She found herself and she held on. The music played for 4 minutes. Amelia counted them, not intentionally, but because the part of her brain that measured things could not entirely stop even now. Even in the middle of a dance floor with 200 people watching and the whole town of Red Willow Creek deciding in real time what it thought about what it was seeing. 4 Minutes, two songs, the quartet shifting without pause from a slow waltz into something a little more upbeat, and Nathaniel held her hand through both and did not once look at anyone except her.
That was the thing she remembered afterward. Not the silence when she took his hand. Not Victoria Harrington's expression, which she caught once from the corner of her eye, and which was the face of a woman revising a very long set of calculations. Not the whispers that started around the third minute and spread outward through the crowd like ripples from a dropped stone. What she remembered was that for the full four minutes in a room full of people who had an opinion about her, Nathaniel Carter's eyes were on her face, only her face, like she was the only person in the room worth looking at.
When the music paused between songs, he led her to the edge of the floor and stood beside her, not steering her away or tucking her out of sight. Beside her, in full view of everyone, his hand moving from hers to rest quietly at the small of her back, and she felt the warmth of it through her uniform, and did not allow herself to step away from it, because she had made her decision, and she was going to stand in it. Three people came to speak to Nathaniel in the next 10 minutes. The first was a rancher named Aldis Briggs, who shook Nathaniel's hand and said nothing remarkable except that he said it directly to both of them, including her in the acknowledgement with a nod and a miss that was short but genuine. She filed that away.
The second was a woman named Clara Stanton, who had three daughters and who had been on the social committee with Victoria for 11 years. She came up with an expression Amelia couldn't immediately read. And she looked at Nathaniel and then at Amelia and then she said very quietly, "You dance well, Miss Whitaker." Just that. Then she moved on. The third was Franklin Harrington.
He arrived the way powerful men arrived when they had decided to make a point slowly, giving everyone time to notice them coming. The crowd adjusting around them the way it did around Nathaniel, but with a different quality, not respect exactly, but the awareness of consequence. He stopped in front of Nathaniel. Carter, he said. Franklin, Nathaniel said.
The two men looked at each other. Amelia stood at Nathaniel's side and kept her face neutral and her breathing steady and her hands very still because she understood that she was present at a negotiation and that the be best thing she could do was be exactly what she was without performing any version of it. A word Franklin said. His eyes didn't move to. You can say it here, Nathaniel said pleasantly.
Franklin's jaw shifted. I'd prefer I know you would, Nathaniel said, but I'd prefer here. If it's something that can be said to me, it can be said in front of Miss Whitaker. The silence stretched between them. Around them, the nearest conversations had gone quiet in that particular way of people who were very interested and were managing their interest by looking in different directions.
Franklin looked at her then directly. He had the kind of eyes that didn't give much away flat. Measuring the eyes of a man who had been doing political calculations for so long they'd become his default mode of seeing everything. You're the woman who worked on Carter's accounts. He said, "Yes, sir." She said, "Four weeks of work.