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

Yet Keith had sworn he’d never danced before.
    That wasn’t the truly baffling part, though.
    This man wouldn’t stop staring at me throughout the entire session. He spent the whole time dancing with Alexis, who was a hot little package. There were half a dozen other women in the room, all of them better looking than me. But he’d only had eyes for me.
    And he’d been an incorrigible flirt the whole time, too, so much so that he was embarrassing Cole.
    Every time Cole and I had danced near Keith and Alexis, Keith had winked at me or said something that I could never repeat in polite company. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t find a way to make any sense of it in my head.
    I mean, we’d spent one night together. One . And yes, I was insanely attracted to him and I’d had a hard time pushing him from my mind after we’d met. But it had only been one night of weakness for me. It’d been a moment in time when I’d felt my most vulnerable and least confident, a time when I could hardly find the strength to push myself out the door each day. I’d asked him to lie to me, to make me feel beautiful. I’d asked him to help boost my confidence at least enough that I could move on with my life, and he had. Amazingly so.
    I could never let it become more than that one night, though.
    Yet, here he was, coming up to me after class when I was trying to escape into the office so I could talk to Tanya and pretend to be busy so he would leave. I’d bent over to grab my bag and bottle of water, and I had been hoping to get through the door before he had finished talking to Cole.
    That didn’t happen. I felt him before I saw or heard him.
    “I still need your number.” He settled his hand on my waist as though it belonged there.
    “I’m not in the habit of giving out my personal number to students.”
    “I’m not just a student, though, am I?”
    “Aren’t you?” I spun around so I could face him. “What exactly do you think this is?”
    He shrugged, and I couldn’t stop my gaze from falling to his shoulders. Couldn’t stop my mind from thinking of the feel of them beneath my fingers.
    I was a wreck, and it was all his fault.
    “I don’t know what it is, but I know what it could be.” He reached up and took my glasses off my face. “We’re good together, Brie.”
    “One night doesn’t mean anything,” I snapped, grabbing my glasses out of his hand so impatiently that I smudged sweaty fingerprints all over the stupid lenses. I dug around in my purse for a wipe to clean them with. “We don’t know anything about each other,” I muttered.
    “We have insane chemistry. That much we know.” He leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms and his ankles in a stance that said he didn’t have anywhere else to be. “We know enough that I want to know more. Let me take you on a date. One date, and then if you want me to back off, I’ll back off.”
    I twisted the lid off my water bottle and guzzled it to buy time.
    “Brie,” he said, and he waited until I looked up and met his gaze. “One date. You can’t tell me you aren’t at least curious.”
    I was a heck of a lot more than curious, and that was part of the problem. But the longer he stood there staring at me, the more I felt my resolve slipping away.
    “One date? And then you’ll leave me alone if I tell you to?”
    “Scout’s honor,” Keith said.
    “When?” And why was I even thinking about this?
    “Tomorrow night? I can pick you up at seven.”
    “Tomorrow’s no good. I have a class.” I didn’t see any reason to tell him more than that. And it was the truth, even though it wasn’t a class I was teaching. I had signed up to take a contemporary class taught by Devin Shreeve, a choreographer whose work I idolized. I doubted I would get any jobs from taking the class. No one wanted to hire a dancer who looked like me. But I still wanted to go, test myself, stretch my boundaries. I wanted the experience. “What about