He said it with certainty. Not the empty, reassuring kind—the kind that came from having watched people go through this before, having been the person pulling them out and checking on them after.
He was still standing in my hallway. The hallway was narrow. There were maybe two feet between us, and I was leaning against the door frame of my bedroom, and he was standing under the smoke detector he’d just installed, and the apartment was very quiet.
“Thank you,” I said. “For coming over. For doing that.”
“Took thirty seconds.”
“That’s not what I’m thanking you for.”
He didn’t ask me to explain. He just looked at me with those green eyes that saw too much and said too little, and the space between us felt like it was getting smaller even though neither of us had moved.
“You were on a call tonight,” I said. “A structure fire.”
“County line. Barn on a horse property. No one was hurt.”
“Do you always go in?”
“When it’s my crew, yeah.”
“Every time?”
“Every time.”
I should have let it go. It wasn’t my business how he did his job, and the man had been a firefighter for fourteen years—he didn’t need me worrying about him walking into burning buildings. But the thought of it—of him in the smoke, in the heat, on the wrong side of a wall that could come down—sat in my chest like a coal.
“That scares me,” I said.
The words were out before I could stop them. They hung in the narrow hallway between us, and I watched his face for the reaction—the dismissal, the reassurance, the “it’s the job” response that would put distance between us and make this easier to walk away from.
He didn’t give me any of those.
“Good,” he said quietly.
“Good?”
“Means you give a damn.”
My breath caught. He was looking at me the way he’d looked at me in the truck—steady and certain and unhurried—but this time there was heat behind it. Not the careful restraint of a man choosing his moment. Something rawer. He’d walked out of a fire tonight and driven straight to my apartment, and he was standing in my hallway in his turnout pants with soot on his arm, and the control I’d watched him maintain for the past four days was thinner than I’d ever seen it.
“Gabriel?”
“Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you kiss me in the truck?”
His jaw tightened. His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up. “Because I wanted you to know it wasn’t about the moment.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve been thinking about it for two days and I just drove here in my gear because you called and I couldn’t—” He stopped. Exhaled through his nose. Started again, quieter. “I couldn’t not come.”
I reached for him. My hand found the front of his shirt—the damp navy cotton, warm from his body—and I closed my fingers in the fabric and pulled. Not hard. Just enough to close the distance I’d been pretending didn’t matter.
He came forward. One step. His hand found my hip, and the weight of it—heavy, deliberate, his fingers pressing into the curve of it—sent a current through me so strong my knees softened.
His other hand came up and cradled the back of my head, his fingers sliding into my hair, and he tilted my face up toward his. I could feel his breath. I could count his eyelashes. My heart was hammering so hard, I was sure he could feel it through his palm where it rested against my hip.
“Brenna.”
