“You don’t have to dance with me,” she said with a half-laugh that was anything but amused.
Those candles would come in handy right about now. He’d love to have some extra light to read the things in her eyes that she hadn’t said. But if his persuasion skills hadn’t completely deserted him, he could still feel his way through this wi
thout benefit of additional clues. “Come on. You don’t want Tristan to ask you to dance and then stumble all over his feet, do you? This is just practice.”
Labeling it as such seemed to do the trick, just like it had for him a minute ago. This was no big thing. It meant nothing. She placed her hand in his and climbed to her feet, crowding into his space and then there was nothing left to do but pull her into his arms.
Yeah, he was really wrong. This was a big thing. Huge. She smelled like cinnamon and something fruity which he would have never expected to go well together but on her, it swirled into a magical blend which crossed his eyes.
“What do I do now?” she murmured throatily and the catch in her voice told him that she was similarly affected by the moment.
How, was the question, but he didn’t dare chalk it up to anything other than nerves, likely because she worried she might be doing it wrong. The least he could do was set her at ease.
“You’re doing great. Put your other hand at my waist,” he instructed her without giving away just how affected he was.
His performance deserved an Oscar to boot, especially once her warm fingers nipped into his flesh. The T-shirt between them hardly mattered since he could still feel her heat through it, and he wasn’t at all ashamed to admit he’d much prefer it if the shirt could go.
“Let me lead,” he said and guided her in a clumsy circle that probably told her all she needed to know about his skill on the dance floor, which was somewhere in the low fives on a scale of one to ten. But it wasn’t zero.
They found a sweet spot where they moved pretty much in sync, and when he caught her gaze, deep and rich and full of unfathomable things, his soul turned over.
“This is kind of fun.” The surprise in her voice made him smile. “And not as hard as I was thinking. It probably won’t be easy when I’m trying to do it with another man, though.”
Not for either of them, he thought sourly, but pushed that out of his mind. He had a lot of nerve even thinking about Aria as anything other than a friend, her scent and the way she felt in his arms notwithstanding. “We’ll practice a lot. How about that?”
Yeah, he was a saint, wasn’t he?
He spun her slowly, giving her time to acclimate to the new direction. She did so flawlessly, catching on to the rhythm much faster than he’d have expected. The waning light provided just enough illumination to see each other but not much more than that. It was kind of a blessing, taking some of the tension out of their nearness for some reason, like a twilight filter that muted any weirdness.
The song swelled around them as he caught her back up in his arms, holding her a little closer than was expressly necessary, but in his defense, she’d never danced before. She might trip and fall. That wouldn’t do.
“Her voice is so beautiful,” she said wistfully. “I wish I could sing. I’m tone deaf.”
“Ironic much?” he teased. “With a name like Aria, you should be belting it out.”
“Yeah, well. The fact that I can’t is one of Ember’s favorite jokes.” She seemed to be a good sport about it though. “Besides, that would be like me questioning why you can’t spout prophecy.”
“Point taken.” He was definitely not in the same category as his biblical namesake, and prophecy wasn’t his favorite subject right now. “We’ll pretend our names have nothing to do with who we are and move on.”
She went quiet for a moment and he imagined she was concentrating on the moves, but then she said, “Why ‘If the Stars Were Mine’? For the theme song, I mean. Why not ‘I Put A Spell On You’? That might play to the quirkiness of the community that Caleb hopes to capitalize on.”
“Perfect.” Why hadn’t he thought of that? Easy answer—because he was still not on his game yet. But she’d filled in his gaps and he didn’t mind that at all. “Where do you stand on the otherworldly aspects of this place?”
“What, you mean in relation to Havana and Caleb’s plan to tease out the supernatural part of the town?” She shrugged, and he felt the movement under his fingers. “I think it’s brilliant. The residents love their oddities and that’ll motivate them to make it work.”
As she was one of the longtime residents, he couldn’t help but ask. “What’s your oddity?”
“The fact that I don’t do feminine things isn’t enough of a clue?” she said with a wry laugh. “Havana’s always after me to do something with my hair or clothes, but that’s just not me.”
“What? You do feminine as well as anyone.” Case in point, the moon had peeked over the horizon in the opposite direction of the sun, lighting up her hair with an ethereal fire that caught in his throat.
She smiled. “How do you always know what to say?”
Because it was easy when it was the truth. Mostly. The truth he’d like to be speaking he shied away from, though.
“I almost never know what to say,” he mumbled and even that was a lie. A lot of times he knew what he should say, but didn’t. For example, he should be talking about the plan to draw tourists to Superstition Springs. He should not, under any circumstances, tell Aria how beautiful she was.
“Is that why you wanted help on working through ideas for Caleb?”