With a little grin, he spun me suddenly around, pulling me into his chest as one hand wrapped around my lower back. I sucked in a gasp of surprise—relieved beyond words that my skyscraper heels hadn’t sabotaged me—and only then realized that we were on the dance floor.
“How do I handle it?” Nick repeated, offering out his other hand with a smile. “I have a great publicist.”
That was the last the two of us spoke for a long while. I p
laced my hand lightly in his, and together, the two of us began spinning across the marble floors in a slow waltz.
It didn’t matter that we were only ones dancing—the second we started, the rest of the room was quick to join in. It didn’t matter that the orchestra was playing a bit fast for the leisurely speed we were moving—the second they saw us, they slowed the tempo down. It didn’t even seem to matter that I didn’t actually know how to waltz. Considering the way Nick was holding me, I might as well have been floating above the ground.
“This is insane.” I giggled softly, glancing around at the couples dancing around us. They looked like paper dolls on parade—each more colorful and lovely than the next. “I was worried about just staying on my feet, but I think you’re starting an entire craze. Taking the city back to sometime in the seventeen hundreds.”
Nick chuckled, squeezing my hand tighter in his own.
“The seventeen hundreds was a good time. I would have liked the seventeen hundreds.”
“I bet you would have,” I scoffed sarcastically, as a thousand different Casanova scenarios flashed through my head. Did they have publicists in the seventeen hundreds? That man would have needed one for sure. “If you were rich—that is. The seventeen hundreds weren’t so great for the rest of the world.”
“That’s true.” Nick gazed out over the heads of the crowd, his eyes glassing over as he imagined it. “And I don’t know what you mean about ‘staying on your feet,’” he murmured as he released my hand, then spun me back into him, “you’re a wonderful dancer.”
“In a club, maybe.” I tossed back my curls and flashed him a smile. “But not all of us had ballroom dance lessons when we were a child.”
“Come on—this isn’t so bad.”
“You’re not the one doing it in heels!”
“Abby, you should know that I’m the one taking all the risk here.” He glanced down at our feet with a grin. “If you step on me even once in those things, I’m bound to lose a toe.”
We both laughed, as I made a conscious effort to pay more attention to where I was stepping. But I somehow knew that no matter what I did, Nick would never let it happen.
He would never let anything bad happen. Somehow. Impossible as it might seem.
From the second I’d stepped into his arms, an overwhelming feeling of security had washed over me. A feeling I had never felt before. I feeling I didn’t think existed in real life.
Leave it to me to ruin all that.
“So, um...about what just happened—”
Before I could say another word, Nick spun me around—twirling me out onto the floor before pulling me back to the safety of his arms. The second I landed, he looked down at me with a sudden grin—a grin that completely dissipated all the tension in the air between us.
“I told you it would be work related.”
“Work related?” I gasped breathlessly, unable to decide whether to laugh or rip out my hair in frustration. I’d settle for the room to stop spinning. “You call that work related?”
“I certainly do.” He laced his fingers innocently through mine, pulling me extra close under the guise of making room for another couple. “You are posing as my girlfriend, are you not? Well...that’s the way I like to touch my girlfriends.”
For a second, I just stared up at him—bowled over by the sheer audacity of such a statement. Then he flashed me a little wink.
“As long as they agree to dance with me afterwards...”
I was still laughing as the song came to an end. As the couples drifted apart in a rousing wave of applause. As Nick bent down to give me a soft kiss on the cheek.
Then, before I knew what was happening, a dozen ushers appeared from out of nowhere and began politely herding people to the sides of the room. A team of men came out shortly after with a roll of mats and rope, and a minute later, a microphone descended slowly from the ceiling.
“What is this?” I asked Nick quietly. It was easy to have a private conversation amidst the noise and growing anticipation of the crowd. “What’s happening?”
“You’ll see.”
His eyes glowed excitedly as he gazed out toward the mats, but he refused to give away the secret. I was about to press, but just a moment later, a tuxedoed announcer did it for him.