Their moans were intimate, breathy, for their ears alone.
Their eyes met with twin wonder, closing again, mouths locking.
It was the single best kiss of her life.
And Leo was only getting started. His touch wound into the back of her hair, cupping the curve of her head, a shift of his fingers on her scalp bringing goose bumps up on her arms, legs, neck. She tipped her head back, letting Leo step farther into her space, her breasts flattening on his apron, the kiss beginning to border on desperate. If they were alone in the back room, Reese was pretty sure her legs would be winding around his hips about now. No one had ever made her ache between her thighs so quickly and easily, the pulsations echoing in her temples.
Where was this going to end?
She was supposed to be gone by now.
This perfect kiss only hit home how much she’d messed up by lying.
It was Reese’s frustration with herself that bullied her into ending the kiss.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, turning and booking it down the avenue, leaving a stunned Leo in the door of the Cookie Jar. When he called her name again, more hoarsely this time, she turned a corner and broke into a run. There. She’d done it. Whatever strange magic had taken place in the bakery, the spell was broken now. Over and done with.
She had no way of knowing the story was only beginning.
Chapter 5
Reese leaned against the outside wall of the Bexley Theater and plopped down on her duffel bag, elbows resting on her knees, head in hands.
It was Sunday morning, a mere fourteen hours since the kiss spun from gold. She’d just checked out of the cheap hotel room she’d booked for one night, hoping against hope that she could figure out her next move. She’d gotten away with a text message to her mother, explaining that Bernard Bexley would be posting his chosen ones this morning on the door of his theater. Which was a total scumbag lie and made Reese feel like a beast. Disappointing her one and only fan could wait one night, though, couldn’t it?
She lifted her head and stared out across Forty-fourth Street. At the food vendors cranking open their umbrellas, locals walking their dogs while staring bleary-eyed at their phones, cleaning staff coming out of buildings and locking up. There would be matinees at all of the Broadway theaters today. Around two o’clock this afternoon, there would be lines winding around the corner of the block, people clutching their tickets, anticipating a show that would transport them to Cuba or Chicago or the Serengeti.
All she’d ever wanted in her life was to be part of that spell. Knocking people under and sending them back on the streets refreshed, affected by what they’d witnessed. But today she would get on a bus and go back to Wisconsin a failure. No, it was worse than that. She didn’t even seize her chance to succeed or fail. She’d spend her whole life not knowing.
Sure, she’d come to New York and auditioned a few times, but dancers often went to hundreds of open calls before getting a break. She’d been so grateful for those few unforgettable chances, nonetheless. They were hard to come by without a lucrative job and a single mother who poured every dime she made into a mortgage and food. Still, she’d never had the opportunity to give her dream everything.
On the sidewalk outside of the Bexley, with the lights of Broadway beginning to turn on around her, giving up and going home didn’t sit right.
There was that Victory Fund.
Some of the money in the untouched account was left over from a national yogurt commercial she’d done as a child, though she’d burned through the bulk of those earnings paying for dance classes over the last decade. The rest of the cash in the kitty had been earned by Lorna, day in and day out at Cedar-Boogie.
Rather importantly, the Victory Fund was supposed to be used only if she made it. To help her transition to living in New York City while waiting for that first, glorious paycheck. It could buy her a week, maybe a week and a half.
If she used it now—when she decidedly had not made it—the funds would afford her one last chance to go full throttle and catch the right casting director’s eye. Wasn’t this what she’d been training for her entire life? A real shot?
Indecision needled Reese in the side.
She might have won an audition with Bexley, but she couldn’t even hold an audience at the car dealership. She’d never even made it to the second round of an audition in this city. Was she being selfish risking the money? Would using the money in her fund be a waste? If anything, the money should go back to her mother, the woman who’d earned it. There might not be a ton of cash in the account, but it would take a lot of pressure off the woman who’d done everything for Reese.