The Sheikh's Bought Ballerina (The Sheikh's New Bride Book 6) Read online

  It felt new, and it made her feel new every time, as well.

  But then, on the other hand, there were the nerves. The audience made her carefully rehearsed ballet quite unpredictable. It could never be completely known how they were going to react, and how having a live audience in the house would affect her or the other dancers. The energy they would give them or the energy they would take.

  No matter how seasoned, the feedback of energy between performers and the crowd was a living, breathing thing. And living things were, in Ophelia’s view, always trouble in their own way.

  It was almost enough, on the hardest of opening nights, to make Ophelia wish that her parents hadn’t listened to the advice of her childhood ballet teachers and fully embraced the promise she showed. To wish they hadn’t pushed her, and stood by her, and encouraged her forward, through every painful night and every breakdown. To make her wish she hadn’t taken those dreams and possibilities and made them her own, until she no longer needed their voices telling her that if she wanted to be great, she needed to push through it and keep going. Until she had that voice inside herself, always pushing her forward. Always launching her out onto the stage, to be judged and—maybe, hopefully—to inspire.

  And those were just ordinary opening nights. Those weren’t even close to the intensity of tonight. Ordinarily, there were preview performances for critics; ordinarily, there wasn’t quite so much riding on the first performance.

  But Tomas, the owner and founder of the Williamsburg Ballet, had had a novel idea. As quickly as they were gaining prestige as a company, he knew that it would take something special to bring them up into the league of notoriety that every dancer—whether they admit it to themselves or not—longs for.

  So, he had devised the opening performance tonight as a total mystery. The company’s rehearsals had been completely closed. Maxim, the choreographer, had been told specifically that he could not give any interviews to the press telling them about this very new, very exciting ballet.

  Maxim had gone to the press and told them just how frustrated he was not to be able to tell them about the genius of his new work, and how extraordinary the company’s execution of it stood to be. And how sorry he was that they would not be able to preview the work, and had to wait, just like everyone else, until the curtain rose on opening night.

  It had worked like a dream. Tickets for tonight’s performance had become hotly in demand. And, with the way these things do, they’d filtered their way up and up, through the ranks of those who had just been interested and lucky, to those who were interested for the sake of the interest, and wanted to see the show that no one else could get into because no one else could get into it.

  Press were out there, already gathering, Ophelia knew. Among them were representatives from outlets who would normally be hesitant to send anyone across the river—or even the country—to see a group who had really only been on the radar for the last couple of years.

  But along with them would be the highest class of people that the five boroughs had to offer, many of them venturing into Brooklyn for the first time in years. It was, without a doubt, the most prestigious—and, likely, the most judgmental—group of people that Ophelia had ever been in a room with, much less performed for.

  It was a golden opportunity, the kind most dancers spend their careers and their sleepless nights, attempting to finally perfect that one tricky move, desperately hoping for.

  And for Ophelia, it was a nightmare.

  She barely registered the words Maxim was telling her. As a principal dancer in the company, she knew it was important for her to absorb and enact every note he had for her. But her head was spinning.

  She was prepared—she was probably overprepared. And luckily, the notes from the choreographer were all small things that she should easily be able to incorporate. And yet, it still made her feel like her body belonged to someone else, and her lungs barely knew how to breathe.

  How was she supposed to dance when she barely felt like she could walk?

  “Opening night nerves?”

  Maxim was gone, now (when had he left?) and Ophelia was surrounded by her fellow dancers. At least, she considered them her fellow dancers. She knew that a couple of this particular group of women felt the difference between her position and theirs more keenly than she did.

  She felt a lean arm drape around her shoulders.

  “You know what you need? After this?”

  Ophelia was aware that she looked wide-eyed and unfocused, but she couldn’t help it. She hated people coming across her in this state. She felt like a gazelle cornered by lions. How did they always know when to strike?

  “What?” she asked, her normally slightly husky voice sounding almost shrill.

  “A distraction.”

  The other dancer said it as though those two words were an explanation unto themselves, and Ophelia was confused for a moment until she followed the other woman’s gaze.

  There, warming up across the room, was Ryan.

  He was her co-star, and she trusted him completely. She had to, with how intimately involved they were on stage and how often her whole body—and therefore her whole career—was in his hands. He was a good guy. A great guy, even. But not, Ophelia had thought, really an option in that way.

  “He’s not…I mean. I don’t think he’d be into me. Like that, I mean. I mean, he’s great…”

  She was stammering, she knew. It wasn’t like her. None of this was like her. Her cheeks were flushed, and her breaths, far from evening out, were coming in more jaggedly.

  “But he’s gay? Is that what you were going to say? Easy mistake, but no.”

  “No?”

  “No. And he’s into you. I heard it straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Some pretty explicit things he had to say, actually.”

  Ophelia didn’t care for the insinuation in her colleague’s voice, not when she was about to go on stage and be so intimate with him in front of the crowd. Was this woman trying to make her worse? Was she trying to upset her so that she would perform badly and there might be room for advancement at the top?

  It always shocked Ophelia how cutthroat dancers could be, but this was a new low. They were supposed to all be in this together; her success was success for them all.

  “Oh come on, leave her alone,” another voice in their little group rang out. Ophelia was relieved, until she realized who the voice belonged to, and she felt a chill run through her already warmed-up body.

  Eliza, her understudy, was every sad, spiteful stereotype about understudies embodied. She was talented, but just not talented enough. She was ambitious, and frustrated in that ambition. It was a bad combination, and Ophelia hated how much she had to interact with her.

  On a night like tonight, even if everything had gone perfectly so far and she hadn’t been being tortured by the other dancers, Eliza’s mere presence still would have been enough to put Ophelia over the edge.

  Eliza draped an arm around Ophelia’s other shoulder, making her feel as though she were hemmed in on either side by enemies who were supposed to be allies.

  “Ophelia doesn’t need another dancer as a distraction. How’s that supposed to work? She’d probably just end up rehearsing on accident somehow. No, what she needs is my friend, Michael. He’s hot, rich, and here tonight. And if she dances well enough out there, maybe he’ll even be interested…”

  The chill Eliza had put into Ophelia’s body turned, in a fraction of a second, to hot anger. She couldn’t think of anything worse than being set up with anyone Eliza knew. And then, even if she could, adding more pressure on top of an already nerve-wracking situation was the last thing she needed.

  Ophelia raised her hands to shrug off the arms that were wrapped around her.

  “I don’t want to be set up with your friend!” she said, and she realized as soon as the words came out of her mouth that she had spoken much louder and more forcefully than she had intended.

  Most of the girls in the little gag
gle were aghast, but Eliza just laughed. It was a clear, cruel laugh.

  “Well, don’t get offended. I was only trying to help you out. But you don’t want Ryan, and you don’t want Michael. Who do you want, then? Are you into girls or something? What’s your secret? You can tell us; we don’t judge.”

  We don’t judge.

  Of all the untrue things that she had heard over the course of her career in this cutthroat business, that had to be the most barefaced lie. If Ophelia were any less paralyzed with the rush of nerves and emotions flowing through her at the moment, she could have laughed. Instead, she did the only thing she could think of in her fluster.

  “I need some air,” she heard herself mutter, barely intelligible, as she headed for the backstage entrance door.

  She left the other ballerinas looking stunning and stunned in their matching costumes and with their matching expressions.

  Outside, the air was bracing. January was no time to be in an alley in New York with no more protection than her thin costume provided. And she especially shouldn’t be out here wreaking havoc with the careful conditioning she’d done to her body to ensure that it would be ready to give her peak performance tonight.

  But she didn’t care. The condition of her body was meaningless if the condition of her mind was a wreck. You dance with your body. You prepare with your body. But when the moment comes, you perform with your heart.

  Out here, she could breathe. And her breaths were beautiful, floating up and away from her. Her whole life, she thought, she had been single-mindedly pursuing beauty of motion—trying to mold herself into the perfect tool to tell a story on stage.

  She’d given up everything for it. She’d given up the kind of life most people had. She’d given up friends outside of those she’d made in rehearsal. She’d given up other interests that had caught her in school and that might have led her down a different path.

  She’d given up men. She’d given up dating them, and being able to let go and just see where things went. There was no room for any of that in her life. No room for giving anyone her heart and certainly not for giving them her body.

  There had been a few men that had almost gotten there. That had almost stuck with her and her ambition long enough that she was willing to let them into the secret of how sheltered she had involuntarily ended up, and how new a truly serious relationship really would be to her.

  But something always went wrong. Or, rather, a version of the same thing always went wrong.

  Some people would uncharitably say that she allowed her career to get in the way of her relationships. That’s what her older sister would say, certainly. But Ophelia had always hated the implication that relationships were automatically more important. She’d only ever known these men a few months. She’d been dancing all her life.

  Maybe it was some kind of insecurity that all the men she’d dated had shared. They’d sensed that the dance was more important to her, and they’d hated the thought of that. Why did all the men she had ever met need to be more important to her than the most important thing in her life, and so quickly?

  They’d always set themselves up as an enemy of her career. Maybe not meaning to, maybe meaning to; Ophelia could never tell. But the choice she made was frustratingly predictable for all involved.

  And yet, for all that she had given up in the pursuit of beauty, there was a part of her that felt she would never manage to recreate anything as beautiful as the frozen tendrils of her breath, escaping up and up into the night air.

  Perspective, as it always did, focused her. Yes, she was flustered. Yes, she was afraid of what all those people out there in that audience might think and say and do. She was terrified of Eliza, and what she might do when she found out that Ophelia had never been with a man, and how she might use that to make her a laughing stock within the company.

  But above those fears, more important than any of them, was beauty. And Ophelia had a job to do.

  Chapter 3

  Salim

  Say what you will about Nikolai—and people did talk about him, just so long as there was no chance of it getting back to his father—but the man knew how to host. Even when he wasn’t entertaining at home in his family’s veritable palace outside St. Petersburg, he had a way of making every space he was in feel like his own, and a way of making you feel like his invited guest.

  The Lower-Manhattan restaurant where they dined that night was just the latest of these places. There were other people there. Some friends of Nikolai, and friends of theirs. They seemed to just kind of appear without anything seeming to have been arranged.

  This was one of the pieces of Nikolai’s magic—he could just wish for company and it was always there. How disposable or memorable this company was varied greatly. But, all the same, he could always find someone of an appropriate social standing to share a meal with, on little notice or no notice at all.

  And, for most of the evening, these new, temporary friends helped keep Salim from talking about the prize Nikolai was after. Oh, Salim had found a way to bend the conversation around to it a couple times, but each time he did, Nikolai wagged his finger at him—a gesture that few would dare do to someone in Salim’s family—and tell him that he wasn’t going to let him ruin his surprise.

  Dinner was pleasant. It always was with Nikolai. It was how he made up for, well, everything else. They drank and reminisced, and from time to time, Salim even thought he could see the man Nikolai used to be, once long ago, when they had been boys together.

  That didn’t stop Salim from constantly wondering, though, just what it was that Nikolai was after. The anticipation grew throughout the meal, just as he knew Nikolai meant it to. Salim kept coming up with guesses and then surreptitiously looking them up on his phone to see if they were possibilities.

  But all of his guesses were confounded the moment the town car Nikolai had put them into crossed the river.

  “We’re leaving Manhattan, Nikolai? I didn’t know you were capable. Who told you there was more city across the river? We’d been managing to keep that a secret from you for years.”

  “Oh, ha ha, very funny,” Nikolai said, patting his friend’s arm. “It’s true; I don’t find there’s much worth crossing the river for. Mostly, it’s people who can’t afford the real city but want to pretend they can. Or they’ve had children they need space for, and want to pretend they haven’t. Or all those insufferable hipsters with their strange fashions, that will never have anything worth having and want to pretend they don’t care about it.”

  Salim looked out the window, thinking of his favorite places in Brooklyn and wondering if Nikolai had somehow managed to discover any of them, and had a mind to ruin them for him.

  “That’s a very astute analysis. You should say it outside the car. Loudly, and often. I’m sure it will make you friends over here.”

  Nikolai, a little warm with drink, leaned across the car and put his arm around Salim’s shoulders.

  “What do I need more friends for? I have you. And plenty of other friends too! We just ate with some of my friends.”

  Salim shook his head. Most nights, he would just let a little thing like this pass. Nikolai knew how he was. He knew what he was.

  But today, he still felt victorious from his auction win, and annoyed at his friend for falling into the predictable pattern and playing with him the way he was.

  “Yes, all your friends,” he said. “I’ll give you five million dollars, right here right now, if you can tell me the names of everyone we just ate with.”

  Nikolai slumped back over into his side of the town car.

  “Oh, like you know them.”

  “Of course I know them. I pay attention when people talk. I met everyone there tonight. Did you?”

  Nikolai looked thoughtful.

  “Just first names, or you want all of it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  A moment of silence, and then Nikolai broke out into a low, hearty laugh.

  “Well, you saved
me thirty-seven million today—what’s a lost five?”

  “You know, Nikolai, you have an odd way of looking at things.”

  Salim didn’t mean anything by it, but his words seemed to set Nikolai into a quiet moment. Not wanting the evening to turn, the way they sometimes did with Nikolai, Salim spoke again.

  “I’ll bet your prize isn’t really much at all, is it? Just something you think is interesting and no one else would.”

  “Now, there, you’re wrong, my brother,” Nikolai said, his face lighting up in a way Salim couldn’t remember seeing since they were at school. “What I’ve found out here in this over-the-river wasteland is something truly special.”

  Chapter 4

  Salim

  When they pulled up to a somewhat dilapidated theater in East Williamsburg, faint bells of recognition started going off in the back of Salim’s head. Wasn’t there meant to be a group out here that was making waves? Something secretive and impossible to get a ticket for?

  By the time he read on the marquee that it was Williamsburg Ballet, everything clicked.

  “Ah, right, ballet. I’d forgotten about that little hobby of yours.”

  Nikolai looked mock-offended.

  “Hobby? I bought one of the foremost dance companies in Russia. I’m a respected member of the community! I love ballet!”

  Salim rolled his eyes. “You love beautiful women in skin-tight clothing.”

  Nikolai grinned.

  “Well, who in their right mind doesn’t? And besides, it’s in my blood to like it. Are you, of all people, going to deny me my family history? Now, just wait here; I’ve got to go charm someone into deciding they have room for us.”

  Of course, Nikolai hadn’t had someone arrange this for him. It would have been trivial, with his connections, even as notoriously difficult a ticket as this was. But getting into something exclusive with a wave of his hand on the day of the performance was just another way of winning.