“I hate birthdays.” Nat tried to relax under the hydrating antioxidant marine something-or-other masque being applied by the beautician at Oceanic Beauty, but her skin felt like it wanted to crawl right off her face and hide whimpering in the corner. “Especially my birthday,” she added.

The beautician clucked her tongue but didn’t say anything. Vee, on Nat’s right, who was waiting for her mask to dry, wasn’t nearly so good at holding her tongue.

“Wash your mouth out, girl, and enjoy your birthday treat,” she said. “You need some pampering before you enjoy the cake waiting for you at Gracie’s place.”

“That’s right,” Gracie agreed from Nat’s left, with sounds of magazine pages being flipped. “Morgan and Olivia have worked really hard to make this evening’s birthday dinner—your surprise birthday dinner.”

“It’s very sweet of them,” Nat said. And she’d been mentally preparing herself to garner up the oomph to act happily surprised since Gracie and Vee had told her about it. All she’d been able to think of in the following seconds was whether Isaac had been invited.

But Gracie had both crushed her hopes and provided relief at the same time. “It’ll just be our lot, Vee and Ruby, and you and Olivia,” she said. “Hope that’s okay?”

Nat translated that as: We unanimously decided as your friends who’ve witnessed your misery these past weeks not to invite the Ngata brothers and cause you to blubber uncontrollably at your own birthday party.

Yes, she’d accepted why he’d lied and forgiven him, but like hell would she go crawling back to the man who’d walked away from her without explanation.

“Small is better.” Nat had forced her mouth into a cheery smile. “I don’t want a production made out of turning thirty-four.”

Thirty-four. This was so not where she’d thought she’d be at thirty-four. This was not even where she thought she’d be weeks ago, when she and Isaac had been twined around each other in his bed and he’d teased her about throwing a huge surprise birthday party for her. She’d rolled on top of him with a mock glare, telling him she hated surprises, and tickling the spot on his ribs that left him a laughing, squirming, helpless mess until he conceded defeat. He’d lied about submission, because in the next moment he’d flipped her onto her back and kissed her until she submitted.

She’d thought she’d be turning thirty-four with Isaac, the man she loved.

You can’t always get what you want.

The old Rolling Stones song popped once again into her head, as it had at Owen’s birthday party, which felt like years ago but wasn’t. Yeah. Nat closed her eyes and forced her stiff shoulders to relax. Preach it, Jagger.

An hour later Gracie drove Nat and Vee to the surprise party. Blindfolded.

“Really?” Nat asked again from the passenger seat, her fingers locked around the car’s door handle. “What’s with the blindfold again?”

“Don’t blame us,” Vee said from the back seat. “Olivia insisted.”

“Can’t it wait until we get into your driveway?” Nat turned her head in the direction of the driver’s seat. “I’m getting motion sick.”

Gracie snorted. “You are not. We’ve only been driving for, like, five minutes, and no cheating. Just practice your surprised face.”

“Fine.” Nat folded her arms. “But if I barf all over Owen’s car, he’ll be pissed.”

Someone patted her head.

“Poor Natty. Surprises aren’t your thing, are they?” Vee said.

Nat could’ve sworn her two best friends were exchanging wicked smirks.

“I’m serious,” Nat said as the vehicle slowed and made a sharp turn. “If someone blows one of those party whistles in my ear I’m going to pee myself.”

The car came to a complete stop, and the engine died.

“No peeing,” Gracie said. “Promise. Now stay there and Vee and I will help you out of the car.”

Once she was out of the car, Nat hesitated. Something was different—missing one sense really did sharpen the others. The air around her didn’t smell as salty as it usually did at Gracie’s where the beach backed onto the property, though she could still hear the sigh of the waves tumbling onto Bounty Bay’s beach and the caw of seagulls overhead. Her sexy-mama party heels that Vee insisted she wear crunched on loose gravel instead of Gracie’s paved driveway, and a stiff sea breeze whisked around her bare legs.

“Um, guys?” Nat said.

Vee clasped her elbow on one side and Gracie took the other, effectively preventing Nat from ripping off the blindfold. She crinkled her nose, trying to dislodge the padded satin sleep mask Vee had slipped over her head.

“Where am I?”

Her friends, who in the previous thirty seconds had become more like prison guards, ignored her question and tugged her forward, making little directional suggestions of “a little to the left,” and “big step over the pothole now.”

“Step up,” Vee ordered.

Nat stepped up—onto concrete by the sound her heels made as Vee and Gracie led her forward again.

“Stop,” Gracie said. “Sorry, you’re going to have to take off your shoes before going inside.”

It wasn’t an unusual request before entering a house. In Bounty Bay it was pretty common for guests to remove their footwear before entering a house so they didn’t track sand or dirt inside. But this felt different. Prickles skimmed across Nat’s shoulder blades as she stepped out of her heels. There was definitely evening-sun-warmed concrete under her bare toes, and now she could smell—she lifted her chin and sniffed. A trace of aged wood? Her pulse picked up from the slightly elevated patter of unsure anticipation to a quicker thud-thud-thud of oh, crap, what have these two gotten me into?

“I swear, my revenge on you two will be demonically clever and far-reaching if there is a roomful of people waiting to spring up and shout ‘surprise’ in there,” Nat said in a hushed but thoroughly pissed-off whisper.

“Pull up your big-girl panties and stop frowning. You’ll ruin the effect of the marine masque,” Vee said. “Now, last step up.”

Nat climbed the step from rough concrete to smooth wood. Her friends guided her forward, then gently tugged on her arms to stop her.

“You’re right where you need to be,” Gracie said quietly from her left.

“You can thank us later,” Vee said from her right. “But leave the blindfold on until you’re instructed to take it off, okay?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

The prickles, which had turned into little shocks of awareness, zipped up and down Nat’s spine. She didn’t need the blindfold removed to know Isaac was somewhere close by. Her body went on high alert, every atom straining outward in an effort to complete the physical connection with the person she needed more than anyone. And, God, had it ruined her over these past weeks to keep away from him.

Vee and Gracie walked away, and with only Nat’s rapidly growing ragged breathing in her ears, she waited poised like a nervous cat until Gracie’s car started up and drove away.

“You can take off the blindfold now.”

Isaac’s deep voice came from somewhere in front of her and caused another shiver to skim over her scalp and head south, pinging off her erogenous zones like a pinball machine. She did as requested, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. She was standing in the center of Isaac’s marae—not the casual kitchen-dining part, but the actual meeting house with its carved figure poupou along the walls rising up toward the slanted A-frame ceiling. Warm light flickered over the elaborate carvings from the tealight candles spaced on the wooden floor in a heart shape, with long-stemmed red roses scattered among them. In the center of the candles stood Isaac, holding an acoustic guitar and dressed in black dress pants, white shirt and black tie, and a black suit jacket with a stylized fern embroidered on the breast pocket—his All Blacks jacket for formal events.

“Surprise,” he said.

It was. But it wasn’t the candles or rose petals that tripped her heart and stole her breath. It was Isaac. The sight of him—so strong and handsome and sexy that her brain couldn’t come up with any descriptions less clichéd—didn’t surprise her so much as it solidified within her what she knew down to her very DNA. She loved this man, and regardless of if he felt the same way, she’d love him every moment of every day for the rest of her life.

Isaac dipped his head at her silence, perhaps misunderstanding it for some kind of criticism. “The candles were Owen’s idea—he reckoned it worked with Gracie.” He gave a rueful chuckle. “And Sam suggested roses were a safe bet, so I bulk ordered from the florist and then had no idea whether to stick them in vases or where to even find so many vases and—shit, I’m screwing this up.” He scrunched up his face and let go of the guitar neck long enough to pinch the bridge of his nose.

Isaac was…apologizing?

Blood pounded through Nat’s head, throbbing against her temple. Candles, flowers, serenade—he probably had a box of expensive chocolates around somewhere, too. Classic guy I don’t know what I did wrong but I’m sorry anyway starter kit.

“You don’t need to do this.” Her words fell from numb lips and the padded mask slipped from her fingers. “There’s nothing to apologize for, if that’s what this is about.”

“That’s not what this is about.” He took a step forward. “I had you brought here, to a place that, other than my parents’ home, is the most important physical place in my world. I’ve been coming here since I was a baby, and it’s at the center of my history and my culture, and it’s where I choose to declare my intentions toward you before my ancestors. I know you’ll appreciate the sincerity of that,” he added with another step toward her, strumming a melodic chord on the guitar.

Nat swallowed hard and nodded, since her voice box had quit on her, and all she could do was stare, mesmerized, by Isaac’s approach.

“May I sing you a waiata?” He stopped three feet away from her.

She nodded again, unable to stop the chills that rippled through her at the familiar chords of “Pokarekare Ana.” It was an old Māori love song with deceptively simple lyrics about a man’s yearning for his woman to return to him and how he could die of love for her. Isaac’s singing voice—which she’d only heard on a couple of occasions when someone had convinced him to pick up a guitar at a party—was rich and deep, and like his brother and father who’d joined him on those rare occasions, perfectly in tune. His beautiful voice soared to the rafters, sending a squadron of butterflies fluttering around her stomach. Isaac turned the familiar sing-along Māori words that almost every New Zealander knew the chorus of into something amazing and heartfelt.

The final strum of the guitar drifted away. Nat didn’t know whether to applaud, burst into tears, or run like hell. She kinda wanted to do all three. As with everything about the man himself, this experience, being this close to the intensity of his personality, was overpowering. She was like a nocturnal creature who’d spent her life wishing to feel sunlight on her face, but when she did, it was so much brighter, hotter, and more intense than she’d imagined that she struggled not to flee to the safety and familiarity of the shadows.

He stepped over the candles, leaned his guitar against one of the marae’s central carved pillars, and returned to stand in front of her. Nat’s jagged pulse nearly knocked her weakened knees out from under her. Unless she was way off base, and unless the man was being incredibly dense and a little cruel with his song choice, Isaac was telling her he loved her. And Isaac was neither dense nor did the man possess one drop of cruelty in his body.

“When I met you all those years ago,” he said, “you were already Jackson’s wife, and in my eyes, in my heart due to my relationship with him, that meant you were like my brother’s wife. I smothered the spark I felt toward you, but no matter how many times I did, that spark continued to flare up. I was in love with you, but I couldn’t live with myself being the asshole who fell for his mate’s woman, so I buried it deep.”

“You were in love with me?” Repeating the words didn’t make them seem any more real to Nat, yet a tiny part of her back then had somehow known. And in self-protection, denied, and in turn, burrowed down into her subconscious to hide.

“Yeah.” Isaac linked their hands together and lightly squeezed her fingers. “But for my own sanity I convinced myself what I felt for you was brotherly, and I got comfortable with the self-satisfaction of being the good guy who did the right thing by keeping his hands off his mate’s woman. That night…” His eyes flickered shut, deep lines carving across his forehead. “I’d never been so fucking furious with Jackson.”

When he opened his eyes again, the rawness of the memory in them sliced Nat to the core.

“Chatting up a pretty girl was one thing. All the guys were flattered by the female attention we got in public, and Jackson could be a bloody flirtatious peacock at times. But the gall of hooking up with some girl in a bar, when he had a beautiful, incredible woman at home waiting for him, a woman that I wanted so much I could hardly bear to be around her—” He shook his head, his weight shifting from foot to foot, mouth in a grim line. “I hated him in that moment. And then the accident took away the opportunity for him to realize he was turning his back on the best thing in his life.”

Isaac’s fingers tightened on hers as their gazes met. “I wasn’t entirely honest with you about my motivations for volunteering as a scapegoat. Yeah, I wanted to protect you and Olivia from any more hurt, but it wasn’t the only reason. The selfish reason was it protected me from wanting to be near you, by giving me a solid way to shield myself from temptation. It kept my mana, my pride in myself as a man of honor, intact. Those lies I told everyone and myself worked for a long time, until even I believed them.”

“You ruined your relationship with Emily because of those lies,” she said.

“No one’s heart got broken over the split, and like every couple, we had other issues stirring the pot of discontent.”

Isaac let go of her hands and skimmed his palms up her bare arms, leaving a trail of goose bumps in his wake. He rested his hands lightly on her shoulders and dipped his head. “And maybe I would’ve succeeded living a lonely life of denial, but then you blasted into my life. Suddenly it was real between us, and I was terrified to realize those old feelings were surfacing again, ready to burn my old life to the ground.”

“A phoenix rising from the ashes.” Nat had no idea why that metaphor popped into her head, but it somehow seemed apt. She’d torched her old life when she’d quit fighting her need for Isaac and allowed it to consume her.

The corner of his mouth ticked up. “I was broken, damaged goods in Owen’s kitchen that day. During these past months you’ve picked up all my pieces and given me the glue I need to make myself whole again.” He cupped her jaw, stroking his thumbs along her face. “I just didn’t understand that those broken pieces of myself I’d put back together formed a whole around you. Without you in my life—as my manawa, my heart—for always, I’m nothing. I’m the one who’s invisible.”

Her eyes welled up and he bent to brush the softest of kisses on her lips. It broke the last fragile wall of hurt and resentment inside her, letting a flood of love flow through. She clutched at the lapels of his jacket, but all too soon he pulled back—and oh my God…he sank to one knee in front of her.

“I love you, Nat. And I stake my claim to be the man who loves you always, here, in front of God, my ancestors, and Jackson, the man we both loved. He’ll always be a part of our lives, but I want to make a new life with you.”

“I want that, too,” she whispered. “I think it’s time for us both to let him go.”

The world didn’t stop. She wasn’t struck down by a stray bolt of lightning. And the last remaining ties binding her to Jackson with woven strands of grief, anger, and guilt, finally slid free.

Isaac reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a small handwoven flax pouch. From inside the pouch he produced a black cord from which hung a carved pendant made of greenstone.

“This ponuamu I’ll give to Olivia,” he said. “As a reminder that I’ll always love and care for her as if she were my own.” He slid the pendant back into the pouch and then removed a ring, which he held out to her.

A beautiful sparkly diamond-y ring that flashed fire in the candlelight. She was grateful her bare feet were planted on the solid wooden floor of the marae, because her knees began to wobble.

“And this is for you—with input from your daughter—if you’ll wear it,” he said. “Tahu, put me out of my misery. Tell me you love me and say you’ll marry me.”

“I love you, and yes, I’ll marry you.” She held out her left hand and he slid the ring onto her finger. The strange but oh-so-right weight of gold and diamonds made her want to burst into happy tears.

He stood and reeled her in, once again cupping her jaw in his big hands. He bent, briefly pressing his forehead and nose to hers in the age-old hongi, a traditional Māori greeting.

“Māori legend says that the creator god, Tāne, performed the first hongi when he breathed life into Hineahuone, the first woman,” he said. “You breathe life into me, Natalie.”

Then he took her mouth and stole her breath with a kiss that would’ve knocked her out of her sexy-mama heels had she still been wearing them.

When they finally drew apart, Nat twined her arms around his neck and luxuriated in the warmth of being his. He smiled down at her, and her heart gave another flip-flop, even though it was still racing. She’d never, ever get tired of seeing Isaac’s smile.

“Hey,” she said. “Just how much do you love me?”

“You’ll find out in the next sixty years or so.”

She pretended to frown. “How about something more concrete? Like, do you love me more than rugby?”

“Let’s not get crazy.”

She laughed. “Okay, what about coffee? Do you need me more than coffee?”

He sighed. “Yes. I need you more than the dry-roasted, organically grown ground coffee that I’ll make for you every morning for the rest of our lives. Is that enough? Do you want anything else, birthday girl?”

“Nope.” She gave a little jump and wrapped her legs around Isaac’s hips. “Now that I have you, I have everything I want.”

“We both do,” he said and kissed her again.

And as he swept her away, she knew that in this instance, the Rolling Stones had been both right and wrong. They had each got what they wanted, but more importantly, found in each other what they truly needed.