Forget Me Not (Golden Falls Fire Book 4)

by Scarlett Andrews

  Could this night be more perfect?

  No, Annabelle thought. It couldn’t. Sean might not be a scholar, but he sure was a gentleman, and a romantic gentleman at that. Her crush was on the boy he’d been, but her feelings now were for the man he’d become. The one who spent his days trying to make other people’s worst days a little bit better. The one who’d rappelled into a narrow crevasse and saved her life. The one who’d taken a trick from her grandfather’s playbook and made her heart swoon.

  When the Ray Charles song ended, they stood still. Annabelle wanted to freeze the moment, to stay in his arms forever, to dance like this with Sean for the next fifty years and more. But the pianist was taking a break, so they returned to their table. Annabelle felt newly shy and newly hopeful.

  A waiter appeared at the table. “Miss? Another Baileys?”

  “Please,” Annabelle said.

  “Another porter for you, sir?”

  “Sure, thank you.” As soon as the waiter walked away, Sean leaned in. “Thank you for the dance.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m sorry that I didn’t get to know you in high school. But I’m going to make it up to you. In a way, I’m glad this is my second chance.”

  “This?” Annabelle asked, her voice high and nervous.

  “Yes, this.” Sean swept his arm to encompass the old-world elegance of the piano bar. “This moment. This dance. This date.” He looked straight at her with his brilliant green eyes, and an electric current of adrenaline and desire flowed through her bloodstream. “I really like you, Annabelle.”

  “I like you, too, Sean.”

  But as she said it, Annabelle had an odd feeling like a prank was being played on her. That there was a hidden camera recording the hot, perfect guy leading on the nerdy, unattractive girl. All her high school insecurities were still intact, all these years later. And even if Sean wasn’t pranking her—and her logical mind told her that he wasn’t—if he ever realized how insecure she was, he—so confident, so desirable—would drop her in a heartbeat.

  Fake it until you make it, she told herself. Pretend this is no big deal.

  Their second round of drinks arrived, and they ordered dinner: a seared steak salad for Annabelle and a reindeer burger for Sean.

  Sean raised his glass. “So. To second chances?”

  Annabelle clinked her glass against his. “To second chances.”

  She took a long sip of Baileys, its sweet warmth relaxing her. “So who are you now?” she asked. “Besides a guy who saves people for a living?”

  He told her a bit about his life—that he owned a home and was a volunteer coach for the city’s youth hockey league and had a moody cat named Samwise. Annabelle was delighted by this; she loved cats and was a sucker for funny cat videos. He told her about his family: parents still together and living in Anchorage, his dad a pharmacist and his mom a paralegal, his quite-a-bit younger brother finishing up a college degree in business management.

  Annabelle tried to listen, but at the same time, she thought this date couldn’t really be happening. Sean was too handsome. Too attentive. He’d even danced with her. It had been a truly swoon-worthy moment.

  But it didn’t feel real.

  It felt like a teenage fantasy . . . and she was a grown woman, too smart to be so stupid as to think a man like Sean would be interested in a woman like her.

  “Enough about me,” he said just then. “Give me the rundown on yourself now.”

  She did: the rented apartment, no pets, grad school life. Her parents, still together. Her dad a seasonal feast-or-famine fisherman and her mom a postal employee. An older brother she wasn’t close with who lived in Seward with his wife and two kids. She told him about Peter and Linda Eubanks and how they were her university family, the people with whom she celebrated holidays and who understood her far better than her own family.

  “And do we want to talk about our exes?” His eyes gleamed. “Or is it too soon?”

  She bit her lip. It would always be too soon to hear about Sean with anyone other than her.

  “It’s just . . . I remember the kind of girls you dated in high school, and I saw what your most recent girlfriend looks like. I’m nothing like them.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” Sean said. “And I mean that in the best way possible.”

  “I feel like you’re totally out of my league.”

  “No.” Sean’s reply was firm. “I’m the one who’s out of your league.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re Sean Kelly!”

  “I don’t—” He paused and looked a bit frustrated. “I might have been the golden boy in high school, but all I had going for me was hockey. I had no backup plan, and no one ever told me I might need one.” Annabelle noticed he rubbed his right knee in what seemed like an unconscious gesture. “So when I got injured, all the expectations I had for my life, and the expectations that everyone had for me, were gone.”

  Ouch, Annabelle thought as Sean took a long drink of his porter and looked toward the far side of the room. She remembered how Sean had felt about hockey back then, the same way she felt about science. She could only imagine how she would feel if some life circumstance took that away from her.

  “That must have been awful,” she said.

  Sean shrugged. “Everything turned out fine. I have this stubborn streak, and I wasn’t going to let myself become some washed-up old jock. I might not have been the best academically, but I knew I had to pull it together and find an alternative to the NHL.”

  “You mentioned dyslexia,” Annabelle said.

  “It hasn’t held me back,” Sean said. “I never let it.”

  She smiled. “Another way you’re stubborn.”

  “It just meant I had to work harder, and I’m not afraid of hard work.”

  “Tell me about paramedic school,” she said. “What kind of stuff do you need to know as a paramedic?”

  “You need to know about everything that could possibly go wrong out in the real world,” he said. “Trauma—from getting an airway on someone who’s been in a major car accident to controlling bleeding from a gunshot wound—to interpreting EKG patterns during a cardiac event, to administrating antidotes for drug overdoses. We don’t have to know the biochemistry behind it all, but we do have to know the practical, immediate, correct responses to a bunch of different things.”

  “Are you an adrenaline junkie?” she asked.

  “Not to an extreme,” he said. “I like high stress in the moment, but I’m not as big of a risk taker as some of the other guys. But it’s definitely not a tidy clinical setting. Like this one time, we had a guy who was shot while on a motorcycle and crashed into a wall in the middle of deep snow, and it cracked his helmet. So we had to treat the gunshot wound, plus get his helmet off, plus get him out from under this collapsing brick wall . . .”

  “Whoa,” Annabelle said. She didn’t know things like that happened, especially not in Golden Falls. “Did he live?”

  “He did, amazingly. Not that we can take a whole lot of credit. We do what we can, but there are so many factors in whether a person survives. It’s more of a crapshoot than most will admit.” He shook his head a little, which made his wave of brown hair fall across his forehead, and he pushed it back. “For a lot of the people we run on—like terminally ill patients or a drug overdose—it’s just a stop-gap. They’ll die soon no matter what we do on that particular call.”

  Annabelle tilted her head at him. This wasn’t the laughing, joking, always-on social guy. This was a Sean Kelly she hadn’t known existed, someone who had seen a lot and done a lot and had to confront ugly truths about the world. Much more, she had to admit, than she did: her world was cerebral, scientific, academic.

  “I’m so boring compared to you,” she said.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I find you utterly fascinating. I have to tell you, the reason I broke up with my last couple of girlfriends is because I got so bored by them and their small little worlds and their
petty perspectives on life. You’re crazy smart, and you’re working on big problems. That’s sexy as hell.”

  She warmed to his compliment. “Thank you.”

  A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face. “I just worry that you’ll get bored with me.”

  She wanted to reassure him that could never happen. To tell him that while her previous boyfriends indeed had been intellectual, they hadn’t been smart in how to treat people. They hadn’t been emotionally intelligent, which was a quality Sean had in spades.

  But she said none of that because it felt like her impossible dream was coming true and she wasn’t prepared for it. As always, she shied away from her high emotions and, noticing that the piano player had stopped and that the old-fashioned clock above the bar read eleven o’clock, she stammered out a change of subject.

  “It looks like we closed this place down.”

  Even in the dim lighting, Sean’s eyes blazed with an intensity that frightened her. It made her feel unbearably vulnerable.

  And then, as if sensing this, too, Sean spoke with a warmth that put her back at ease. “We sure did. Wait here. I’ll close the tab and grab our coats, and then I’ll walk you to your car.”

  Annabelle made to get her wallet since that was what Derrick would have expected, but Sean shook his head and smiled. “I’ve got this.”

  Once their coats, gloves, and hats were on, both Sean and Annabelle resembled people twice their size. They stepped out together into a cold night made beautiful by soft snowfall. Annabelle thought about the snow falling on glaciers high in the mountains, the weight of it compressing the layers beneath it, delicate crystals compacting into hard glistening ice, that in turn crushing and grinding against the rock upon which it lay.

  Her musings were interrupted when Sean’s gloved hand took hers. The mere pressure of his fingers through Gore-Tex and insulation was enough to send a happy shiver across her skin.

  “Where’s your car?” he asked.

  “Next to City Park,” she said. They walked up Main Street, hand in hand, Annabelle limping slightly, as snowflakes fell softly like confetti around them. The street had some traffic, both vehicle and pedestrian, but the fresh spring snow gave everything a hushed, muffled atmosphere.

  Annabelle’s body hummed with awareness of Sean’s strong figure beside her, a buoyant feeling of being swept away on an uncontrollable tide. It scared her.

  “Sean,” she began. Her voice sounded too loud. “I have to tell you . . . I’m not used to feeling such fireworks.”

  He grinned at her. “You’re feeling fireworks? Good. Me too.”

  Annabelle bit her lip. “I’ve lived a boring life as far as relationships are concerned.” The words didn’t quite convey the truth: that she was terrified by the emotions sweeping through her, the lust and the hope and the out-of-control-ness of it all. It was like being stuck on that ledge in the crevasse all over again, but with no training to get her through and no rescue helicopter on the way. “I guess I’m a little bit afraid of what I feel when I’m with you. I just need to take things slow, to process and think about it and analyze what I’m feeling.”

  Sean chuckled slightly. “You’re such a thinker. Me, I just go with it.” He squeezed her hand. “But I’ll take things as slow or as fast as you need, Annabelle.”

  Her car was beneath a glowing golden lamppost near the pioneer statue in the corner of the park. “This is me.”

  Sean didn’t say anything, but he pulled Annabelle against him into a hug. It made her want to take off the heavy layer of her down jacket despite the cold, just to remove the layers of clothing standing in their way. Her heart was in overdrive, pulse pounding in her ears, watching the way the clouds of her breath and Sean’s mingled in the space between them.

  This is too much, too soon, that frightened voice in her head told her. Don’t fall so hard, stupid! But Annabelle was powerless to stop herself from tilting her face up at Sean, helpless to prevent herself from thinking, kiss me, please, please, kiss me . . .

  And he did. His kiss was soft at first, tender, and it sent waves of desire thundering through her blood. Her entire awareness was focused on his lips and the magic they were working on her. She pushed off her sense of caution and deepened the kiss.

  He pulled her even tighter against him and now his kiss was hard, wanting, passionate. Their tongues danced against each other, each brush sending a thrill of pleasure downward. The warmth of him was a shocking contrast to the coldness of the air.

  After several minutes, they broke apart. Annabelle was out of breath, feeling wanton and achy. She knew that if they were alone, in a room together, nothing would stop this from going further and further until they were satiated. Annabelle had never felt such wildness coursing through her.

  But then her voice of reason piped up again. Be careful, it shrilled at her. How do you think this ends?

  She had to escape before she fell further under the intoxicating spell of Sean’s lips on hers and the thought of his body, of his hands, doing things to her . . . “I should go,” she gasped. “Thank you for tonight.”

  “Wait,” Sean said.

  He kissed her again. Annabelle’s annoying voice of reason was once more muffled in the back of her head.

  “I guess I should let you get home before we both freeze out here,” Sean said, and she realized that he’d released her. Everything was a glorious fog. “See you soon, Annabelle. I’ll be on shift Monday and Tuesday, but I’ll call you before I see you on Wednesday.”

  Wednesday? Then she remembered trivia night. When it came to taking things slow, Sean wasn’t making it easy on her.

  “I hope tonight gave you something to think about,” he said.

  She laughed in spite of herself. “It did.”

  She said goodnight, and when she got into her car, letting the engine warm, she touched her shaking fingers to her lips.

  Sean had kissed her, and she thought life would never be the same.

  16

  Trivia night, take two.

  It was the Wednesday after Sean had taken Annabelle on what had been the best first date he’d ever had. Certainly, he’d been on dates where he’d gotten “luckier” in the traditional sense of the word, but sex hadn’t been his goal, not that first night. What happened instead had felt more significant.

  Annabelle had confessed to having feelings—actual feelings!—for him. Such powerful ones, in fact, that she, being the scientist she was, felt the need to take a step back and examine them critically. Sean had found that need not only significant but adorable.

  So she’d held back with him.

  But she hadn’t held back during their kiss, not at all. Her wanting came through loud and clear, and Sean was sure his had, too. How could it not? He was more taken with Annabelle than he’d ever been with a woman. His senses had reeled and time had stood still, and he could have sworn that for the duration of their kiss there had been peace on earth and angels singing and the whole heavenly shebang.

  He’d thought about that kiss a lot in the days since. Replayed it again and again. While he was driving the fire truck on icy streets in the middle of the night, while he was waiting for his morning coffee to brew, when he was at home with a purring, tail-flicking Samwise taking a nap on his chest, a flash of memory would interrupt. Annabelle had stirred up a wild mix of uncertainty, intrigue, and damn-near-uncontrollable lust.

  All the while, he’d counted down the hours until he would see her again. They’d been exchanging friendly, flirty texts; he sent her silly cat videos because she’d said she enjoyed them, and she’d sent him cat memes back, as well as a picture of her grandparents when they were younger, dancing in the kitchen. The photo had struck an unexpectedly deep emotional chord with Sean, although he’d kept his response light, just an, “Aww, sweet!” because he didn’t want to scare her off.

  On Wednesday, he coached hockey practice in the afternoon, showered at the rink, and drove straight to The Salmon Eye for trivia night. For the firs
t time in months, the temperature had climbed to just above freezing for a few hours, and the cheerful, plinking sound of snow melting put a smile on Sean’s face. It was only a hint of things to come; the “melt-out,” as they called it, didn’t usually happen until late April, when the ground would be free of snow.

  He arrived at The Salmon Eye half an hour early and joined the rest of David Attenborough’s Pants at their table—all except for Annabelle, who wasn’t yet there.

  “No Annabelle?” he asked after greeting them and nodding to Cameron that yes, he’d love a beer.

  “She’s not late. We’re just early,” said Lottie.

  Cameron poured Sean an IPA from the pitcher, and Sean made a quick toast to the team’s success that night before he took a sip. The group was friendly except for Derrick, who couldn’t muster up a greeting beyond a quick nod. That night, probably because he was more confident that things were on the upswing with Annabelle, Sean found Derrick’s sullenness amusing—at first.

  “Rescue any cats from trees this week?” Derrick asked with a smirk.

  “I wish,” Sean said. “We ran calls all night, and rescuing a cat would have been a welcome break, especially after I had to resuscitate an eighteen-year-old girl with a heroin overdose. She was a code—that means dead or dying—almost no pulse, no respiration . . . Man, but after I pushed the Narcan—that’s the antidote—she puked like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.”

  With Cameron and Lottie listening in rapt attention, Sean went on to describe to Derrick in vivid terms the situation inside the ambulance as they’d raced the girl to the hospital. Sean felt a kind of little-boy glee when he saw Derrick turn greenish, knowing he’d probably never ask him about his job again.

  “But enough about my work. I’d love to hear about what you guys are working on.”

  Lottie explained that her area of focus was atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as measured by high altitude glaciers. Cameron was measuring mercury levels in Alaska’s permafrost.

  “And you, Derrick? What’s your research topic?” Sean asked when Derrick seemed disinclined to participate.