“Exactly. And you’re on her hit list.” She told him what her fellow runner had overheard. “Be careful not to be caught alone with her. Looks like she’s out for a husband, but who knows? She might settle for a scandal and associated celebrity clout.” Feeling oddly protective, she frowned and held his eyes. “Promise?”

Dark eyes looking into hers with a focus so absolute it stole her breath. “Cross my heart.”

The lights went down.

Shuddering out a quiet breath, she faced forward… but she didn’t slide her hand out from under Danny’s. So if you wanted to get technical about it, they held hands throughout the play.

Danny had to be honest. He didn’t fully comprehend Leon’s masterpiece. But that might’ve been because he’d been focused on Catie rather than the stage.

Leon had decided an intermission didn’t suit the flow of this play, so Danny got to sit next to her all the way through, her presence a bright light: the light floral scent she liked that always took him by surprise, the slender bones of her hand, the softness of her skin—and especially how her face lit up when she turned to him as she laughed during a funny moment in the play.

Sharing the laughter with him.

Stealing another piece of his heart.

He was really in trouble, and he was beginning to think he didn’t want to get out of it.

Fuck.

The single terrified word passed through his mind just as the curtain fell to rapturous applause. Danny rose to congratulate his friend, Catie beside him. He might not have caught all the nuances, but he could tell it was good. The kind of good that would get Leon the attention he needed to take his work to a bigger stage.

“That was brilliant,” Catie said to him as she kept on clapping. “I could watch that again! We should go when he brings the show to Auckland!”

“Yeah,” he managed to get out through his thickening throat.

The curtain went up again as the cast came to take their bows.

They returned twice more as the applause continued on—and they brought Leon out with them on the final round. He emerged with shining eyes, and tears were rolling down his face by the time he took his own bow as the cast stepped back as one to applaud him.

Danny put his fingers to his mouth and whistled.

It startled the more sober theatergoers around him, but Leon’s local rugby mates as well as his extended family took up the whistle, adding loud yells of support, and they blew off the roof until even the “proper” theater people were laughing and clapping with their hands in the air.