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with misery—“with nobody to dance with.”
    Avery slung a comforting arm around her, pulled her to his chest, and felt the flicker of outrage over the stupidity of the boys in her class.
    At age thirteen, his daughter had shot up to five-nine, the tallest girl in eighth grade. It had taken a couple of years for the boys to catch up and pass her. In the interim, her braces had come off and her frame had changed from lean, like both her parents, to downright curvaceous. Charlotte was, to him, a dark-eyed, dark-haired knockout, but the sting and shyness of being over-tall remained. And now this…
    He squeezed her close. “Poor Kitten,” he murmured. With a girl like Charlotte, the average guy would probably figure he hadn’t a chance. Why risk the embarrassment of asking, or the potential humiliation of being told no? Easier by far to do nothing and accept that you were—same as
I
was, back then—a tongue-tied, ham-handed oaf.
    “Leo could take her,” Steve suggested softly.
    Avery took a slow inhale. Over Charlotte’s head, his eyes sought Emilio. The boy’s ears flushed red, but he nodded earnestly. He could.
    “What?” Charlotte asked, turning around to peer at Steve. “What did you say?”
    “Leo can take you,” Steve repeated confidently, problem solved. “And I’ll bet you a ten spot he’s a better dancer than any of the local clodhoppers.”
    Emilio stepped forward. “When my sister was in Cotillion, I was her practice partner. Enrique Jorrín, the man who invented the cha-cha, was our teacher,” he told Avery proudly. Then, respectfully dipping his head toward Charlotte, he said, “It would be my great honor to take you.”
    Nicely done, Avery thought. I’d never have had the nerve.
    Charlotte stilled head-to-toe, but her face flashed delight, then indecision, then, in the glare of their communal stare, froze with embarrassment. She glanced at the floor and raised a flat hand to blot the tears clotting her lashes.
    Emilio politely averted his eyes. Steve took a sudden, keen interest in the rain pelting the station canopy like gravel. But Avery’s attention remained on his daughter. Watching her sly appraisal of Emilio’s profile—his height, probably, and handsome good looks—he tried to guess her thoughts.
    From the beginning the two teenagers had been shyly friendly. The first week Emilio started work and school, Avery had heard them comparing class schedules. Emilio had admitted his hardest was trigonometry, which Charlotte had aced last year. “The formulas are tough at first,” she’d told him, “but once you get to factorization, it’s kind of fun.”
    Her least favorite was speech. “I get so nervous in front of the whole class,” she’d confessed.
    Emilio’s face had softened with understanding. “Back in Cuba, our teacher told us to forget about the crowd, pick out one or two friendly faces, and speak directly to them. It helps,” he’d said.
    Just last week, she’d thanked him for the tip. “It does help,” she’d told him. And because her college applications were top-of-mind, she’d asked him his plans after graduation.
    “I’d always hoped to study law like my father but…” He’d trailed off, at an obvious loss.
    In response, Charlotte had blushed almost as bright red as her Edgewater Eagles sweatshirt. “Oh, Dad,” she’d told Avery later, “I was just so certain that, as a teenager with no parents, he was having all kinds of fun, and freedom. But it never occurred to me—until then—that, coming here, Emilio not only left his parents and his past behind, he lost the future he’d always planned. I felt like such a dimwit!”
    “What about you?” Emilio had asked quickly, his eyes curious, his lips curving in an
it’s okay
smile.
    “Aeronautical engineering,” she’d told him; though that wasn’t something she normally admitted outside the family, for fear, she’d said, of being labeled a brainiac.
    “Like a lady astronaut?”
    “More like