Free Dancing on a Moonbeam (Bedford Falls Book 1) by Kate Perry

don't appreciate me, I'm going back to the salt mines."
    "Come back when you can't stay so long," she called after him.
    "I love you too," he called back.
    She heard the door close, and she smiled. She loved that man. He'd always been by her side, and he always would be.
    Taking out her laptop, she set up office on the kitchen table. She needed to do something to feel productive, to take her mind off the delays. So she started making a plan for the coming year and attracting new students.
    She wasn't delusional; she knew that her background only carried a certain amount of caché. In town, people knew her story well enough, but Bedford Falls by itself couldn't support a dance studio. She needed students from all over Westchester. She just wasn't sure how many people would find her interesting. She'd given up dancing close to twenty years before.  
    But she could ask a current star to come talk to her classes or guest teach, and she knew who to ask.
    Taking her cell phone, she dialed the number for the Joffrey Ballet's administrative offices. She chatted with the woman on the other end, asking to leave a message for Anya Rusakova. She left her phone number and hung up. Anya would call her back—she was positive of that.
    She hadn't figured her old dance friend would call her back so quickly, though. So when her phone rang with an unknown number less than an hour later, she was shocked.
    "Eleanor Westwood," Anya exclaimed from the other end of the line. "I don't know what I can't believe more, that you called me or that you went for so long without calling me. You really are terrible, you know."
    "I really am," she replied, the same way she always had when Anya used to say she was terrible. She smiled, her heart warm at the familiarity. "You aren't, though. I saw the reviews on your ballet last winter."
    "I know, it was a smashing success," her old friend said without vanity. "I had to do something. I'm getting old, Eleanor."
    "Choreographing and starring in your own show was a brilliant decision." She'd gone to see the show by herself, and it'd been stunning. Emotionally moving. She'd cried, though she knew some of the tears were for herself and the longing for dance.  
    "It was necessity," Anya said. "If you were still dancing, you'd do the same."
    But she wasn't. "I'm opening a dance studio," she said in a cheery voice.
    "Ballet?"
    "And ballroom," she improvised. Because why not? She loved all the dances, and it'd broaden her clientele.  
    "Why would you want to do that?" Anya asked in her usual matter-of-fact way.  
    "Because, like you said, I'm getting old and I can't go back to ballet myself," she said just as bluntly.
    "Yes, but teaching ?"
    She felt a moment of doubt, because she knew Anya understood in a way no one else would: dancing was her first love.  
    But then a voice in her head that sounded very much like Charles's reminded her how old she was, and how long it'd been since she'd danced. "Where would we have been if we didn't have teachers?"  
    "On top of the dance world, still, darling, because that's how we are."
    She rolled her eyes.  
    "Eleanor, you have too much talent to teach little brats."  
    "Did you forget the part where I haven't danced in almost twenty years?" Saying it out loud hurt. Badly.
    Ignoring her, Anya gasped. "And the mothers! Don't you remember the stage mothers who were more cutthroat than their daughters? I shudder , Eleanor. I shudder."
    "With all the drama in you, no wonder you produced such a hit."
    Anya gasped again. "That's it. Come and produce a show with me."
    "That's crazy." She shook her head. "I haven't danced in so long—"
    "What does that matter? Have you forgotten everything you know? Of course not, because dancing is in your soul. I know you can't perform like the ballerina you once were, because you're too old—"
    "Thanks," she said with a roll of her eyes.
    "—But that doesn't mean you can't create. You always had the best musicality of us all, and you could