by Bella Andre
Clearly, he wasn’t the only one having a hard time with their little reunion. He got more satisfaction from that than he should have.
His stomach growled and when hers quickly followed suit he said, “I’m going to call for a pizza.”
“No thanks. I’m not hungry.”
He frowned. She’d always been up for a meal, any time of day or night. It had been one of the things he liked about her, that she was a pretty girl who ate like a normal person, rather than starving herself to fit into a pair of jeans. Had that changed, too?
“Guess you’ve got to stick to salad to fit into all those fancy clothes, huh?”
Her mouth tightened. “I’m not on a diet. I’m just not in a very hungry mood right now.”
Shit, he was acting like an insensitive jerk again. It was just that being with her again pushed all of his buttons. Buttons he hadn’t even realized were there until today.
In lieu of an apology he said, “I know you may not feel like eating right now, not after what you’ve just found out, but you’re not going to do April any good if you’re starving.”
Shrugging as if she didn’t care either way, she said, “You’re right. Order pizza.”
He said, “Everything on it,” at the same time she did and their eyes locked together in an electric moment of remembered awareness.
All the signs of arousal were there—the way her skin flushed, the rapid pulse in her neck, the speeding up of her inhalations. He could have her horizontal and naked on the bed in sixty seconds.
It took every bit of self-control he possessed to force himself to turn away, pick up the phone, and order the pizza.
After hanging up, he paused to wipe all the desire off his face. When he turned around to face her, she was standing in the same place, her eyes still on him.
“Thank you for helping me,” she said in a soft voice. “I know things are kind of weird and—”
He held up a hand. She was about to take them straight into the danger zone. He couldn’t let her do it.
There was only one way to diffuse the bomb of their relentless attraction: clear ground rules.
“Let’s concentrate on finding your sister and bringing her home safely. And because we’re going to need to work together and trust each other, I’ve decided that the best thing we can do is keep the past in the past.”
CHAPTER NINE
DIANNA REELED in disbelief. Had he really just issued her an order? Here’s how we’re gonna do it, babe. No questions. No answers. Just suck it up and get with the program.
But after she’d had a few seconds to digest it, she realized it was less what he said than how he said it that really got to her.
She hated his cold, emotionless voice.
“On the contrary,” she finally replied in a steely voice that not only matched, but raised the frigidity another level. “I don’t think there’s any point in having a big white elephant in the room with us the whole time.”
In her experience managing a sometimes-conflicted staff for a live TV show that couldn’t afford any screw-ups, she never allowed grudges to linger between team members. Between her and Sam, however, she might have been tempted to take the high road and let sleeping dogs lie.
That is, if he hadn’t acted like such a bull in her china shop.
Crossing her arms over her chest, she said, “Because we’re stuck together in this motel room for tonight, I think we should lay everything out on the table and be done with it already.”
Maybe, she suddenly thought, if she got her grievances off her chest, she’d be able to get him out of her system once and for all.
Before she could think better of what she was doing, she continued with, “In the hospital you asked me why I left. Well, I’m ready to tell you my reasons, Sam. Because frankly, I’m sick and tired of carrying them around with me all the time.”
“Forget I asked,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. We should be focusing on April right now.”
No way, she wasn’t letting him backpedal to try to shut her down.
“Of course I’m upset about April,” she said as calmly as she could. “Of course I’m freaking out about what could be happening to her, but if we don’t find some common ground, we’re going to have a very hard time working as a team.”
But he was still shaking his head, his expression completely closed. “I don’t want to fight with you, Dianna.”
“Don’t you see, Sam?” she asked, exasperation breaking through again. “That’s part of the problem. You never wanted to fight. You never wanted to have any kind of conflict between us. I know your parents had a shitty relationship, I know they never stopped fighting, but that doesn’t mean people can’t disagree with each other sometimes.”
“Stop right now, Dianna,” he said, each word a warning, “and we can still do this. We can still go forward and find April.”
But the train she was on was moving too fast for her to just hop off. Even though she was heading straight for a brick wall.
“You haven’t changed a bit, have you?” she said, any pretense of calm now blown to smithereens. “You always thought you knew what was best for both of us.”
“I wouldn’t make accusations you can’t back up,” he said in a hard voice.
She took a step closer, too swept up in her fury to remember to keep her distance from all of his mouth-wateringly hard heat.
“Oh, you want backup? Let’s see, how about the first time we had sex and you didn’t bother to tell me that the condom broke? Or what about when you’d come back from a fire where people had lost their homes, or even their lives, and I’d ask, ‘How are you?’ all you’d ever say was, ‘I’m okay.’ And when I pushed you on it, when I said there was no way anyone could be okay with the things you’d seen, you wouldn’t tell me a damn thing about how you were feeling. All I wanted was to be a part of your life, Sam. For you to let me in. But you refused to give me anything, to open up at all.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew that there was no way Sam—or anyone else, for that matter—could possibly respond to her laundry list of grievances. And yet, when he didn’t even try to defend himself, she couldn’t stop herself from taking it a step further.
“Honestly, I could have forgiven you for all of that. In fact, I did forgive you. Until you went and broke my heart completely.”
His jaw jumped and the sinews on his crossed forearms were taut.
“No need to keep me in suspense any longer, Dianna. I’m a big boy. I can take the blame, so feel free to dish it out.”
Oh God, she hadn’t felt this close to breaking down, to completely falling apart in years. Not since that night she’d left Lake Tahoe.
“After I miscarried, I knew I’d spent too long crying, too long feeling sorry for myself,” she admitted. “So one night I got out of bed, took a shower, actually put on clothes instead of my nightgown.”
She closed her eyes and the details came back to her, one after the other as if it had all happened a week ago, instead of a decade ago. She remembered taking the time to shave her legs and blow-dry her hair, even putting on makeup when she noticed how pale she was, how much weight she’d lost. She was planning to go for a walk or to the grocery store. Something, anything, to get out of the apartment and try to start living again.
“You’d been gone on that Reno fire for three weeks and I missed you so much. None of my friends from school understood how hard it was to lose a baby and I knew my mother would probably be too drunk to even know what I was telling her. Or maybe she’d tell me I was lucky to have narrowly escaped becoming a mother.”
She opened her eyes and forced herself to look at him, even though she didn’t know what she’d see on his face.
“I was so lonely, Sam. All I wanted was for you to come back home and hold me. So when I saw on the news that the fire you’d been fighting was out, I was so happy. I couldn’t wait to see you and tell you I was ready to make a fresh start.”
At the time, she’d thought the
re’d be other babies, a whole crew of boys with his naughty grin, girls with his dark, silky hair. How stupid she’d been. How pathetically hopeful. Pitifully naive.
“But you weren’t at the station, and when I asked Bev where you were, she was beyond embarrassed to have to tell me that you’d gotten back from the fire hours ago.”
She’d hated knowing how sorry the hotshot station administrator had felt for her. Even though Dianna knew there were no secrets on a hotshot crew, it didn’t make it any easier for everyone to know your business. Especially when her business had been falling apart.
“It wasn’t hard to find you guys. You were at—”
“The Bar & Grill,” he said, finishing her sentence in a gruff voice.
She nodded. “I walked into the bar and it was like another world in there. Laughter. Pool sticks hitting balls. Pinball machines beeping.” Her voice cracked. “That was when I saw you, sitting at the bar. I could see you smiling, flirting with the bartender.”
“I wasn’t flirting, Dianna.”
She felt her mouth open in amazement. Was he kidding? Did he think she had amnesia? He hadn’t been home for weeks. And when he was free to come home, he’d chosen to stay away.
“Maybe you weren’t,” she forced herself to concede, “but I couldn’t remember the last time you’d smiled at me like that or leaned in close to me and laughed at something I’d said.”
She angrily wiped away with her knuckles the sudden tears that were blurring her vision.
“You were the first man I ever trusted. When you said ‘I love you,’ I didn’t think you were saying it just to get me into bed.”
“Goddammit, Dianna, you know that’s not why I said it.”
But she wasn’t done yet, wasn’t ready to listen to any of his excuses. “You said you weren’t marrying me because I was pregnant. You promised you’d be there for me forever. You’d convinced me that I was important to you. That’s what made it hurt even more.”
All her life she’d vowed not to let her hopes and dreams get wrapped up in a man. From that moment forward, after leaving the bar, throwing her clothes into the backseat of her car, and driving away from their apartment for the very last time, she hadn’t ever again made the mistake of trusting another man with her heart.
“You let me down, Sam.” She held his gaze. “That’s why I left.”
A knock sounded at the door and it took Sam several seconds to figure out where it was coming from when all he could hear were Dianna’s words spinning around and around inside his head.
The sound came again, accompanied by a voice this time.
“Pizza delivery. Do I have the right room?”
Feeling as if he were sleepwalking, he made his way to the door, gave the kid some money, and took the pizza.
Dropping the steaming box on the scratched-up dresser, he knew he needed to get a grip before he turned around and blasted back at her. But even though some of the things she’d said made sense, even though it didn’t take a genius to see that he hadn’t exactly behaved like a hero when he was a clueless twenty-year-old kid, he wasn’t ready to concede a damn thing.
Not when she thought he’d only wanted to marry her because she was pregnant.
Not when she’d accused him of “doing the right thing,” instead of truly loving her.
If she couldn’t see that he loved her with everything he had back then, he sure as hell wasn’t going to waste his time convincing her now.
“Do you have any idea what it was like to come home to an empty apartment?”
He’d never been able to erase the picture of her thin gold engagement ring lying on the Formica kitchen counter.
She didn’t say anything, just clasped her hands tightly in front of her chest like a shield over her heart.
“You didn’t even leave me a note. You just packed up your things and left. It was like being kicked straight in the gut.”
He’d never believed in love. Not after watching his parents tear each other to shreds his whole life. But he’d believed in her. Until she’d betrayed him by walking out of his life without a word.
“You let me down too, Dianna. So I guess that means we’re even.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when he noticed her shoulders rounding as if the fight had gone out of her. In the dim light of the lone lamp by the bed, her eyes looked haunted, with dark circles beneath them.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, her eyelids at half-mast, and he felt like the world’s biggest bastard for temporarily forgetting what she’d been through in the past twenty-four hours.
First the crash. Then her sister’s Mayday call. Now him railing at her for something that happened long enough ago that he should have been over it already.
“You’re tired,” he said, abruptly changing the subject.
It would be better for both of them if he got out of the small motel room. No question that he needed to walk away, regroup.
“Eat some pizza and get some sleep. You’re going to need the food and rest for our adventure tomorrow. I’ll be back in a bit.”
She didn’t say anything as he walked out of the room, didn’t call his name or ask him to stay. Why the hell would she, he asked himself as he made the short walk down the street to the closest bar.
The grizzly bartender slid him a pint of Guinness and he chugged half before he set the glass back down. Midway through his second pint, after her claims had time to settle, he suddenly found that he couldn’t refute them. All these years he’d been so busy blaming her for leaving. But now he saw that he’d taken the easy way out. He hadn’t wanted to take a frank look in the mirror and ask himself what he’d done wrong or how he’d fucked things up.
In that instant, he realized why he’d lost it after she left: Way down deep in his subconscious, he’d known that he’d driven her away.
Staring bleakly at the dried condensation rings on the bar top, he realized that although he’d defined his entire life by saving people, in the end, he was helpless with the people he cared for the most. Dianna and her miscarriage. Connor and his burns.
He hadn’t meant to leave her to cope all by herself. Those first couple weeks after the miscarriage, he’d tried to be there for her, but it was so hard to know what to say, to know what not to say. Most of all, he didn’t want to talk about anything that would make her cry any more than she already was. When she finally told him to go back to work, it was such a relief to stop feeling like the clumsy giant tiptoeing around the apartment that he’d grabbed the chance with both hands.
Stupid kid that he was, he’d thought that maybe after both of them had some space to come to grips with what had happened, things would return to how they were before the baby. He’d wanted everything to go back to normal, for the hardest choice to be what kind of pizza to order. At twenty, it had just been easier to go fight fires. To tell himself he was needed on the mountain.
Leaving his unfinished beer on the counter, he headed for the door.
He’d bailed on Dianna once. He wouldn’t bail on her again, even though sticking around was by far the hardest thing to do.
CHAPTER TEN
DIANNA TOSSED and turned in the hard, lumpy motel bed. Not only was she terribly worried about April, but she felt horrible about the way she’d behaved with Sam.
After he’d left the motel, she’d barely had the strength left to strip out of her clothes and crawl beneath the covers. She didn’t remember anything after that, not until two a.m., when she woke up. She was disoriented at first, having slept in two strange beds during the past twenty-four hours.
But quickly, she realized she wasn’t alone.
Sam was only a couple of feet away, which meant she’d never be able to get back to sleep, not when she could hear him shift on the sofa and breathe in his delicious scent.
He aroused her senses like no other man ever had.
As anxious as she was about April, it was still hell on her system being so close to him, knowing that if she wanted
to, she could crawl out of bed and wrap her arms around his neck, curl up on his lap, and bury her face against his chest.
And that was just the problem: She wanted to. Badly. Even when they’d been fighting only hours before, he was still the one she wanted to run to for comfort.
And for pleasure.
She’d never been able to resist him, not for one single second. She’d moved to San Francisco because if she’d stayed in Lake Tahoe, she would have inevitably returned to him, despite how empty, how broken their relationship had become.
Again and again while he breathed evenly beside her, Dianna considered waking him up and apologizing for the things she’d said after leaving the hospital. It wasn’t that she didn’t mean them, but lying awake in the dark with nothing to do but think, she realized she could have approached the confrontation differently. She hated knowing she hadn’t given him so much as an inch of space to respond to her grievances.
She’d been on the attack. Intent on full-on, outright damage.
And yet, amazingly, he’d come back to their room. After the way she’d ripped him to shreds, he hadn’t left her to search for April alone. Or taken off altogether.
If she hadn’t been able to push him away last night, then was there a chance that nothing she said or did was going to make him run? Did the fact that he was sleeping in the cramped sofa mean he’d changed?
Propping herself up in bed with the pillows, she watched him sleep soundly, his inhalations seemingly peaceful and even. All hotshots were trained to catch rest wherever they could, and it suddenly occurred to her that she didn’t know if he’d come straight from a fire to the hospital or even how long it had been since he’d been to bed.
Quite possibly, she realized as her stomach twisted into a tight knot, he hadn’t been alone in that bed.
He didn’t wear a ring, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dating someone. It didn’t mean he wasn’t getting ready to pop the question to some small, cute brunette who worshipped his every move and made him feel like a million bucks.