Lips with enough of a curve at the corner to suggest he is capable of humor and exercises it selectively. And above the mask—hair that's dark auburn shot through with silver at the temples, worn short but not severe, the kind of mix of color that happens on a man over a certain age and looks like something achieved on purpose.
His eyes are grey-green.
Not one or the other. Both, simultaneously, shifting between the two the way water shifts over stone—sometimes predominantly green in certain light, then catching grey when he moves, as if the color itself can't commit and has decided the ambiguity is the point. Looking into them is?—
Look at his ear. Look at the balustrade. Look at literally anything else because those eyes are not something you should be looking at this directly this quickly.
"Sort of," I say.
My voice comes out even. I'm moderately impressed by this.
"The bar was more interesting, if I'm being honest."
Something moves in those grey-green eyes—the specific microscopic shift of someone who wasn't expecting that particular answer and finds that interesting. Not amusement yet. Something that precedes amusement, the moment before the door opens.
"The bar," he says.
"Cole's a good bartender. He had things worth discussing."
"Cole."
"We were introduced." I hold his gaze and take a sip of champagne and let the sentence sit there.
The corner of his mouth moves.
There it is.
Not a full smile. A quarter-rotation, the kind that's earned rather than manufactured, and it changes his whole face in the way that small movements can when the face has good bones.
"Would you rather have a dance than stand out here being bored?" he asks.
The question is direct, which I appreciate, but not demanding—the kind of directness that offers rather than assumes, gives the door without walking through it uninvited.
I look at him.
I consider it—not performing consideration, actually doing it. The way Elowen's voice comes in: the version of yourself before the pack, before you started apologizing for wanting things. The girl who walked into rooms and decided whether she wanted to be in them based on her own read rather than someone else's.
He's not giving off cocky.
That's what I notice, doing the actual read. He's standing in my space without being in my space. He's asked a question and is waiting for the answer without filling the silence with more questions or pressure. He smells like old cedar and worked leather and Irish whiskey, which is doing things to the underside of my scent receptors that I am going to address privately and not right now.
He's just—present.
The way some people are present, and some people are merely occupying space.
I smile.
Not the service smile or the performing-ease grin. A real one, the one I only produce when something has caught me genuinely, that arrives before I've decided whether to let it.
I extend my hand.
"I suppose," I say, "that you could be better entertainment for the rest of the evening. Depending."
His grin—because it's a grin now, not just the quarter-rotation, the full thing that reaches the grey-green eyes and changes them from watchful to warm—is effortless. That's the word. Not practiced, not deployed. Effortless, the way something is when true.
He takes my hand.
His hand is large. Warm. There's a specific quality to the way an Alpha holds an Omega's hand when they know what they're doing—not gripping, not loose, the precise middle pressure ofsomeone who is aware of the size differential and has made a considered decision about how to account for it. He holds my hand like it's a thing he's been trusted with.
