Wendy Etherington - Can't Help Falling In Love

My, my, my. There was just so darn much of him to absorb. All that agility, muscle…and man. She dropped her gaze to note he was standing one rung below her, but he still towered over her by several inches. But then, she was a mere five-two, whereas—she observed shamelessly—he was maybe six-four. It was hard to tell with their entwined proximity. Maybe this weird rumbling in her stomach was her weakness for large men.

Then, she remembered. Rescue. The cat.

She pointed toward the pesky feline, still perched several feet above her and looking for all the world like someone had interrupted her late afternoon adventure—and was none too pleased about the censorship. “Don’t forget Fluffy.”

He glanced over her shoulder briefly, then said, “How ’bout I handle you, then I’ll deal with the cat.”

Okay by me. She gave Fluffy one last you’re-on-your-own glare as the fireman started down the ladder and the crowd began to cheer. When they reached the safety of the ground, and her feet rested on the summer green grass, she gazed up at him.

Way up at him. Whoa, baby.

He grasped her shoulder, as if to steady her. “Are you okay?”

Light-headed, she nodded slowly. His smile appeared—bright, charming, confident, maybe a bit reckless, and her throat tightened. As the park began to spin before her eyes, she finally recognized the odd sensation trickling through her body.

Why me? was her last thought as she fainted dead away.

AS JACK TESSON scooped the unconscious woman into his arms, he raised his eyes heavenward, deciding some saint up there had finally cut him some slack. Maybe all those years at the hands of the St. Michael’s Parochial School nuns had finally paid off. No doubt Sister Katherine, who’d thrown him out at least twice a year, and his grandparents, who’d punished him by making him scrub floors in the restaurant/bar they owned, would say she was the devil’s temptation incarnate. Certainly not a woman for “Wild Jack” Tesson.

“Mon Dieu,” he whispered, gazing down at her beautiful oval face. Though she looked angelic, he knew from staring up the ladder that her lacy purple underwear was anything but virtuous.

Ben Kimball raced toward him. “Skyler?”

Perfect name for an angel, Jack thought, even as the medic in Jack finally overrode the man. “She fainted.” Wait a minute. Skyler? The guys at the firehouse had mentioned her. “Your sister?”

As Ben nodded, Jack realized why those bright baby blue eyes of hers had seemed so familiar. The worried and frustrated version of them stared back at him from his captain’s face.

“Let’s get her to the truck,” Ben said.

As they rushed to the ambulance, they picked up a trail of curious bystanders, one being Ben’s younger brother, Steve.

His expression fierce, Steve ordered, “Get her on a back board.”

“She just fainted,” his brother explained as they reached the back of the ambulance.

A grin tugged the corners of Steve’s mouth. “Naturally.” The brothers exchanged a troubled, but affectionate look.

Jack gently laid Skyler on the stretcher Ben pulled from the ambulance bay, pressing his fingers against her wrist and taking her pulse as he did so. A little fast. He fitted an oxygen mask over her face, while Ben hovered, watching his every move. “She’s fainted before?”

“Oh, yeah,” Steve said, sitting on the back bumper.

Jack pulled a stethoscope from a med kit to check Skyler’s heart. As the rhythmic beats reverberated in his ears, she moaned, and he tried to ignore the soft skin beneath his fingers, the tan line along the slope of her breast. He’d worked on patients he’d found attractive before, but never with this level of intensity. Never had one smile and a wide-eyed stare from a pair of baby blue eyes brought him practically to his knees.

He glanced over at his colleagues as he checked Skyler’s extremities for injuries, noting a thin cut on her forearm that he cleaned with antiseptic. “Is she pregnant?”

Fists clenched at his sides, Steve leapt to his feet. “She better damn well not be.”

Ben grabbed his brother’s shoulder, shoving him back down. “Cool it, little brother. She’s not pregnant.”

“How do you know?” Steve countered, his eyes narrowed.

“Because you or Wes would have killed the guy by now.”

Jack snatched his hands from Skyler’s body. Okay. So, he could list an attraction to his boss’s sister under the category headed Bad Career Move.

“She tends to faint whenever she gets too excited,” Ben explained to Jack. “She has MVP.”

“Oh, God!” A man broke from the crowd and threw himself across Skyler’s legs. “She’s going to die!”

Jack grabbed the guy’s arm and lifted him off his patient. His size had always been effective with crowd control, so the small, almost delicate man was easy to remove.

The man gaze up at him fearfully, blinking tears out of his brown eyes. “But, Skyler—”

“Will be fine, Roland,” Ben said, looking exasperated as he pulled him away from the stretcher. “MVP is short for Mitral Valve Prolapse. It’s a condition where the heart doesn’t empty the chamber completely of blood. Stress can sometimes aggravate it.”

Roland eyed Ben with a look that Jack could only describe as adoring. “Really? How fascinating.”

Ben let go of the man’s arm as if he’d just realized he’d grabbed a hot poker.

“Uh, Steve?” Jack said, his voice low.

“Yeah?”

“That guy, is he flirting with Ben?”

“Yep. That’s Roland Patterson.” The pet store owner who’d made the 9-1-1 call, Jack realized. That explained the other guys’ eye-rolling when dispatch had announced their destination. “You should see him whenever Wes is around,” Steve continued. “He gets a bigger hard-on for cops than he does firemen.”

“No kidding.”

“You need to stand back and let the medics work,” Ben was saying to Roland as he gestured—as opposed to leading him—to the crowd.

“What about Fluffy?”

“The cat,” Jack said when Ben frowned.

Stretching, Steve rose. “I’ll check.”

He sauntered away just as an elderly woman approached, shaking her head. She handed Ben a business card. Over his shoulder, Jack read Clovis Crisis Counseling. “You should encourage her to make an appointment with my office as soon as possible, Captain. Climbing that tree was a blatant cry for help.”

“Skyler’s not suicidal, ma’am,” Ben said, tunneling his hand through his hair. “Just impulsive.”

The woman gave him a cagey glare. “Just give her my card.” She walked away.

“Damn.” Ben braced his hands on the stretcher and stared down at his sister, who rolled her head to the side, obviously fighting her way back to consciousness. “How does she get herself into these things?”

Personally, Jack thought the whole event was kinda fun, certainly the most exciting call since he’d arrived in town two weeks ago. He envisioned “ladder rescue experience” on his résumé, surely an asset when he applied to the bigger fire departments in Atlanta in the coming year. Baxter was going to be a great stepping stone. And he knew he’d learn a great deal from working for Ben. Though the guy could loosen up a bit. Especially when it came to his sister.

Jack glanced at her again, checking her pulse at her wrist to have an excuse to touch her again. Damn, she was beautiful. And tiny. Even her bare feet—with toes painted a shocking orange—were small. She was funny, too, remembering her response of “not today” to her brother’s question of whether or not she was going to jump from the tree. Too bad she was off-limits. Of course, a protective family member or two hadn’t stopped him before….