He cut her off ten feet from the doors.
Her eyes found him, and her entire body went rigid. A half-second of something raw broke across her face—shock, then alarm, and underneath both, something that flickered and vanished before he could name it. She recovered fast. The mask came back, smooth and practiced, and by the time he was close enough to speak she looked like a woman mildly surprised to run into an acquaintance.
But he’d seen the half-second. He’d seen all of it.
“Isaac.” She said his name like she was testing whether it was still real.
“Fallon.”
“What are you doing in Austin?”
“Working. You?”
“Same.”
“Yeah.” He let that word carry everything he wasn’t saying. “I noticed.”
Something recalculated behind her eyes.
He touched her elbow, light, and angled his body toward the far corner of the dance floor where the crowd was thinnest, partially shielded from the main room by a cluster of tall cocktail tables and a large arrangement that someone had spent too much money on. “Dance with me.”
Her mouth pressed flat. “I was just leaving.”
No way in hell, sweetheart.“I know you were. Dance with me, anyway.”
She looked at his hand on her elbow, then at the terrace doors behind him, then back at his face. He could see her thought process. Pulling away would draw attention. Refusing loudly would draw more. Walking onto a dance floor with a man who was smiling at her would draw none at all.
She went with him.
The band had shifted into something slow. He took her hand and settled his other palm against the curve of her hip. The contact registered through his whole body. Four months since he’d touched her, and his hands remembered before his brain caught up. Everything he thought he’d put behind him was right here, alive and immediate, tangled up with what he’d just watched her do.
Her hand landed against his lapel. Light. Tense. Ready to push off.
“So,” he said. “Event planning.”
Her chin came up. “So. Standing by pillars.”
“I said I was working. That was true.”
“It was vague.”
“It was honest. Can you say the same?”
She didn’t answer.
“Because I just watched you lift a money clip out of a man’s jacket pocket in front of six witnesses, and nobody even blinked.”
She didn’t flinch. “You don’t know what you saw.”
“I know exactly what I saw. Your hand went inside his jacket and came out with something metal. Four seconds later you were casually walking away.”
“People bump into each other at parties. It happens.”
“That wasn’t a bump. That was a lift.”
Her chin tilted up. Defiant. “You’re making a lot of assumptions based on one moment across a crowded room.”
“Am I? Because I’m also thinking about Boston. Two events, two different looks for you as to not be recognized, and both times you were reading the room in a way that had nothing to do with event planning.” He held her gaze. “The layout and the lighting. That’s what you told me. That you were scoping them out for a client.”
