Pushing his way through the crowd, he took the phone, stuffed it into his back pocket, reached for her hand and tugged her up.

She resisted. “Hey! What’re you doing?”

“Come,” he said, leading her out of the room to a stairway.

“Where are we going? Isn’t it almost midnight?”

“Yep.” Nick charged up the stairs, almost dragging her along with him. At the top of the darkened stairwell, he pushed open the door to the roof. Their city stretched out before them. Above, the clear sky twinkled with stars.

“Oh, wow, Nick,” she said breathlessly. “Oh, look at this!” She spun on her heel to get the full view of the Capitol, White House and monuments at the far end of the Mall.

Nick drew her into his arms. “You like?”

“Totally. This is amazing!”

“Are you cold?”

“No,” she said, gazing up at the stars.

From the sidewalk below, they heard revelers counting down the final ten seconds of the year.

He brought his hands up to frame her face. “I love you. This year, next year, every year.”

She reached for him, and as fireworks burst into the sky above them, she kissed him softly, thoroughly, deeply. “I love you, too. Thank you for the best New Year’s ever.”

“The first of many.” He kissed both her cheeks. “I promise.”

“Can we do this every year?” Her eyes brimmed with excitement, the way he liked them best. “Can we come back to this very spot to ring in every New Year?”

“It’s a date,” he said, his throat tight with emotion. He’d had no idea, no idea at all, that it was possible to love someone this much. “Next time, I’ll remember the champagne.”

“We don’t need it.”

Even though it was cold, even though their breath came out in puffy clouds, they stayed on the roof to watch the entire fireworks display. Nick kept his arms tight around her from behind, immersed in the jasmine and vanilla fragrance he would recognize anywhere as hers.

“I love the way the colors in the fireworks reflect on the monuments,” she said, her hands covering his at her waist.

“Mmm, me, too.”

The fireworks ended with a booming finale of color and sound.

Sam sighed. “That was fabulous.” She turned to him. “Thank you so much.”

“I have a theory.”

Her mouth quirked with amusement. “And what’s that?”

Unable to resist, he touched his lips to hers. “That how you spend the first minutes of the New Year is how you’ll spend the year itself.” Adding a light brush of his tongue over her bottom lip, he leaned into the kiss when her arms curled around his neck. The tangle of teeth and tongues took his breath away. Reaching down, he cupped her ass and lifted her right off her feet. She surprised him when she wrapped her long legs around his waist.