“Right.” Daniel’s face sank as Ifan refused to even look at him. So, this was how the other half lived? He reached for a pair of flutes. “Uh. Let me take two, I’m meeting—”
“Daniel?”
It was a romantic movie cliché, but, like all romantic movie clichés, Daniel Best believed it was true. When he whirled around toward the sound of his name and saw Samantha Dubarry in all of her ball gown finery, time lay down at their feet.
She was… Unlanguageable. A million lifetimes wouldn’t have been enough time to write a song capturing how she looked now. She stood in the middle of the large French doorways, right in the hustle and bustle of everything, but the rest of the world went dark, leaving only Sam in a puddle of perfect, glittering light. Her thick brown hair—pulled back, per usual—was studded with small pins. They caught the haze of light, giving her an almost angelic glow. A blue dress rippled down the curves of her body; it was as if someone had made a fabric of a stormy sea and tailored it to her every inch until she became a thing of the earth, a living embodiment of nature and all its beauties and dangers.
Trading her usual slacks and blazer for a ball gown, she looked so unlike herself and more like herself than he’d ever seen her. As always, she was a dizzying swirl of contradictions, each more confusing and intriguing than the next.
He wanted to kiss her. God, did he want to kiss her. With every passing second, he realized he wanted to kiss her ten times more than in the second before it.
“Sam. You look— You are…”Say something poetic, man. You’re a writer. The romantic poet of Oxford, for Christ’s sake!“Wow.”
“It’s just a dress.” She blushed and nodded at the floor, though her tone flatlined.
“It’s not the dress. It’s the woman wearing it.”
“You look very handsome.” She changed the conversation with a deftness he hadn’t anticipated. “Where’d you get a tux?”
As proper as she tried to speak and behave, Sam betrayed her own anxiety. Her fingers tugged at the fabric of her dress. A sheen of sweat beaded on her forehead. Her eyes darted this way and then the other. Daniel furrowed his brow. What did she have to be worried about? This was her party.
Not wanting to spook her, he didn’t pry. He tried to distract her as best as he knew how. He laid on the charm especially thick. If Ifan hadn’t run off with the champagne, he would have prescribed her a glass of the strong bubbles as well.
“This old thing?” He tugged on his lapels. “I bought it off a drunk who lives on my street.”
“Really?”
“No,” Daniel admitted with a chuckle. “I play weddings sometimes.”
This evoked a real, honest-to-God reaction from her, a scoff and an authentic toss of her head. Around them, the prying eyes of the crowd peered into their conversation, but he didn’t care. The band could play all night and Daniel would still be here, trying to puzzle out this beautiful woman before him.
“What a drag,” she grumbled.
“Weddings? What have you got against weddings?”
“You like listening to people lie to each other?” Daniel’s face must not have been doing a very good job of concealing his shock. She continued incredulously. “What? I don’t need to tell you weddings are stupid, expensive symbols of a union doomed to last five to ten years at best.”
It would have been a disappointing statement if it hadn’t given him the key to unlocking this woman who’d so fascinated him.
“You’re a cynic.”
“I’ve had a long twenty-three years to become one,” she said. Her smile didn’t touch her cloudy eyes. Daniel couldn’t stop himself.
“Do you want to dance?”
Sam scanned the dance floor with imperious eyes. Empty. She tilted her chin up slightly.
“No one’s dancing yet.”
“No one has a partner like mine,” he said, offering her his hand.
Part of him expected her to demur and run away. She didn’t. She placed her small hand in his with an agreeing tilt of her head.
“One dance.”
Though his feet were firmly planted on the ground, Daniel could almost see this moment playing out through the eye of a movie camera, pulling out and zooming in as he led Sam to the dance floor, placed one hand on her hip and one hand in hers, and waited for the new song to begin. A skilled photographer would capture Sam’s sharp intake of breath as he drew her to him, the hungry eyes of the crowd, and the happy fingers of the musicians as they struck up a new tune, something smooth and sensuous.
The only thing a camera couldn’t detect was the thrumming of his own heart.
