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he sensed her amused exasperation at his enigmatic answer. He smiled.
    “I never saw a firework display until I was almost sixteen years old. Every kid should have an opportunity to see fireworks a couple times a year. It should be a summertime childhood guarantee. Fireworks. Ice cream. A barbecue. Maybe I can’t supply the ice cream and the barbecue to everyone, but I can provide the show.”
    She spun in his loose hold and put her hand at the back of his neck, beckoning him. He noticed the blazing quality of her eyes, and then he was sinking into her sweet, generous kiss.
    * * *
    Jacob reclined against some pillows on the sofa, and she lay between his long legs, her head resting in his lap. He’d brought out a blanket. She snuggled beneath it, warm and content beneath it and next to the heat of his body. He’d turned on a stereo earlier, and the sounds of classical music swirled around them in the darkness. She looked up at the brilliant fireworks display in the sky, but her entire awareness was caught up in the sensation of his fingertips lightly skimming her bare shoulder, the feeling of his body beneath her and his long, strong legs bracketing her. She stopped fighting it. For the first time, she accepted the full, sweet feeling in her chest.
    She’d fallen in love with him. And there, in that moment shared so completely with him under the stars with colorful fireworks shooting across the sky, she knew that no matter what happened, no matter how short or long their time together, she would do it all again. He was a man who deserved to be loved unselfishly. Wholesale. For all of his many glories. For all of his sadness.
    For all of his secrets.
    * * *
    Twenty Years Ago
    Jake drove them hard all that day, only allowing them brief respites for food and water. This wasn’t hiking like Harper was used to doing with her parents, an easy stroll through pre-blazed trails. This was grueling, sweaty work made even more challenging by the fact that Jake was as fastidious and careful in their movements in the forest as he was ruthless in keeping them traveling at a brisk pace. If they broke a branch during that exhausting ten-hour trudge, Harper would have been shocked. He insisted they move through the territory with utmost caution. She came to admire his agility in the woods, his almost dancerlike avoidance of trees and brittle brush beneath his feet. She came to resent it, too, as the warm summer day wore on and her fatigue mounted. Not just her exhaustion weighed on her. The first several hours of their hike had been undertaken in the rain. The wet, in combination with the fact that Jake’s old tennis shoes were a little large on her, had brought out a blister on her right heel. The pain became excruciating.
    “Jake, I can’t take any more of this. We gotta stop. Please?” she begged him through a parched throat. They’d just approached a clear stream and Jake had bent to refill their canteen. The coolness coming off the water and the soothing sound of the trickling brook had made her long for peace and rest.
    He stood and handed her the canteen. She drank from it greedily and then handed it back to him.
    “Why are you crying?” he asked her sharply.
    “What?” she touched her face dazedly. “It’s this blister,” she admitted, lifting her foot. “It hurts so bad.” She blinked at the sound of his curse and looked down to where he stared. Crimson blood had leaked through the dirt-stained white canvas.
    “God damn it, Harper. Come here.”
    She followed him and sat where he directed, sitting on a large rock beside the stream. He pulled out of his pack the familiar first-aid equipment they’d used for her wrists. He washed her foot in the cold water. She gritted her teeth at the mixed feeling of pain and relief.
    Jake noticed.
    “You should have said something.”
    “I didn’t want to complain,” she grated out miserably. “You’ve seemed so worried ever since we left the cave.”
    “We’re out in