Was this a surreal moment or an unreal one? Crystal was not sure which word applied. All she knew was that she could barely make her legs move while her whole body trembled on its own. Somehow, probably with the prodding of Lexie of which she was only half aware, Crystal got herself out of her seat and out to the middle of the room to the sound of the same applause that had greeted all the others chosen to dance with Trace.
And there he was again, smiling that same sexy smile. Crystal surprised herself by noticing for the first time tonight that Trace had shaved for the evening. His blazing handsomeness was only shadowed, not stubbled. It hardly mattered; he was sex appeal in living form. As he did at the table earlier, he offered her his hand. As she did before, Crystal took it. The applause ebbed, the music rose, and like a sudden summer breeze, they were off.
Now Crystal knew the wonder of being held in the arms and pressed warmly against the chest that she saw bare at the stream. Clad as he was in his tuxedo, Trace was not in his full glory, but he was glorious enough. Now she had that face, so handsome that it should not have been real, hovering and floating close to hers as his strong, sure legs glided the two of them back and forth and round and round.
It was only another thing among so many amazing things about Trace that he was as graceful in movement as he was powerful of build. The human muscles that Crystal was sure could do so many wonderful things now moved the two of them along in steps and sways and circles. His moves were flawless. She smiled up at him, wondering if this came naturally to him or if he’d had lessons. He returned the smile with the hint of a laugh.
Trace had been at this for so long, yet he showed no sign of tiredness or tedium. He looked as if it were all a game to him, and she guessed that on some level it may have been. Perhaps he had already made up his mind to whom he would make the ultimate offer of his hand, his life, his position in his pack, and his bed. Had he even now zeroed in on his favorite, and was he simply going through with the rest of the evening as a gallant gesture to all the females who had come out for him and all the people from the town who had come with them?
Was this his gentlemanly way of saying, Thank you just for being here? For all Crystal knew, this dance could be her farewell to Trace Blackwood, and once it was over, she would be free to go back to Johnny McKinnon and whatever and whomever else life sent her way.
But for now, there was the dance, and it was a moment of such pure, distilled romance that it could have been something out of a movie. Trace kept her hand in his but moved away until he had her exactly at arm’s length, then gently pulled her back. Crystal reacted instinctively, spinning her way across the distance he had put between them until she spun back into his embrace, and he once again held her tight against his chest. And then, to the greatest wonderment that Crystal had yet known this evening—and in a way, the greatest wonderment that she had ever yet felt in her life—Trace did something unexpected. Romantically, astonishingly unexpected.
He leaned her backwards into a dip. She never saw it coming; it just happened. Like an artist confident of every move he made and every move that he brought out in her, Trace, with his legs apart, had Crystal swaying like the stem of a flower, her eyes swerving up to the chandelier, her shoulders falling while his hand kept a firm, warm grip on the small of her back, her one knee bending upward. Their movements were perfectly synchronized as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They seemed to become one body and one sensuous gesture, a living symbol of two beings becoming a single thought, a single idea, a single feeling.
As quickly as the dip happened, Trace brought Crystal back upright, spun her from the hand that had clasped the small of her back to his other hand, and pulled her close and tight into a final embrace, timed perfectly with the last note of the song the band played. They stood there, just like that, at the end of the song, Trace leaning his face down at her, bringing himself close enough to kiss her.
Crystal could have sworn her heart stopped, not just skipped a beat, but stopped altogether. In that instant, there seemed to be no reason for her heart to beat, as there seemed to be no reason for time to go forward any more from anything so perfect.
A final applause welled up in the room, with Trace and Crystal locked in that last, most perfect embrace. They actually lingered that way, seeming to become a statue, immortalizing their dance forever. Trace’s expression became almost unreadable. He was not smiling, but he looked as if he had focused on her as the only thing in the world. There was no living room converted to a ballroom, no ball, no band, no other members of his pack, no guests, and no applause—only Trace Blackwood and Crystal Shaw, frozen together to immortalize their dance.
Crystal was hardly aware of it when he finally pulled apart from her. Some piece of her being stayed in that moment when she had no breath and no heartbeat, only the sight of Trace. Slowly, reality seeped back into her consciousness, and she saw Trace smile again and bow his head to her. Full awareness asserted itself, and Crystal bowed her head back to him in return. He stepped away from the dance floor, returning to the table that he shared with his father, his cousin, and his uncle.
Crystal, now completely conscious once again of all the eyes on her, made her way back to her own table in the midst of a last applause. She sat down tingling and trembling all over as she had done when she was first called upon, and accepted the warm looks of congratulation from her parents and Lexie’s parents, and Lexie’s enthusiastic hug. At some point, she became aware of her own breathing once more.
Gradually, Crystal began to calm down. It was over. She had done it, and it was over. The dance floor was now free for the rest of the guests, and people including her parents and Lexie’s rose to take advantage of it. Crystal had had her fill of dancing. She just sat there, letting Lexie rub her arms supportively and the trembles and tingles ebb away.
Crystal watched her mother and father dancing and tried to transform them in her mind to the young people that they were at her age. She had seen photos of them from those days, of course, when they were newly together and not yet fully embarked on what would be the journey of their lives.
Naturally, she did not try to imagine them consummating their relationship; no one wants to think of her parents that way. It was one of the taboos that lycans could not help sharing with humans. But she had sometimes tried to picture them when they were young and their lives were new and the whole world was new for them. They were so comfortable together, so familiar. She tried to think ahead to the day when she would be where they were now.
In her future, there would be someone with whom she would feel the close and casual familiarity that her parents showed now. And somewhere in this room was a female with whom Trace Blackwood would someday reach that point. Remembering their dance now much more calmly, with less of a rapture now that she was no longer in the moment, Crystal smiled softly, thinking that whoever she was, that female was very lucky. She would be getting herself the perfect man and the perfect wolf.
She would carry the memory of that dance with her forever, and perhaps she would even find some quality of Trace in the male who would one day be her mate. Smiling a little more deeply now, she wished the mate of Trace Blackwood all the happiness that life had to offer her.
Getting up, Crystal excused herself to go to the bathroom, which lay in a hallway outside the living room. On her way there, she had another look at the interior of the lodge by standing in the entrance hall. With the main event of the evening over, she was able to appreciate a little better the elaborate structure of stained wood with the tall windows and the grand staircase leading to the upper level, and the doorways leading to other parts of the lodge.
Whoever Trace chose was certainly going to have a beautiful place to visit when she and Trace were not at his place in the city or in any of the places he liked to visit. Whoever she was would certainly have a wonderful life. She found her way to the downstairs bath by going down a hallway from which she saw some other guests coming. The bathroom, as she expected, was itself the size of a studio apartment, and while washing her hands and dabbing a little water on her face, Crystal reflected on how the Blackwood Pack never seemed to do anything small.
Well, there was no reason they should, after all, when they had the means to do better. They had built so many homes for so many people over the generations, and they had served families of considerable wealth. Crystal realized that wealth both attracted and bred wealth, and created its own world of beauty, excellence, and privilege. Again, whoever Trace Blackwood chose as his mate would enter his world hand in hand with him.
Stepping out of the bathroom, Crystal found herself possessed by a curiosity more like that of a cat than a wolf. She suddenly had an impulse, a whim, to see more of this place where some other lycan female would soon have the run of the house and the estate. She had no reason to believe she would be the one, but suddenly Crystal wanted to know more of what that other yet unidentified female would be getting.
Returning to the stair hall, she glanced around to see if anyone might be observing her.
Finding no one else there at the moment, she seized the opportunity. Feeling very much like a mischievous little girl, she made for the staircase to the upper floor.
At the top of the stairs, she found a hallway leading off to either side, and in front of her, the tall, wide glass doors that let out onto a fabulous terrace where other people were standing and looking out at the view of the valley. This made Crystal feel a little less mischievous, as she recognized some of the people out there as members of the Blackwood Pack. They had no doubt brought some of the guests upstairs as part of a guided tour of some sort.
Though no one had escorted her up here, Crystal felt a bit less like a “snoop” now. If anyone questioned her being here, she could simply and truthfully explain that she was exploring the place on her own initiative. And why would they object, after all? Wasn’t she one of Trace’s prospective mates?
How could they object to her wanting to have a look at a place where—as thoroughly unlikely as it was—she might be living? Emboldened, she made for the tall doors, grasped the ornate handles, and let herself out onto the terrace into the warm air of the late spring night.
She walked out across the paving to the rail, and her ears caught little snatches of conversation, members of the pack talking to their guests about the history of the pack and the lodge, and the years that they had lived here, and telling little stories about the times they’d had here. Having never seen Reynolds Hollow or the valley from this vantage despite having grown up here and lived here all her life, she wondered if she could spot her street from up here. She stood at the rail and peered down at the swath of lights, like a cluster of fireflies, beyond the dark shapes of the trees.
She looked long and hard, tuning out the sounds of quiet chatter around her, trying to work out where down there might be the landmarks that she could follow to the part of town where she lived. And as she looked so intently, Crystal did not hear the footfalls coming up behind her. She heard nothing except the soft music of the crickets wafting up—until from over her shoulder came the sound of someone clearing his throat, and following that, a male voice asking, “What do you think of the view?”
Crystal froze and stood up straight, her eyes widening in recognition of the voice, and turned around into the smiling face of Trace Blackwood. “Trace,” she said, a bit tremulously, now feeling just the least bit naughty again. “Um…hi. I probably should have asked someone to show me, but I just thought…”
He waved off her explanation. “Forget about it. I really shouldn’t be up here myself; I’m supposed to be down there, still looking over…my ‘special guests’…and being looked over. And being charming, like the Prince in the story, for all of them. I thought maybe if I got away for a few minutes and took some air, I could recharge a bit of my ‘charm.’”
“You’ve really had to be kind of ‘on display’ tonight, haven’t you?” Crystal pointed out.
“Just like all of you have—all you ‘special guests.’” There, he used that expression again, special guests—a euphemism for prospective and hopeful brides. “This whole night has been about people being ‘on display’ and looked over. It’s been a little exhausting. I came up here for a second wind, you might say.”
“If I were you, I’d be exhausted too,” said Crystal. “We only had to dance one time with you, but you had to be up there dancing with all of us, one after the other. You’ve got a right to be tired.”
“Thanks for understanding,” Trace said.
“You know what, though?”
“What?” Trace felt a tiny twinge of curiosity.
“You don’t look it,” Crystal replied. “I mean, you don’t look exhausted or even tired. You don’t even look like you’ve broken out in a sweat. You still look…fresh, I guess. And still all put together and groomed and creased and…just like you were at the beginning of the evening. You still look just as hands…” Here she stopped herself, deliberately catching the wind in her throat and the voice in her mouth, blocking the word she had just half-pronounced. She felt herself blush.
A devilish look came over Trace. “I still look just as what? Were you about to call me ‘handsome,’ maybe?”
Crystal looked off, feeling like a little girl caught expressing a crush on a teenager or someone even older. And after all, was that not in a way what she was? Perhaps she was not a child and perhaps he was not a teenager, but it felt like the same kind of situation. And it felt almost unbearably awkward. She took just a step away, enough to reach out and put her hand on the rail to steady herself.
“That just sort of slipped out,” Crystal said, looking at him bashfully only from the corners of her eyes.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” said Trace. “That’s what this night is about. You’re supposed to think I’m handsome. It’d make me feel like I was slacking off if you didn’t think I was handsome. And frankly…I think you’re really beautiful tonight. If you don’t mind me saying so, I think it’s not just tonight. I think you’re just beautiful.”
Trace’s words sent a ripple of warmth through Crystal. To her astonishment, she no longer felt awkward, and she no longer felt like such a little girl. She now felt something that she had never felt in the presence of anyone else she had ever met in her life, something she was not sure that she could even name. But whatever it was, it felt good—good enough to make her let go of the rail and face him directly, meeting Trace’s sincere expression and returning a look that told him that she accepted the truth of his feelings. “Thank you, Trace,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he replied.
“They’re all beautiful tonight. All of them, they looked…they look amazing.”
Trace nodded slightly, cocking an eyebrow, seeming to dismiss the others. “They’re all downstairs with my father and my uncle and Glen. The last I saw, a few of them were buzzing around Dad and Uncle Harmon and Glen, trying to impress them, probably hoping they’d put in a good word with me about what perfect mates they’d make for me. Frankly, I welcomed the diversion. I was able to give everybody the slip for a minute and get away to have a few minutes to myself.”
“Oh,” said Crystal. “I can go if you want some alone time; I don’t blame you for that.” And she started away, but as she moved to go elsewhere on the terrace or perhaps leave it altogether, she nearly gasped at the feeling of Trace’s hand on her wrist. She met his eyes again and could not move another step.
“You don’t have to go,” he said. “After being surrounded all night, I kind of like having just one person for company.”
Another feeling passed between them. If Crystal had to name what it was she felt, she would have called it understanding. Or, to use her English major vocabulary, “empathy.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go,” Trace admitted further.
Not knowing what else to do with the feeling she was getting from Trace suddenly wanting only her company, Crystal distracted herself from it by saying, “This must be so hard for you, Trace.”
He sighed a bit and said, “It’s nothing I asked for. But it is what it is. I’m going to be Alpha. It falls to me, so this falls to me too.”
“But doesn’t it feel like you’re not really the one deciding your own life?” Crystal asked. “I mean, you’re the one who’ll decide who your mate’s going to be, but were you really ready to start looking for one? Is this really the time you wanted this?”
“This time was coming sooner or later,” said Trace. “So, it’s here sooner. It’s here now.”
“But not when you wanted it.”
“I know what you’re saying,” Trace said. “To tell you the truth, I always thought I’d be the one to do what my brother Dominic did: find a female from some other pack, be with her, and join them. Or even go off and start a pack of our own. But I didn’t expect it to be for a few years still, maybe five or ten years. I didn’t expect to be Alpha, I didn’t expect it to be now, and it’s nothing I would have ever asked for. This was supposed to be Dominic, not me.”
“This is what we were talking about when you came to my house,” Crystal said.
“Yeah, it kind of is what we were saying then.”
“So, what are you getting from this? You’ll be the leader of your pack. You’ll be the head of the family business…”
“…with all the money and the responsibility and authority, yeah,” he finished for her.
“But you’ll have to settle down with a mate and have a pup and live that life. It’s like the biggest choice of your life has already been made for you.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“You’re getting so much, but…I don’t know, I guess it probably sounds like I don’t know what I’m talking about, and it probably sounds like I don’t think you should be grateful for everything. Because you know, it’s really a great life you’re looking at. You’ve had a great life, I know, and you’re getting a great life…”
“But we like to make our own decisions,” Trace finished for her again. “No matter how good something may be, we like it to be something we chose.”
“Something like that,” Crystal said. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about, after all. The world is full of people who wish something like this would just fall in their lap. Or wish they’d been born into it.”
“You know what it is?” Trace said. “It’s like things you must have heard, things we hear our whole lives. ‘The road not taken.’ Or, ‘the grass is always greener on the other side.’ Or, ‘you always want what you can’t have.’ I’ve got to admit, being who I am, there’s not a lot of things I can’t have.”
Crystal did not answer that last part in words. She was afraid it would make her sound too much like a peasant looking up to an aristocrat in some old story. She only made a shrugging look with her face and her brow and the tilt of her head.
“So, I give up five or ten more years of the life I’ve been living,” Trace mused aloud, “and choose a mate and take over as leader of the Pack and the business, and have a pup, maybe two. And it’ll be a good life, I know. But I guess there’ll be a part of me that’ll wonder how it could have been if Dominic had stayed, and I’d gotten the life I expected I’d have.”
“I think we always wonder how it would have been if we could have done something else or picked something else,” said Crystal.
“Yeah, no matter who we are, I think that’s true. I’ll bet the Princes and Princesses in Europe even wonder that. ‘What if I’d been born someone else? What if I’d been born into a different life?’ You always wonder.”
They found themselves now standing together at the rail of the terrace, looking out into the night and into the valley, as if all the possibilities in the world were out there in the dark.
“You know what I keep thinking about lately?” Trace asked.
“What?”
“There was this day a little while ago when we first came up from the city after the fire. I went wolf and ran out into the forest, and down the mountain to the stream, and I took a little swim. And while I was in the water, this female wolf—I could tell she was a lycan, not just a wolf—came down the bank of the stream, and she spotted me. I’d never seen her before, and I did something, just on, I don’t know—like a whim. I went half-wolf and stood up and morphed back to human for her.
It was my way of asking, Like what you see? It was this spur-of-the-moment thing, just an instinct I had because I was there, and she was there and it was a female I’d never met, and…” Trace glanced over at Crystal in mid-sentence, and the words halted in his throat as if they had all crashed together on the way out. Crystal's entire look had changed.
Everything about her—the set of her eyes and her mouth, the tone of her skin—was different. She was wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and pale. She fumbled with one hand at her mouth, her throat, her bosom, trembling beside him. Trace was afraid she would faint, and he would have to lunge out and catch her. Anxiously, he asked, “Crystal, what is it?”
“I have to go,” she said in a hushed voice. Despite what she said, she was rooted to the spot. Trace grew more anxious.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. Then, with a realization: “Oh my God…,” he hung his head and cursed. “I shouldn’t have mentioned that, should I? There goes my Princely behavior for the night, doesn’t it? Crystal, I’m sorry. We can just change the whole subject; I won’t go there any more…”
“I really have to go,” Crystal repeated.
“Why?” Trace asked. “Crystal, I know that was out of line. That was the kind of thing I’d bring up with Glen, or one of my friends. I shouldn't have…”
“Trace,” said Crystal, still hushed, with an unsettling note of dread, “I never wanted you to know. I wanted this night to be over, and I wanted us to just go on with our lives and you were never supposed to know about…” She stopped herself. She could not bear to say anything else now.
“‘Never supposed to know about’ what?” Trace pressed. “What was I…?” He searched her face. For a second, he returned to that afternoon, to the stream, to the young female wolf who had found him there, to whom he had shown himself. He did the math. The answer fell exactly into place. Now, he recognized her expression. Except for the finery of the way she was dressed, Crystal looked exactly the way she did when he first met her at the tavern—except Trace now knew that was not their first meeting.
“This is why you acted the way you did that night when we had that meeting at your father’s place, isn’t it?” he asked. “This is the reason. I brushed it off because I thought it was too much of a coincidence, but…”
“It’s not a coincidence, Trace,” she said, looking away again. Handsome and gorgeous as he was, she could not bring herself to look at him now.
Watching her relive that moment, Trace felt a swelling of sympathy for Crystal that he did not believe he had ever felt for any other person. On one level, he could understand why she felt this way, but on another… “Crystal,” he began, as soothingly as he knew how, “why are you not looking at me now? You can’t be ashamed you saw me.”
She snapped her head back around at him in a way that almost startled him. “Why did you do that?” Crystal demanded. “Why did you stand there in front of me and…and…?”
“Show myself? Because you’re a female, and I’m a male, that’s why. It’s the most natural thing in the world, Crystal. I showed you my body. There was nothing wrong with it. Only humans think that way.”
“I shouldn’t have seen that!” she said in that way of shouting with a discreetly lowered voice as not to attract attention. “I had no business seeing that! You shouldn’t have done that!”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why?’” So many things that Crystal had felt about that day, that encounter, which she had pushed to one side or emotionally swept under the rug, began to surface at the least opportune time, and she found herself not caring. “You just…just…show yourself that way to someone you've never seen before, and you act like I shouldn’t be bothered by it?”
“You shouldn’t. Crystal, you’ve seen other boys naked when they shift…”
“‘Other boys!’ Other boys, Trace! Boys my own age! Not…not…”
“Old guys like me?” He actually sounded the slightest bit hurt.
“That’s not what I mean!”
“What do you mean, then? Crystal, when I see a female who interests me, I want to show her I’m interested. It’s what I do. It comes naturally for us; you’ve got to know that. Do you mean there was never a lycan boy your age who showed himself to you and let you know he was interested?”
In the space of a heartbeat, Crystal relived her entire relationship with Gary, and all the moments when they came so close came to life for her once again. She closed her eyes and shook her head, then opened her eyes again and answered, “That was different.”
“Why? Because of our age difference? Really? Is it really that much?”
“I can’t even believe I’m having this conversation!” she said, almost unable to stifle a shout this time.
Trace was now as worried as Crystal was about this conversation being overheard. He held up his hands in the most calming gesture he knew. “Crystal,” he said, “so you had a boyfriend, I’m guessing. And you shifted with him, and the two of you were naked together, and he wanted to…and you didn’t. Right?”
Crystal did not answer in words, only with the look in her eyes.
“Okay,” Trace went on. “I understand. It’s all right. I respect that you didn’t let it get that far. But…weren’t you even the least bit interested yourself? Did you really not want to? Not at all?”
She took a step back and away from him, a step that Trace felt almost as a sharp pain in his heart. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Crystal,” Trace said. “I really am. I’m just…really surprised that you’d react this way. It’s nothing I’d ever expect. I never would have thought I’d get a reaction like this, not from one of us. I’ve never been in a situation like this before. I don’t know what else to say; I’m just really surprised.”
And now, they were silent. They just stood, facing each other, neither knowing what to do, each of them afraid to make the slightest move, afraid even to speak. Neither Crystal nor Trace had ever felt at such a complete loss.
It was Crystal who finally broke the silence. “I have to go,” she said.
“No, you don’t have to…,” he started.
But she cut him off. “Yes, I do. I have to go. I’m going back downstairs, and I’m telling my parents I want to leave. Thank you for inviting me, and thank you for the dance.” She could not believe how polite she was being at this moment, in these circumstances. “Just…good night, Trace. Good night.”
And Crystal quickly turned and walked off the terrace and back into the lodge as quickly as she could go without breaking into a dead run, leaving Trace standing alone, feeling as if his heart had just gone sailing and plummeting over the side of the mountain.
Trace watched her disappear beyond the glass doors and muttered a bitter curse, feeling at this moment as if he were the stupidest wolf who ever lived.