Night's Honor
Page 37

Her sharp gaze darted from the windows to the gleaming expanse of the floor, and he realized what she was doing. She was making sure it was safe enough for him to enter.
Something startled inside him warmed. Not only did she pay attention to the details in her immediate environment, also she had good protective instincts.
“It’s safe,” he said. “But thank you.”
The glance she gave him was as uncertain as everything else she had done that evening, but her grip on his arm relaxed, and they walked forward together until they stood in the middle of the empty, polished floor.
Earlier, he had set a portable stereo on the piano, already loaded with a CD filled with waltz music. He turned to face her, and while he was not quite able to ignore how her heart sped up when they came face-to-face, at least her scent didn’t fill with such overwhelming fear.
“The waltz is a simple and elegant dance,” he said. “And the music is beautiful. It’s in triple meter.”
“I’m not musical,” she told him, looking down at their feet. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Don’t look at your feet. Nobody looks at their feet when they dance. Look at me.” He paused until her head lifted, and her wary gaze met his. “Triple meter simply means three beats to a measure. One-two-three, one-two-three. That’s the rhythm of the dance. Spatially, visualize a box. We will be stepping around the corners of the box together. You move backward, while I move forward.”
The angle of her head acquired a skeptical slant. “Why can’t you move backward, and I move forward?”
Trust Tess to ask that question. He bit back another smile. “Convention. I’m the male, and you’re the female. That means I lead and you follow, which is good for you, since I already know the dance.”
“Well, you know how that old saying goes,” she said.
“What saying is that?”
A spark of humor entered her gaze. “Ginger Rogers did the same thing Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels.”
He had met Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers once in 1934, when they had come to Evenfall to dance for the Masque at winter solstice. He chuckled. “Very true. I’ll keep the pace and guide you around the corners of the box, like thus.”
As she watched, he stepped back and positioned his arms as if he held a woman, one hand curved around his invisible partner’s back and the other pretending to clasp her hand. Then he glided through the steps as he watched Tess.
Her eyes widened, and he stopped. “What is it?”
Color tinged her skin, along the proud curves of her high cheekbones. “You have this way of moving.”
“What way is that?” He walked back toward her with a frown, disquieted again.
When he had invited her, he truly had not anticipated how much she might change. The strong angles of her face highlighted the shape of her eyes and the sensual curve of her lips.
She had become too striking. That meant more eyes would fall upon her and linger, more people would remember her, and that meant, in some situations, she might be in more danger.
He would have to consider the possible ramifications of that, another time. For now, he set the issue aside and concentrated on her.
She lifted her shoulders in an awkward shrug, and her gaze fell away. “You move with such grace and self-assurance all of the time. I’ll never be able to match that.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “Not only have I been dancing for a very long time, but I was also engaged in fencing lessons and swordplay from the time I was a young child. I have a lot of experience, and you haven’t. You will learn soon enough.”
She shook her head and gave him a wry look. “Believe me, the way you move takes a lot more than just experience, no matter how many decades—or centuries—you have under your belt. Just now you looked as if you were floating.”
If that had come from anyone but Tess, he would have been sure that was a compliment. As it was, he had no idea how to respond.
Instead of speaking, he dug in his pocket to pull out the remote for the portable stereo and keyed on the music, and the lovely, timeless strains of Chopin’s Grande Valse Brillante swelled to fill the room.
A sense of peace and contentment filled him. He loved music, and he loved to dance. Teaching Tess to waltz was going to be a pleasure.
A half an hour later, he had revised his opinion drastically, as she stepped on his foot again. Instantly, they both stopped moving and glared at each other.
“Young lady, you are not an elephant,” he told her. “Kindly refrain from imitating one.”
“I’m sorry!” she said for the fifth time.
Or perhaps it was the sixth. He wasn’t sure; he had lost count. It was certainly often enough that she had begun to say it through gritted teeth.
He forced himself to take a breath. While he might not need to breathe anymore, the action seemed to help him reach for patience. “Not to worry. We’ll keep doing it until we get it right.”
Rubbing the back of her head, she muttered something about dancing with the stars and Vampyres.
He cocked his head. “What was that? I didn’t quite understand you.”
“I—never mind.” She squared her shoulders. “Are we going again?”
“Of course.” He opened up his arms, and she stepped into them.
While teaching her to dance had turned into much more of a chore than he had anticipated, this one thing was purest pleasure: she came readily to him, and she no longer remembered to flinch from his touch.
Of course, he did not clasp her too tightly, but instead held her precisely at the correct distance. And her heart rate still sped up every time he looked at her, or reached out to touch her slender, muscular body. But mostly, he thought, her fear seemed to have subsided, and even though she seemed to have the dancing ability of a koala bear, for that reason alone, he counted the waltzing lessons a success.
They assumed the proper dancing posture, hands clasped. His right hand cupped the strong, graceful curve of her shoulder blade. She rested the fingertips of her left hand along the shoulder seam of his jacket.
He met her gaze as they waited for the right beat in the music. Then he nodded to her, and as they began to move, she stepped forward instead of back and trod on his foot again.
“Madre de Dios,” he said. He said a few other choice things too. He hadn’t realized that he had slipped into speaking Spanish until she started to snort and shudder. He stopped to glare at her. “What?”