Can't Help Falling in Love (9 page)

“Right.”

She was a blur of activity, clearing off a stack of Frosty the Snowman drawings she and Summer must have been working on, pulling out a pretty plate and arranging some white-frosted snowflake cookies on it.

He’d never dated anyone with kids. Not, he reminded himself, that he and Megan were dating. But it was the first time he’d seen anyone apart from his mother juggle more than just her own life.

She handed him the cup of coffee. “Why don’t we go sit down?”

He followed her over to the small living room on the other side of the open kitchen, noting that she wisely chose to sit on the small, velvet-covered chair rather than joining him on the couch.

She slid her heels off and tucked her bare feet up under her, rubbing them with her free hand. “My feet were killing me in those heels.”

Gabe wouldn’t ever have called himself a foot man. Feet were just feet. But Megan’s pink painted toes were incredibly sexy. He wanted to push her hand away and replace it with his. He already knew how sweet her mouth was, how soft her hair was. What would her skin feel like beneath his hands?

He was blowing the “just friends” thing already. What made it worse was that not only was he just as opposed to falling for Megan as she was for him, but he also understood her reasons for not wanting to be with him. She had every right to want to be with a man who wouldn’t die unexpectedly on her this time around.

There was no question whatsoever that he didn’t fit that bill. At all.

There was a desk in the corner of the living room, along with a couple of large filing cabinets and a bookshelf that looked like it held reference manuals rather than novels.

Following his gaze, she offered, “I work from home. I’m a CPA.”

Before tonight, Gabe might have assumed that all accountants were dry, passionless geeks glued to their calculators and spreadsheets.

Megan definitely wasn’t passionless.

“Do you like being an accountant?”

“I do.” She took a sip of coffee. “I like how numbers add up. I like the rhyme and reason. How they always make sense, and if there’s a discrepancy, I know that as long as I look hard enough, I’ll figure out what the problem is. And solve it.” She blinked at him with those beautiful green eyes. “I take it you love being a firefighter?”

“I was never able to sit still when I was a kid. And I used to like playing with matches a little too much. Fire always fascinated me.”

“Your mother must have loved that,” she said in a tone that indicated just the opposite.

He acknowledged, “Not so much.”

“I guess the fascination with fire makes sense,” she said slowly, as if considering it for the first time. “Otherwise you might not be so willing to run straight into one rather than away from it like the rest of us.”

Did she know that he was fascinated with her, too? That even when he knew he should be turning away from her, he wanted to move closer?

“You have a great family, but I have to say, some of you must have been a handful. My hat’s off to your mother. And,” she said with a slight question to her words, “your father?”

“He passed away when I was five. She raised us alone.”

His father’s death was another reason he’d chosen his career. Also trained as a paramedic, many of the calls he went on were medical. He couldn’t save everyone’s father or mother or child, but he wanted to know, at least, that he’d done everything he could.

Megan’s eyes grew big. “Eight children alone?” She put a hand over her heart in a clear gesture of sympathy for his mother. “Half the time Summer feels like too much for me to deal with by myself.”

“You’re a great mother.”

She smiled at that. “Thank you. Although I’m not sure you’d say the same thing if you could see me yelling at her about homework or clothes on the floor or spending too much time on the phone with her friends.”

He shouldn’t want to see those things, shouldn’t want to get any closer to Megan or her daughter. But the longer he sat with her, talking about family, the more that wanting grew.

Quickly downing the rest of his coffee, he got up and put his empty cup on the coffee table. He noticed the window off the kitchen was open a crack and a cold breeze was coming in.

“Do you want this open?”

“No, it’s jammed,” she replied, coming back into the kitchen with her own still half-full cup of coffee. “The landlord said he’d try to stop by this week to see if he can fix it.”

Not wanting her to have to deal with being cold and paying for heat that just seeped outside, Gabe put his hand on it and pushed. Nothing happened. “Do you have a small screwdriver?”

She pulled one out of a well-organized drawer. “Here.”

It didn’t take him long to fix the problem. “A little glue or paint was stuck in under the metal.” As he handed her back the screwdriver, he said, “Your old place must have had a great view.”

“That’s why I bought that apartment. I knew it was an old building, but I figured the view was worth it.” Her green eyes shadowed. “I never thought about how safe it would or wouldn’t be in a fire, though.”

“Isn’t having a view still at the top of the want list for your new place? Along with a backyard for a fire pit?”

“Views aren’t worth quite as much as I thought they were,” she replied in a soft voice. “And I’m not sure that a fire pit is such a great idea, either.”

For all Megan’s outward resilience, the way she’d clearly moved past losing her husband so young, how capably she’d recovered from her home going up in flames, Gabe could suddenly see her vulnerability.

Along with the fears she was trying so hard to hide.

As if she suddenly realized she was letting him look too deep, she said, “Well, thanks for fixing the window. And for the ride.”

He got the hint. It was time to go.

She was right. He needed to leave before he kissed her again.

She moved to the front door just ahead of him. Opening it, she stood there as he walked out, so close. Too close.

He should have just kept going down the hall and out to his car without looking back or saying anything more, but in the same way that being in her apartment, putting Summer to bed, and staying for coffee had felt so right, leaving felt just as wrong.

“Tell Summer I had a good time playing flashlight tag with her.”

He was standing close enough to smell her perfume, something soft and floral that made him want to bury his nose in the curve of her neck until he figured out exactly what kind of flower it was.

“Okay.”

The one word was slightly breathless and from the way her eyes were focused on his mouth, he knew she was just as close to that edge of wanting as he was.

Just one kiss. That’s all he wanted.

Needed.

Gabe had almost convinced himself it wouldn’t hurt anything, that he could stop at
one more,
when she abruptly lifted her gaze and took a step back on a sharply indrawn breath.

“Just friends.” She shook her head. “I like you a lot, Gabe, and that kiss in the kitchen...” Another shake of her head. “Well, we’ve got to forget that kiss. Because we’ve both agreed that’s how things need to stay. Even if it’s not easy, we’ve got to keep things totally platonic.”

When she was done laying out the reminders, she put her fingers over her mouth as if to keep herself from jumping across the threshold between them and kissing him. The problem was, all the good sense in the world couldn’t negate the magnetic pull between them.

Compelled to be as honest as they’d been in her kitchen after they’d given in to desire for way too short a time, he said, “I want you. And if you were anyone else, I wouldn’t be leaving right now.” Her eyes went wide at the shock of his flat-out admission. “But I already know and like you and Summer well enough to know we can’t just sleep together.”

“No,” she said quickly, even more breathlessly, “we can’t.”

Wanting her more with every word they spoke about the hot sex they weren’t going to have, he said, “I’d better go now.”

“Yes,” she whispered, “you should go.”

But then, instead of leaving, he was reaching out and pulling her against him, his hands on the swell of her hips. “One last kiss.”

“God, yes,” she gasped out. “One more.”

And then her mouth met his and he was backing her up against the open door, pressing himself into the soft heat of her body, taking, giving, falling deeper under the spell that Megan had woven around him from the very first second he’d seen her.

Her taste was addictive, so sweet he couldn’t stop himself from going deeper, from moving from her lower lip to her upper, from pulling her so close that he could feel her nipples pressing into his chest even through their layers of clothes. He moved between her thighs and she opened them for him as he pressed her harder into the wall, her hips moving against his groin, making him harder than he could ever remember being in his life.

Here. He could take her right here. Pull up her skirt, unzip his pants, and be in her in seconds, her legs wrapped around his waist.

Somehow, a noise from down the hall broke through the fog of lust clouding his brain. He knew better than to put on a public sex show with Megan when her daughter was only a couple of rooms away.

In sync, they moved apart, both of them breathing hard.

“That was the last one,” she said in a shaky voice. “The very last kiss we can have.”

Somehow, he managed to turn away, to get his feet to move. But with every step that he took away from her, Gabe had a feeling that not kissing Megan again just might prove to be the most difficult thing he’d ever done.

* * *

Megan closed her front door and leaned against it, closing her eyes as she fought to deal with what had just happened. She brought her fingers back up to her lips. They were tingling, burning up from his kiss.

She couldn’t remember ever wanting anyone the way she wanted him. She’d had a couple of lovers since David had passed away five years ago, but none of them had imprinted themselves on her body like this. In fact, she suddenly realized the faces of her past lovers were cloudy in her memory.

After David, it wasn’t like she’d sat down one day and made the decision to stay away from men with dangerous, deadly jobs. She hadn’t been thinking about other men at all, actually. She’d been trying to raise her daughter on one income with only so many hours in the day while going back to school to get her degree in accounting.

It had been more of a gradual realization as she’d surfaced from her grief that she couldn’t go through all that again. Yes, she understood that a businessman could get hit by a car and die. But she was a numbers girl and it didn’t take a statistician to calculate that the odds of an early death were a heck of a lot lower for a man who sat behind a desk nine to five than they were for a fighter pilot.

Or a firefighter.

Still, she couldn’t help but remember the way he’d carried Summer out of his mother’s basement and then into their apartment a little while earlier. It had been utterly different from the way he’d carried her daughter out of the burning building. He’d been one hundred percent firefighter then. Tonight, he’d looked more like a father taking care of his sleeping daughter.

Her hands shook slightly as she locked the front door and turned off the lights in the kitchen and living room before heading to the bathroom to get ready for bed. She knew better than to make the mistake of thinking of Gabe as anything but an off-limits firefighter. They shouldn’t have shared those two kisses. But, since they had, at least they’d been smart enough to stop.

A few minutes later, as she crawled into her big, empty bed, she refused to let herself imagine what it might have been like to have Gabe there with her, his strong muscles pressing hers down into the mattress as he came over her.

Into her.

No, she thought as she buried her face beneath her pillow to try and block out the far-too-potent images, she couldn’t let herself imagine that.

Chapter Nine

“Mommy, what’s the name of the place we skied at last year?” Summer asked as they sat down to bowls of cereal the next morning.

“Heavenly.” Megan had hoped to make it up to the snow again this year, but things had been so crazy since the fire that she hadn’t had a chance to think about holiday plans.

“I love snow.”

“I know.”

“I mean, I really,
really
love snow! And I wish we could see some soon.”

Megan grinned at her daughter. Summer not only loved snow, she loved sun and wind and rain. She was an equal-opportunity outdoor girl. Although more than once Megan had thought that her daughter preferred the more extreme weather simply for the thrill of it.

Because of the fire and the time it had taken to find and move into another apartment, they’d had to cancel Summer’s birthday party. They’d taken a few of her friends out to pizza, but Megan knew it hadn’t been the same as a full-blown party with games and homemade cake. She couldn’t throw a party together with so little notice, but they didn’t have anything planned for the next couple of days. An impromptu ski trip was the perfect birthday gift.

Besides, it suddenly occurred to her that if they didn’t get out of town, Summer might very well request another trip to the fire station to see Gabe.

And Megan
definitely
couldn’t see him again anytime soon.

Not until she was holding much firmer reins on her self-control.

Despite being high season in Lake Tahoe, Megan figured they were due a little good luck. She picked up the phone. Summer watched her with wide, excited eyes as she was connected through to the Heavenly Ski Resort.

“Hi. I know this is last minute, but I was wondering if you might have a room that we could rent?” She gave her daughter a thumbs-up. “You just got a cancellation for tonight? And tomorrow night, too? Fantastic!”

By the time she’d given the reservations person her credit card information, Summer had run back to her room and was gathering up her new winter clothes.

Megan stood in her doorway and said, “Is that what you were hoping for?”