Page 12 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
Honestly, this made me a little impatient. Indignant even. “You know no one gives a shit about that here,” I told him, meaning the Army. Carpathia. “Not even a little bit.”
“Of course not,” he agreed, but there was a distance to his agreement and he remained distant as we walked down to the restaurant and sat for our dinner. He remained distant as we ate. And as Morgan reached for the bill and paid for all three of us, his distance crystallized into something else. Self-consciousness maybe. A feeling of embarrassment he couldn’t quite rationalize away, perhaps. And for the first time, I began to wonder about Colchester’s background. The clothes he wore were nice—but off-the-rack nice, clearly purchased on a soldier’s salary. I knew he’d gone to college, but had he gone on a scholarship? Taken out loans? Had he grown up in the suburbs? The city? The country? Suddenly, I burned to know. I burned to know it all. What kind of childhood made a man like Colchester, so serious and self-assured at twenty-three? What had he dreamed of at night, where had he wanted to go? Was he there now? Was he still dreaming of it?
After dinner, Morgan insisted we go for cocktails in some plush bar with private rooms, and so a couple hours later, it was just the three of us in a small blue room with two soft couches, the front of the room lined with a balcony that overlooked a dance floor. An eight-piece was playing pop standards converted into Viennese waltzes, and dancing couples filled the floor below us. I ordered myself a glass of straight gin in anticipation of having to watch Colchester and Morgan dance.
But that didn’t happen. After about fifteen minutes, Morgan started looking green and clammy, clutching at her stomach.
“Bad schnitzel?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
She glared at me. “I don’t feel well,” she said delicately. Well, as delicately as anyone can when they’ve eaten bad schnitzel. “Excuse me.”
She rushed out of our private cove to find the bathroom, leaving Colchester and me alone together, sitting in silence and watching the dancers.
The knot in my chest felt alive and pulsing. This was the first time we’d been truly alone, just the two of us, and suddenly everything about him seemed more. The stubble thicker, the eyes greener, the large hands cradling his scotch glass even larger.
I drained the gin and signaled the waiter for another.
A few minutes passed like this, me power-sipping gin and Colchester holding his scotch, and then he said quietly, “I wish I knew how to dance.”
This surprised me. Not that he didn’t know, but that he wanted to. “Why on earth would you want that?”
He shrugged and rubbed his forehead with his thumb, looking a little sheepish. “I guess it just seems like the kind of thing a man should know how to do.” He turned to look at me. “Do you know how to dance?”
Was he kidding?
“I think I learned how to dance before I learned how to ride a bike. Morgan and I were Mother’s favorite political props—the sooner she could doll us up in formal clothes and show off how well-bred we were, the better.” I thought of those endless nights at Mother’s events, which grew more and more tedious the older and better-looking I got. By the time I was fifteen, women weren’t asking for dances out of motherly adoration any longer, and I’d go home with blisters on my feet and tiny bruises on my ass where all the Mrs. Robinsons had pinched me.
I threw back the rest of the gin and stood up. What the hell. “Come on,” I said, holding out my arms. “I’ll show you.”
He bit his lip once, blinked. And then he stood up, setting his glass aside and stepping close to me.
“It’s probably easiest if I lead first,” I told him. “Until you get a feel for it.”
“Okay,” he said, a little uncertainly. “I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means I’m the man right now, and you’re the woman. And since this is a waltz, pretend you have a ball gown and you just found out your husband is sleeping with the nanny.”
He laughed, his teeth looking extraordinarily white in the dim blue light of the room. I took one of those large, rough hands and put it on my shoulder, and then slid my own past his ribs so that it rested just below his shoulder blade. Then I took his other hand and held it, keeping our arms extended.
“Viennese waltzes are not the easiest place to start,” I apologized. “Just think of it like a drill. A sequence. One, two, three, one, two, three. Slow, quick, quick. Slow, quick, quick.”
The band had struck into a waltzed-up version of Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, when I realized what song they were playing. “As if Batman Forever wasn’t bad enough, Seal had to go and record this song.”
More white teeth from Colchester as he laughed at my bad joke, more knotting of my cherry-stem heart.
“Okay,” I said. “What we’re about to do is called a box, except it swivels in the Viennese waltz, which is not boxey at all, but just follow the way I turn. We step together twice and then pause—my feet crossed and yours together—and then step together twice and pause again—now with your feet crossed and mine together. Yes, just like that.”
Colchester was a quick learner. He grasped the steps easily, responded to my pressure on his back and hand readily. The only problem was that he had no sense of the music. Like, at all.
“Okay,” I said, trying not to laugh. “You know how we do the slow, quick, quick? The music does that too. You’re supposed to do it at the same time.”
He frowned. “I am.”
Fuck, but his hand felt so big in mine, the other so heavy on my shoulder. It made it hard to concentrate. “You’re not, I promise. It’s okay, I know it’s a lot to remember. Three whole steps, after all.”
That full mouth twisted. “It’s six, in total.”
