She is the one dream that never had a chance to come true…until now.

Takeshi is finishing up a brutal double shift in the ER when a familiar—and bloody—face erases all thought of heading home. The broken body of the woman fighting for her life belongs to Gabby, his best friend’s mother. A woman he has rarely seen since he turned nineteen and foolishly declared his love for her.

She’s not dying today. Not on his watch. And not with a promise left unfulfilled.

Gabby has never forgotten the taste of the kiss Taka gave her under the mistletoe all those years ago. Or the silly promise that surely by now he’s forgotten. She’s wrong. Taka remembers. And she melts as he uses every trick in his highly trained surgeon’s hands to heal her—and rekindle the heat between them.

But there’s a secret lurking in Gabby’s past. And when it follows her all the way to Seattle, it threatens to drag the one man she loves into the nightmare she thought she’d left behind.

Warning: Contains a reluctant cougar heroine with a planeload of emotional baggage, a hot Asian surgeon who knows how to kiss it and make it better, and smoking-hot love scenes that’ll give you a new appreciation for the tenacity of younger men.