by Julie Miller
TOO LATE. Too late.
Gideon thrashed about in his sleep, trapped in the fiery hell that haunted his dreams. He was burning up. Melting. Going mad with the impending grief that would never let him escape. But the images played over and over again.
The impact of raw, compressed air exploding into a ball of flame lifted him off his feet and dumped him on his backside.
“Meghan!”
She was trapped, and he was her only hope.
Gideon shook his head and moaned out loud. The nightmare that had plagued him for three nights in a row had altered with a sickening twist.
He sucked in a deep breath of oxygen from his tank and plunged into the smoke. “Meg, sweetheart,” he whispered into his mike, “I’m coming for you. Stay with me, babe.”
He paused in the heart of the black, billowing darkness and shut down all his senses except for that finely tuned radar that would lead him to her.
There.
He stumbled into the collapsing boiler room and found her. On the floor. Pinned beneath a ton of burning, warping metal.
“Meghan!”
“Gideon?” He heard her voice like a weak, desperate plea in the distance. “Gideon.”
A shadowy figure materialized out of the smoke, charging at him, knocking him to his knees.
He struggled to stand, but his gear was too heavy. His lungs were bursting in his chest, starved for oxygen. “Meg?”
The unknown shadow knelt over her and laid a long yellow rose across her chest like some damned kind of funeral. Then he bent to kiss her.
“Get away from her!”
Gideon lurched to his feet and tackled the shadow. They fought until his energy waned, until his oxygen gauge clicked on zero.
“Gideon?” Unseen hands pulled at him, and still he fought.
He collapsed beside Meghan and the shadow vanished. But the fire blazed up into the skeletal beams of the dying building, searching for him, circling ever closer. Its fiery talons leaped at his throat and attacked. The evil essence of the fire and the shadow were the same. One enemy.
“Meghan.” He had to help. He had to save her. With a superhuman effort he rose to his knees and looked into her colorless, unseeing eyes. She couldn’t breathe. She was trapped. Dying.
Too late.
He scooped his hands beneath her supine form and lifted. Shoulder to gut. Hand behind knees. But he couldn’t. His left hand refused to hang on. He couldn’t pull her free. He couldn’t hold her. He couldn’t save her.
“Meghan!” He screamed her name on a hoarse plea for mercy.
He’d lost Luke. He’d lost them both.
He was too late.
“Gideon.” He heard the voice from the fringes of his grief. Strong hands were on his face, on his shoulders, shaking him. He felt a soft tap on his cheek, then a harder one. “Gideon.”
Meghan’s face swam in front of his eyes, her smooth skin lined with concern, her golden hair falling down around him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, hearing his voice crack with unshed tears from the pit of a distant dream. “I’m so sorry I lost you.”
“Wake up, Gideon. Please.” She was kneeling beside him now, leaning over him—a sunny savior calling him from his darkest nightmare. Her soft fingers brushed his fevered brow. “I’m right here. Come back to me.”
Gideon’s breath burst from his lungs as he slammed into wakefulness. He sat bolt upright in bed, tumbling her onto his lap. Welterweight though she might be, she was real and solid. And before she could crawl away, he crushed her in his arms, trapping her supple strength and life-affirming warmth against his body. He buried his nose in the citrusy dampness of her freshly washed hair and breathed in the clean, sunny scent of her.
“You’re safe,” he whispered against her neck, teasing his lips against her soft, dewy skin. “Oh, God, baby, I thought I’d lost you.”
“Gideon.” Strong, capable hands brushed the curve of his scalp. “It was a nightmare. Whatever happened wasn’t real.” She traced the rims of his ears and stroked the taut cords of muscle down his neck and shoulders. Her hands continued their tender massage, slowly pulling him back from the tormenting shadows of memory and imagination. “It’s gone and I’m here. It must have been horrible. I heard you cry out in your sleep from the other room. I’m here now. Do you see me? Can you feel me?” She looped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her lips to his feverish temple. “I’m real.”
Deep, tortured breaths shook his body and were absorbed into her sweet, feminine strength. He splayed his fingers at the flat of her back and held her impossibly close, soaking in the scent and softness and sensation of her. “Oh, God, Meg. I’ve needed you.”
He admitted the aching emptiness before rational thought censored his heart.
And he thrust his fingers into her hair and captured her mouth with his, pulling her down beside him onto the bed, seeking the life-affirming welcome of her body before the darkness from his past could claim him again.
Chapter Ten
Making love with Gideon had always been a gentle, leisurely thing. A slow seduction of mind and body. As patiently as he’d taught her about fighting fires, he’d taught her about enjoying and loving sex.
But this was a fiery conflagration that burned out of control, a desperate need for one body to connect with another in that elemental way that celebrated life and trust and humanity.
And Meghan was just as eager to lose herself in the moment. To be everything that Gideon needed. To place herself in that ultimate haven of trust and security. To belong. Truly and completely. To—for this night at least—find her home. Her family. Her love.
“Gideon,” she whispered on a catch of breath between kisses. “Are you sure?” His hand skimmed down her back and squeezed her bottom. She wound her leg around his hip, feeling the strength of him already rising to meet her welcoming heat. “Be sure.”
“I should be asking you that.” He murmured the apology beneath the point of her chin. “But I don’t want you to say no.” He pushed up her chin, exposing her throat to his lips and the dance of heat that moved lower beneath the neckline of the old T-shirt she’d borrowed from him for pajamas. “Say yes, sweetheart. Please.” He pulled back just as his lips grazed the swell of her breast. His face was a contorted mask of control, his chest heaving in deep breaths that butted against her own. “I’ll understand if you don’t—”
“Yes, Gideon. Yes.”
She framed his smoothly shaven jaw between her hands and guided his mouth to hers for a kiss.
Spontaneous combustion flared in the meeting of lips and tongues and fevered breaths. His hard hand slid up beneath her shirt to stroke the bare skin of her back. His calloused palm traced circles that pulled her ever closer and closer, creating a torrid friction that spread through her body like molten lava.
Gideon’s body radiated heat that fed into her own imminent meltdown. His naked torso was slick and musky with the furious struggle from his nightmare and the white-hot strength of his passion. Meghan buried her nose in the raw, masculine scent and ran her tongue along the salt of his skin, catching the tip of a flat, bronze nipple and taking it into her mouth.
“Meg.” His body jerked in a helpless response.
Feeling a sultry feminine power, she repeated the action, licking her way toward the other male nipple and laving him until his hips ground into hers through their underwear and one very annoying sheet.
“Witch.” He swept her shirt up over her head and pushed her onto her back. As the shirt tangled in her arms, he seized the advantage, closing the moist heat of his mouth over her exposed breast, sucking hard and taunting the nipple with the raspy stroke of his tongue.
Meghan twisted and bucked beneath him. It was too much, too fast. A flashover of flame shot through her to the ends of her fingers and toes, and fanned the heavy, throbbing embers between her legs.
“Gideon. Please.” The night was hot. The room was hotter. The oxygen was being rapidly consumed by two bodies that had bee
n alone for too long, two hearts that had always longed to be one.
“I know, babe. I know.”
Answering the urgency of their need, she tossed off the shirt. In seconds the sheet, her panties, his briefs had all disappeared and there was nothing between them. Nothing but hot skin singeing hot skin.
He scooped his hand beneath her bottom and lifted her up to his driving shaft. He plunged into her once. She was slick and hot and primed for release.
He drove into her a second time. The heat bubbled up and threatened to explode. “Gid—”
He stopped up her mouth with a kiss, pushing his tongue inside and claiming her there just as he was claiming her entire body. He was on top of her, in her. Plunging, driving. Taking. Giving. “Now. Meg.” His breath whooshed out against her neck. “I. Need.”
The moan in his throat foretold the brink of his release. Holding tight to his shoulders to finish this ride with him, Meghan hooked her feet around his hips and opened herself wide. Gideon thrust long and hard, pouring himself into her as her body detonated around him.
When he collapsed on top of her, their bodies spent and sated from their frantic joining, Meghan wondered if she would ever breathe properly again. She hadn’t held anything back. She’d given him the solace he’d asked for and found the acceptance she’d needed for herself.
Gideon switched positions before he crushed her, rolling onto his back and pulling her on top of him. He hugged her close while his fingertip traced a tantalizing, languid line along her spine and the curve of her buttock.
She was draped over him like a sheltering blanket, her ear nestled against the hammering beat of his heart. She rode the rise and fall of his chest until their hearts beat at a more soothing rhythm.
“Well.” He made a sound that was half a laugh, half a sigh. “So much for separate bedrooms.”
Now came the cuddle part. The quiet talking. The regrouping. Meghan snuggled closer, winding one hand behind his neck and holding him as best she could in this position.
He’d been so tense when she’d run in from the spare bedroom to see if the moans and cries of her name had been real or part of her own unsettling dreams. The nightmare that gripped Gideon had twisted his muscles into straining knots. His face had been wreathed with pain, his skin bathed in sweat as he faced the horrors that consumed his slumber.
She’d been frightened for a moment. As frightened of the demon who could make this strong man tremble as she’d been of her stalker tonight.
But then he’d reached for her. Groggy with the stupor of sleep, he’d called to her for help. For once in her life she’d been able to give him something her past and her secret couldn’t take away. She couldn’t give him everything he wanted, but she’d been able to give him this.
Meghan dipped her finger into the dimple beside his mouth and smiled with a smug, womanly satisfaction.
Everything about him now was relaxed.
Well, not quite everything.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice drowsy with contentment against her hair.
She nodded. “Are you? I was scared when I heard you cry out.”
He didn’t immediately answer, but she could feel the tension building in him again. “I was dreaming about the night Luke died.”
“That must have been horrible.” She knew the kind of shock and grief she’d gone through when a fellow firefighter had fallen. The sense of one of her own being taken clutched at her heart even now. She stroked a soothing hand across Gideon’s face. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose your partner that way.”
She felt a barely perceptible tightening of his arms around her. “I was too late to help him. My radar chose that night to go on the blink. The one night it counted most in my career. I couldn’t get to him in time.” She waited through a long, long silence for him to continue. “What if I lose it again? When it’s really important. What if you’re in danger? What good is my creepy talent if it doesn’t work when I need it most?”
Meghan was confused. She moved her contented body at last, shifting off Gideon and propping herself up on her elbows beside him. “‘Fires are unpredictable things,’ a wise mentor once told me. You stay alert, you stay fit, you stay smart.” She held his gaze when it slid over to hers. He remembered the skills he’d taught her. “You let the fire talk to you. You listen and react.”
He looked away, finishing the adage for her. “But the lady can still lie.”
Meghan sat up, unmindful of her nudity or the warmth of the night that made a cover necessary only for modesty’s sake. “I know you did everything you could to save Luke. He knows that, too. Everyone knows it but you.”
The surface of his chest shuddered in an uneven breath. “I lost more than a friend that night.”
Meghan dropped her chin to her chest and looked for the sheet, feeling the first stirrings of self-conscious awareness. “So you’re human like the rest of us now. Maybe you lost your confidence in one fire.” She set aside her own misgivings and tried to make him see reason. “You’re still the smartest, most thorough investigator in the department. You can act under pressure, make snap decisions. You took care of the fire at Dorie’s house today.”
He shook his head. “It was a little self-contained fire. And I almost didn’t get that job done, either.” He lifted up his left hand and studied it. “Because of this damn thing I almost failed.”
“But you didn’t.”
“The stakes are higher now. And a lot more dangerous than any trash can fire.” He rolled over onto his right side, propped himself up on his elbow and faced her. The soft glow of the lamp burnished his cheekbones and jaw, but cast shadows across his eyes. “I promised to keep you safe.” The bleakness in his tone was unmistakable. “Luke couldn’t afford to have me fail. Neither can you.”
GIDEON WASN’T SURE how to respond when Meghan reached for his left hand. She sat there beside him, a naked nature-girl temptress, stirring a slow, seeping heat in his blood. He wanted her all over again. But she needed to talk. Or maybe her nurturing instincts sensed that he needed to talk.
But not about this.
“Don’t, sweetheart.” He’d just made love with the most incredible woman in the world. He’d escaped into the sunlight of Meghan’s generous heart and welcoming body. For those few glorious minutes he’d forgotten all about the past.
He wasn’t ready to spoil it by bringing up the doubtful success of their future.
“Let me look. Please.” She cradled it now between both of her hands. Her soft voice and even softer touch had always been hard for him to resist. He wasn’t sure he wanted the useless appendage held up to the light for her inspection, but maybe it was the best way to illustrate his doubts to her. What if her stalker showed up on her doorstep again? At her station house? Her truck? What if he threatened her physically? Trapped her in one of his fires?
Could he do anything? Could he get to her in time? Would he lose her the same way he’d lost Luke?
Yeah, he was a good investigator. After the fact. Someone else, younger, stronger—whole—would have already done the dangerous part. Putting out the fire. Rescuing the victims inside.
Would his only benefit to Meghan be after the fact?
I’ll shower you in rose petals. One for every day you’ll be mine.
Gideon couldn’t let that happen. Meghan might not see a future with him, but he would die before he let that psycho make good on his claim to possess her.
Trouble was, he didn’t know how to prevent the guy from contacting her again. He’d already assigned himself her personal protector. But with his track record for saving lives… Even with the best of intentions…
“Can you feel this?” Her curious question brought him back from his exploration of every worst-case scenario.
She was stroking her thumbs across the back of his hand, tracing the intricate web of scars from the original injury and resulting skin grafts. “A little.” It seemed inherently wrong to see the ugly thing being cherish
ed by two such beautiful hands. “I feel the pressure, not the actual touch on the surface of the skin.”
“What about here?” She dragged her hand along the length of his two stiff fingers. “Can you feel this?”
He shook his head. What was she expecting, a miracle? That he could suddenly clap his hands and it would heal? Luke would come back? He’d have his old job and she’d be his wife?
“There’s too much nerve damage. If I look at them and concentrate…” He did just that, staring hard at his hand where it rested between hers. He curled his thumb and first two fingers into a fist. And then—his physical therapist had said to visualize—the last two fingers jerked, more like a spasm than planned movement. He wiggled them again.
“Gideon!” Meghan’s delighted cry startled him. She leaned over and kissed him, then kissed the hand itself. It had taken him six months to master that little trick. But her sparkling enthusiasm almost made him believe he had done something miraculous.
For a moment he saw himself through her eyes. Her ready acceptance of his handicap, her guileless hope that any improvement was an improvement to celebrate. Her lighted smile reminded him of all the reasons why he’d wanted to marry her in the first place.
“Does the scarring affect the rest of your hand?” she went on, blithely unaware of how he drank in every nuance of her sunny expression. “I mean…” Her cheeks spotted with color, no doubt remembering the incendiary passion they’d just shared. “I couldn’t tell anything before, but—”
“Without the nerves to stimulate them, some of the muscle is atrophying. I do physical therapy to rebuild the muscles that are working and to develop control.”
“Then you should use it more, not tuck it in your pocket.”
She’d noticed that? Of course, she would. She’d been a stellar pupil, with powers of observation almost as scary as his own. He sat up across from her and pulled a pillow into his lap, letting his hand fall to the side, out of sight. “It’s an ugly reminder of losing Luke and the job I can’t do anymore.”
