“Are you talking to your imaginary friend, Miss Rosa?”
Daniela, she who started everything by spotting the first mistletoe, yanked on her blazer. “I have an imaginary friend, too,” she said. “His name is Boco. He’s a talking elephant. Is your friend an elephant, too?”
“No,” said Rosa, embarrassed to be asked about her imaginary friend. “She’s an angel named Christina.”
“Like the name of this place?”
“That’s right. She’s been helping me make sense of a very confusing problem.”
“Is it helping?” Daniela asked.
“Not yet,” Rosa replied. “But we’ll keep trying.” Broken hearts were never solved in one day. And when the person you loved had also been the center of your life...she suspected she’d be trying to sort things out for a very long time.
“Maybe cake would help,” Daniela said. “When my mama needs to think, she always eats cake. And ice cream.”
“Your mother is a very smart woman.” Though in this case, cake would only make matters worse. She’d already eaten her weight in Christmas cookies.
Sending the little girl back to play with the other children, Rosa stole a couple more cookies and made her way to the rear picture window. In the distance, Mount Cornier’s snow-covered peak had been swallowed by clouds. She bit a cookie and imagined her sister’s spirit sitting on a fluffy white cushion, watching over her legacy.
Holidays and heartache made her overly poetic.
If Christina was watching, the least she could do was tell her what to do next, since Rosa didn’t know. In some ways, she was worse off than when she left Fredo. Then, she’d had Armando. This time she would have to lean on herself. Maybe she would go to the continent and find a job there. Or America. She didn’t care so long as she could start fresh.
And someday forget Armando.
Maybe.
If she didn’t—couldn’t—forget him, she knew she would still survive. She wasn’t the same woman who had scurried away from Fredo thinking she was a fat, ugly lump of clay. Oh, she still had days...but there were also days when she felt good about herself. The fact she made the choice to walk away from Armando said she was stronger.
In time, she would be all right. Sad. Lonely. But all right.
“If only you could make my heart stop feeling like it was tearing in two,” she whispered to the glass.
“Ho, ho, ho! Buon Natale!”
The entire shelter burst into high-pitched squeals. “Babbo!”
It couldn’t be. They must have hired a professional impersonator for the day, as a surprise for the kids.
The director hadn’t mentioned anything to her, though.
“Is everyone having a good Christmas?”
Uncanny. They even sounded alike. She looked in the glass hoping to catch a reflection, but it was too bright out. All she could see was a darkened silhouette in costume.
“Babbo needs your help, boys and girls.”
This was silly. Armando was not at the shelter playing Babbo. As soon as she turned around she would see that the person...
Was Armando.
Why? He was dressed in costume and surrounded by children. “There’s a very special person whose present Babbo forgot to deliver,” he was telling them in his boisterous Babbo voice, “and I’m afraid she thinks I decided to give her present to another girl. It’s really important I find her, boys and girls, so I can tell her that I would never pick someone else. That she’s the most important person in the world to Babbo. In fact, Babbo cares about her so much that he wants her to come back to the North Pole with him.”
Throughout his speech, Rosa moved closer. Spotting her, he dropped his voice back to normal. “Her name’s Rosa,” he said. “Do you know where I can find her?”
“Right there!” the children screamed, two dozen index fingers pointing in her direction.
Rosa was too stunned to breathe. “What are you doing?” she whispered.
“What do you think I am doing?” Armando said. “I’ve come to bring you back home where you belong.” He reached through the throng to catch her fingertips. “I love you, Rosa.”
Beautiful as those words were to hear, they were still only words. “I told you, Ar—Babbo. I can’t stay at the North Pole.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the children watching intently and lowered her voice to a whisper. “It hurts too much.”
“But you don’t understand,” he whispered back. “Mona’s gone. Come with me.” Grabbing her hand, he led her to the shelter’s lobby and closed the community room door. “I told Mona I couldn’t marry her.”
She had to have heard wrong. “What about your agreement with King Omar? You gave him your word.”
“It’s a long story. What matters is I love you and I don’t want to be with anyone else.”
Rosa couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was too unreal. “Are you saying that you damaged relations with one of your closest allies for me?”
“When you put it that way...yes.” He pulled off his hat and beard, leaving only his disheveled self. His beautiful, disheveled self. “I would do it again, too. Are you crying?”
“Like a newborn baby.” All those years married to Fredo, believing she wasn’t anyone special. How wrong she had been. Armando made her feel beyond special. Not because he’d nearly created an international incident on her behalf, or tracked her down dressed like Santa Claus, although both were amazingly romantic.
No, the reason he made her feel special was in his eyes. They were shining as clear and bright as a summer’s day without a trace of melancholy to be found. He was happy being with her, and that was all she needed. “I love you,” she told him.
Her reward was an even brighter shine. “Does that mean you’ll come back with me to the North Pole?”
“Absolutely, Babbo. Right after you kiss me under the mistletoe.”
“Forget the mistletoe,” he said, tossing the beard over his shoulder. Rosa gasped as he pulled her into his arms and dipped her low. “All I need is you.”
New Year’s Eve
“Five minutes left in the year. Will you be sad to see it end?”
Rosa took one of the glasses of champagne Armando was carrying. “Yes,” she said. “And no. I’ll be sorry to see December end. For all the ups and downs, it turned out to be a pretty wonderful month.”
“The last week certainly was.” Armando gave her a champagne-flavored kiss that quickly deepened. “Have I mentioned how glad I am that we decided to skip a formal courtship?” he asked, lips continuing to tease hers.
“Well, it did seem a little silly, considering...”
“Mmm, considering,” he said, kissing her again. What they were discovering was the intimacy that came from being friends before becoming lovers. There was a level of trust that made everything they shared feel deeper. Of course, the fact Armando was an amazingly enthusiastic lover didn’t hurt, either.
“You know what else I’ll miss,” Rosa said, turning in his arms. “Once Epiphany passes, this will become a plain old archway again.”
They were in their archway now, preferring to ring in the new year alone rather than in a ballroom full of dignitaries.
Armando kissed her temple. “If you’d like, I can insist the trees stay up by royal decree.”
“Is this the same royal decree where you’re going to ban the use of fake Babbo beards?”
“The fibers give me a rash.”
“My poor baby. Too sensitive for synthetic fibers.” She snuggled closer. “As much as I’ll miss the decorations, they need to go. How else will they stay special?” Christmas decorations weren’t like the man with his arms around her—Armando woke up being special.
While she woke up feeling like the luckiest woman in the world.
“Besides,” she told him, “we still have tonight.”
“Which switches to tomorrow in less than two minutes,” he replied.
A brand-new year. Given how wonderfully this year was ending, Rosa couldn’t imagine what the next year had in store. As far as she was concerned, she had everything she could want sitting next to her with his arms wrapped around her waist. She loved Armando, and he loved her. What could be better?
“Do you realize,” she said, pausing to take a drink, “that if we hadn’t gotten our act together, you would be announcing your engagement to Mona at this very moment?”
“You’re right—I did plan to be engaged by New Year’s, didn’t I?”
“That was before.” Armando’s breaking the engagement to date his assistant turned out to be scandal enough to push Arianna’s pregnancy out of the papers completely. Fortunately, Mona and King Omar, while hurt, didn’t hold too big a grudge. Hard to be angry at a country that was funding doctors’ relocation efforts.
“There is still the matter of my producing an heir, though,” Armando said, shifting his weight.
“That can be arranged,” Rosa said with a smile.
“Very amusing. If you don’t mind, I would like to establish my family in the proper order. Marriage, then heirs. What do you think?”
“I think that’s a very logical...” Armando had moved to his knee. In his hand was the most beautiful diamond Rosa had ever seen. “Are you—” She couldn’t finish the sentence; her heart was stuck in her throat.