by Jill Shalvis
her concierge service and had more business than she knew what to do with.
She’d spent time with Kenna and the other Kincaids. She’d settled into Jacob’s cabin, feeling warm and safe and deeply attached to the place, unlike anywhere else she’d ever lived.
That was all Jacob.
He wasn’t there, but she could feel his presence, and she thought about him a lot. Thought about what it would be like when he returned home.
And here he was, leaner than he’d been, tanned from long days in the sun, hair once again military short, eyes dark and filled with things that caught her breath.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said.
“You too. Jacob—” She broke off, nervous. He seemed content to wait for her to gather herself. He was excellent at that. God, she’d missed him. “Just so you know,” she murmured, her heart pounding hard. “I did as you suggested. I made myself at home.” She trailed off as…victory? satisfaction?…flickered across his face. Maybe both, but what caught her by the heart and wouldn’t let go was the intensity of his eyes and a smile that warmed her to the bone.
“You’ve made another choice,” he said.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “I’m home.”
He stood and strode straight for her, leaning over her to kiss her long and deep, one hand sliding up her spine to cradle the back of her head.
She gripped him tight, her fingers running up his arms, bared thanks to his T-shirt. His skin was chilled. “You’re cold,” she said. “Come in here. Let me warm you,” she whispered, and lifted the covers in invitation.
Holding her gaze, he stripped and climbed into the bed, pulling her into the circle of his arms. A low, rough, heartfelt groan escaped him as he pulled her naked body to him. “We’re both home now,” he said.
Epilogue
Six months later
Sophie had never been so happy and so miserably sick at the same time. Currently she was kneeling on the floor in the bar’s bathroom, trying to decide if she was done. She hadn’t had any alcohol, but upon reflection, the second order of hot wings might’ve been a serious error in judgment.
Kenna was helping to hold her hair back. “Honey, you should’ve canceled tonight if you were sick.”
“I’m not.” Pretty sure she was over this latest bout, she sat back and eyed the diamond wedding band on her finger. Jacob had put it there two months ago, on a weeklong vacay in Hawaii, where they’d stood together and exchanged vows. It still gave her a thrill to see the ring. “I’m okay now.”
“You’re not,” Kenna said. She brought Sophie some dampened paper towels while simultaneously speaking into her cell phone. “Sophie’s sick,” she said. “Yeah, she’s thrown up, like, four times.”
“Three,” Sophie corrected weakly, “and are you really tattling on me?” She rinsed her mouth in the sink. “What are we, twelve?”
Ten minutes later Jacob came barging through the women’s bathroom door looking very much like a warrior soldier ready to kick ass, making another woman squeak and rush out.
Jacob didn’t even glance at her. All he had eyes for was Sophie. He dropped to his knees next to her where she was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. He pulled her in, hugging her tight, and Sophie found herself laughing and crying at the same time as she clutched at him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded incredulously.
“I didn’t know until this morning, I was going to tell you later tonight, after I warmed you up to the idea…”
“Babe…” He stroked her hair from her damp forehead. “Why would you need to warm me up to the idea of having a baby?”
“You don’t remember?” she asked on a low laugh. “Last week at the ball game, the woman next to us had a two-year-old who kept having a temper tantrum. And you said, ‘Let’s never do that.’”
“I meant because she had him dressed up in a mini Raiders uniform. No kid of mine is going to wear anything other than a Broncos jersey.”
Kenna dropped to her knees next to them. “Okay, someone needs to tell me right here, right now…We’re having a baby?”
Sophie felt her eyes fill again at the look on Jacob’s face—pure, radiant joy.
“Yeah,” he said, leaning in, pressing his forehead to Sophie’s, his own eyes suspiciously misty too. “We’re having a baby.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t drink!” Kenna grinned. “Even when I said vodka was made from potatoes and potatoes are a vegetable, which practically makes vodka a salad.”
Sophie smiled. “No alcohol for eight more months.”
“We’re having a baby,” Kenna repeated in marvel, a wide grin on her usually taciturn face.
“Well, I don’t know much about the ‘we’ part,” Sophie said wryly. “Seems to me most of the work is going to be mine.”
“I’ll be right there with you,” Jacob vowed, voice deep and rich with the promise. “You won’t ever be alone in this.”
Her heart nearly burst it was so full. Him. His family. A baby…It was all so much more than she could’ve ever hoped for. “You might feel differently when the pregnancy hormones kick in,” she warned.
He cupped her face. “I fell hard for you, Soph, and I haven’t gotten up since. Never will. We’re in this together, heart and soul.”
She couldn’t think of anything she’d ever wanted more.
The hottest property in Cedar Ridge is Aidan Kincaid—firefighter, rescue worker, and heartbreaker. But when the love of his life returns, it’s up to him to convince her to give Cedar Ridge—and this bad boy—a second chance…
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Second Chance Summer
Chapter 1
After fighting a brush fire at the base of Cedar Ridge for ten straight hours, Aidan Kincaid had only three things on his mind: sex, pizza, and beer. Given the way the day had gone, he’d gladly take them in any order he could get them.
Not in the cards.
He and the rest of his fire crew had finally managed to get back to the station. They’d been there just long enough to load their plates when the alarm went off again.
“What the hell!”
“Gonna break the damn bell and shove it up someone’s—”
“This is bullshit…”
Whoever said no one could outswear a sailor had never lived in a firehouse. Ignoring the grumbling around him, Aidan pushed his plate away and met his partner Mitch’s gaze.
“Gotta be a full moon bringing out the crazy,” Mitch said.
“Maybe the crazy just follows you,” Aidan suggested.
In turn, Mitch suggested Aidan was number one. With his middle finger.
They’d been playing this game since first grade, when Mitch had stolen Aidan’s lunch and Aidan had popped him in the nose for it. As punishment they’d had to pick up and haul trash for the janitor for two weeks.
The two of them had become best friends and had spent the next decade being as wild and crazy as possible.
Eventually they’d grown up and found responsibility, going through the fire academy and now working as Colorado Wildland Firefighters for their bread and butter, volunteering on the local search-and-rescue team as needed. And here in Cedar Ridge they were needed a lot. Lost hikers, overzealous hunters, clueless novice rafters—you name it, they’d been called to save it.
Tonight’s fire call came in as a possible suicide jumper off the courthouse, which at five stories high was the tallest building in town.
As they pulled up, they could see a woman had climbed out a window on the fifth floor. She stood on a ledge that couldn’t have been more than a foot wide, wearing nothing but her bra and panties.
“Well, at least Nicky left her Victoria’s Secrets on this time,” Mitch noted.
Nicky was a bit of a regular.
And Mitch was right. The last time Nicky had gotten upset was after finding the town councilman she’d been sleeping with going at it on his desk with his assista
nt. She’d stripped all the way down to her birthday suit before covering herself in Post-it notes. Aidan wondered what had set her off this time.
“I changed my mind,” she screamed, jabbing a finger down at them. “I don’t want to die! He’s not worth it!”
No Post-it notes this time. A bonus. The police had blocked off traffic, but the scene was still chaotic.
“Somebody get up here and save me!” Nicky yelled. “If I fall and die, I’m going to sue every one of you for being so freaking slow! Honest to God, what does a girl have to do to get a rescue around here?”
“So she’s changed her mind,” the captain said dryly to Aidan and Mitch. They exchanged glances. No one could reach her from inside the window. And climbing out on the ledge wasn’t an option; it was too narrow—and decomposing to boot. And thanks to the layout of the building and the hillside, their truck couldn’t get close enough to the building to be effective either.
They all knew what this meant. One of them was going to have to follow the half-naked crazy chick out onto the ledge. There were a few problems with this.
Aidan and his team had a reputation for being unflappable and tough as nails, but the truth was, plenty unnerved them—including a half-naked crazy chick on a ledge five stories up. They’d just learned to do whatever needed to be done, no matter what.
“Let the fun begin,” Mitch muttered.
Plan A was for the captain to head inside and attempt to talk Nicky back inside the window. Since Plan A had a high potential for going south, Plan B was to be run simultaneously—head to the roof and begin setting up rigging for an over-the-roof retrieval.
Through it all, Nicky never stopped screaming at them, alternately begging them to hurry and hurtling insults their way.
Then came the cap’s radio message. “Yeah, so she’s declining to crawl back in the window because there’s no press here yet. Last time she was front-page news.”
Onward. The team found a good anchor spot on the roof. As Mitch and Aidan were the two most senior members of the unit, one of them always took lead. Mitch looked at Aidan. “Okay, go make like Spider-Man and rescue the damsel in distress.”
“Why me?” Aidan asked.
“It’s your turn.”
“Hey, you’re the one who likes her undies,” Aidan pointed out. Not that he objected to a rescue, any rescue, but this one had shit show written all over it.
“I weigh more than you do,” Mitch said logically.
Only because he was six foot four to Aidan’s six two, but whatever. The team got the line set up, and then Aidan got into his five-point harness and hooked himself to the first of the two lines. Mitch hooked himself up to the second one just in case Aidan got into trouble, and the rest of the unit prepared for go time.
Aidan dropped over the edge. The plan was to rappel him down until he hung ten feet above Nicky. He’d then kick out from the building at the same time that his team lowered him eleven more feet, bringing him to just below her, putting him between her and the fifty-foot drop. He’d attach a harness to Nicky, and the team would give them enough slack so that Aidan could rappel down with her.
And the team indeed lowered Aidan to just above Nicky. Aidan kicked out. But as usual, nothing went to plan. Just as he started to swing back toward the wall, Nicky leapt off the ledge like some rabid raccoon and wrapped herself around him.
Not more than a hundred and ten pounds, she clung to him like a monkey as they hurtled at neck-breaking speed toward the wall. Aidan managed to grip her tight and twist in midair so that he was the one to slam into the brick.
Even as lightweight as she was, it still hurt like hell.
“Jesus Christ,” Aidan heard the captain and Mitch say in stereo as they watched helplessly—one from above, one from below, at the window.
They didn’t know the half of it. With Nicky’s legs wrapped and locked around Aidan’s waist, her arms squeezing his head like a grape and her breasts literally suffocating him, he couldn’t breathe. Somehow he managed to turn his head sideways to suck in some air, but he still couldn’t see. “I’ve got you,” he said. “I’m not going to let go, but you need to loosen your grip.”
Nicky was too busy screaming in his ear to hear him, not loosening her grip at all. “Omigod, don’t you fuckin’ drop me or I’ll sue you the most!”
Mitch had dropped over the edge as soon Nicky leapt on Aidan’s back. He was rappelling down as fast as he could, laughing all the way. Aidan couldn’t see shit, but he could hear him clearly, the asshole.
“Got his six,” Mitch said into the radio as he came even with Aidan, still laughing. “Though I can’t tell where Aidan ends and Nicky begins.”
You can kill him later, Aidan promised himself. “Listen to me,” he said to Nicky. “I’ve got you. I need you to stop yelling in my ear and look at me.”
She gulped in a breath and relaxed her hold only enough to look at him. Her eyes were wide, wet, and raccooned from her mascara.
“I’m not going to let go of you,” he assured her, staring into her eyes, doing his best to give her an anchor. “You hear me, Nicky? No one’s falling to their death today.”
She nodded and started to cry in earnest at the same time. Aidan preferred her screaming.
“She’s not attached to anything,” the captain reminded them via radio.
“You don’t have to worry about that, Cap,” Mitch responded. “She’s not letting go of Aidan.”
Nope, she wasn’t. She’d embedded her nails into him good, and her legs were crossed and locked at the small of his back, but at least he could breathe. “Just get us down,” he said.
As the team lowered them, Mitch kept alongside, offering encouragement, cracking his own ass up as they went.
On the ground, Aidan’s new companion was peeled off of him and taken away for further evaluation. Aidan took his first deep breath since the rescue had begun. Aching in more muscles than he’d realized he even had, he gathered his gear.
“You okay?” their captain asked. “You took a few hard hits up there.”
“I’m fine.” He could feel where he’d have bruises tomorrow, and he was pretty sure his back had been scraped raw from the demolition derby collision with the brick wall, but he’d had worse.
Mitch grinned at him. “Man, you just had your bones totally jumped by a nearly naked chick. We almost had to resuscitate you. ‘Fireman Asphyxiated by Boobs, news at eleven.’”
Their captain eyed Mitch and then Aidan. “You remember we have a strict no-killing-each-other policy?”
Aidan reluctantly nodded.
“I’m going to lift that rule for a onetime exception,” the captain said, cocking his head at Mitch.
Mitch’s smile faded. “Hey.”
But the captain had walked away.
“Whatever,” Mitch said to Aidan. “If you kill me, you’ll never find out what I know.”
Aidan slid him a glance. “You never know anything.”
“I know lots, starting with a rumor that you’re about to get a blast from the past.”
“What?”
“Yeah. I hear Lily Danville’s back,” Mitch said.
Aidan froze at the name he hadn’t heard in a very long time. Years. Ten of them to be exact.
Mitch raised a brow. “Gray hasn’t mentioned it?”