He held up his hands and grinned. “I get it. Love’s a powerful thing. Just ask your friend Nina here. She fought hard enough to make a WWE wrestler proud, but my arrow always wins out in the end. It’s like Khristos said, your aim was just off, but you’ll get better.”
Nina grinned and gave his thick neck a squeeze. “Good to see ya, C.”
Khristos gave Cupid a hard handshake. “Thanks for that save, buddy. If you hadn’t yelled at me to go left, we’d have been screwed. Couldn’t do this without you. Now you,” he said, turning to Quinn, “come with me.” He held out his hand to her.
She took it hesitantly, letting the warmth of it seep into her skin.
He led her to almost the exact spot where the photographer had posed Rolando and La-Tee-Shay and pointed to another couple just beyond the tree where she’d all but knocked them over.
He pulled her closer, forcing her to smell his yummy goodness mingled with the crisp air of fall. Quinn gritted her teeth to quell the butterflies flitting about the lining of her stomach and chalked them up to never having had a man as incredibly good-looking as Khristos so near.
“Look over there, Quinn,” he said, his tone hushed and gruff.
She followed the line of his finger and saw an elderly couple with their backs to them, probably in their mid-eighties, judging by their hunched figures and silver hair. The man sat on a thick plaid blanket beside the woman who was in a wheelchair, his hand, aged and gnarled, entwined with hers.
He looked up at the woman then; his gaze was tender, almost fragile, but the love shining from his eyes was so real it pierced Quinn’s heart. So real and so full of complete adoration, for the second time that day, her breath was stolen.
The woman leaned over the arm of her chair and smiled back at him. The profile of her face, silhouetted by the setting sun, was just as full of love when she pressed a kiss to his lips and cupped his jaw with a hand that had a dried carnation attached to its wrist.
Quinn’s heart melted right in her chest when the man rose and tucked a blanket just underneath the woman’s chin with such a fiercely protective gesture, her knees shook.
A tear stung her eye and her throat tightened. She gripped Khristos’s arm. “It was them, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he murmured. “They were your target. But you were only off by a hair.”
Her heart pounded as guilt pricked her very soul. “What would have happened if you hadn’t intercepted and saved the day?”
She knew she shouldn’t ask. The answer would likely haunt her dreams, but she had to know.
“You don’t really want to know, do you, Quinn? It’s all good now. That’s all that matters.”
“No. I really do want to know, to serve as a reminder of how I could blow this whole thing sky-high. Call me a masochist, but maybe it’ll keep me on my toes. Because I couldn’t bear it if these two people had ended up apart when they so clearly adore one another.” Her words hitched, forcing her to clear her throat.
Khristos turned to face her, his eyes, glinted with amber flecks, searching hers. “If I hadn’t intercepted, Bart would have lost his courage for the second time in their lives and Alice wouldn’t be wearing that carnation around her wrist—one he’d dried and saved all these years. That was her engagement ring, so to speak.”
She clenched her fists and eyes together to keep from crying out an apology to them. “What do you mean by the second time?”
“Bart and Alice knew each other a long time ago. They were almost married straight out of high school, but Bart was drafted and her father didn’t approve of him anyway. Alice’s father made that very clear to Bart. He told Bart he’d kick her out of the house and she’d have to fend for herself while Bart was serving in the military overseas.”
Parents, they could really suck. No one got that better than she did. “How awful.”
“So instead of proposing the way he’d planned, he let her go rather than ask her to choose between him and her family. He feared her father really meant what he said and she’d be left with nothing.”
Her heart ached for them. “Wow. Talk about a painful sacrifice.”
“The sacrifice of real love.”
“What happened to them all that time in between?” All that lost time.
“In the interim, of course, each moved on and married and had families. They hadn’t seen or heard from each other since their high school graduation. Until their fifty-third high school reunion just this past year, where they reunited and fell in love all over again.”