His Princess in the Making by Melissa James

so long, so long since she’d been herself, since she’d had an hour without pressure or expectation.
    She lifted her arms to the moon and lifted up on her toes, pas seul to arabesque, and with a movement she became part of the night.
     
    Every part of Toby ached, just watching her. She was a wood nymph dancing between the moonlight and the stars. A fairy princess weaving the magic of her own unique, living beauty. So close, always so close, yet just out of reach.
    Sleep had eluded him, so he’d come here to work off too many weeks of stress. He hadn’t turned on the lights. The darkness suited his mood; his heart was filled with loss and anger and a love that owned every pore and cell of him.
    And then, like a silent miracle, she’d walked into the darkened gym. Once again she’d come to him when his heart was screaming for her.
    She’d always had that gift. Somehow she always knew when to come to him and give him hope when he needed it most.
    She’d been all of twelve when she’d found him at the local park in Ryde, punching out a classmate, Mick Reilly, for making fun of his tears. How she’d known he desperately needed someone—needed her—he hadn’t known, then or now. But some dim part of him had known that, somehow, she’d come.
    “Toby,” she’d said softly, when he’d been on the verge of losing control, so lost in black grief he hadn’t known what he was doing. The gentle, husky voice had stopped his fist mid-punch. She’d had that knack with him from the first day they’d met. He couldn’t upset little Lia with the dark violence in his soul.
    And “little Lia” had taken him away from Mick, away from curious eyes, and had made him tell her what was wrong. When she’d heard about his parents’ divorce, and their demands that he choose a parent over the other, she’d seen the solution without trying. “Come and live with us, Toby. You can share Charlie’s room until Dad and Papou build you one.”
    He remembered trying to laugh. At fifteen, full of hormones, anger and loss, it had seemed so simple an answer. Only a kid would have found it; it was such a miracle only a kid would believe it could happen. “Why would your dad and grandfather build anything for me? They won’t want me. I hang around your place too much as it is.”
    “We like having you. You’re family, Toby. Come home now and see.” And she’d smiled at him, had taken his hand, led him home, and pulled off the first miracle he’d ever known with her unswerving faith.
    That day was the first time Giulia had made him lose his breath with her wisdom, her smile and her touch, but far from the last.
    Looking back now, he wondered if he’d fallen in love that day, because when he’d seen her unconscious in hospital and had known this love was for life, it had felt so right, so inevitable; he hadn’t been able to believe he hadn’t seen it before.
    Fifteen years of small miracles; the one certainty in his life had been that Giulia always knew when to come to him. Half a lifetime of looking at her, wondering what she saw in him to need; but she did, and every day she turned to him had felt like a gift from God—because, no matter how much she needed him, he needed her more.
    Like tonight. He’d ached and burned so badly, and she’d danced into his waking nightmare and made it beautiful.
    This wasn’t the princess, not the woman of duty and honour and sacrifice who’d told him to go home. In her ballet gear,her hair scraped back, this was his shy, giving, wonderful Giulia, the girl who danced into his heart whenever she moved.
    He watched and ached as she spun and leaped across the moonlit space. His whole body twitched with the need to go to her, but he couldn’t bear to break her spell with clumsy words or movement.
    She danced on, oblivious grace, a shadow of spun glass, eternal memory.
    He’d never seen anything more beautiful than this woman moving amid the moonlight and stars. This moment was so perfect as she