Emily’s smile brightened first at the sight of her brother, then wobbled and dimmed, her eyes darting nervously over toward where Layla stood.
Goddammit, she echoed Griffin silently, this scenario somehow way worse than a simple bonus episode of theIs Layla Looking at Jamie?show. Because in this scenario—in that wobble of Emily’s smile—Layla saw all the worry from yesterday morning coming back, Layla and Jamie apart here in this garden palace ballroom, a couple Emily had once watched having a perfectly coordinated, devotedly practiced first dance at their beautiful backyard wedding.
“Let’s, uh—” she started to say to Griffin, with absolutely no meaningful escape plan in mind, save maybe a fae prince ordering his choir to sing a spell that would make her disappear.
But before she could voice something so desperately ridiculous, a strong arm came around her waist.
Turning her toward the body that had been hovering near hers all day.
One of her hands enveloped in electric warmth. Her arm lifted.
And then, suddenly, she was dancing.
Chapter Fourteen
“Look at me,” he said to her, for the second time in as many days.
Her eyes snapped up to his, wide and searching, as he stepped to the side, and then backward, his left hand pressed tight to her lower back. That was how she needed it, at least right now, in order to follow him—stiff and startled as she was, as though she’d spent the last couple of hours forgetting that the ex-husband was here.
Or that there was an ex-husband at all.
“Just me,” he said, when one of her feet scuffed awkwardly against the gravel as he turned her, further into the circle of the outdoor ballroom’s floor, her back toward the ex now, but he couldn’t bother himself to see if that guy was watching.
He was very busy being bothered by everything else about this situation, and to him,everything elseamounted to the fact that he was commanding this woman to look at him from an even more unsafe distance than he would have ever considered possible when he first floated this idea to her last night.
Bell tower!his brain screamed, like an alarm going off.Bell tower,notballroom!
One side of his face suffused with heat—the normal side, with the normal, human sort of embarrassed heat, not the prickly, inexplicable kind that sometimes lurked beneath his deadened skin, a trick of his nervous system that he couldn’t control, and he prayed it was not too noticeable to her. That the pink flush would be unremarkable, compared to everything else she’d be able to see from this angle.
He felt it then—on the right side, the normal-warm side—a thin wisp of her breath exhaling against his neck. Deliberately steadying as she managed her nerves.
Everything elsewas now a much more complicated prospect.
Because JesusChrist, that breath against his neck.
Ten out of ten, he thought, for once in his life not thinking of the fucking pain scale.
He flicked his gaze up, over the top of her head, caught sight of the ex, his light-eyed gaze lingering briefly on Layla’s back before he turned to the girlfriend with an easy smile, extending a hand but stepping back at the same time.
If he was about to—
Yeah, he was.
What a fucking idiot. Abow.
“What?” Layla said, because clearly his face—hisup closeface!—had done something in response.
“Nothing,” he said, then shifted his gaze toward Michael and Emily, who were dancing again. For a fleeting second, Michael caught Griffin’s eye as he guided Emily into a turn, and mouthed,Thank you.
“I don’t know if—” Layla whispered, then broke off, swallowing and starting again. “I’m not sure if the solution is turningourselvesinto the show.”
“We aren’t,” he said, not whispering, but still keeping his voice low. “They aren’t watching.”
He suspected they both knew that this was at least a partial lie—there was no way that there wasn’t some occasional watching, even if it was just from that security guard, who was probably thinking,Look at these six American assholes, but at the moment, he did not care.
He cared about that fucking guy showing up and ruining all the good work Layla had been doing.
For Michael, obviously.
