Page 43 of Dirty Dancer

“Fuck, sorry, Boo-Boo.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” she said, tightening her grip on my hands. “I will talk to all of them but first, I need to know if it’s even doable. Sully and I discussed this a few times and he reached out to some other fire dancers for ideas.”

“Wait, so what are we practicing if you don’t know how to do it?”

“Well, I wanted to start with twirling the fire baton for the heat and before you yell—” She let go of me and raised a hand asif asking for patience. After retrieving the baton, she held it up. “I want to practice with the baton, then the ribbons. Once I have those down, I add fire.”

“Then you add the fire.” I sounded like a parrot, yet I was rubbing a hand over my face. “Boo-Boo, you remember that I’m the red hot mess in this relationship, right?”

Her wide smile didn’t settle my heart down nor did the way her eyes softened. “Trust me?”

The guys were going to kill me.

“What do you need me to do?”

A week later…

“The whole block?”This was about more than just adding new challenges to the shows. Rehearsals for the next leg would begin in just a couple of weeks. Vaughn, Rome, and I had sat in on her video call with Sully. I wasn’t sure who seemed more stunned by the long list of changes she wanted to the routines.

No, correction, Sully was definitely the most stunned. We’d at least had front row seats to what she was planning and practicing. But now? She wanted to buy this whole block?

“Yes,” she said, pivoting to face me. “I know it’s a lot. Okay, it’s really a lot. But I’m pretty sure I can afford it and I want to do something good with the money.”

All of my earlier objections blew away as I stared at her. “Boo-Boo, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But the Sharpes did. I was a Sharpe for a very long time.” Old pain and darkness coated those words. “I know that I was a Hardigan, and that I was adopted. That I had no choice in who raised me.”

“Who abused you.”

She sighed. “Yes, who abused me. That I can say that aloud without fear of reprisal is a good thing, but at the end of the day, I wanted to be proud of being Emersyn Sharpe. Even when I was hiding all the ugliness.”

“That’s not your fault,” I protested. “Boo-Boo, your uncle was the monster. Your father was a weak, spineless man who deserved so much worse than we did. Your mother—” Here, I hesitated. We knew the story, we knew she’d alsosuffered. But she’d left Boo-Boo with that monster even knowing what he was capable of.

Maybe Boo-Boo could forgive her. I wouldn’t.

“I know what she did,” Boo-Boo said with a sigh, arms folded as she hugged herself. I hated being the one who made her defensive. “But that’s the thing, all of that money, all of those holdings—Liam has been cleaning them up, from the money to the companies, to everything, but nothing erases where it came from.”

“You don’t want it.”

She shook her head. “Liam took control of all of it because he thought someday I might want it. He’s made me learn about it because he never wants me to be dependent on anyone. Just like he taught me to fight or Kellan taught me to shoot and drive, and you taught me how to use a knife.”

“We want you safe.” No arguments. Even if she couldn’t win every fight, we wanted her to be able to survive long enough for us to get there if we weren’t already.

“You also want me tofeelsafe.” The emphasis on the verbiage had emotion clawing at my throat. “All of you do that for me. You make me feel safe being who I need to be, whether it’s taking my show on the road, doing stunts that terrify you?—”

I frowned but the way her lips quirked promised it wasn’t a complaint.

“You let me be me, even when I’m trying to figure out who that person is or can be. Maybe especially when I’m evolving.” She turned to look down the length of the block. The buildings were decrepit, old trash, leaves, and broken bottles cluttered the gutters.

Beyond the tagging on the doors and the broken windows, there was just an air of sadness. Sagging roofs, and crumbling facades as well as cracked pavement with grass fighting its way up to split it further were all testaments to the abandoned area’s decline.

Hardly something new in Braxton Harbor. Sadly, more and more of it was beginning to look like this.

Sliding an arm over her shoulders, I tilted my head to meet her gaze. When she leaned into me, some of the tension in both of us eased. “You want to evolve with this particular block?”

“Maybe,” she answered, not dismissing the question. Instead, she just leaned her head against my shoulder. “Braxton Harbor is my home. It’sourhome. I want to give back to it.”

“Okay… still think that buying a block might be overkill.”

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