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spoke.
    â€œI saw you dance Thursday,” he said.
    Searching her real name on Google gave him a shock equivalent to the one he felt when Miss Banks walked into the room their first night together. Marin Bryant, aka Miss Banks, was a principal dancer at the peak of her career with a modern dance company, and in a heart-stopping moment of realization when he clicked through reviews in
Time Out New York,
the
Post,
and the
Times,
the puzzle pieces of who she was and what they were about clicked into place.
    She paused in the act of tugging his shirttails free from his jeans. “Thursday night was the closing show of our season. Tickets were sold out nine months ago. How did you get a seat?”
    â€œI’m now a Platinum Circle Patron of the Selma Galenti Company,” he said.
    She let out a short laugh as she glanced significantly around his Fifth Avenue apartment, then pulled his shirt free. “God only knows who the front office browbeat into giving up a seat to please a new major donor,” she said, then slid both hands up his chest to his shoulders and pushed the fabric down his arms.
    The shirt caught on his still-buttoned cuffs. The error made a blush flare in her cheeks, but he liked the unscripted feel of this, and at an extremely base level, he really liked the way she looked kneeling naked in front of him.
    She recovered quickly, murmuring, “What did you think?” as she unfastened one cuff, then the other, playing the subservient role to the hilt.
    He couldn’t put what he thought into words. When the curtain opened and he saw Marin rise off the stage, using what seemed like an acre of iridescent silk in her skirt as a prop in a whirling, leaping piece titled Transfixed, his heart seized tight and punched his ribs. Then his brain shut down entirely.
    â€œI don’t know anything about dance,” he admitted, “but you were spectacular to watch.”
    At his faint, inarticulate praise, she glanced up. Electric shock times ten, because the wildness and power and intensity of the dance flashed in her eyes before she locked it down. He went still.
    There it was. Transformation.
That
was what she locked down, except when she was performing.
That
was what he’d seen flashing under Miss Banks’s serene surface, the surface no amount of erotic pain could crack.
That
was what he wanted to feel flowing through him, over him, what pleasure had almost broken free a few minutes earlier.
    Life itself, channeled through Marin.
    She pulled off his shirt and tossed it toward the foot of the bed. “You’re not supposed to ‘know dance.’ You
feel
dance. At its best, dance steals into your soul and transforms you.”
    â€œThen what I saw was dance at its very best,” he said quietly.
    She halted in the process of hooking her fingers in his belt and looked up at him, absorbing his words. “Thank you,” she said, but she didn’t stop removing his clothes. With deft fingers she got his belt open and jeans unzipped, but he didn’t lift up so she could push off his jeans.
    â€œWhat do you have in mind, Cole?”
    Her trademark serenity was a thin veneer over the passion he felt straining to break free. He’d come too far to flinch now.
    â€œKiss me.”
    The wildness glinted bright and hot in her eyes then disappeared as she bent her head. He smoothed his palm along the side of her jaw, cupped it, stroked her cheek with his thumb. There was nothing more intimate than mouth-to-mouth contact, the shifting, sliding pressure of lips, the mingled breaths, the soft words and pleas tasted as much as heard.
    She looked at him then, really looked at him. He had no idea what she saw. She was Marin Bryant and Miss Banks and a conduit for Terpsichore, the goddess of dance, but he was Colson Fleming IV and Fleming from prep school and Captain Fleming to his fellow Marines and then Fleming again when he joined Cooper Bensonhurst as a trader. He had no