The bartender came back and grabbed Kayla’s empty cup. She confirmed with a nod that she’d like another of his excellent margaritas. While he got busy mixing it, she noticed that something had caught Mack’s eye. There seemed to be a lot of activity happening on the nearby pool deck. It was the columned area under the roof where tables were normally set for breakfast, but the staff was clearing the tables and chairs away.
Mack asked, “Hey, Marcus, what’s going on over there?”
The bartender looked up from juicing limes to the spot she indicated. His voice was a rich baritone with an unmistakablelilt of the islands when he replied. “Dance lessons. Haven’t you looked at the activities schedule?”
Mack plopped back down on her stool and looked at the laminated card he indicated. “There are activities?”
“Of course, my friend. Every afternoon, there are dance lessons on the pool deck. You and your lady friend can learn salsa, tango, waltz. Learn something nice for your first dance, yeah?”
Mack turned back to Kayla, her face shining with child-like excitement. “Sounds like fun. Want to go?”
Kayla was a terrible dancer. Like danger to herself and others bad, but Mack looked so excited. How could she possibly resist? “Let’s do it.”
Almost as soon as the words came out of Kayla’s mouth, Mack’s shoulders slumped. “No. We can’t.”
“What? Why not?”
“We shouldn’t go. We should look for Skye and work on the plan. That’s why we’re here after all.”
Kayla’s stomach churned with nerves that she wasn’t making progress, but she knew she needed to be patient. She tended to rush in to things. That was why they were here, in fact. She blurted out her lie about getting married before giving herself time to think, and now Mack was having to lie to help her. She could be patient and work on her other mission for an afternoon.
Kayla said, “No way. We’re taking a break today. I’m making sure my best friend has a good time on her honeymoon.”
Her wink made Mack chuckle, but she shook her head. “The important thing is getting Skye back. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m just being selfish.”
“You are the least selfish person I have ever met, so you can just forget that idea for starters.” A glimmer of a smile lit Mack’s eyes, so Kayla pushed on. “Getting Skye back is important, but there’s one thing that’s even more important.”
“What’s that?”
Kayla pushed to her feet and grabbed Mack’s hand. As she led her toward the pool steps, she said, “You, dummy.”
It should’ve been that easy, but Mack was just as stubborn as she was. She pulled back against Kayla’s insistent tugging. “LaLa, wait. Do you even know how to dance?”
“Not at all. That’s why I need lessons. Now come on, let’s go.”
Considering how easy it was to drag Mack along after that, it was obvious she had really wanted to do this all along. They took a moment to dry themselves and throw on some clothes before hustling onto the newly cleared dance floor. They were a few minutes late and missed the introductions from the two resort employees leading the lesson. At least a dozen couples were nodding along to their instructions and smiling in that goofy way couples did when they were in the honeymoon phase of a relationship.
Mack nudged her arm and pointed across the room to where the older couple they’d met on the shuttle bus stood hand-in-hand. Linda gave them a smile that was far less warm than the one on the bus. It held a note of the same confusion she’d shown at dinner the previous night.
Kayla went on tip-toes to whisper into Mack’s ear. “I think this is a good opportunity to practice looking like a couple again.”
Mack nodded and put on a serious expression that was too severe to be genuine. “Should be easy. You’re such a bad dancer, you’ll probably fall into my arms within a few minutes. I’ll try to look excited about it.”
Kayla slapped her arm, but they both dissolved into giggles.
“Did everyone hear that?” The male instructor called out over the crowd.
On instinct, Kayla straightened her back and looked straight ahead. How many times had she and Mack been caught talking in class rather than listening to the lesson back in their highschool days? Could a resort dance instructor put them in detention?
Mack cleared her throat and studiously avoided the stares of the other guests. “Yep. We’ve got it.”
Fortunately, he didn’t ask them to repeat what he had said, like Mr. Ali, their chemistry teacher always did. Instead, he clapped his hands in an authoritative way, and all the couples scrambled to claim a clear spot of dance floor. Humility won out over pride, and Kayla cleared an extra-large area for them. Mack wasn’t wrong about the likelihood of her falling. She just hoped it was into Mack’s arms and not onto the floor or, worse yet, into the pool behind them.
Music started to play through the speakers mounted on the columns all around them. The male dance instructor called out in his teacher voice again. “We won’t face our partners yet. Let’s learn the steps first. And one, two, three, very good.”
Kayla scrambled to keep up, but he wasn’t doing a lot of explaining, just holding his arms out like there was an invisible partner and shuffling his feet in a bewildering pattern. The woman next to him wasn’t much help, either. She held both an invisible partner and the edge of a flowing scarlet skirt high enough to show off ridiculously thin heels. Just the sight of them made Kayla’s ankles ache.
Well, no choice but to try. Kayla snatched up the edge of the thin sundress she used as a pool cover-up and held out her arms. She tried to move her feet like the teachers were, but she was relatively certain the movements they proposed were impossible. She could tell just from the sound of her sandals slapping against the floor that she was doing it all wrong. It didn’t help that her embarrassingly bad attempts at the hip movements were met with a constant stream of giggles from beside her. When she took a moment to cut a look at her dancepartner, she saw that Mack’s face was an alarming shade of red from stifling the majority of her laughter.
