The Unsung Hero by Suzanne Brockmann

several long seconds. “He told me that after he met her, there was really no point in looking any further, you know? No one could ever compare. And Joe, he said he wasn’t the kind of man who was willing to settle. He’d rather be alone.”
    Kelly stared up at the statue’s grim face. “Lost,” she whispered. “Did she . . .” She looked at Tom. “Did he mean that she died?”
    “I don’t know,” Tom admitted. “Lost could mean a lot of things, couldn’t it? Maybe she married someone else.” He looked down at the papers he still had in his hands, as if surprised by the sight of them. He stepped toward her, holding them out.
    She exhaled her disbelief as she took them from him and put them back into her bag. “God. It all seems so, I don’t know . . . So romantic.” Yet Joe had always struck her as pragmatic and down to earth. He was a gardener, a handyman. To think that he’d spent all these years carrying a torch, refusing to settle for anyone else. Who would’ve thought? . . .
    “Do you think he’s right?” she asked Tom. “That we each have only one chance at true love? Do you think there even is such a thing as true love?”
    He shook his head. “You’re asking the wrong guy. I don’t have a lot of experience with this subject. I don’t really, um, do love, you know? It doesn’t quite . . . fit with my line of work.”
    “But you have an opinion, don’t you?” she persisted. “We all have ideas and beliefs about what love should or shouldn’t be. In fact, your beliefs about love are probably behind your determination to avoid serious relationships.”
    “Well, thank you, Dr. Freud,” he said, amusement in his voice. “Has it occurred to you that I might not be in a serious relationship because I know that with the combination of my, shall we say, restless temperament and the strains of my intensely relationship-unfriendly job, the odds of any relationship working out are zip?”
    “So if your dream woman approached you—someone who fulfilled your every physical and emotional and mental expectation for what a life partner should be,” Kelly hypothesized, “and she said, ‘Tom, here I am, ready to be your friend and lover forever, ready to stand beside you through bad and good, ready to play out your every sexual fantasy,’ you’d turn her down?”
    Tom laughed. “I don’t know. You want to be more specific about those sexual fantasies?”
    Yes. This was flirting. There was definitely an underlying current of attraction beneath his words. Now what she had to do was zing one right back at him. She could do this. She looked him squarely in the eye. “You tell me. It’s your fantasies we’re talking about.”
    Now it was his turn, but instead of pressing forward, he stepped back. He laughed.
    “I’d feel kind of funny going into detail with Uncle Joe listening in,” he said lightly, glancing up at the statue.
    “I don’t think you’d turn your dream woman down.” Kelly didn’t want to laugh. She didn’t want this conversation to turn lighthearted. She wanted to get back to that place where the very air between them crackled with sexual energy. Then all she had to do was ask him to dinner. She could do this.
    Tom shook his head. “I’d have to turn her down,” he countered. “If she was that perfect . . . I wouldn’t want to hurt her.”
    “But if you were her one true love, you’d hurt her by not being with her.”
    He rubbed his forehead as if he still had a headache even as he laughed again. “Okay. Whoa. That’s enough. You can’t set up a completely fictional, no-chance-of-it-ever-happening scenario, and try to force a point of any kind with it. Let’s get real here, Ashton. No ‘dream woman’ is about to walk up to me and offer to—” He broke off, clearing his throat. “Fill in the blank—I’ll leave it to your imagination, but figure it probably involves whipped cream and black lingerie.”
    Kelly couldn’t keep from giggling. Black lingerie