Can't Help Falling In Love (The Sullivans Book 3) Read online

  Preparing himself to deal with the possibility that the reason Eric hadn’t been able to get back up the stairs to the apartment on the third floor was because the stairs had burned up, or collapsed while he’d been helping Megan and Summer, Gabe called out to Megan, “You’re doing great. All we need to do is grab the hose and follow it back down.” There was no time to try to radio his captain with his coordinates. Everything he did from here on out would depend on a decade of fire training…and instinct.

  He took her hand in his and placed it over the rigid pressurized hose. When he was confident that she had it, he moved behind her to help push her along, lifting her when her legs collapsed every few feet or when she was coughing too much to move on her own.

  It was damn hard going through the heat and smoke, and he admired the hell out of her. He should have been carrying two dead weights out of the apartment building, not just one little girl. But somehow Megan was holding it together. Despite everything, she was holding focus.

  One leg, one arm after another, she put everything she had left into moving forward. The weight of his safety gear and oxygen tank combined with holding Summer under one arm was extraordinary. But he hadn’t spent the past fifteen minutes hiding in a bathtub holding on to hope that someone would find him. He had it worlds easier than Megan did.

  “Turn around,” he yelled to her when they reached the landing at the top of the stairs. “We’re going to go down backward. And we’re going to keep moving, no matter what.”

  He moved behind her again, going lower on the stairs to catch her in case she fell. Her little girl was stirring in his arms, and he prayed she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of this fiery hell.

  A loud booming noise sounded, and he looked up to see part of the wall beside Megan’s front door falling down in sheets. The oxygen that had been reintroduced from the bathroom had combined with the heat and heavy smoke inside the apartment to create rapid combustion.

  Grabbing Megan, he moved with her and her daughter as quickly as he could down several steps. She had her head lowered and her arms over her head to protect herself from falling Sheetrock.

  “Keep moving!” he yelled.

  As the seconds ticked by, they made it down one more step, and then another, but it was slow going and fraught with peril. Beneath his feet, Gabe could feel how thin the well-worn steps were. They could crumble at any second.

  They’d made it down two flights of stairs before he heard his crew yelling over the deafening sound of the mini explosions that kept going off all around them.

  Gabe knew time was running out. It was time for a last burst of speed.

  He pushed himself to the brink as he descended the last few steps, still maintaining a firm grip on Megan and Summer.

  When he was almost at the bottom of the stairs, he finally saw what had stopped Eric from coming back upstairs. A huge ceiling beam had fallen down over the rail, and it had sent the whole area around it up in massive flames. Judging from the water and smoke pouring off it, he guessed Eric had been focused on putting that fire out before it destroyed the entire staircase, leaving Gabe and his victims stranded upstairs.

  Somehow he needed to get around the beam, but it was still too big and too hot for him to get past without letting go of Megan first. Damn it, he didn’t want to leave her there alone where anything could happen to her while he took Summer outside.

  Just then, thank God, through the smoke he heard voices yelling, “Give them to us,” and a moment later Eric and Todd were pulling both mother and daughter from his arms and taking them to safety.

  Amazingly, it wasn’t until that moment that Megan lost consciousness, her strong grip at his arm going limp as Eric took her from Gabe.

  As he yelled, “The mother just passed out,” to his partner, Gabe’s attention was so focused on Megan that he waited a moment too long to hurdle the smoking beam himself.

  He heard the loud crack a split second before a chunk of ceiling came flying down straight onto his forehead. He hit the ground as hard as the beam had hit him. Darkness swam before his eyes.

  The last thing he heard was the motion-detection alarm on his belt going off.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Megan Harris woke with her daughter in her arms. They often snuggled at night after a late movie or if Summer had had a bad dream, but something felt different. Not just the bed, but the itchy spot on the inside of Megan’s elbow and the way her throat felt raw and abused.

  She smelled smoke in her hair, in Summer’s hair, and she scrunched up her nose at the scent of fire that felt as if it was seeping from their pores.

  Suddenly, it all came back to her. She woke all the way up with a gasp, her eyes flying open. There were two narrow beds pushed together side by side in the hospital room, but Summer’s bed was empty. At some point during the night her daughter had chosen to climb in with her and snuggle up close.

  The fire.

  Oh, God, the fire.

  She’d almost lost—

  No. Summer was right here, in her arms.

  Megan pulled her daughter closer and Summer shifted to look up at her.

  “Mommy?”

  “Hey there, baby.” Her words came out rough and ragged. As if she’d actually swallowed fire. Which she pretty much had. Megan kissed her little girl on the forehead and each cheek, following those kisses up with a puckery smooch on her soft little lips. “How are you feeling?”

  Summer gave a little wiggle. “Okay, but I want them to take this itchy tube out of my arm.” She lifted up her left arm and looked at Megan’s. “We match.”

  Smiling through tears of joy and gratitude, Megan agreed with her daughter. “We do,” she said, then held up four fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Six.” Her daughter’s crooked grin told her she was teasing. “Four.” Summer held up one finger. “What about me?”

  “One,” Megan said with a kiss to the fingertip. “How about we call the doctor and see if they need us to keep our IVs in or if we can be set free?”

  A smiling, middle-aged doctor came in shortly after Megan hit the call button, clearly pleased to see them awake and doing so well. The doctor quickly checked their vitals, smiling as she wrote on their charts, then removed their IVs. “You’re welcome to stay here a while longer if you’d like, but I’m happy to say it doesn’t look like either of you have any of the serious aftereffects of prolonged smoke inhalation, probably because you’re both young and healthy.”

  Megan shot a glance at Summer. She didn’t want to freak her daughter out, but she needed to ask the doctor a very important question. “Summer was unconscious for a while. Are you absolutely sure she doesn’t need to see a specialist to make sure everything is okay?”

  The doctor shook her head and smiled again at both Megan and Summer. “No. Everything looks great.” She turned her focus to Summer. “You’re in awesome shape, kid.”

  Summer grinned back at the doctor. “I’m the fastest kid in my class when we go out to the track. Even faster than the boys.”

  The doctor laughed. “I have no doubt you are. So,” she asked Megan, “do you know what you’d like to do? Would you like to stay here for another day?”

  “Thanks, but I think we’d both like to head home.” A moment too late, she realized she didn’t have a home to go back to.

  The doctor gave her a sympathetic look. “I’m sure you’d like to get washed up and changed.” Before Megan could remind her that they didn’t have any clean clothes to change into, the doctor brought over a bag. “The hospital keeps a stash of clothes for people in your situation. I’m so sorry about what happened to you, but I’m very glad you’re both doing so well.”

  Tears threatened again. She was in a situation. How she’d hoped that her situations were behind her.

  Well, she thought as she ruthlessly pushed more tears away, she and Summer had survived the first “situation” five years ago and they’d survive this one, too. Heck, they already had survived, hadn’t
they? Now it was just down to details.

  If there was one thing Megan knew how to deal with, it was details. Her work as a CPA meant she was a master at taking the often messy financial details of her clients’ lives and transforming them into clean, well-organized accounts and spreadsheets. She’d simply have to do that for herself now. She’d heard enough accountant jokes to last several lifetimes, but she loved her work. It gave her great pleasure to make sense out of chaos and to watch numbers line up in perfect rows and sums. And after what she’d been through with Summer’s father, Megan loved the security of a job in which gray areas simply didn’t exist. The figures had to add up every single time, and for every disparity, there was an accompanying reason that would clear up the problem.

  Thankfully, she was religious about backing up her clients’ files to an off-site server. She’d be okay there, at least, once they’d found another place to stay and she was ready to get back to her job.

  Before leaving the room, the doctor reminded them to take it easy for a few days and to check back in with her if they had trouble breathing, had coughing spells or felt dizzy and confused.

  The police came in a few minutes later to take her statement about the fire. She tried to keep her voice strong and steady while Summer was listening, but her voice caught more than once. Each time, the two police officers would stop their questioning so that she could compose herself.

  When they were finally alone again, Megan told her daughter, “I’m going to take a shower and then you can go on in and clean up.”

  Summer nodded, reaching for the remote control and turning big, pleading green eyes on her. “May I watch TV?”

  Even though Megan was usually strict about not watching TV during the day, she quickly decided that something mindless would be a very good thing for her daughter right about now. She nodded, ruffling Summer’s short blond hair before scooting off the bed. “Just for a little while.”

  “Yay!”

  As Megan headed into the bathroom toward what was going to be the best shower of her life, she was glad to know that, where her very resilient daughter was concerned, it looked as if she was going to be okay.

  Only, as she stood under the warm spray that was slowly washing away the black smudges of smoke on her skin—along with what she realized were the charred ends of her hair—she didn’t have any idea how long it was going to take her to feel okay, too. Not with the visions of what might have happened to them running through her head one after the other—mental pictures of their ordeal that were blurred with the dark edges of a thick, black fog.

  And yet, despite how exhausted and drained she felt, she hadn’t forgotten about the heroic firefighter who had pulled them out of their flaming apartment. He’d risked his life for theirs. Once she and Summer were back on their feet, she would go find him. Not just to say thank you, but to find a way to repay him for the incredible gift he’d given them.

  The precious gift of life…when death had been so horribly close.

  Closing her eyes tight, as if that would keep the dark visions at bay, she lifted her face to the water and let it wash away her tears of shock—and joy that she got to live another day with the little girl who meant absolutely everything to her.

  * * *

  As they walked through a nearby Target store a couple of hours later, Megan was amazed to find that, despite the horrors of the fire they’d lived through, Summer had returned almost immediately to her normal energetic personality.

  Megan wished she could rebound so fast. As soon as they’d walked into the store, they sat down on the plastic red chairs in the small cafe and made a to-do list. There was so much to think of, so many things to tackle.

  Despite what the doctor who had attended them had said, Megan had already made an appointment with Summer’s regular pediatrician. She knew her daughter wouldn’t be crazy about going to the doctor again, but Megan couldn’t take any risks with her. And, to be perfectly fair, since fairness was of utmost importance to six-year-olds, Megan had scheduled an appointment for herself, too.

  They were wearing mismatched clothes that didn’t fit quite right. She needed to get all new IDs. The tips of her hair had singed badly enough in the fire that she now desperately needed to get a haircut if she wanted to look at all presentable. And she badly needed to find out if her neighbors were okay. When she’d asked around at the hospital, no one had mentioned anyone else from her building being admitted. She prayed it was because everyone else had gotten out unscathed.

  Of course, making this very overwhelming list after filling out approximately two zillion forms for the insurance company wasn’t exactly helping her state of mind. She was used to plenty of paperwork, but this had been over the top.

  She’d purchased their small but charming apartment last winter and had been fixing it up in her spare time. Now all she had to show for her hard work was a promise of money from the insurance company. After they did their assessments, of course. Until then, they’d given her enough cash to get by on until she could contact her bank for new ATM and credit cards. They’d also informed her that she had been checked into a Best Western hotel near the hospital until she could make other arrangements.

  As soon as she bought a new cell phone, she’d call her parents and try to break the news of the fire to them without giving them heart attacks. No doubt they’d be on the next plane out from Minneapolis to come take care of her and Summer. Of course she wanted to see them, wanted to feel their warm arms around her, but at the same time…well, she wasn’t looking forward to a repeat of five years ago when David had died.

  No doubt about it, they were going to put the pressure on her to come “back home.” They’d use this fire as the perfect example of how much safer she and Summer would be in the small town she’d grown up in.

  Megan unconsciously lifted her chin. She was proud of how well she’d done raising her daughter by herself. And, regardless of what her parents thought, she’d learned her lessons about safety perfectly well. The men she’d dated the past couple of years had been accountants like her, or teachers, or corporate engineers. She’d never again make the mistake of giving in to the thrill of being with a man who thrived on risk, who ran toward danger instead of away from it like any sensible, reasonable person would.

  Summer tugged her toward the food, and Megan broke another one of her rules, this time about junk food as they bought hot dogs and nachos and big cherry Slushies. But although Summer polished everything off, Megan couldn’t do more than take a couple of bites.

  Knowing how much her daughter liked new clothes—oh, who was she kidding, they both did—Megan told her, “We’re just going to buy a few essentials like jeans and T-shirts today.”

  “But we’ll need to get a whole bunch of new stuff soon, right?”

  Silently thanking God that her daughter was more pleased about getting new clothes than she was distressed about losing her old ones in the fire, they went to try on a handful of things and were on their way to the front of the store to buy them when Megan realized she’d forgotten something very important.

  Yes, they needed clothes. Of course, they needed to buy some food. But despite how cheerful Summer was being about their situation, her daughter had just had all of her things taken away from her…including the Rapunzel doll she’d slept with every night.

  Knowing they needed to be extremely careful with their cash for the time being, she put down one of the T-shirts she’d been planning to buy on the dressing room reshelving cart and steered her daughter toward the toy section.

  “Look, I think they have Rapunzel dolls here. Why don’t you go pick one out?”

  Summer’s eyes lit up, and she threw her arms around her mother. “You’re the best mom in the whole world!” As she ran down the aisle to get the doll, Megan found herself standing in the middle of the big store with tears threatening to fall again.

  When they’d been trapped in the bathtub, she’d hoped, she’d prayed, that she and her daughter would live to do
something as mundane as go shopping together, but the fact was that as the fire had raged hotter and bigger, as the sirens had rung out louder without anyone coming to help them, she’d almost stopped believing.

  When Summer returned with the brand-new doll, perfect in its shiny package, Megan quickly wiped away the evidence of the emotion threatening to spill over again. She knew she had a lot to learn from her daughter’s smiling face, from her happiness over something as small as a pretty doll.

  They’d lost things, but they still had each other.

  All she wanted to do now was check into their hotel room and curl up with Summer for a much-needed nap. But as soon as they arrived at the hotel, her old neighbor and friend, Susan Thompson, pulled her aside.

  “Megan, Summer, thank God you’re all right!”

  The older woman brought both of them in for a hug. Again, tears threatened, and Megan had to hold her breath and focus on a patch of dried gum on the carpet to keep from breaking down. She wasn’t normally a crier, hadn’t let herself give in to tears even after David’s death. She’d been too busy then trying to keep up with her two-year-old, trying to hold on to her accounting job and keep them fed with a roof over their heads, and resisting the pressure from her parents to go back home to Minneapolis immediately and never, ever leave again.

  Mrs. Thompson, however, had no such qualms about crying. Her cheeks were shiny with tears as she finally let them go. “As soon as I told the firefighter you were both inside, he ran straight in to get you.”

  Again and again throughout the past hours, Megan’s brain had flashed back to the firefighter who had found them in the bathtub, his firm, confident voice directing her. Her skin, her muscles and bones, still felt the phantom imprints of his hands, the strength of the way he’d lifted, moved, pulled her and Summer toward safety.

  They were alive because of him.

  Susan sat with Megan on the nearby faded couch in the lobby. “He had just helped me and Larry out onto the sidewalk when I looked around and realized you and Summer weren’t standing there with the rest of us.” Her mouth trembled. “I’d seen you come in just a little while before the fire started, so I knew something was wrong.”