My name in his mouth. Low and rough and careful, like he was making sure he had it right. Like it mattered.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he said.
“I know.”
His mouth found mine, and the world went quiet.
Not the nervous, tentative quiet of a first kiss between strangers. This was the deep, ringing silence of something finally falling into place—a key in a lock, a door swinging open, the held breath before you realize you can breathe again.
His lips were warm and firm and he kissed me like he did everything else—deliberately, thoroughly, without a singlewasted motion. His hand tightened in my hair. His thumb pressed into my hip bone. I made a sound against his mouth that I’d never made before—something between a sigh and a gasp—and I felt his chest expand on a sharp inhale, like that sound had gone straight through him.
I pulled him closer. Both hands on his shirt now, fisted in the cotton, pulling him down to me.
He came willingly, his body solid and warm and smelling like smoke, and I kissed him harder because I needed him to know this wasn’t gratitude. This wasn’t the girl he’d saved, clinging to the man who’d carried her out. This was me. Just me. Wanting him in a way that had nothing to do with fire or fear or the worst morning of my life and everything to do with the man who’d sat across from me in a diner and told me he wouldn’t insult me by saying it could be worse.
He pulled back just far enough to look at me. His breathing was rough. His eyes were dark—that sharp green gone deep and liquid—and his hand was still in my hair, still cradling my head like I was something he’d been given and intended to keep.
“Stay,” I said.
The word came out before I thought about it. Before I could weigh it or qualify it or wrap it in something safer. Just the bare, honest truth of what I wanted, standing in my hallway in a smoke-stained apartment with a man who’d driven across town in his turnout gear because I’d asked.
His head dropped. His eyes closed. I felt his thumb trace a slow circle against my hip, and then he exhaled—a long, unsteady breath that told me the control was gone.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
6
GABRIEL
Her breath was coming out in short, quick bursts. Her fingers were still fisted in my shirt. I could feel her heartbeat through her palms where they pressed against my chest, and the last thread of control I’d been holding since the morning of the fire snapped clean.
I kissed her again. Deeper this time, slower, my hand sliding from her hip to the small of her back and pulling her flush against me. She was warm through the thin cotton of her shirt, and every place her body pressed against mine—her chest, her stomach, her thighs against the rough canvas of my turnout pants—registered like a brand.
I walked her backward. She went willingly, her hands climbing from my chest to my shoulders, her mouth opening under mine, and when her back hit the hallway wall she made a sound—a soft, caught breath—that went straight through me.
My mouth moved to her jaw. Her neck. The spot below her ear where her pulse was hammering. She arched into me and her fingers dug into my shoulders and I groaned against her throat—couldn’t stop it, didn’t try—and fisted the fabric at her hipbecause if I didn’t anchor myself somewhere I was going to lose what was left of my restraint.
“Not the bedroom,” Brenna said against my mouth.
I pulled back enough to look at her. Her eyes were dark, her lips swollen, her chest rising and falling fast. I waited.
She tipped her head toward the end of the hallway. The kitchen was right there—a few steps past the living room, the half wall dividing it from the rest of the apartment, and tucked against that half wall was a small oak table she’d refinished herself, solid and well-built.
“The table,” she said.
Something in me shifted. The careful, measured version of myself—the one who’d pulled back in the truck, who’d chosen his moment, who’d been deliberate about every step—burned off. What replaced it was simple and clear and entirely focused on the woman in front of me.
I lifted her. Hands under her thighs, her legs wrapping around my waist, her arms locking around my neck. She weighed nothing. I carried her the three steps to the kitchen and set her on the edge of the table and stepped between her knees and looked down at her.
Her hair was loose around her shoulders. Her lips were parted. Her eyes were on mine—steady, certain, not a trace of hesitation.
“You’re sure,” I said.
Not a question. A checkpoint. One last off-ramp before I stopped being careful.
She pulled my shirt over my head and put her hands flat on my chest. Her palms were warm, her fingers spread wide, and she looked up at me with an expression that emptied every thought from my brain except one.
“I’m sure.”
