Snowbound by a Stranger by Rebecca Rogers Maher

Grade: B-

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Maher—

I loved the idea of your novella, Snowbound With a Stranger: two strangers stranded by a snowstorm share a passionate weekend. The last time I was stranded by a snowstorm, I was stuck in my house with four little kids, no heat, no running water (septic system), and a husband who spent all his time outside building the kids what I considered a deadly luge run. (My children, now ten years older, still speak of the majesty of that sled ride.) It was a decidedly not romantic weekend. I thought reading about a snowy weekend that was steamy hot–mine was miserably cold–would be fun.

Your novella, thought, was not what I was expected. I thought, given the brevity of the prose—just 78 pages—and the tag line,

Dannie Marino is hiking with colleagues when a sudden blizzard separates her from her group. She’s rescued by Lee, a dangerously sexy stranger who leads her to a remote cabin to weather the storm.

the book would be a light, fun romp. It is not and that turned out to be a treat.

Dannie is, at 38, divorced and utterly burnt out from her job as a hospital nurse. She’s been talked into taking a Saturday hike up a nearby mountain—she lives in Brooklyn—by Dr. Stevens, the head of her department, who leads hikes like these once a month. Dannie hikes to escape.

In the mountains it usually took a full hour for her head to clear. Two hours before she could even begin to appreciate the scenery around her. A full day, sometimes, before the constant echo of hospital beeping would flush itself out of her system. For these first few minutes all she could do was walk and breathe. And let the cacophonous thoughts in her head swirl out one by one.

She doesn’t like to talk to the other hikers—not even Lee, the good looking guy she notices who is hiking with the group for the first time–and, when she leaves the trail to use the bathroom just as a storm begins to blow in, she finds herself lost and alone, unable to find the trail in the snow. Several hours later, the storm has turned into a blizzard, and Dannie is panicked.  Frozen and terrified, she’s overjoyed when the cute—make that gorgeous—guy she noticed earlier appears. Lee has been trying to find her, and, by the time he does, the roads are impassable. After conferring with Dr. Stevens via walkie-talkie, Lee and Dannie decide the only option they have is to hike to Dr. Steven’s cabin and wait out the storm.

Once they get to the cabin, they make a fire—the power is out—and take stock of their situation. Lee tells Dannie the likelihood is they could be snowed in for several days. There’s water (c0ld, of course), food, firewood and Scrabble. They settle in and, as they do, both realize they are exceedingly attracted to the other. Lee thinks,

from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her, he’d wanted to put his hands on her. With the kind of urgency a starving man feels.

For her part, Dannie feels her skin tingle every time he’s near her; the idea of being trapped with Lee for a few days is turning her on.

She was thirty-eight years old. She had never in her life had a one-night stand with anybody. She was divorced. She hated the job she was supposed to love. She wanted to sleep with Lee.

Still though, there is awkwardness to the situation and Dannie suggests, to pass the time, they play Scrabble. Their game immediately turns into to lexical foreplay. Lee goes first and plays SCENT, then asks Dannie why she smells deliciously like raspberries. Dannie plays CHEST and tells Lee she noticed how broad his was when she first saw him in the parking lot. Lee retaliates with EYES, saying, as he lays his letters down, ““They’re beautiful, Dannie.” After a few more tiles and confessions, it’s game over.

“Dannie. I’m just going to say this. I want you.”

She closed her eyes.

“I don’t want to fool around. I don’t want to hook up. I want to make love to you.”

Beneath his hand she began to tremble.

“Do you want that too?”

She drew a ragged breath and nodded.

He slid his hand into her hair and pulled her nearer. Her eyes met his. When his lips brushed against hers, it was as though a snake unfurled itself inside her chest. She opened her mouth.

Ten hours earlier, she couldn’t even allow herself to look at him. Now, his tongue trailed a hot path along her lower lip. He tightened his fingers in the tangle of her hair.

She’d been right to be afraid. He was barely touching her and already she was on fire.

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Cecilia Grant's A Gentleman Undone

Rating: B+

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Grant:

As I read your novel A Gentleman Undone I brooded over words from one my favorite 18th century wordsmiths, the great Alexander Pope: “Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part: there all the honor lies.” Here Pope asserts honor and shame are products of  behavior rather than experience or birth. He pledges if we act honorably, we then have honor irrespective of what has happened in our lives. This is the premise of A Gentleman Undone. Both the hero and the heroine of your brilliantly written novel are consumed with shame; both, at times during your tale, act in ways they themselves define as dishonorable. And yet, by the story’s end, both are defined by their honor rather than their shame. It’s an interesting character trajectory, one that—like that in your first novel A Woman Awakened—takes tropes tried and true in historical romance and presents them in an utterly unique way.

It’s summer of 1815, the Waterloo Campaign is a deathtrap for a quarter of its soldiers, and Will Blackshear has made a medical misjudgment. He has carried fellow soldier and friend George Talbot, horribly wounded on the blood soaked grass of Belgium’s Quatre Bras, to a makeshift hospital in order to save him. Instead, by moving Talbot, he has damaged his spine. The man is now paralyzed, in great pain, and of no interest to any army surgeon Will takes him to. Will knows there’s nothing he can do to save his friend, but he can’t keep himself from lying and trying.

“I’m going to take you out of here.” The man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth tightened and he managed a sort of nod. “The wounded are too many and they can’t spare a surgeon or even opium. There’s no purpose in your staying.” There’s no hope. What good would he do the man by saying that aloud? “Another of the hospitals might be better appointed, and we might find you some gin, at the least.”

Gin. Not likely. Unless he proposed to start pillaging corpses in search of a flask. Of course that might come to sound reasonable, between now and when Talbot’s last breath left him.

Will gathered his dreadful limp form from the pew and nearly staggered, not under the weight of the man but under the weight of the man’s misguided trust.

A little less than a year later, Will, now in London, is still trying to atone for his sin. He is determined to provide for Talbot’s widow and child, who are now stuck living on the cruel whims of Talbot’s married sister, and to make enough money to invest in a shipping venture run by a severely burned fellow veteran. He’s promised the latter three thousand pounds in a little more than a month—Will has less than a thousand and much of that must go to his living expenses. Will decided his only chance is at the tables—despite the fact he’s not a stellar player. It is at the mediocre gambling establishment Beecham’s he first glimpses Lydia Slaughter.

She, along with a few other courtesans, is playing cards near the table where he is desperately trying to win at vingt-et-un. Will notices her—she’s no traditional beauty but she draws and holds his attention. She, however, is already taken. She’s the mistress of a fellow player, the square-jawed Roanoke. Will listens as Roanoke and his friend coarsely discuss Lydia.

“I should never have bet on you keeping her this long. Not half so comely as the one you were squiring about last summer. Pretty winsome thing, she was.”

A small compression of Square-jaw’s mouth was the only sign he took offense at the questioning of his choice. “That one gifted me with a bastard child.” Green-jeweled cufflinks glinted in the candlelight as he reached out to gather in the cards. “This one can’t.”

“Or so she tells you, I’m sure,” was the first gentleman’s rejoinder, his undertone abandoned to more generally air his wit.

“She can’t.” With the patience of a crown prince accustomed to dull-witted minions he made this correction. “Something’s gone wrong with her insides. No monthly courses.”

….Where did you come by her?”

“Plucked her out of Mrs. Parrish’s establishment.” Roanoke took his time squaring the edges of all the used cards before putting the stack faceup at the bottom of the deck. “And you may believe they trained her up proper. If there’s a thing she won’t do in bed, I have yet to discover it.”

An hour later, Will, who has slunk away to the library to think bleak thoughts, finds his privacy interrupted by Lydia and Roanoke who have come to couple in between hands. Initially, the two don’t realize Will is hidden away in the corner of the room, and he, after giving them a moment to shove up against a wall, rises, prepared to abandon them to their carnal encounter.

Slowly he eased up from the chair, angling round the bookshelf for a furtive glance to assure himself they wouldn’t notice him.

He stopped, half-risen.

He’d been prepared for something sordid, a brute coupling between an importunate boor and a harlot who’d learned her trade at Mrs. Parrish’s. And of course it was sordid by its very nature, this retreat to the library, and Square-jaw himself was everything sordid, with his mouth at the juncture of her neck and shoulder and his hands groping here and there.

She, though. She was … Confound him if he could even begin to find the right word. He only knew sordid wasn’t anywhere close.

She stood with her back to the drapery, eyes closed, chin lifted, whole person swaying with pleasure.

Lydia opens her eyes and sees Will watching her revel in her paramour’s attentions.

She said nothing. She didn’t jump away from her lover, or yank up the bodice he’d tugged down, or cross her arms modestly before her. Only her eyes, widened and showing an excess of white, betrayed her consciousness of exposure. And that, for only a second or two, though the interval was sufficient to make him feel like a thoroughgoing cad.

The bookshelf’s edge bit hard into his hand. He couldn’t seem to look away, let alone make an apologetic bow and hasten from the room. He stood, frozen, as she regained her composure and her face hardened into the unmistakable lines of defiance: Judge me if you dare. Then that expression too subsided and only her falcon-like blankness remained. She looked through him, and past him, and altogether away.

Will leaves, his desire for her now a thing of hunger. Later, the two come down, having missed dinner, and Roanoke again picks up his cards. This time, however, Lydia sits in his lap, and as Roanoke dozes, Lydia takes up his cards and plays in his stead. At first, she seems a mediocre player, but, by evening’s end, she’s won four hundred and eighty pounds, one hundred and eighty of which have come from William. Lydia scoops her winnings from the table and puts three hundred pounds in her lover’s pocket. The other hundred and eighty—Will knows exactly how much it is—she puts in her bodice.

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Lucky in Love by Jill Shalvis

	Grade: B
	passion rating: hot

I always enjoy reading a Jill Shalvis book. She’s a consistently elegant, bold, clever writer. Her latest, Lucky in Love, the fourth in her Lucky Harbor series, is a sweet, sexy read. This book is the first of a series of three Lucky Harbor books all being released this summer.

The novels tell the stories of three women who are caught in the Eat Me diner during a sudden snow storm and who bond over chocolate cake. Each makes a vow to do something to change her life. Mallory Quinn, the heroine of this book, vows to get a date — just one — for an upcoming auction she has to chair. Her friend Amy, a waitress at the Eat Me and the heroine of the next book, makes Mallory promise she’ll look for a Mr. Wrong. Mallory, the good girl of Lucky Harbor, reluctantly agrees.

Moments later, the three women — the third is Grace who is new to town and to the Lucky Harbor series — hear a thud against the wall of the diner and then a moan. Mallory, a nurse and the sort who tries to save anyone she thinks needs saving, bravely steps out into the howling storm and almost steps on a large semi-conscious male who looks to have been knocked out by a fallen tree branch. He’s bleeding from the head and as Mallory tries to examine him she realizes he’s the man known on Lucky Harbor’s exceedingly popular Facebook page as Mysterious Cute Guy. MCG has been in Lucky Harbor for six months and no one knows anything about him at all — except of course that he’s one fine-looking man. Before the ambulance shows up to take MCG to the hospital, Amy gets him to agree to be Mallory’s date at the upcoming auction (a deal that later he has no memory of).

Mallory goes to the auction, hoping that MCG shows up, but even if he doesn’t, she’d be there anyway making Lucky Harbor a better place. Mallory is a grade A good girl. She’s a fabulous nurse who goes beyond the normal call of duty to care for her patients, works hard to keep her somewhat slack family on track, and lately, has poured hours of time and effort to start a public health service clinic to serve the non-traditional patients whose counseling and health needs aren’t being met by Lucky Harbor’s hospital. The auction, organized by Mallory, is a fundraiser for the future clinic and most of Lucky Harbor is there. So, although he is completely unaware he’s Mallory’s date, is MCG.

MCG is Ty Garrison, an ex-Seal first responder trauma paramedic. Ty quit the military after losing his entire team in a plane crash four years ago and has since been working as a private contractor. He’s currently out of action — he reinjured himself on a mission jumping out a second story window — and is counting down the days until he will be cleared by his doctor — Lucky Harbor’s Dr. Josh Scott - to return to work. Ty’s in Lucky Harbor, renting a house found by his friend Matt, a local forest ranger Ty went through naval basic training with years ago. Ty is a loner who doesn’t do relationships. All that matters to him is getting back to the job — he believes that the only way he can atone for surviving the crash that killed his team is to keep going out on missions and saving those in need.

Ty goes to the auction, hoping (against his better judgment) to see “his bossy, warm, sexy nurse” again. Once there, Ty realizes that not only Mallory, but much of Lucky Harbor, assumes he’s there as her date. Ty steps up to the plate, helping out with auction, getting the bidding going, and in general, charming the hell out of Mallory who is already aswoon at how hot he looks cleaned up in his tux. Mallory finds him so charming, in fact, when the two find themselves in a deserted storage room looking for a misplaced vase, Mallory, who has never had sex outside a committed relationship in her life, pretty much throws herself at Ty. The two share a super-charged kiss and just as Mallory is about to pass out from desire, Ty tells her they’re stopping. Mallory asks why.

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White Tigress by Jade Lee

Grade: D

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Lee—

When I saw you’d released your Tigress series digitally and the first one, originally published in 2005, White Tigress was free at Amazon, I downloaded it immediately. I’m always thrilled to find a historical romance not set in Regency England and I’m fascinated by China and its complex history. I cannot say I was fascinated by this book. I was actually rather repulsed by it and found it to be so bizarre I wondered perhaps, in order to make sense of the story, I needed some sort of cultural Rosetta stone. I questioned if I was too Western or too humdrum for your book for not only did much of the novel baffle me, much of it made me cringe.

The book is set in Shanghai in 1897 and, from the first chapter, the heroine, Lydia Smith behaves inexplicably. She’s arrived in Shanghai two weeks earlier than her fiancé Max (Maxwell Slade) is expecting her—she got better rate on an earlier boat. As she steps down the gangplank, she’s oddly sure everything will be JUST FINE even though she doesn’t speak the language, she’s a beautiful blonde woman traveling alone in Asia in the 19th century, her fiancé has no idea she’s in town, and everyone around her is a total stranger. The only person she knows is the captain of her ship, whose looks she hasn’t liked from the moment she met him. He promises he will take her to the address she has for Max, bundles her onto his rickshaw, and promptly delivers her to a brothel, the Garden of Perfumed Flowers, where she is drugged with opium tea and abandoned to her fate.

Normally this fate would be a life where she was forced to become addicted to opium, used over and over again by men, and then, when her beauty and youth had faded, she’d be thrown out on the streets of Shanghai where she’d ultimately die of opium addiction and/or the damage from of life of prostitution. But, Lydia gets, comparatively, lucky. A very bizarre woman, Shi Po, who is considered “senior in these teachings, a tigress far ahead… on the path to immortality,” (she’s an expert practitioner in the certain Taoist tantric sex practices that can make one, while still living, an Immortal) has found out about the now captive Lydia and believes her primary student, Ru Shan, needs to buy Lydia immediately—while she’s still unsullied—in order to restore him to his place on the path to Immortality. This didn’t make a lick of sense to me. Maybe it will to others. In case it’s just me who is clueless, here’s Shi Po’s reasoning:

“Look again at the girl,” she ordered. “See how much water she has in her? See her breasts, how full and round they are? They will give much sustenance to a man with too much yang.”

Ru Shan grimaced, knowing she referred to him. Indeed that was the source of his problem, according to her: too much male yang. Too little female yin.

….”You will have to buy her.”

“What?”

….”No!” The very idea revolted him.

“Then you have abandoned the Tao and all the gains you have made these last nine years. You will never become an Immortal. Even your status as a jade dragon will disappear.”

He felt his jaw tighten at the thought, the heat in his belly rising with his temper. Nearly a decade of study, of diligent effort and constant attention, all would disappear? Because he would not sacrifice his family to his goals? Not possible!

“Then you must buy the white girl. You must establish her in an apartment close enough to see her every day. You must partake of her essence every moment that you can.” Shi Po stepped even closer, pressing her point. “And as her water flows into you, your family’s fortunes will recover and your pathway back to the Tao will be revealed.” She lowered her voice into a seductive murmur. “Your mind will find peace, your body rest. You will return to the middle path with new energy, and as her yin mixes with your yang, the spiritual embryo will be born. You will become an Immortal. You can, Ru Shan, if only you will do what is necessary.”

So, Ru Shan, whose life has sucked for the past two years, goes deeply into debt and buys Lydia, a ghost woman, whom he sees a little more than a pet. He installs her in an apartment and plans to use her yin to balance his yang and thus make it back to the Chamber of a Thousand Swinging Lanterns, the antechamber to the Realm of the Immortals, where he’s been three times before his life fell apart. Lydia, still heavily drugged from her doctored tea, has no idea what has happened to her and, when she finally comes out of her opiate induced coma, she finds herself lying on a bed in a small room, completely shaved, and being cared for by a nice young Chinese houseboy named Fu De. When she first awakes, she believes, for no reason I could fathom, somehow her situation is due to Max, her fiancé, whom she demands to see.

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oh my man I love him so....

So Dr. Feelgood asked me to give him a list of my top romance novels I think he should read/would enjoy. I started with 958 and have gotten the list down to under 100. I think the next step is one book per author although I find that culling physically painful.


Here's what I've got now. I'm shooting for 25, but may end up at 50.

Anna Campbell Untouched Anne Mallory One Night Is Never Enough Anne Mallory Seven Secrets of Seduction Anne Mallory Three Nights of Sin Anne Stuart Black Ice Anne Stuart Reckless Carolyn Jewel Lord Ruin Cecilia Grant A Lady Awakened Christina Dodd One Kiss From You Courtney Milan This Wicked Gift Courtney Milan Unlocked Courtney Milan Unveiled Cynthia Eden Deadly Heat Dee Ernst A Different Kind of Forever Elizabeth Essex A Sense of Sin Elizabeth Essex The Pursuit of Pleasure Elizabeth Hoyt The Raven Prince Jeannie Lin Capturing the Silken Thief Jennifer Ashley Madness of Lord Ian MacKenzie Jill Shalvis The Sweetest Thing Jillian Hunter The Seduction of an English Scoundrel: A Novel Jo Beverley The Dragon's Bride Jo Goodman The Price of Desire Joanna Bourne My Lord and Spymaster Joanna Bourne The Black Hawk Joanna Bourne The Forbidden Rose Joanna Bourne The Spymaster's Lady Johanna Lindsey Prisoner of My Desire Julia Quinn Romancing Mister Bridgerton Julia Quinn The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever Julie Anne Long I Kissed an Earl Julie Anne Long What I Did for a Duke Karen Hawkins An Affair to Remember Kathleen O'Reilly Sex, Straight Up Kresley Cole A Hunger Like No Other Laura Kinsale Flowers From the Storm Laura Lee Guhrke Guilty Pleasures Linda Howard Death Angel: A Novel Lisa Kleypas It Happened One Autumn Loretta Chase Lord of Scoundrels Loretta Chase Lord Perfect Lorraine Heath Waking Up With the Duke Louisa Edwards Can't Stand the Heat Madeline Hunter The Rules of Seduction Margaret Mallory Knight of Desire Meljean Brook The Iron Duke Melody Thomas A Match Made in Scandal Meredith Duran At Your Pleasure Meredith Duran Bound by Your Touch Meredith Duran The Duke of Shadows Meredith Duran Written on Your Skin Pamela Clare Breaking Point Pamela Clare Hard Evidence Patricia Gaffney To Have and to Hold R. Lee Smith Heat Rachel Gibson Any Man of Mine Rachel Gibson Simply Irresistible Rachel Gibson True Confessions Rachel Gibson True Love and Other Disasters Sarah Mayberry Her Best Worst Mistake Sarah Mayberry Hot Island Nights Shannon McKenna Extreme Danger Sherry Thomas Delicious Sherry Thomas His at Night Sherry Thomas Not Quite a Husband Sherry Thomas Private Arrangements Sherry Thomas Ravishing the Heiress Sophie Jordan One Night With You Susan Elizabeth Phillips It Had to Be You Susan Elizabeth Phillips Kiss an Angel Susan Elizabeth Phillips Natural Born Charmer Susan Elizabeth Phillips This Heart of Mine Susan Sey Money Shot Susan Sizemore The Price of Innocence Suzanne Brockmann The Unsung Hero Tessa Dare A Week to Be Wicked Tessa Dare Goddess of the Hunt Toni Blake One Reckless Summer Tracy Anne Warren My Fair Mistress: A Novel Victoria Dahl Bad Boys Do Victoria Dahl Lead Me On

A Different Kind of Forever by Dee Ernst

Grade: B+

passion rating: hot

Dear Ms. Ernst,

Once upon a time, in a seedy bar, many years ago, I met a man, fell for him on the spot, married him, and decades later count myself lucky to have and hold him as my own. And yet, as I read your book, the wonderful A Different Kind of Forever, I found myself wondering, what if my life had turned out differently. What if I were divorced, trying to raise my kids as a single mom, loving my work, surrounded by great friends, but, romantically, sexually, alone? If I were, if I had that life instead of the one I do, I pray to the gods I, like your forty-five year old divorced heroine Diane Matthews, would have the great good fortune to one day, walking in the park, meet twenty-six year old Michael Carlucci.

Michael isn’t just any twenty-six year old. He’s “Mickey Flynn” the creative genius behind and the keyboard player in one of the world’s most successful bands, NinetySeven. He and his band have come back to their home town to play the last concert of their current tour. A few weeks before the concert, he’s walking his dog Max in the park and Max, who has a serious obsession with pastrami, smells the sandwich Diane is eating and begins dashing toward her. Diane, standing on the picnic table she’s jumped up on, decides her lunch isn’t worth being tackled by a very large dog, and gives Max her sandwich just as Michael finally catches up with his marauding pet.

Diane stared at the animal in amazement, then turned as the owner came running up to her. He was completely winded, gasping, bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.

“I’m so sorry,” he panted. “But my dog really loves pastrami.”

Diane stared at him. “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”

The owner of the dog nodded his head. “Oh, I know,” he gulped. “It’s probably the silliest thing I’ve ever had to say.”

Diane began to laugh, a tickle that began in her throat and bubbled up. She felt tears streaming from her eyes. No one would ever believe this. The owner started to laugh with her. He seemed very young, dark hair cut short and as he lifted his smiling face, she saw startling blue eyes, an angular jaw. Suddenly, she stopped laughing

“Oh, my God. I know you.”

He was still breathing heavily. “I’m Michael Carlucci, and this is Max.” The dog had finished and was sitting quietly at his master’s feet. Michael gazed up at her. “I’m very sorry. Can I help you down?”

“Oh. Yes, please.” She felt suddenly awkward, and reached down to take his hand. She climbed down off the table carefully, her skirt riding to mid-thigh, heels unsteady on the grass. They were suddenly eye to eye. He was not much taller than her, slim, in a white polo shirt tucked into faded jeans, a thin belt around his waist. His arms and hands were beautiful, she noticed, sculpted and strong-looking.

““I’m sorry,” she said, smoothing her skirt. “I thought you were somebody else. You look just like Mickey Flynn.”

He grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, that’s me. Michael Flynn Carlucci. I was named for my Irish grandfather.”

“I thought it was you. There’s a life sized poster of you in my daughters’ bedroom.

Diane is the mother of three daughters. While the eldest, Rachel, has outgrown her obsession with NinetySeven, her younger two, Emily and Morgan, ages fourteen and sixteen, have not. Michael, as a peace offering for his dog’s thieving behavior, offers Diane free tickets to the concert, and, after talking with her for a few minutes, asks if he can buy her lunch. At lunch, he throws in backstage passes as well. Diane isn’t sure he’s serious, but sure enough, the next day, a large envelope arrives at her house with eight VIP tickets to the show. Then, that night, Michael calls her and asks her out to dinner. Diane, nervous but attracted, agrees to meet him but doesn’t tell anyone she’s going out with him.

The date though, is perfect. Michael tells Diane his life story, she tells him hers, they drink, laugh, and, when Michael walks her to her car, he kisses her until she can’t breathe and tells her he wants to see her again. They agree to meet backstage after his concert this coming Friday night. Diane, her friend, and their daughters go to hear the band—Diane isn’t sure what to expect. She hasn’t been to a concert in years and all week she’s thought about Michael, his kiss, his smile, and how much she’s wanted to see him again. The concert is great—Diane is astonished at how talented Michael is. As the music winds down, Michael comes out onto the stage—it’s a band tradition: at the end of each show he tells a story. This night, he tells the story of meeting Diane,

“So, last week, I’m back home and I figure I’ll take Max out to Bloomfield Park. I got the Frisbee, I got tennis balls, we’re ready for anything, you know? So, we’re on the ball field, the park is practically empty, we’re having this great old time, and suddenly the wind shifts. Max freezes, and takes off like a shot and I know, man, I just know.” He paused and dropped his voice. “Shhhiiiit. It’s pastrami.”

Diane sank lower into her seat as Sue hit her excitedly on the arm.

“So Max is flying, and I am pounding after him, and there’s one, lone woman, sitting at a picnic table, eating a sandwich.” Laughter. “I yell, ‘he wants your sandwich’, and the woman jumps up on the picnic table, and she sticks out her hand and Max leaps like a gazelle, gets the sandwich, and it’s gone .” The audience started to clap and cheer. Michael was shaking his head, one hand on his hip. “So I’m looking up at this woman.” He got in closer to the mike, and dropped his voice again. “Sensational legs.” Diane glanced over at Emily, who was open-mouthed. “And this great tattoo right above her ankle.”

The crowd roared and hooted. Diane felt the blood drumming in her ears.

“Since she didn’t say anything about suing me,” Michael went on, “I bought her lunch and invited her to the show.” He shaded his eyes and looked down at them. “Are you girls having a good time?”

Megan, Emily and all their friends shrieked and waved excitedly. Michael nodded.

“Good.” He turned to the stage hand that had walked onstage with another microphone and an acoustic guitar. “Thanks, man.” He slipped the guitar strap over his shoulder and adjusted the mike.

“Now I’m going to tell you all about my sisters. I have three, all older, and they were all into music, and I spent my whole childhood sneaking into one of their rooms, and listening to whatever they were listening to. That’s how I began to love music. That’s when I decided to make it a part of my life.”

His voice had dropped, grown softer, and Diane could feel everyone leaning in, straining to hear.

“When I was five, I started taking piano lessons, because everyone in my house took piano lessons. But I wanted to play guitar. Angela, my youngest sister, was taking guitar lessons. I made a deal with my Dad that I’d go to my piano lesson like a good little boy, if I could also go with Angela. So she took me along with her, I’d sit in the corner and listen, then we’d go home and practice together, and that’s how I learned to play the guitar. Angela had this big, old Lennon-McCartney songbook, and we learned every song.” The crowd burst into applause. As they quieted, he went on.

“My sisters all loved the Beatles, especially Paul. I would play and they would sing along. And that is just about as perfect a memory you could have.” He had been looking down as he spoke, his hands folded over the curve of the guitar. He suddenly lifted his eyes and his smile went out across the audience. “I had forgotten. Diane with the sexy tattoo reminded me. I want to thank her for that. So this song is for the Carlucci girls, who are responsible for so many of the good things in my life.”

He began to play ‘And I Love Her.’

Michael, you see, fell in love with Diane the moment he met her. He believes there is one true love out there for each of us and, for him, he’s sure Diane is his. He woos her with everything he has.

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