by Alys Murray
“Why?” Sam asked, though she shouldn’t have bothered. No sooner had she said it than she understood. “Jesus! I can open my own door.”
He opened the door and leaned into her. The light from the Hangar glowed around him.
“Who invited whom on this date?” he asked.
“You did.”
“Looks like you’d better play by my rules then, hadn’t you?” His lips quirked up in a smirk, the perfect, unchallengeable gesture. Her stomach tensed in reply. Then she swallowed hard and took his outstretched hand.
“Just this once.”
Once inside, Daniel led them to a ticketing table where a few men in old-fashioned army uniforms and caps greeted them. The toes of their shining boots tapped in time to the music vibrating the walls around them.
“Two, please.” Daniel reached for his wallet.
“I can—” Sam protested, reaching for her purse in turn.
“Danny Boy!” one of the mustachioed men called to him. “You’re not playing with the band tonight?”
Mild surprise registered at the question. She’d assumed he played with a few groups; a 1940s cover band was not one she would have pegged him to be part of.
“Not tonight. Gave the mic to Freddie. He sounds good in there.”
“Not as good as you. There are your drink tickets.” The man handed over a “ration packet” of drink coupons before pointing at two side doors on either end of the welcome room. “Ladies to the left, gents to the right. You know the drill.”
Daniel wasn’t kidding when he said the volunteers learned efficiency. With most of the guests already in the hall (Daniel said folks started arriving as early as four o’clock, though the live music didn’t start until ten), a barrage of sweet-eyed women hustled Sam into a soft green dress and a pair of heels straight from the set of From Here to Eternity. Her gown was checked into a tall locker as one woman worked on restyling her hair and another made some slight alterations to her makeup.
When it was all done, she stared at herself in the mirror. At least, she thought she was looking at herself.
Rational thinking told her she couldn’t enjoy this night; she couldn’t invest in it or in the man who brought her here. She could only be doing this to seem like she was getting closer to him, not to actually get closer to him.
Reason told her to calm down. But as she looked at herself in the mirror, she couldn’t help but choose a different path.
I look so different. Maybe… for tonight… I can be a different person. For tonight, I can let myself go. It’s only one night. What’s the worst that could happen?
In no more than twenty minutes, she was clinging to the side wall of the Hangar, watching the ball commence from the sideline. The electric pull and hum of the place she’d felt from the outside only intensified once she was in the thick of it; she was drunk without having even a taste of liquor. Red, white, and blue bunting and Union Jacks hung from the ceilings, creating an intimate setting out of the cavernous space. At the front of the room, a bandstand had been constructed out of wooden wartime shipping crates, and one of those tin-can microphones had been set up for the lead singer, a handsome black man in an American serviceman’s uniform.
She wasn’t a music girl, so she couldn’t describe it with any kind of knowledge or authority, but even she could tell this band was really swinging. If she’d been deaf in both ears, the fervent dancing of the crowd would have told her everything she needed to know about the band’s quality. Her heart jitterbugged along with the happy feet of the crowd as it filled with an emotion she hadn’t genuinely felt in a long time.
Happiness.
For a moment, she didn’t think about her father. She didn’t think about her brother or the Animos Society or her thesis due at the end of this year or her mother or how Sam would eventually have to trade Daniel’s heart in for her acceptance into a glorified drinking club. She simply leaned against the nearest wall and let her pulse rush in time with the piano’s wild thrashing.
“Hey there, doll.”
A shiver ran up and down her spine. This room was many things: joyful, musical, wild. Cold was not one of them. The shiver wasn’t from a chill; it was from Daniel’s warm breath on her neck.
When she looked at him, he was handsome enough to make her wish she hadn’t. He’d looked good, painfully good, in the well-tailored tuxedo he’d worn to her party. It was nothing compared to him now, in the green military fatigues of the 1940s British Army.
“Soldier boy,” she greeted. She liked the distance the foreign, antiquated words gave her. Talking like this was another way to pretend she wasn’t herself. “Hey, where are your parents?”
“What a thing to say to a fella!”
“I’m sorry. I’m so curious what spawned…” She waved at all of him, hoping he would take the joke. Totally removing the stiffness from her voice, the voice she’d trained and forced to remain emotionless, was difficult. “This.”
“Very funny.” He tried to adopt a tone of displeasure, but there was no hiding the twinkle in his eye. “They’re right over”—he pointed to a couple toward the front of the crowd—“there!”
Up on her tiptoes, Sam squinted at the couple. There was no doubting they were Daniel’s parents. He had his father’s height and broad chest; his mother had gifted him her kind eyes and golden hair. Daniel’s mother was a short, stout woman with a cheek-splitting smile, while her husband was her direct opposite, tall and almost lanky. They were unmistakably in their late forties, marked by a lifetime of wrinkles and gray hairs, but they held each other with all the desperation of a pair of fresh young lovers. Mr. Best expertly swung his wife around in a dizzying and practiced dance, laughing all the way. Every touch and glance they shared was soaked in sugar. They’re sickening, Sam wanted to say. Instead, she settled on a flat declaration:
“They’re adorable.”
It all looked nice, but Sam couldn’t help her scrolling thread of skepticism. She must be his second wife. She probably cheated on her first husband with him. They’re putting on a show for the crowd. Anyone can look happy for a few minutes. They probably fight like cats and dogs all the time. He’s probably having an affair. No, two affairs.
Her mind answered every seemingly convincing motion of affection with some explanation of why it wasn’t real. There had to be something lurking beneath the surface, something to explain away the perfect picture she saw before her.
“They’re my heroes. You know, they met when they were at university. And one night, they’d only been dating three months at this point, my dad got down on one knee and asked her to marry him.”
“Really?”
“Yep. And they told their family and friends they’d been dating for a year so no one thought they were being too hasty. They celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary a few weeks back.” Sam tore her eyes away from the dancing couple, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to look back at Daniel, either. Beside her, she felt him shrug against her bare shoulder. “I’ve never seen two people more in love.”
At least she knew now where he got his delusions. His parents explained so much about him. He was such a foolish romantic because he was living under the illusion of his parents’ love. He’d never seen heartbreak, so he could pretend it didn’t exist. Sam turned her attention back to the floor, only to feel his hot stare on her cheeks.
“You don’t believe it, do you? They’re living proof and you’re trying to figure out what the scam is.”
“Love is the scam, Daniel.”
Love and romance was fine for someone like him, but she knew better. She didn’t mind saying so. Part of her, a quiet, whispered part, wished he would open his eyes and believe her. It would make everything between them so much easier.
“So, do you wanna cut a rug?” he asked. A playful twinge, almost enough to make her smile, swayed on the edge of his tone.
She cleared her throat to cover the twitch of her lips. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know how.”
“It’s easy.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You danced fine at your party.”
“Dancing to slow music is easy. We were basically swaying. I can’t do anything like that.” She pointed at a nearby couple. The man flipped the woman over his shoulder, then caught her hand and proceeded right back into a hopping spin. “I mean, how do they even do it?”
“It’s a country dance.”
The dance wasn’t so much the problem if she was being honest with herself. The real problem was she felt as if there was a thick line dividing her from everyone else in this room. The line was of her own creation, yes, but a line all the same. She could never let Daniel swing her around like the scooping couples on the dance floor. She could never throw her hands in the air and kick up her heels.
Since discovering who her father really was, Sam had spent every waking moment constructing and crafting her careful persona. She retired the fun parts of herself, the reckless, the bits open to life’s quirks. Sam didn’t know how to give up the persona now.
She wasn’t brave enough.
“You really should go ask someone else,” she said.
There was no reason his night should be ruined because he was stuck with her.
“But I wanna dance with you.” His eyebrows knitted together, a touch of exasperation creeping up on him. “Why would I bring you to a party and not dance with you?”
“I don’t want to embarrass myself.”
“You think I’d let you embarrass yourself?”
He was too chivalrous, too kind for his own good. She wanted to punch some sense into him. Or ask him to kiss some nonsense into herself.
“I don’t want to embarrass you,” she offered.
“I can embarrass myself well enough on my own, thanks. Don’t need any help from you.”
Daniel stepped in front of her, capturing the attention she’d been withholding. He couldn’t hear her heartbeat, right? Not over the roar of the band’s music. Her breath caught when he extended his hand. Every time they touched, the magic between them heated and threatened to boil over. What would it be like for him to hold her so close on this crowded dance floor?
“What are you really afraid of?”
I’m afraid you’ll sweep me into your arms and I’ll fall in love with you. Not for tonight, but for forever. And I can’t fall in love with you.
I’m afraid I can’t be as free as those people. I’m afraid I can’t let myself go and have fun.
Also, I really am afraid of looking stupid. Basically, the number one rule of being a lord’s daughter is don’t fucking embarrass him. Imagine what it’d be like if the front page of the newspaper tomorrow had pictures of me dancing like an idiot and he saw it and…
Sam didn’t realize how lost in thought she’d been until Daniel extended his hand to her once again.
“Sam?”
She remembered standing in the dressing room mirror, looking back at her strange reflection and deciding she could allow herself to be a new creation for one night.
You’re not Sam Dubarry, daughter of a duke. Tonight, you’re Samantha Dubarry, the nurse head over heels for this soldier. She’s not afraid to dance. There’s nothing else she’d rather do, in fact.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” she declared.
Daniel couldn’t have looked more victorious if he tried. The band up on the bandstand struck up a runaway train of a song. Sam couldn’t place it, but the beat was so fast and loose it threatened to speed out of control. She prayed Daniel couldn’t feel how sweaty her palms were.
“Then I guess you’d better dance with me.”
She left her fear—and everything else holding her back—her father, the cryptic warnings of her brother, the Animos Society—on the sidelines. For tonight, she would let herself free.
And she did. She and Daniel danced and laughed and drank and talked and danced and danced until the sun came up.
It was the first sunrise Sam had seen since she was a child. And it was also the most beautiful.
Chapter Twelve
When she returned home, Daniel walked her to the door and asked if he could see her again. For a moment, Sam thought he might kiss her. The promise of a kiss hung in the air like heavy snow clouds, but it didn’t happen. He was every bit a gentleman, leaving her both amazed and unsatisfied.
An hour later, she was still awake in her bed, tossing through her memories of the night. Her mind wouldn’t quiet. Once it became quite clear she wouldn’t be resting, she set out to occupy herself. First, she wrote down everything she could remember, every moment she wanted to lock away in her heart’s impenetrable memory vault.
Diary, I know I can’t be with him. I know that the clock is ticking on my time with him and that in a few weeks, he’ll probably hate me with every fiber of his being. And I’ll deserve it. But tonight was one of the best nights of my life.
As always, when the diary entry was complete, she crumpled the paper and tossed it into her bedroom’s roaring fireplace. Her life and personal thoughts needed no paper trail.
Then she showered, thoroughly. Washing her hair proved especially difficult, considering her head was up in the clouds, but she managed. After drying off, she reached for her pajamas, slipping into the clean material as a thundering knock shook her bathroom door.
“Samantha! Samantha, open up in there!”
Thomas. He was the only one who got away with calling her Samantha anymore.
“What? Where’s the fire?” she asked, opening the door to reveal him.
“You”—her brother stuck his pointer finger in her face—“were singing in there.”
“No, I wasn’t,” she scoffed.
Sam had never heard anything so ridiculous. She never sang. She wasn’t the singing type. Until a few days ago, she couldn’t even name a handful of tolerable songs.
“Yes, you were,” he snapped. “The song from that mermaid movie.”
“Part of your world” still rattled in Sam’s throat, as if it’d left a permanent imprint there. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d voluntarily sung. Maybe she hadn’t ever? Besides singing in the required school choir, she honestly didn’t know if she’d ever sung on her own.
“I guess I was,” she said, her voice small.
There was no way to defend something she didn’t understand.
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. Why are you on my case?”
An answer never came. Instead, Thomas stared down at her with the same beleaguered sincerity every TV dad wore when their kids stayed out late or got themselves caught drinking underage.
“How was your date last night?” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Spent the entire week planning a party and you leave twenty minutes in.”
“Thomas, it was—” In spite of herself, her eyes lit up and her chest swelled. The sensation lasted a full second before she caught herself and double-bolted her heart’s cage. “It was fine. I need to keep him on the hook, so when he said he wanted to leave, I figured it was the best thing to do.”
“You got in pretty late. Early, I mean.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know I had a curfew.” She rolled her eyes as annoyance flared up in her. She was a twenty-three-year-old woman who’d gotten along well enough before her brother showed up. The last thing she needed was for him to try and take her father’s place as the leading authority in her life. She was fine if he wanted to adopt TV-dad expressions; she was less comfortable with him trying to become her dad.
“Did you sleep with him?”
Her jaw dropped.
“None of your business!”
“You’re my business and you’re really fucking this up for yourself.”
“I have everything under control.” She was only partly aware her voice and body temperature were rising at an alarming rate. “You don’t need to look out for me.”
Thomas met her volume.
“I’m the on
ly one in this house who is—”
But they were rescued from themselves by the appearance of Mrs. Long. The fight fizzled, though Sam’s anger didn’t.
“Excuse me, miss,” she said, a trained oblivious look on her face. “You have a visitor.”
Dismissing her brother, she exchanged her pajamas for a bright dress and headed downstairs. The dress was green, though the green only made her long for the dress she’d worn the night before. This emerald was pale in comparison, a sham dress. She hadn’t had the time or the thought to ask Mrs. Long who the guest was, but she assumed it was Daniel, here to ask her out again or to ask for his coat back or something. Her heart was shamelessly buoyant at the thought of seeing him again so soon.
She was wrong.
She was oh so wrong, and she knew it as soon as she entered the morning room. Her pulse stopped for the briefest of moments, and not out of excitement. For there, in her family’s morning room, stood Captain, the last person on earth she needed or wanted to see. She didn’t like him as a member of the Animos Society. She didn’t need him showing up at her home uninvited as well.
“Oh. Captain,” she said, etching a smile upon her face. “Hello.”
“Piggy. You kept me waiting.”
“I was wearing pajamas. I needed to change.”
With the majority of her body exposed by the sundress, her skin reacted to his stare, flushing all over. She couldn’t help but think of Daniel’s eyes on her. They were gentle, almost caressing in their exploration of her body; Captain assessed her, taking in her uncovered legs and arms like they were slabs of meat to be measured on a butcher’s scale. Under his piercing eyes, she might as well have been stripped nude and set under his magnifying glass.
“I’m surprised to see you here. After you left the party last night…” Captain trailed off. Once again his eyes wandered the trails and planes of her body, an exercise of his power. She fought a shiver. “I assumed you’d be waking up at your mechanic’s place.”
“You came to check on me,” Sam accused.
“How’s your Mud Duck doing?” Captain asked, ignoring her.
Daniel never ignored her. He took every thought and question and idea she had on its own merit. He was careful with language and even more careful with his attention.