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“That was her. Before I was born. I’ve seen old videos,” she qualified with a wry smile. “She danced like a whisper, soft, smooth, so quiet you’d never hear her land.”
Nadia looked at the picture a little longer, blinked and sank her chin into her palm.
“Were you ever a ballerina too?”
She bolted upright at that, hand on her belly, mouth agape. “Good Lord, no! Do I look like a ballerina?”
What she looked was downright fit and lush and good enough to eat.
She let her stomach go, not that it went anywhere. “It takes a very particular kind of tenacity to make it in ballet, to have that level of control over your body. Over your whole life. Which is why Mum’s ballet career was over the moment she fell pregnant with me. As for me, I like food too much.”
Nadia waggled her eyebrows as she took a gulp of her wine.
Ryder quietly pieced together a relationship that might not have been so close after all. A mother and daughter living in the same city, yet not seemingly in touch. A mother who’d never revealed paternity. A mother who tangled the ending of her career and the birth of her daughter. And he shifted the conversation sideways.
“So if not ballet, what’s your...speciality? Is that the right term?”
Nadia’s mouth quirked and this time when she sank her chin onto her upturned palm the move was silken, slippery, sexy as hell. “I’m...well rounded.”
“Learnt from Mum’s mistake, then.”
Nadia’s laughter was scandalised. But she sank back into her chair with wicked wonder in her eyes. “I guess so. I’ve never been typecast, never been tied down to one style. I worked clubs in LA. A few stage shows in Dallas. My first solos were in a burlesque company off Broadway that was sold out for months.”
Her gaze went to the mantel. Ryder’s followed. “Seems a long way from ballet.”
“You don’t have to tell me. Especially considering Mum was working there at the time.”
Ryder’s eyebrows nudged up his forehead. “Well, I’ll be.”
While Nadia’s eyes remained glued to the photo. “She’d always worked in America, but she had to leave her ballet company when she was pregnant with me and she came back to Melbourne. To my grandmother—picture Mum but humourless and grim.”
Glancing at the photograph of Nadia’s mother, Ryder thought it didn’t take much picturing at all.
“Mum tried to stick it out once I was born. But when the dance calls...” Her fingers fluttered upwards in a move that seemed more of an impression than a natural movement of her own. “Then the life of a showgirl became too good to turn her back on. The hotel living. The rich men. The partying that reminded her she was still young, and helped her forget what she’d left behind...” Her eyes glazed for a second before she hauled herself back. “So I danced, and trained, worked my ass off and made it overseas. And then I got the call to work the burlesque club Mum had made her home. It was the first time we’d ever worked together, and I couldn’t have cared if I was dancing Bollywood if it meant I was spending time with her. As for actually dancing with her?” She let go a long slow whistle. “It was amazing. For a little while. I was my own mother’s protégé. We even had one act together, The Kent Sisters.”
Ryder raised an eyebrow. But Nadia just grinned.
“I know. Hilarious, right? But despite that it was everything I’d ever dreamed of being since I first stuck my hands in the air and did a twirl.”
“Since you’re here, as is she, I take it things didn’t last.”
Nadia’s gaze swung back to him as if coming from a long way away. She leant forward and cradled the glass of wine with both hands. “I got my first solo.”
“Ah.”
The wine was gone in a gulp. “And that was when she made it clear every job I’d ever been offered had only been after a phone call from her. That my name, her name, was the only reason I was anything at all.”
Her mouth kicked into a wry smile, but Ryder caught the flash of hurt behind it. The disappointment. The disenchantment. He recognised the moment when you realised the parent you looked up to your whole life turned out to be, oh, so flawed.
“Anyway,” she said, shaking out the funk that had settled over her, “after a particularly punishing day, I secretly auditioned for Sky High—at the last second using my grandmother’s maiden name—and lo and behold got a place. Within the week I’d moved to Vegas, to the first real job that I’d ever been sure I’d got on my own. Not only that, it changed my life. Like I’d been dancing in shoes a size too small all my life and never known it. I’d found my bliss.”
