Kissing Under the Mistletoe

He’d seen the dollar figure listed on the offer and hadn’t blinked an eye, but now he had to ask, "Just how good is my offer?"

The twinkle was back in her eyes as she said, "Good enough to hop on your Ducati tomorrow and be there to light a fire on the beach and lie back to look up at the stars by nightfall."

"Thanks, Mia." She had been, and always would be, a major pain in the rear. But he wouldn’t trade his little sister for anyone else.

She didn’t turn back again, simply waved at him over her shoulder. Noting that every last one of his male employees was drooling over her instead of working, his voice was harder than it would otherwise have been as he told them, "Mandatory company meeting at lunch."

With that, he walked back into his office to prepare for his next meeting...and, with a summer at the lake in his sights, to get started on writing up a list of revised duties for his staff at Sullivan Investigations.

Chapter Two

Some days, Brooke Jansen loved her job.

Every day, actually, since she’d moved from Boston to live at the lake full time and start her own chocolate truffle business. She even loved it on days like today, when she couldn’t quite get her latest truffle recipe to taste right.

She’d spent the past eight hours working on a new summer-themed box of truffles, one she hoped would please people as much as the winter-themed box she’d debuted at Christmas. Now it was time to work out some of the kinks in her back with a swim. Plus, she tended to have some of her biggest epiphanies while underwater. She had been swimming like a fish from the day her grandfather had plucked her out of her father’s arms and plopped her into the lake despite his son’s protests that she wasn’t ready yet.

Brooke took her saucepans and glass bowls over to the sink. As she quickly washed them out, she marveled at the view of the lake and the Douglas firs in the mountains beyond the water. Even though she’d been living on Lake Wenatchee for the past three years, she still could hardly believe how beautiful it was.

She’d spent every summer as a young child traveling from Boston to Washington State to visit her grandparents, Frank and Judy. She’d loved every second outside on the sandy beach, swimming in the cool lake water, roasting marshmallows by the campfire...and spending time with the two warmest, most loving people she’d ever known.

In all those summers, her parents had only come to visit the lake house a handful of times, and each visit had been awkward, borderline uncomfortable. Mostly because her parents and grandparents hadn’t seen eye to eye on much of anything...especially her. Her mother and father weren’t ogres by any stretch of the imagination, but they had always been so focused on their careers that they often seemed to forget they had a child who wanted to have fun. And when they had focused on her, she’d often sensed their disappointment that she was neither cuttingly sharp like her lawyer mother, nor brilliant like her economist father.

They’d wanted a little baby Einstein. Instead, they’d gotten Strawberry Shortcake.

On top of that, it had been so difficult for her mother to get—and stay—pregnant with her that from the moment Brooke was born, her parents had treated her like a terribly fragile glass sculpture. All her life, they’d been afraid of her getting hurt, even though Brooke had been the most careful, conscientious child and teenager around for miles. Well, apart from that one night when she’d snuck out of the house like every sixteen-year-old on the planet and made a mistake they'd never let her forget...

Brooke was twenty-three years old when her grandparents died, their car skidding out on a patch of ice on a remote mountain pass. Though three years had passed, the hole in her heart was as big as ever. They had willed their summer cabin to her, obviously knowing her parents had no interest whatsoever in it, along with the full contents of their bank account.

She’d been so devastated by their sudden deaths that, after the funeral, her parents had tried to convince her that it would make more sense to go back home to Boston and then return later to go through their things when she was stronger. But once she’d gotten to the gate at the airport, instead of getting on the airplane, she’d kissed her stunned parents good-bye before turning right back around.

Everything in her grandparents’ lakefront home was just as they’d left it. How could they be gone? She’d stumbled into the house and barely made it to her grandmother’s favorite rocking chair in the living room before her legs gave out.

Her grandmother’s recipe book had been on the coffee table, and she’d picked it up with shaking hands. Her grandfather had made the wooden cover engraved with a heart surrounding their initials in his wood shop, a gift of love for the wife he’d adored from the first moment he’d set eyes on her. Age and one fall too many onto the floor from the kitchen counter had made a large crack down through the center of the wooden heart. When Brooke opened the cover, on top of the first recipe she’d found a picture of herself and her grandmother standing together at the kitchen counter, both of them wearing flowery aprons and huge smiles. Their hands were covered in chocolate, and shavings dusted the counter all around them.

Brooke had been her happiest each summer making truffles with her grandmother, who was passionate in her hobby to share her love with friends and family through chocolate. As she’d stared at the picture, Brooke realized why she hadn’t been able to get on the plane with her parents to go back to her human resources job in Boston: Life was too short, and far too precious, to waste. Brooke finally knew exactly what she was supposed to do with her life: stay here at the lake, in her grandparents’ house, and make chocolate.