I plastered a smile on my face, and murmured my thanks to Miguel as he handed me a champagne flute.

Miguel and Samuel were explaining that they’d seen a ton of celebrities milling about, and I politely urged them to tell me who they’d spotted.

The chandeliers above us soon started to blink, indicating that the intermission was coming to an end, but Miguel and Samuel continued to laugh and talk. They refilled my glass, and the waiter attempted to refill Bai and Olivia’s but both refused.

Samuel made a crack that Bai and Olivia were acting like my security instead of my dates, because they were standing so close to me, but neither rose to take the bait, and I responded with a comment about being lucky that I had such good-looking security around me, if that was the case.

Miguel said nothing as Samuel and I bantered back and forth. He waved off a man in a dark suit who’d approached us to ask us to take our seats because the concert was about to resume.

I set my flute down on the cocktail table, but Miguel urged me to pick it up again, “we can hear the concert from here quite clearly anyway, right?”

“Well, I’d much rather be watching her from my seat, actually,” I started to say when SSA Black told me through my ear piece, “No, let him take the lead on this, Aerin. If he’s setting something up, it could be right now, when the rest of the crowd is out of sight, watching the concert.”

So I continued, “But this is such a waste of good champagne, and we could, indeed listen to her from here.”

When the lights in the hall dimmed, Miguel leaned closer to me and said, “Will you please excuse Samuel and myself for just a second? We need to talk about something …”

Bai and Olivia looked at each other in a moment of indecision. I made some noises about needing to find a chair, anyway, to fill the void. SSA Black was instructing Olivia to leave her bag somewhere near the table, maybe pretend to drop it on the floor, because it may not be noticed given that the lights had dimmed while Jack was telling me to go to a section about ten feet away where a bunch of chairs were clustered in and to wait there.