Page 15 of Forbidden Until Midnight

Eleanor smiled at Mads as he joined them, but was distracted once again by the feeling of someone watching her. She told herself she was being fanciful, but sheknewit was Santo. She knew it in a way that felt...fated.

‘Don’t you think so, Elle?’

Kat looked at her expectantly, and Eleanor nodded quickly.

‘Absolutely,’ she hedged, hoping it was the right thing to say, breathing out a sigh of relief when Kat smiled.

Mads looked at them both in mock horror. ‘No, not me. I’d never do something like that,’ he affirmed, and Kat playfully slapped him on the arm with a little too much strength.

Eleanor bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from laughing. Kat would never be as subtle as she thought she was being, but it felt nice. Nice to be talking about unimportant things and enjoying someone else’s happiness after the last two years’ tumult.

‘Ah, there you are, Santo, stop skulking and come and join us,’ Mads called over Eleanor’s shoulder.

Her breath caught and the ripples across her skin turned to shivers.

Santo came to stand beside her and she smiled and looked away, not quite prepared for the stark impact of him yet. There was a sense that they were both battling to maintain a distance that had already been thoroughly destroyed, but it was almost part of the unconscious game they seemed to be playing.

‘Have you two met?’ Ekaterina asked, blissfully ignorant of the currents passing back and forth between them.

Eleanor panicked. What was she supposed to say? Nerves made words dry in her throat.

‘Once, I believe,’ Santo said for her.

‘Yes,’ she said, finally turning to him with a smile. ‘It’s nice to see you again.’

Santo tipped his head in acknowledgement, but the glint in his eye—the one just for her—teased and taunted in a way that thrilled her.

‘Likewise,’ he said.

Oh, God, he looked incredible.

All year she’d been thinking about him. Her starved imagination had forced her to search him online, although ‘search’ was a polite term for what many others would call stalking. But the sheer impact of his presence was something else entirely. She almost didn’t know where to look first.

Dark hair, lazily curling, was shorter this year than it had been. The hollows of his cheeks were ever so slightly more pronounced, made so by a close-cropped beard punctuated by the slight cleft in his chin. But there was something in his eyes—so light they were nearly aquamarine—that meant she could hardly bear to hold his gaze. It was as if they refracted all that she was feeling and threw it back at her in glittering fragments, making her unsure what he felt or thought at all.

‘Oh, I love this song,’ Ekaterina cried, and Eleanor looked down at the ground with a smile of affection at the transparency of her friend’s motives.

Santo glanced between Mads and Kat and raised an eyebrow.

‘Would you...?’ Mads started to ask.

‘Oh, yes—yes, please. Let’s dance,’ Kat said, before practically dragging the poor man off to where a few of the others had begun to dance.

Eleanor looked back to Santo’s carefully blank expression and smiled.

‘What?’ he asked, without looking her way.

Eleanor bit back her smile, enjoying her observation of him. ‘I don’t think you’re as indifferent as you pretend to be.’

‘I assure you I am,’ he insisted as if offended, and this time she couldn’t help it. She let the smile break out because their interactions made her feel as if she saw something that few people did. As if he gave her something of himself that no one else saw.

A waiter paused beside her and she took a glass, turning to Santo to make a toast.

‘To the New Year,’ she said.

‘To the New Year,’ he repeated, the clink punctuating their toast before they each took a sip.

‘I hear congratulations are in order,’ Eleanor offered.

---