I also told him about school and high school and all the pranks my brothers pulled on me, on each other, on our parents, on our neighbors. I told him about the pet toad I’d had for two years, which he found disgusting, but I’d loved Toady to death all the same, so I didn’t care.
I told him every story I could remember, and it felt like I talked for hours. He listened to my every word, his eyes around us, but his attention on me only. He absorbed everything I said, and I got another three smiles out him before I was done. It was definitely my lucky night.
Before I knew it, all the tables around us in the VIP section were taken. Over fifty people were around us, sneaking looks our way, and some girls sitting two tables away from us were having the time of their lives, drinking and dancing, celebrating their friend who was about to get married. A pink satin sash hung over her shoulder, with the letters Bride To Be written in rhinestones on it.
The moment I made eye contact with her, she stopped screaming her lungs out at the ceiling and waved her hand.
“Come on!”
I couldn’t hear her voice, but I read the words on her bright red lips just fine.
Then, all four of her friends turned to me, and when they saw me looking, they waved for me to go to them, too.
“Erm, they want me to—”
“Go,” Dominic said. “Go dance. Enjoy yourself.”
I raised a brow at him. “Are you being sarcastic, sweetie?”
He shook his head and pulled his lips inside his mouth to keep from smiling. “No. Just go. You need to be dancing, anyway.”
Hell, yeah, I needed to be dancing. I was on a mission to catch bad guys, and even though I’d felt like a failure earlier today, and I almost believed what Dominic had said to the Chief back at Headquarters about me, I could take some time off from my own thoughts, couldn’t I? I could enjoy myself. If Dominic thought I could, there was no reason why I couldn’t take his word for it. He’d been at this far longer than I had.
And honestly, I already was having a great time, even though I pretended to be pretending. I wasn’t, not really.
I pressed my lips to his cheek, and half my lips were on the short beard that was all Dominic, even though I couldn’t see it. He was shocked to say the least. I saw it in his wide eyes, but he was pretending, too, so he remembered himself before he moved away.
“Go,” he said in a whisper, and I stood up.
“Watch my purse for me?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. The five women were jumping in the air to the beat, screaming, calling for me to join them, and I did. I was going to enjoy all this space to dance properly for once in my life, everything else be damned.
My feet hurt so much,but I couldn’t stop. The music had gotten under my skin, stuck itself deep into my bones, and I couldn’t stop moving if I tried. The woman who was getting married, Elisa, wouldn’t let any of us take a single break if we wanted to, anyway. More girls who’d been sitting around the VIP section had joined us. Elisa had to go drag one of them by the arm because she was too shy to come on her own. Before I knew it, I was dancing with eleven other women, all of them human, like there was no tomorrow. And through it all I could actually breathe.
An hour must have passed, and every time I spun around, I found Dominic’s eyes on me. It heated the blood in my veins even more than the music, and it pushed me to move like never before. I swung my hips to the beat, and I got lost in the darkness and the lights, enjoying every second. It almost felt like I wasn’t me right now, like I was wearing someone else’s skin, and the troubles of the real world couldn’t get to me at all.
Until one of Elisa’s friends wrapped an arm around my neck and pulled me to her until her lips pressed against my ear.
“Your boyfriend is so hot!”
My ear whistled and I moved away on instinct. She laughed, shaking her head full of blonde curls, and came at me again, this time slower.
“Sorry. But he’s so hot!” And she fanned herself.
I glanced behind me to find Dominic, looking more like himself than he realized, even though he wore another man’s face. His attitude, the way he held his body—one arm on the back of the couch, the other on the armrest, glass of whiskey in hand, looking at the world with an expression that said he owned even the air everyone breathed.
My thighs clenched tightly.
“Yeah,” I said with a nod. My pretend boyfriend was really, really hot.
“You should go to him,” the girl said. I couldn’t really remember her name, though we’d introduced ourselves when I first went to dance with them.
“Totally!” said another one of the friends—I think her name was Sarah. The white of her eyes had turned almost completely red, her cheeks were flushed, and she drank tequila shots like they were water. She was properly wild. “He has been eye-fucking you since you walked away from him. Poor guy. Go put him out of his misery! Woo-hoo!” And she tossed back another shot.
My heart was beating a mile a minute, and it had nothing to do with the dancing anymore.
“Go! I want to see him dancing. C’mon, girl! Do us all a favor here!” the first one said with a loud cheer that had me moving away from her again as I laughed.