Elaine St. James. He couldn’t believe he was seeing her again after all this time. He’d never forgotten her. How could he? All that cool blond beauty, that smart-alecky sense of humor, and the almost-hidden sweet vulnerability he noticed when she didn’t know he was watching. The passage of time had added polish and sophistication to a woman who had been polished and sophisticated to begin with. And in spite of all the ways he’d reasoned with himself over the years, he still wanted her. Bad.

She was the reason he had never married and settled down. Thanks to her, he would never be happy with any other woman. She didn’t know that, and he wasn’t about to tell her. Yet what he had done—rather, what he’d failed to do—the last time he’d seen her had had ramifications he never could have predicted. Because of that moment of decision, just that one moment, his heart had been stuck in the same place. He was beginning to think maybe this was true for Elaine, too.

As he navigated the flow of traffic, he could feel her watching him. Waiting for his answer. “I got no idea what that guy was talking about,” he said.

“Simple. He knew we met there every year on Christmas Eve—”

“Every year, Elaine?”

“Okay, for three years. There was a pattern. Even the Zamboni driver realized that.”

He said nothing for a few minutes. A crooner on the radio made “Little Drummer Boy” sound like a timeless love ballad. “Okay,” he said at last. “I showed up that night.”

A small intake of breath. “I didn’t see you.”

“I changed my mind.” He figured she was too proud to ask why, but the question shouted through the silence. “I couldn’t even get down to the rink level. I was just out of the hospital, recovering from surgery. I had to use a wheelchair to get around.”

“A wheelchair?” She leaned forward to get a closer look at his legs. “What happened?”

“Wrecked my knee and couldn’t skate. I was looking at months of physical therapy, and then God knew what.”

Incredulous silence pulsed through the car.

He had not wrecked just his knee. He’d wrecked his shot at the pros, his plans for the future and his chance to offer something to a girl who had everything. He still remembered sitting at the rail above the rink, his knee throbbing, his eyes smarting as he watched her circling the rink below. He’d tried to imagine what was going through her mind. Or did skating blank everything out as it did for him? Even now, he remembered everything he had seen and felt while she’d skated around the ice, alone, a slender figure moving in and out of the skaters. Anger. Grief. Frustration. Shame. Love.

“I watched you for a while,” he said. “You were wearing a long white scarf.”