Prima Donna by Karen Swan Read Free Book Online

her bag and looked at Adam, who had got out of bed to inspect his teeth.
    ‘Was that Pia?’ he asked into the mirror.
    ‘Who else?’ She rested her head on her hand idly, her eyes appraising his naked form, the stupendous physique she’d been trying to encapsulate in charcoal only forty minutes
before. The etchings lay scattered like pieces of confetti, forgotten beneath the heap of clothes on the floor. She bit her lip as she scrutinized the carved hollow of his glutes.
    ‘Everything okay?
    Sophie hesitated. She didn’t want to tell him she thought Pia and Andy had broken up – not yet. She suspected Adam was only here because it was seduction by proxy. After all, she was
Pia’s closest ally, her keeper, the nearest Pia got to a friend – Sophie might be the closest he could get.
    ‘Yes. Just a change of plans. I’ve got to meet her in Switzerland tomorrow.’
    ‘Tomorrow?’ He whirled round.
    She shrugged, knowing his concern was about the performance schedule rather than their curtailed love-in. ‘Reading between the lines, I think Baudrand may have suspended her.’
    ‘Oh great,’ he said, hands on hips. ‘Well, I guess that explains his temper earlier.’
    ‘Yeah,’ she muttered disconsolately.
    There was a long pause and she fell back on the bed, staring up bleakly at the ceiling.
    ‘Of course, you know what this means, don’t you?’
    ‘You’ll have to dance with Ingrid.’
    He shook his head. ‘We’ll need to make hay while the sun shines.’
    She looked over at him in surprise and giggled, diving back under the sheets as he ran athletically back towards her, a devilish grin on his lips.

Chapter Five
    Pia slept for fourteen hours straight when she got to St Moritz, and by the time she awoke her body was stiff with sleep. She didn’t function like other people. Her body
only seemed to relax under strain.
    She called down for black coffee and toast, and lay back on the bed, stretching long, feeling the deep muscle fibres across her stomach reinvigorate themselves. She counted back the days since
her last performance. Travelling yesterday, Aspen the day before that, New York the day before that. Coming into the third day, then; no wonder she was seizing up. It was true what they said
– one day off class and you notice; two days and your colleagues notice; three days and the audience notices.
    She got up and moved into her sitting room to do some
barre
work. She couldn’t afford to lose form. Regardless of her suspension from the tour, Dimitri Alvisio, the legendary
choreographer, was submitting his new ballet,
The Songbird
, to Baudrand in the next few weeks and she needed to be ready for it. After all, he had written it especially for her – one
of the highest accolades to be bestowed upon a ballerina – and that was something even Ava Petrova couldn’t boast.
    Alvisio was the resident choreographer for La Scala and he had written this ballet as a gift to his old friend Jean Baudrand, who was spearheading the ChiCi’s centenary with a year-long
programme of the company’s old favourites and a series of specially commissioned new works.
    Pia knew she needed to sparkle and shine like never before in
The Songbird
, not to flatter Baudrand’s tribute, but to flatter herself – for this ballet was a test. If she
interpreted it to Alvisio’s vision, she knew he would bring her to Milan and the end of her rainbow.
    La Scala was the birthplace of the Prima Ballerina Assoluta ranking and although a couple of other companies had awarded the title in the past hundred years, it tended to be as recognition for a
lengthy and prolific career, and was regarded as an honour rather than an active rank. But Pia had no time for such vaingloriousness. She intended to win her status at the beginning of her career,
not the end. For her, the Prima Ballerina Assoluta ranking was alive and
pirouetting
, and to prove she was the very best dancer in the world she had to go there to get it.
    Ava