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the octopus hands and the insincere smiles.
    Right then, as if her thoughts had conjured him, he wheedled around the table. “One lemonade, as ordered.” He set it down and leaned over her, waiting for… something.
    What could he want? “Thank you,” she offered.
    No, that must not have been it. He kept looming.
    “I… that is, do you want to dance?” She hoped he’d say no. She wasn’t a great dancer, but neither, she’d discovered, was Dana. His style of leading was somehow both oozy and overpowering. She’d wanted to leave after the first dance, but that would have attracted even more attention than the admiral’s daughter walking into a dance on a midshipman’s arm for the first time in more than a year. No, she’d gotten herself into this mess: She had to see it through.
    Which wasn’t even to acknowledge the real reason she didn’t want to dance sitting across the room. She could feel his —Joe’s—eyes on her.
    “Nah.” Dana answered her question as he slouched into his chair next to hers. “We can sit this one out.”
    Frances sent up a silent prayer of thanks and sipped her lemonade. It was weak and room temperature and it reminded her of the ratafia in Georgette Heyer.
    At the thought, she snuck a glance at Joe. He’d arrived without a date, which had pleased her unaccountably. However, he’d danced plenty, with seemingly every girl in Annapolis—except for her, of course. At the moment, he was sitting without a partner in front of an enormous papier-mâché turkey, which tied into the night’s Turkey Trot theme. Somehow he still looked dignified even with the bird behind him. Dana couldn’t manage that feat without it.
    Even now, chatting with the boy next to him and gesturing absurdly during some story about a training drill, Dana looked foolish. His entire air was entitled, without any reason to be.
    “I was sorry the Admiral wasn’t there when I picked you up,” he said, turning back to her. The words were pitched entirely too loudly. They carried even over the band playing “Little White Lies.” Several heads turned toward them.
    “He’s often late at the office,” she replied, softly enough that he canted toward her. That wasn’t the outcome she wanted—particularly when his breath reeked of alcohol.
    She’d wondered if that was what all those long trips to the men’s room had been about. Now she knew for sure.
    “A hard worker, the Admiral?” Dana said, or shouted rather. He needn’t have bothered: Everyone knew who she was.
    “Disciplined too. Almost ascetic,” she said drily, trying to calculate her father’s daily intake of scotch.
    But true to form, Dana didn’t get the message. “He loves art?” At this, he draped his arm over the back of her chair and resumed his looming.
    She pursed her lips. She didn’t care that Dana confused ascetic and esthete , but she couldn’t see a man who didn’t understand when she was making a joke.There was no way she could get through this evening.
    She’d accepted Dana’s offer in no small part because of Joe’s note. She wasn’t comfortable by what Joe seemed to think he saw when he looked at her. She might have taken over some extra responsibilities when her mother had died, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have any fun. And it really didn’t mean that she didn’t know what she wanted out of life.
    All the flowers and the books and the journals and the brief, annoying conversations: He didn’t, he couldn’t , have sensed all of that about her. It was wrong. He was wrong. He had to be.
    And so she’d broken her rules with the next boy brave enough to ask her out directly. It had been the wrong thing for the wrong reason, but she’d paid enough for her mistake.
    She leaned as far away from Dana as she could without toppling over. “Mm. Look, I feel a headache coming on.”
    “Oh, too bad. Do you want me to see if one of the girls has something?”
    “No, I’d really rather leave.”
    He tipped his