Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 126060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Amaranthe had to turn completely away from him. She’d never received so many compliments in her life—all of which appeared to be genuine. She heard the sincerity in his voice. She was trained to hear lies. It was one of her gifts, and Jean-Claude and the other instructors training her had insisted she develop that trait, testing her daily.
Geno tended to be casual when he gifted her with a compliment. He didn’t make a big deal of it; he stated whatever he said as a fact. That was so much better than flowery compliments she would have known weren’t sincere. The things he said would stay with her forever. She wanted to hold them to her and take them out when she was alone to go over every word.
“Yes, I was honored more than once with a request to try out, but I’m a shadow rider first. I work for the International Council, and dancing is a cover. That means I have to take work with the smaller companies just as I did here in New York.”
“That means you will never have the chance to dance on a big stage with the best of the best, Amara. You deserve to be with them.”
“I’ve had the privilege of working with remarkable dancers. If I’d stayed with one company, I never would have met these wonderful dancers, all of whom taught me something I had yet to learn. I’m a shadow rider, Geno. I wouldn’t give that up for any reason. I love to dance. I do, but I’m a shadow rider first. That’s who I am. It’s who I was born to be.”
Geno swirled water in the crystal glass, still looking at her intently behind his smoky glasses. “You do realize you trained from the time you were two, first by your parents, and then not only your training but essentially your entire life was shaped by the council. You could change the course of your life if you wanted. Your career in dance would take off and the Ferraro family would back you.”
That offer was sincere as well. She frowned, trying to puzzle out what else she heard, what underlying note was there. He wore his expressionless mask, and the dark gray glasses covered the look in his eyes so she couldn’t read him. It didn’t matter. She knew the truth, and she was going to be honest with him about the things that counted.
“I’m a shadow rider, Geno. The offer would be amazing, but I would never voluntarily give up riding.”
She felt his instant satisfaction. More than satisfaction, almost as if he’d been holding his breath, determined to give her an opportunity to change her path if that was what she wanted.
She studied his face. He was so much younger than she had originally thought he would be. Younger than Stefano when she had thought the cousins were the same age. She knew most people thought that because they were the head of their families and Geno looked older than he was, but in fact, he was several years younger.
“What about you, Geno? Tell me what it was like for you. You were so young when you took over for your parents, weren’t you?”
He poured more water into her glass and added shrimp salad to his plate. “I was a kid, a teenager, so angry. Really angry. I knew my parents were lying to us. And I knew the Archambaults knew more than they were letting on. Translate that into being a reckless pain in the ass to everyone. I was big and fast and already very strong for my age. Put that together with angry, and you had a disaster on your hands.”
Amaranthe had always had an empathic side to her nature, and she felt his memories of that teenage boy surfacing, the anger that was still smoldering. She couldn’t blame him—his childhood had been ripped from him.
“We’d been happy, all of us. My parents were strict, but they were loving, especially my mother, and then all of the sudden they cut themselves off from us. It was bad enough that they’d done that to me, but Salvatore and Lucca were younger, and Salvatore was sensitive and sweet. He was very close to Mama.”
She didn’t think they were that much younger, but a few years made a world of difference in the early years.
“They were lost and that made me even angrier. Fortunately, I have a fairly decent brain and it didn’t take me long to figure out that my parents weren’t going to relent. I was angry with the wrong people. I might not like how strict the Archambaults were, but I realized I needed their knowledge not only for my survival but for Salvatore and Lucca’s as well. So I changed my attitude and learned everything I could from them. Once I made up my mind to train and learn everything I could, I challenged myself daily to become faster and stronger. I learned everything they could teach me and constantly demanded more.”