“And then this hand here,” Nicolai said, lifting my right hand out and holding it up at shoulder level. “I’m going to apply pressure here, to lead. Push my hand back. There should be tension. I need resistance.”
Oh, he wasn’t going to get any resistance from me if he?—
He pushed on my hand, and I pushed back, holding the tension.
“Good.” He slid his arm not so much around my waist, but a little higher, near my shoulder blade.
“It’s just a box step. Just step-together-side.” He looked up, thinking. “You start with your right foot, and so it’sback-side-together,forward-side-together. Keep a little tension here.” He shook our joined raised hands. “Because that’s how I’m going to signal you when we move.”
We chanted my steps,“Back-side-together,forward-side-together,” as we moved in a square.
I stared at my feet, and my pale gold sandals and pink-manicured toes peeped from under the hem of my white dress with every step.
Even though we’d been theoretically moving in a square, we drifted far over to one side of the deck, farther and farther away from the floodlights of the roof over the main part of the terrace and out of eyeshot of the crowd inside the ballroom.
“If I didn’t know better, I would think that you might be trying to get me alone in the dark,” I teased Nicolai.
“Maybe I am.” I could hear his smile, even though his face was shadowed in the night.
I laughed at him. “No, you’re not. I saw that the virginity clause is still in the contract. Victoria was actually clutching her heart while she explained it to me and advised me to run for the hills.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Still might. There’s no penalty formebreaking it off, other than losing something I never had.”
Nicolai frowned, even as we continued the simple box-step waltz. “I never thought of it that way. I should’ve written a penalty into the contract,back-side-together.”
“Too late now.”
We moved aside as we danced. A hazy wash from the terrace’s lights drifted across Nico’s tuxedo. I stared at the single white enamel button, showing between the frill of his white bow tie and where the white vest crossed over his chest.
“Now we turn as we do the box step,back-side-together,” he said.
His hand pressed mine, and I concentrated on making my legs go the right way even though the world was turning around us. “Oh! This looks like a real waltz now!”
“I told you it was easy. Some things are easy.”
I glanced up at him. “We aren’t.”
Nicolai guided me toward the shadows with pressure on my hand. “I think we could’ve been easy, if circumstances had been different.”
“It’s too bad that we didn’t really meet in an art museum in Italy.”
“Not an art museum,” he said, guiding me. “The Juliet Capulet’s House, as inRomeo and Juliet,is a museum in Verona. Definitely, Juliet’s House is where we met, not just a generic art museum.”
“You mean they took a typical house for the era and area and branded it the Juliet’s House for marketing purposes, right? Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters that Shakespeare made up.”
“Well, it’s a house, but the Capulets were a highly successful merchant family in Verona. It very well could have been their house. It was originally built in the mid-1300s, so the house was well over two centuries old when Shakespeare wrote the play in 1596.”
I stopped waltzing.“Wait,Romeo and Juliet werereal?”
“Other writers wrote about them as early as the 1400s. Two wealthy, well-connected families named the Montecchi and the Cappelletti definitely lived in Verona.”
“Montague and Capulet,” I said, starstruck.
“Dante mentioned both families in the early 1300s when he wrote thePurgatorioof the Divine Comedy, the sequel toThe Inferno.”
“That’s crazy!”
