That had been deliberate on her part, but she couldn’t explain that to him.
“Isaac.” She let herself smile. Small, controlled. “Hi.”
Up close he was worse than she remembered in all the best ways. The suit fit him like it had been cut for his body, and without a tie the open collar showed the line of his throat, the hollow at the base of it. His jaw was still just as sharp, but the stubble on it tonight made him look less polished and more dangerous. His eyes caught the overhead lighting and shifted—green at the edges, gold near the center.
She looked away before she could catalog anything else.
“You look different tonight.”
She kept her voice light. “You know how it is: new event, new look.”
“It’s working. You look good.” His eyes moved over her—not the way men usually looked at her, cataloging parts. He was studying. She could practically watch him filing away the discrepancies between what he saw now and what he remembered.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, because she needed to steer this somewhere she could manage. Prescott’s voice was still humming in her ear, but she ignored it.
“Working. You?”
“Same.” She left it there. The less detail she offered, the less he could cross-reference later.
“That’s a shame. Because there’s a perfectly good dance floor over there that nobody’s using, and I’ve been standing here for an hour trying to figure out what to call the music this DJ is playing. Best I’ve come up with is a computer having a dream.”
Her mouth tilted into a smile before she could stop it. “A computer having a dream.”
“It’s either that orelegant dial-up noises. I’ll workshop it.”
She couldn’t stop the full smile at that. Damn it.
“Dance with me.”
Her smile faded. She should leave. Right now, while the conversation was light enough to walk away from. He was a distraction she couldn’t afford. And more than that, he was a material witness. Someone who could place her at potential crime scenes.
But her body wasn’t moving toward the door. Her body was angled toward him, weight shifted onto her right foot to ease the ache in her left knee, and the distance between them had somehow closed to two feet without either of them stepping forward.
“One dance,” she said. “Then I have to get back to work.”
He held out his hand, a half-smile tilting his lips, causing ridiculous somersaults in her belly.
She took it, and as they walked toward the open floor, his palm settled against the small of her back. The heat of it registered through the thin fabric of her dress. She used the motion of tucking a strand of hair behind her ear to press her fingertip against the receiver in her left ear. The tiny device loosened. She palmed it in one smooth motion and slid her hand into the pocket of her dress, dropping it in without breaking stride.
Prescott’s voice cut out. The silence in her ear was sudden and total.
As if on cue, the DJ shifted to something slower—still electronic, but a melody had surfaced underneath. Isaac turned to face her. His hand settled on her hip this time, lower than the waist, his fingers curving against the fabric. Her hand landed on his chest instead of his shoulder. She could feel his heartbeat under her palm. Steady. Unhurried.
They might as well have been the only two people on the floor.
“You disappeared on me last week,” he said.
“I had somewhere to be.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You had somewhere tonotbe. There’s a difference.”
The easy humor was gone. He was just watching her, steady and quiet, waiting for an honest answer.
“You’re right,” she said. “I left.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to stay. That’s usually my cue to go.”
