He hugged her back, looking up into the apartment just as Megan came around the corner...and completely took his breath away.
She looked surprised to see him. “Oh. Hi. I didn’t hear you knock.” Her eyes were soft as she looked at him with her daughter. “Thanks for coming to pick us up on such short notice.”
There were half a dozen things he could have said, at least a handful of replies that would have made sense. But even though he knew better than to go there, all he could get out was, “You’re beautiful.”
And she was. So damn beautiful his heart couldn’t decide between stopping in his chest or racing out of control.
He watched her try to contain her shock at his unexpected compliment. And then her smile.
“Thank you.”
Holy hell.
That smile.
It affected him just as much as it had in the hospital room. He’d seen her determination and tears and forced politeness...but her sweet, genuine smile was what undid him every time.
He felt Summer tug on his arm and barely managed to drag his gaze away from her mother. “You’re gorgeous, too, kid,” he told the little girl, who did a little pirouette to show off her sparkling green dress. “And whenever you say Mr. Sullivan, I think you’re talking about my grandfather, so why don’t you call me Gabe?”
“Okay, Gabe! Can we go now? When did you decide you wanted to be a firefighter? What’s it like having so many brothers and sisters? Was it hard to become a firefighter? Why is your fire hat red?”
The rush of questions from the seven-year-old girl sitting in the middle of the extended cab should have been the perfect way to keep his focus from landing on Megan again and again during the drive out of the city to the suburban home he’d grown up in. Especially since the woman sitting beside him remained nearly perfectly still and silent.
But through the forty-minute trip, despite the mouthwatering smell of the large plate of fudge Summer had made, Gabe was all too aware of Megan’s faint scent, something flowery and clean, along with her gorgeous curves beneath her knee-length velvet dress and those toned legs that he’d been unable to keep from admiring as he’d followed them out to his truck from her apartment.
When he finally pulled up outside his mother’s house to let them out, as he stepped out onto the sidewalk to open their door, Gabe took in a hard breath of cold, crisp air. “I’ll see you both inside in a few minutes, after I park the truck.”
Megan nodded but didn’t make eye contact with him as she helped Summer jump down into her arms.
He hadn’t smoked since his first day in training with the fire crew. But for the first time in years, Gabe would have killed for a cigarette.
* * *
It hadn’t taken more than five minutes to find a space for his truck and walk into his mother’s house, decked out with a ten-foot-tall Christmas tree and carols playing. So then, how the hell could his brothers already have found Megan so quickly?
Ryan and Zach were flanking her on either side and as she laughed at whatever they were telling her, she was beautiful. So beautiful it made something inside him tighten up whenever he looked at her.
He was going to kill his brothers. If they so much as laid a hand on her, they were dead men.
And then, almost in slow motion, he saw Zach’s patented load-for-launch move as his brother reached up to brush a lock of hair away from her eyes.
Gabe was halfway across the room, his hands in tight fists, when his mother stopped him with a hug.
“Honey, I’m so glad you’re finally here.” She looked across the room to where Megan was being entertained by his brothers. “And I’m so glad you brought Megan and Summer with you. They’re both just lovely. Absolutely lovely.”
Gabe tried to get his blood pressure to return to normal. He had no claim on Megan. Maybe Sophie was right. Maybe someone like Megan was just what an asshat like Zach needed to make him see the light and change his ways.
But the thought only made Gabe’s blood boil hotter.
Feeling his mother’s eyes on him, he somehow managed to hold it together enough to grit out the words, “Looks like another great party, Mom.”
“As long as all of you are here, I’m happy. Well, minus one, unfortunately, but I know Smith tried his hardest to get back.”
Smith hadn’t been able to clear his shooting schedule to fly to San Francisco. To his credit, Gabe was fairly impressed with how many family functions Smith managed to attend. They were neck and neck actually—for every movie Smith couldn’t get away from, Gabe dealt with a fire that had to take priority over seeing his family.
Megan’s laughter pulled his gaze back over to her despite his best efforts to look elsewhere. He was torn between wanting to get an emergency fire call so he could get away from temptation...and not wanting to ever stop looking at her.
Judging by the way Zach was hanging on her every word, his brother clearly felt the same way.
“Megan said the sweetest thing to me when we met.” His mother’s hand on his arm had him working to yank his attention back to her. “She thanked me for raising such a wonderful man who made such a difference in her life.” He watched his mother swallow hard. “I almost started crying right there in the kitchen thinking about what would have happened to her and her little girl if you hadn’t been there.”
He knew better than to let himself think about that scenario, about what might have been if he hadn’t gotten to them in time. Instead, he told himself he was glad for the reminder of what they were to each other.
Megan was the woman he’d saved. The one time he’d made the mistake of getting involved with a fire victim he’d saved, things had gone terribly wrong. All these years later, he could hardly believe what Kate had done when he’d broken up with her, that she’d—
“Gabe, honey, are you all right?”
At his mother’s hand on his arm and her soft, but concerned, question, he shoved the memory back down. Still, he needed to get his mother to understand that Megan wasn’t any different from any other fire victim, and that there was nothing special between them.
“She’s still processing the incident. It’s perfectly normal.”
“I suppose so,” she said softly, “but I didn’t expect her to apologize to me.”
He frowned. “She apologized?”
“She feels responsible for you getting hurt. She said if she had moved faster, if she’d just been able to hold it together better, that you wouldn’t have been where you were when the beam fell.”