her back, reaching up to take my hands. “Let’s keep going, guys,” she said to the class. “Everyone get back into a closed hold.”
    Tentatively, I took one of her hands in mine, placing the other on her shoulder blade. She settled her arm over mine, her hand gripping my deltoid since she was too short to comfortably reach my shoulder.
    “Here we go. And one, two, three, one, ready, go.”
    It took every ounce of restraint I possessed not to drop my hand down to her waist and pull her closer to me. Now that I had her in my arms again, I never wanted to let her go.

    “ W HAT ARE YOU doing in Portland?” Keith asked.
    Why in God’s name did he have to look good enough to eat while he asked me that? “One, two, three, close the box,” I called out in a singsong voice to the room at large in lieu of answering him. There wasn’t any way I could have prepared myself for running into him today, and I still had to teach this class while I was trying to figure out how to feel, what to say, what to do.
    The last thing in the world I wanted was to end up dancing with him, because that meant we had to touch. Everywhere he touched me, my body filled with electricity, and it ruined my ability to think. My body was betraying me, and all I could think about was all the ways he’d touched me once before.
    Keith let his hand drop to the midpoint of my back, right around my bra-line, when it should have been on my shoulder blade. I grabbed him by the elbow and jerked it back into position, glaring at him as I did.
    He smiled in return, one of those knee-weakening, heart-stopping sorts of smiles he’d given me so many times the night we met, and I wanted to forget about the fact that I had a class to teach. He made me want to curl into him, to run off so we could continue where we’d left off.
    But that was a different time and a different place. It was a different me. That was Allison and Jacob, two people who had existed only in that hotel room. In the real world, Brie Hayden had nothing to do with a man like Keith Burns.
    Or at least I shouldn’t have anything to do with a man like him. I’d only end up getting my heart smashed in the end, and I’d already had enough of that for one lifetime. I didn’t need to invite more heartache. It would be way more sensible to meet some average guy, someone who looked like someone like me would belong with.
    “You’re not going to answer me?” he asked. “We have a good forty minutes or more left in this class. That’s a long time for you to be in my arms without saying a word.” He leaned his head closer to my ear, thoroughly ignoring his frame. “I can think of a lot of things we could do in forty minutes, you know. In fact, if memory serves, I made you come three times in about that same amount of time the last we saw each other. And you talked then. A lot.”
    He wasn’t