The little girl stood in front of the fireplace, in a space vacated by the coffee table. Jace’s parents and sister sat lined up in a row on the sofa, a willing audience. Ginny’s shoes were off, her hands held in some dancer’s pose as her head bobbed in time with the music, counting in. The moment she spied her sister, she broke form and raced over.
“Tara! Listen! It’s the ‘Waltz of the Snowflakes’! Dance with me.” She dragged at Tara’s hands, pulling her into the room.
“I don’t think there’s time before dinner, munchkin.” Her voice came out normal, but Jace could see the tension in her shoulders.
“Oh everything’s on warm in the oven and the bread needs to cool before we slice it,” Livia said. “Besides, there’s always time for performing. Isn’t that right, Ginny?”
“Yeah! Please, Tara? Please please please please?”
From his position slouched in a chair, Austin rolled his eyes.
Tara looked down at her sister, obviously searching for the right thing to say. She didn’t want to dance. Not in front of all of them. That much was obvious. Being goofy at home with your kid sister was a lot different from being goofy in front of relative strangers.
Jace stepped forward, intending to rescue her, but as it turned out, Tara couldn’t deny her baby sister anything.
“All right. But just one. I’m starving.” Tara moved to toe off her shoes and shrug out of her coat. “You may want to push the furniture back a little. My legs are longer than Ginny’s.”
By the time they’d shoved the sofa and chairs further back, the music had shifted yet again.
“Do you want to go back to the ‘Waltz of the Snowflakes’?” she asked Ginny.
“The ‘Spanish Dance’ will do,” Ginny said, quite seriously.
Jace perched on the arm of Austin’s chair and settled in to watch as the sisters took their positions. Ginny looked over, tried to match her stance to Tara’s. Some formal pose with their arms curved and their feet in opposite L shapes. It was going to be fun to see Tara loosen up.
Then the music started and they began to dance, mirroring each other in posturing bows to their tiny crowd. Whatever assumptions he’d made that they’d be silly or awkward vanished the moment Tara began to move. Her arms reached for the sky in long, graceful lines. As a unit, she and Ginny took several steps to the side, reaching and pointing. Tara’s leg snapped up, high as her head with each pass. As the music escalated, the pair of them spun in circles Jace thought of as more common on ice skates. But Tara did it without any apparent effort. Jesus, how could anyone actually balance on their toes like that? What kind of strength must be in those feet?
Coming out of a spin, Ginny lost her balance with a giggle, landing splayed in Livia’s lap. Tara kept going. Jace realized her eyes were closed and half expected her to run into someone or something. But she never faltered, moving in perfect tune with the music until it came to a close, her body bent in a graceful arc, one foot curved impossibly above her head. Her expression when she stopped was caught somewhere between pleasure and pain. She held the position until the next track began, then unfolded in a sinuous motion entirely in keeping with the ‘Arabian Dance’ that was starting. Jace didn’t even think she was aware of doing it.
He was the first to break the stunned silence. “I think I speak for all of us when I say, wow. I had no idea you were a dancer.”
The openness in her face shifted to something else, a flash of pain quickly shuttered by her usual even expression. “I’m not.”
“Pretty sure everything we just saw points to the contrary,” Livia said.
“I was a dancer.” Her tone indicated the subject was closed. She bent to tug on her shoes. “Now, time for you both to wash your hands for supper.”
The kids raced down the hall to do as she asked.
Dinner was a raucous affair, with Ginny and Austin providing a play-by-play of their evening since they arrived at the farm.
“—and then we met Kip. He likes to play fetch and give kisses,” Ginny reported. “I wanted to bring him to my room, but Jace said he sleeps in the barn.”
“He does,” Jace’s dad, Evan, said. “He’s a total bed hog otherwise.”
“I’m tiny. I don’t mind.”
“Yeah but if we let him sleep with you, it’d spoil him and then he’d expect to come inside all the time,” Linda told her.
“Plus he keeps Pepper company so she doesn’t have bad dreams,” Jace said.
Ginny looked worried. “Pepper has bad dreams?”
Uh oh. Misstep.
“Not with Kip,” he assured her. “They snuggle up in her stall.”
“I have bad dreams sometimes,” the little girl said quietly.