Hard to Stop

by Wendy Byrne

  "Fielding French." Her mind was too scattered to find a way to shake the girl without alienating her. Not a good idea when she needed to keep a low profile.

  "I haven't seen you around here before, have I?"

  "I've been working in London for the last several years."

  "London?" Against all laws of nature Fielding could comprehend, Daphne's eyes seemed to get even bigger. "I would die to try for the Royal Shakespeare, but I'm just too afraid of rejection. Did you work for Bentley there?"

  It was the perfect in. "No, I've never even seen him. Is he here now?" She asked, feigning nonchalance she didn't feel.

  Daphne's smile came easily, and her teeth were very straight and white with a charming overbite. "I wish I knew. I've never seen him either. I don't think anyone has, who hasn't worked with him directly. I swear, he must live in a cave. Look, I gotta run to the ladies' room. Auditions make me have to pee. Could you keep an eye on my things?"

  "Go ahead. It will be here when you get back."

  As soon as she was gone, Fielding searched the crowd for someone who might be Chandler Bentley. She settled for a moment on a man who had "wealthy and negligent" stamped on his forehead, but then dismissed him easily. He was far too young. Josh, a researcher for Mac's hip off-beat paper, the Greenwich Village Surveyor, was still working up a complete bio, but she had Bentley's birth date, which placed him squarely at forty-three.

  In the farthest corner, she spotted a man, partially hidden by the ebb and flow of the crowd, his focus completely on the dancers. His posture was rigid, with arms crossed across his chest and a look on his face that could never be mistaken as friendly. He exuded power and authority even at a casual glance.

  He was tall, over six feet, and fit. In his black ribbed shirt and black draw-string athletic pants, it wasn't difficult to see that he had the body of a dancer, hard and lean. He was wearing flat-bottomed black tap shoes and no jewelry aside from a simple, but clearly expensive, platinum watch.

  He was maybe thirty feet away and with the ever-moving crowd, it was hard to make out every nuance of his appearance. She could tell, however, that he was blond and his face had that slightly gaunt quality so common among the English.

  Suddenly, his eyes jerked up toward the front of the room. Even though she couldn't be sure that he was actually looking at her, a prickle of horror and awareness crept along her scalp.

  He took a few steps forward. He was looking at her, no question.

  He was coming closer, and, though her mouth had gone dry and she had no idea what she was going to say to him if he addressed her, she couldn't break away from his stare. This close, she could see that his eyes were deep-set and, with his sharply arched eyebrows, had a certain quality that made him look just as she'd always pictured a Shakespearean lord would. With a goatee, he would have been the personification of the saying, "The prince of darkness is a gentleman."

  His eyes were hazel, fringed by long lashes and ringed by dark circles. They were cornered by the deep crow's feet she'd seen on even very young men who had dimples. If ever he smiled, she knew that he would have them, too. His nose was long and thin, every bit the picture of aristocracy.

  He took another step closer. His lips compressed into a hard line. Fielding's stomach roiled, and she pressed her hand against it as though the action would settle it. She could not deny, as much as she instinctively wanted to, that the disturbance was more fascination than fear.

  He was close enough now that she could have spoken to him without shouting. Goosebumps rose on her arms. Any reaction so immediate and powerful was not to be trusted, but that didn't negate the attraction she felt.

  Without really meaning to, she stepped back, putting some space between them. As though ten feet constituted intimacy, she moved away from the force of his consuming gaze, away from the obvious and inexplicable anger in his expression. And straight into Daphne Buhler, returned from the bathroom. Murmuring an apology, she turned again to the man, but he was gone. Melted into the crowd like he had never been anything more than a figment of her imagination, the random fantasy of her repressed libido, which had lain dormant for years without complaint.

  "I think that was him," Daphne said breathlessly.

  "Him who?" Fielding's attention had wandered back to the place where she had first seen him. Had he been her imagination?

  "Chandler Bentley, of course. Who else?"

  Chandler Bentley, the man whose innocence Mac had begged her to prove with every bit of the energy left in his withering body. Fielding, for her part, wasn't as married to Bentley's innocence in anything as Mac was. Bentley exuded an aura of having done something sinful. When she'd pressed for a reason Mac had muttered, "I owe him. I just owe him."

  As a professional dancer, she had been peripherally aware of Bentley for years. He was the ultra-reclusive British producer and choreographer whose stunning musicals had netted him millions of dollars and an incredible twenty Tonys that he had never shown up to claim.

  On the plus side, Fielding actually admired Bentley's work. She had been in two of his shows over the years, long after he himself had moved on to greener pastures and venues for new Tonys he clearly didn't want. While she had never worked with him herself, she had met plenty of people who had. He was a cruel perfectionist according to all accounts. Fielding had never met another dancer who'd worked with him and didn't fear him.

  And somehow, despite his reputation for harsh judgment and his hatred of reporters, she was supposed to get Bentley to talk to her. And somehow she had to make it work better than that disastrous phone call.

  "Don't get near him, Fielding. Don't let him touch you." His bird-like hand reaching out from the hospital bed, squeezing her arm with surprising strength, Mac's demand had seemed like an odd request at the time. Now that she had seen Chandler Bentley, it made more sense.

  Chandler Bentley. Who else, indeed? She so didn't need this. Daphne launched into a creative list of things she knew about Bentley as Fielding made for the sidelines where she couldn't have seen the sexy stranger if she tried. Fielding ignored her and made a showy pretense of digging through her bag while she collected her savagely scattered thoughts. Was she ready to do this? Even for Mac?

  This was not a weak spirit like Dale who would always head straight for the path of least resistance. With the stubborn jut of his jaw and the angry tightness of his mouth, she knew Bentley was not to be underestimated. She could feel the force of his will just by looking in his eyes. The image was still burned in her brain. He would have no qualms about eating her alive if he so much as suspected that she was here to write an exposé on his innocence. Not that she knew why she was proving him innocent, since Mac hadn't told her.

  She weighed the pros and cons while she rifled through her bag. Mac's life was nearing its end. He had asked this one thing of her in return for a lifetime of love. She was an actress as well as a dancer. She could do this. There was no reason why Chandler Bentley would ever have to know who she was until everything was over but the lawsuits he was bound to press. She pulled her hand triumphantly from the bag with a tube of ChapStick.

  The skeleton finally returned and turned them over to one of the other dance instructors. The new man ran through the tap routine with the brisk efficiency of a drill sergeant and all the warmth of a dead whale. The result of such force and aggression was slightly dampened by his badly affected Russian accent. And his pink leg warmers.

  Fielding followed along with the moves, tap-ball-change, wings, without really thinking. She was an expert tap dancer, and the routine hardly called for her attention. She easily made the cut.

  The group was moved back to the holding room to wait for the next section. Fielding nursed a bottle of water and stared at the slowly ticking clock, wondering when reality had stopped and this bizarre world she'd suddenly sunk into had started. Finally, the dance mistress returned and gave them to the ballet instructor. She glided through the pas de bourrée and the long Chassé without any difficulty.
She wasn't surprised to make that cut as well.

  She did what she could and hoped for the best when it came to the modern dance, which had never been her forte. But in the end she was among the group that was led to another room to learn a routine from the actual show.

  As they were directed out to the stage for their turn to present the routine, her palms were wet with sweat. They emerged into the brightness of the stage lights. Beyond the blinding white of the overhead beams the auditorium was dark. It would have been impossible to see the audience even if its members were all seated in the first row.

  Her normal audition nerves were overshadowed by larger concerns. If she didn't make this final cut she was out of luck. After that disaster of a phone call, she had no idea how else to get an introduction to Bentley. Of course, if the intimidating man she'd seen earlier was indeed the man in question, she wasn't sure she wanted to encounter him again.

  Every instinct she possessed told her that Daphne's assumption was the truth. The man in the shadows had been Chandler Bentley, and this entire exercise was doomed to failure.

  It was the girl. Chandler recognized her immediately. He sorted through the cards in his lap until he found the one that corresponded to the number pinned on her sea green leotard. Fielding Amanda French, aged thirty. She was probably younger than that. They almost always lied in this business. The young ones were older and the old ones grew younger every year. Though thirty was pushing it, almost too old to be a professional dancer. Someone should have told her twenty-five was more reasonable.

  Her chestnut brown waves were pulled back from her face in a no-nonsense ponytail, and even in the harsh glare of the stage lights, it was obvious that her gleaming blonde highlights came from sunshine and not a bottle. She was smaller than she'd seemed when he'd seen her all alone. He referred to her stats again. Five foot three and one hundred and two pounds. Much smaller than he liked the girls in his line to be.

  He had noticed earlier that her fey features were rather curiously devoid of make-up, revealing a smattering of faint brown freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were green. An improbable light, mossy green that could not possibly be natural. Yet judging from the rest of her, he had to assume that it was.

  She had on the same Spandex as the rest of the dancers—it was imperative that he be able to see every movement of the auditioning dancers' bodies—but on her the outfit seemed almost indecent. Too brief. Too clinging. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and handed the cards off to his casting partner, Sara.

  He had vaguely hoped to discover the girl had fled the auditions completely. Or that she would be patently awful. He'd turned to look at her earlier because he'd felt the force of someone's gaze on him, the distinct message of danger, but when he'd turned he'd seen only her. She didn't appear dangerous; she appeared to be a kindergarten teacher.

  He forced himself to concentrate on some of the other dancers. It took far more willpower than he would have liked to keep his gaze from wandering back in her direction. Ten dancers were up, but the routine showed him only three people he thought deserved further consideration. Unfortunately, one of them was Fielding French, whom he wanted to dismiss on principle. He hadn't liked the way she had stared at him from across the room. He hadn't liked the way it had made him feel—exposed and trapped—when he rarely felt anything at all. And he particularly didn't like the way that she had drawn him toward her when he hadn't even meant to move.

  But he was a businessman first. He would always do what was best for the show at any cost. Unless, of course, the cost was related to his daughter, Anne. That focus was how he'd consistently eked out the best show possible for the last thirteen years. There was no luck in one of his shows, only hard work and precision.

  His merciless grandmother had taken every opportunity to drill into him the axiom that God was in the details, and somehow, over the years, the details had become his religion. Off the top of his memory, he could not recall seeing a more proficient tapper at a line audition. If Fielding French continued to hold up under the pressure, he would cast her.

  Sara and his staff were sorting through the cards, and eventually the papers came back to him in two piles. He glanced at the smaller pile and saw that the three names there were his choices as well. Trust his well-trained staff to know what was best; yet he was still incapable of turning control over to them. He didn't even wait for the routine to finish. He'd been doing this for twenty years and had refined the process to an art. "Number twenty-three, you in the pink leotard, and you, sir, you may stay. The rest of you may go."

  He turned his attention away from the stage and the compelling visual lure of Fielding Amanda French. He listened with only half an ear to Sara telling their three choices to come back for the singing audition in the afternoon before she called the next group. As he watched the new dancers he couldn't shake the feeling that he was going to be exceptionally sorry he'd told the French girl to come back. And after all of his mistakes, he'd become very good at knowing when he was going to be sorry. Very good, indeed.

  AWAKEN THE DEVIL

  coming soon!