He glanced over where he had seen her last. One of the flautists, an energetic young man named Matteo, was looking in her direction in between bouts of laughter with his friends and looked away again when Florian caught his eye. “Somehow you have forgotten that this was your evening as well as mine,” he said. “Congratulations on your first taste as the soloist in Italy, Frau Geigerin Neidhardt. I am certain it won’t be the last.”
     She blushed — or, at least, he thought she did, because her face was already pleasantly rosy from cheek to cheek. Was it the champagne, the embarrassment from the attention she’d been getting, or the heat of one hundred and fifty bodies packed into a ballroom? Perhaps some combination of all three. “Oh, I — I don’t know.”
     “I do. You’ve forfeited your right to be modest tonight, Greta. Think, your job was to do justice to Lalo. And you did well.”
     He held her gaze for the entirety of his response, and the pink in her cheeks slowly bloomed into a rash of scarlet. She dropped the eye contact a moment later; despite that, her eyes shone with a fierce pleasure, and the sight made something in Florian quake before it stilled.

—"Una Notte a Villa Molinari"