Naked Angel by Logan Belle Read Free Book Online

to be grateful for what he had been given to work with. And he was.
    With a busy afternoon ahead of him, he couldn’t quite get focused. Something was nagging at him, and he hated to admit that it had to do with that woman last night. There was something wrong with the world when a talented dancer like Nadia Grant could suffer one injury and then be compelled to turn her back on everything she’d worked for. She obviously felt it was none of his business—the mere suggestion that there were other things she could do in ballet had elicited a “drop dead” glare that he was in no hurry to see directed his way again. And really, it wasn’t his business.
    So why was he still thinking about her? For some reason, he felt certain he knew of her for more than just her accomplishments in the city’s dance scene.
    He Googled her name. Sure enough, an array of articles popped up that seemed to have little to do with her work in the corps de ballet. The first headline read, “Dirty Dancing: Cheating Choreographer Gets the Boot from Live-in Love.” And then he realized how he knew her name: She was the dancer who had been engaged to that Hollywood sellout, Jackson Mandel.
    The receptionist buzzed his desk. His first meeting of the day.
    “Thanks, April. One more thing: Is Anna Prince in the studio?”
    “Yes, I think so,” the receptionist told him.
    Max headed down to the studio. This was going to be awkward. But he needed that phone number.
    He found Anna and a group of half a dozen other dancers stretching at the barre in one of the smaller studios. He didn’t want to interrupt, but as Anna dipped into a deep
plié
, he rapped on the glass window until everyone looked up. He pointed at Anna and gestured for her to come outside for a minute. She looked quizzical, but glided across the room to meet him in the corridor.
    “Hey—what’s up?” she said.
    “I hate to interrupt you, but I need Nadia Grant’s phone number.”
    Anna looked at him suspiciously. He thanked goodness he’d held firm and refused to take her home with him last night.
    “She can’t dance anymore,” Anna said acidly.
    “Clearly,” said Max. This dig seemed to calm Anna slightly. She wiped her sweaty forehead, bent the toes of her left foot, and shuffled in place for a moment.
    “What do you need it for?”
    “I want to find a place for her here. There’s no reason a dancer of her stature should feel she has permanently lost ballet.”
    “Like, doing what?”
    “I don’t know, Anna,” Max said, getting impatient. “That’s what I need to figure out. But I don’t even know if she’s open to the discussion until I call her.”
    “She’s not,” Anna said. “She told me it’s too painful for her to be anywhere near ballet right now.”
    “She’s got to get over it.” Max held his iPhone, waiting to program the number.
    Anna looked at him, and it seemed to be a standoff until she said, “Fine!” She gave him the ten digits in such rapid fire, it was as if she was daring him to get them down at all.
    “Thanks, Anna. Have a good class.”
    She looked at him as if he were the world’s biggest asshole, but he barely paused to let it register. He was, uncharacteristically, extremely excited to make this phone call.
    First thing that morning, Nadia had turned on her Black-Berry to find a text from Mallory asking her to meet her at Agnes Wieczorek’s costume design studio.
    Nadia knew that Agnes, the former owner of the legendary burlesque club the Blue Angel, had once upon a time been a ballerina in Warsaw, Poland. Maybe Mallory wanted Agnes to give Nadia some sort of pep talk. The thought was excruciating. But after her performance last night, she felt she at least owed it to Mallory to show up. Work through the pain, she’d always been told. She believed that still applied, even though the pain was now emotional rather than physical.
    The studio was an unmarked storefront on Broome Street. At eleven in the morning, the streets of