Kissing Under the Mistletoe

She had a little tomato sauce on the corner of her gorgeous mouth, and without thinking, he reached across the table with his napkin to wipe it off.

Their hostess took in their every move, of course, along with the fact that both of their ring fingers were bare. Her husband—the chef—came out briefly to say hello to Brooke and to shake Rafe’s hand. When he went back into the kitchen, his wife’s eyes were full of love as she watched him go.

"Jim and I met when we were children here on the lake. It will be fifty years this fall."

"How romantic," Brooke exclaimed. "Congratulations!"

The bell over the door rang as another couple walked in, and as the older woman left to seat them, Brooke sighed, her eyes soft and full of romance. "Imagine being so in love for fifty years that you still look at each other the way they just did."

Rafe gestured to the couple in the other corner of the restaurant who had been either glaring at each other or arguing the entire time he and Brooke had been seated. "Seems easier to imagine couples like that. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to make it another fifty minutes."

Brooke frowned at him. "How can you be that cynical when your parents are the definition of true love?"

"As far as I can tell," he told her, because he didn’t want her to have the wrong idea about where he stood on romance and forevers, "my parents are the exception, not the rule."

"I know you’ve seen a lot of bad marriages because of your work, but from what you told me, I have to wonder if maybe they were people who never should have been together in the first place."

"Even if that’s true," he argued, "it sure doesn’t seem to make it hurt any less. My office manager has to buy more boxes of tissues for our clients than an allergist would." He shook his head as flashes of dozens of crying women ran through his head. "If that’s how hard people cry when bad marriages break up, then I sure as hell never want to see what true love gone wrong looks like."

"But if it’s really true love, then how can it go wrong?"

He couldn’t believe how optimistic she was, so much so that she actually thought there were different kinds of love...and that if you hit on just the right one, you’d have won the forever lottery.

"Plenty of ways, Brooke. So many that I could spend the next twenty-three hours listing them all for you."

"I’d much rather you told me your definition of true love."

Of all the things he thought they’d talk about tonight, true love would have never made the list in a million years. "I’m a guy," he reminded her. With his thumb, he gestured out the front window at his Ducati. "I ride a motorcycle. I’ve never tried to define that, apart from knowing it only happens once in a blue moon."

"I wonder which I can get you to say first," she mused. "Kinky or true love."

She surprised another laugh out of him.

"Actually, I’d much rather hear you laugh like that again." And then she caught him off guard one more time by asking, "Try now. Just for fun. Pretend true love is real and out there for any of us to find."

For a moment he was so lost in her big green eyes that he couldn’t remember what she wanted him to try.

Oh, right. Define true love.

His brain went blank until he thought about his parents. "Holding hands." She was silent as he thought more about it. "Laughing together." What else? "Being a unified front, especially when times get tough." The more he thought about the ways his parents had weathered their storms together, the easier it became to add to the list. "And celebrating together when things get better."

"Are you sure you’ve never thought about true love before?" she asked in a soft voice.

He shrugged. "I’ve never had anyone ask me to try before." And if they had, he would have laughed in their face. He was the one who asked the difficult questions, never the one who answered them. But when he’d tried to make a joke about it with Brooke, she hadn’t let it go. Despite how sweet she looked, she would make one hell of an investigator. "Your turn now, since I’m guessing you’ve given it quite a bit of thought over the years."

"What girl doesn’t think about it?" she asked, clearly teasing him about the fact that he still hadn’t said the two words aloud, referring to true love as that and it instead. She toyed with the stem of her wine glass for a few moments. "True love would be passion that burned so hot you were almost afraid of the power the other person had over you, the way they could turn you inside out with a look, a touch, a kiss. It would be wanting to fall asleep every night and wake up every morning for the rest of your life in that one person’s arms. Just like you said, it would be holding hands and laughing and building a family together. And, most of all, it would mean being able to talk to each other about absolutely anything, knowing that no matter how hard it was to say the difficult things, you’d both still love each other...and that you’d find a way to work it out together. No matter what."

Mrs. Lombardi’s granddaughter removed their plates and replaced them with a huge piece of tiramisu, and Rafe was glad for the distraction. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anything more beautiful in his life than Brooke talking about what true love meant to her. Which was crazy, considering he couldn’t imagine having this conversation with anyone else—especially any of the women he’d been out with over the years. Not when he was certain none of them had believed in the steadfast nature of love any more than he did.