“But it made me sick, so I ground it out under my shoe. The leaves started smoking and burning so I stomped them out.” Josh took a shaky breath. “But I guess I didn't get it all out.”
Connor had done this a hundred times, heard the confession of an accidental arsonist, worked to calm the person down. But it was different this time. Not because it was his cabin burning.
“Ginger could have died up there.”
The kid really started crying then, had to wipe his nose on his sweatshirt. “I'm so sorry. It was an accident, I swear. I didn't mean to hurt anyone. Especially not Ginger. She's great. I would never want anything to happen to her.”
That made two of them, Connor thought angrily as Andrew moved between them.
“I'll go with him to talk to the fire chief. Make sure he doesn't say anything they can twist later to try to pin this on him as anything other than an accident.” He put his arm around Josh's shoulders, which were shaking with fear and remorse. “Isabel, you should be there too.”
She nodded, turning to say “I'm so sorry,” to Connor before she followed her son and Andrew back to the car.
The receptionist cleared her throat from behind her desk. “Excuse me, are you Connor MacKenzie? Ms. Sinclair has asked you to come back to see her.”
All his life, Connor thought as he moved through the waiting room and down the hall to the triage area, he'd been the steady one. The guy who everyone could count on to keep it together. Even after his stint in the burn ward, he'd been a rock.
It was almost as if the events of this past two weeks had been put into motion to test him, to see what he was made of.
The Forest Service call.
Losing control every time he touched Ginger.
Learning he was going to be a father.
Ginger throwing back his words of love.
Poplar Cove burning down, one hundred years of history, gone up in smoke.
And now, Ginger lying in a hospital bed.
The curtains were drawn and when he pulled one back to step inside, his heart stopped at the sight of her hooked up to an IV, propped up by pillows, lying beneath a thin white blanket.
“Hi,” she said with a small smile.
It was only then that his heart started beating again. She sounded fine and her color was good. But there was no way that he could look at her as just another fire victim, no way he could scan her stats and be satisfied that she was all right.
He told himself to be gentle with her, but once she was in his arms, he couldn't stop kissing her, couldn't help but pull her closer.
His throat was dry, cracked, as he asked, “How is the baby?” His hands automatically moved to her still flat stomach. “Is it-”
She put her hands over his. “Perfectly fine.”
The breath he'd been holding came out in a loud whoosh of air.
“Thank God,” he said, and then, “Seeing you up there on the roof, I've never been so scared. And when I realized there was no way to get to you-”It had been the worst moment of his life.
“Nothing else mattered but getting you off that roof.”
“I had to try to save the cabin,” she said. “Even though I knew you'd be furious with me for not leaving at the first sign of fire.”
“Promise me you'll never do something that brave — or stupid — again.”
She winced at the “stupid,” but held her ground. “I can't make you that promise, Connor, not when something I love might be at stake. Are they going to be able to save the cabin?”
“Probably not.”
A tear fell down her cheek. “It's not fair that the first chance you've had to fight fire in two years is because your own home was burning. I'm so sorry, Connor.”
“I don't care about any of that. Not the cabin. Not even firefighting. The cabin was there when we needed it, to bring us together, to make it impossible for us to ignore our feelings for each other.”
He wasn't going to hold the words back another second.
“I love you, Ginger. Please, marry me. Not because you're pregnant, but because we belong together.”
She didn't pull her hands out of his, but he felt her fingers grow tense.
“I don't want us to repeat a bad pattern, Connor, to do the same thing as your parents and just get married because I'm pregnant.”
“My father was in love with someone else when he got my mother pregnant. I'm in love with you, Ginger. He was nineteen. I'm thirty. He wasn't ready to get married, not to my mother, anyway. But I'm ready for this, Ginger. I'm ready for you. For a life with you. With our child.”
He watched her try to take in everything he was saying, but even so he knew he had to give her more. After the way he'd hurt her, she deserved every last piece of him, no matter how hard he'd fought to hold himself back from everyone for so long.
“That night you told me you loved me, I've never felt so overwhelmed by sensation before. Not even when my hands were melting. It scared me, Ginger. More than anything else I've ever faced. It seemed easier to go numb.”
He lifted her hands to his heart, held them there.
“But now I know I'd rather feel too much than nothing at all.”
She'd made herself say that stuff about repeating a bad pattern, even though her heart wasn't really in it. Just to make sure they'd covered all the bases. So she'd know that nothing had been left unsaid between them.
Because when she looked deep into her own heart, she believed that he loved her. Connor wasn't the kind of man who would lie about being in love simply to get what he wanted, to get her to agree to marry him. Connor would never try to keep her in an emotional prison like so many others had.
Connor was her first love.
Her true love.
“I've never felt this way before, either,” she admitted. “My feelings for you scare me too. You're a part of me now. In so deep that I'll never just be me again. And all I could think as I was up on the roof and the fire was closing in was that I was never going to get the chance to tell you yes.”
Nothing had ever moved her as much as the pure joy on Connor's face.
“Yes? As in yes, you'll marry me?”
“There was never any other answer, Connor. No other choice I could have possibly made. I've loved you almost from that first moment you walked onto the porch. Every time you lost control, I was right there with you, already lost. But this morning on the beach, my feelings were hurt. I wanted to make you work for it.”