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“No!” she said, making a move toward the door.
She slipped past him and Dylan raced after her, catching up a few steps inside the door of the shop. He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back against him, her backside nestling into his lap in a way that made him forget all about the dangers of fire and focus on the dangers of a soft, feminine body.
They both watched as Artie Winton hooked his ax behind the smoking machine and yanked it onto the floor. Then he dragged it into the middle of the shop, raised the ax and brought it down. A few moments later, Jeff Reilly covered the mess of twisted stainless steel with a coating of foam from the extinguisher.
“This is the source,” Jeff called. “It looks like that’s all the farther it got.”
“What was it?” Dylan asked.
Reilly squatted down to take a better look. “One of those frozen yogurt machines?”
“Nah,” Winton said. “It’s one of those fancy coffee-makers.”
“It’s an Espresso Master 8000 Deluxe.”
Dylan glanced down to see the woman staring at the mess of stainless steel. A tear trickled down her cheek and she gnawed on her lower lip. Dylan cursed softly. If there was one thing he hated about fighting fires, it was the tears. Though he had given bad news to victims before, he’d never really known what to do about the tears. And to his ears, his words of sympathy always sounded so hollow and forced.
He cleared his throat. “I want you two to check around,” he ordered as he patted the woman’s shoulder. “Make sure we don’t have any electrical shorts or hot spots in the walls. We don’t know what kind of wiring they’ve got in here. Look for a breaker panel and see if it’s flipped.”
He pulled off his gloves and took the woman’s hand in his, then gently pulled her toward the door. He should have been thinking about what to say, but instead he was fascinated by how delicate her fingers felt in his hand. “There’s nothing you can do in here,” he said softly. “We’ll check everything out and if it’s safe, you can go back in after the smoke clears.”
When they got outside, he led her toward the back of the truck and gently pushed her down until she sat on the wide back bumper. A paramedic came rushing up but Dylan waved him off. Her tears came more freely now and Dylan felt his heart twist. He fought the impulse to gather her in his arms. She really didn’t have much to cry about. All she’d lost was a coffeemaker.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I know you were scared, but you’re fine. And you barely lost a thing.”
She snapped her head up and leveled an angry glare at him. “That machine was worth fifteen thousand dollars! That’s the best machine on the market. It makes four shots of espresso in fifteen seconds. And you and your ax-wielding Huns chopped it to bits.”
Stunned by the intensity of her outburst, Dylan took a step back as if scorched by her words. She owed him at least a small bit of gratitude! “Listen, lady, I—”
“My name’s not lady!” she cried.
“Well, whatever your name is, you should be happy,” he said, unable to keep the anger from edging his voice. “No, you should be thrilled. Today was a good day. No one died.” Dylan sighed, then lightened his tone. “You didn’t get hurt, no one got hurt, you didn’t lose precious family mementos or your favorite pet. You lost a coffeemaker, and a defective one at that.”
Her mouth snapped shut and she looked up at him through thick, damp lashes. Dylan watched as another tear trickled down her cheek and he fought the temptation to reach out and catch it with his thumb.
“It’s not just any coffeemaker,” she reminded him.
“I know. It’s an Espresso Deluxe 5000 whatever,” he said. “A big hunk of stainless steel with a few gauges and a lot of tubing. Lady, I have to say that—”
“My name’s not lady,” she insisted. She brushed the hair from her face, then wiped off a smudge of soot from the end of her nose. “It’s Meggie Flanagan.”
Up until that very instant, the moment she’d said her name, Dylan hadn’t recognized her. She’d changed—a lot. But there were still traces of the girl he knew so long ago. “Meggie Flanagan? Mary Margaret Flanagan? Tommy Flanagan’s little sister.”
She sent him a dismissive look. “Maybe.”
Dylan chuckled, then pulled his hat off and ran his fingers through his hair. “Little Meggie Flanagan. So how’s your brother? I haven’t seen him for ages.”
She regarded him suspiciously at first, then her gaze flitted over to the name tape on his jacket right below his left shoulder. Her expression fell and a blush rose on her cheeks, so intense Dylan could see it beneath the soot. “Quinn,” she murmured. “Oh, God.” She braced her elbows on her knees, then buried her face in her hands. “I should have figured you’d show up and try to ruin my life all over again.”
“Ruin your life?” Dylan asked. “I saved your life!”
She jumped to her feet. “You did not,” Meggie countered. “I was perfectly capable of putting out that fire on my own.”
Dylan crossed his arms over his chest. “Then why did you call the fire department?” he inquired.
“I didn’t,” she muttered. “The alarm company did.”
He grabbed the dish towel from her hand and waved it in her face. “And is this how you were planning to put it out?” Dylan shook his head. “I’ll bet you don’t even have a fire extinguisher inside, do you. If you only knew how many serious fires could be stopped with a simple fire extinguisher, I—” She tipped her chin up defiantly and his words died in his throat.
Meggie Flanagan. He almost felt embarrassed by his earlier attraction. After all, she was the little sister of one of his old buddies. There were unwritten rules between guys and one of the biggest was you didn’t hit on a friend’s sister. But Meggie wasn’t that gawky kid with the braces and the goofy glasses anymore. And he hadn’t seen Tommy for years. “I could cite you for a code violation.”
“Oh, go ahead,” she challenged. With a soft curse, she neatly turned on her heel and walked back toward the shop. “Considering our history, I wouldn’t put it past you.”
History? Dylan stared after her. “Meggie Flanagan,” he repeated, this time out loud. He’d always remembered her as a shy and nervous kid, the kind of girl who stood back and watched the world from a safe distance. This woman could never be classified as shy. She used to be so skinny—and flat as a board. Even from his vantage point, he could see that she’d filled out in all the right places.
He’d spent hours after school at Tommy Flanagan’s house, listening to music or playing video games. And she’d always been there, silently watching them through those thick glasses, standing in the shadows so she wouldn’t be seen. He’d practically lived at the Flanagan house when he was a senior, but it wasn’t the video games that brought him back again and again. Tommy’s mother was a cheerful and loving woman and she could always be depended on for an invitation to dinner, which Dylan gladly accepted.
Meggie always sat across from him at the table and whenever he’d looked up, she was always staring at him, the very same stare she fixed on him whenever they met in the hallways at school. She was two years behind him, a sophomore when he was a senior, and though they’d never shared a class, he saw her at least once or twice a day near his locker or in the lunch room. He’d seen how the kids poked fun of her and Tommy had been particularly protective, so Dylan had felt the same, considering her a surrogate little sister.
He watched now as she paced back and forth in front of her shop, rubbing her arms against the early November wind. The urge to protect was still there, but it was heavily laced with an undeniable attraction, an overwhelming need to touch her again just to see if his reaction was the same. Dylan shrugged off his jacket then walked over to her. “Here,” he said. “You’re going to catch a cold.”
He didn’t wait for her assent, merely draped the heavy waterproof jacket over her shoulders, allowing his hands to linger just a moment. The tingle that shot up his arms when he touched her did not go unnoticed. She stopped pacing and gave him a reluctant “thank you.”
“What did you mean?” he asked, leaning back against the brick facade of the building to watch her pace. “When you said I’d ruined your life once before?”
She frowned. “Nothing. It doesn’t make a difference.”
Dylan shook his head and smiled in an attempt to lighten her mood. “I hardly recognize you, Meggie. Except for the name. We never really knew each other, did we?”
An odd expression crossed her face and he wasn’t sure if he read it right, through the soot and the windblown hair. Had he hurt her by his words? Was there a reason he was supposed to remember her?
To his disappointment, their conversation ended there. The radio on the truck sounded another alarm and the firefighters gathered at the scene stopped to listen. Dispatch gave an address in an industrial area, a factory fire, already a three-alarm blaze. “I have to go,” he said, reaching out and giving her hand a squeeze. “It should be safe to go back inside now. And I’m sorry about your machine.”
She opened her mouth, as if she had something more to say, then snapped it shut. “Thank you,” she murmured.
He walked backward toward the truck, strangely unable to take his eyes away from her. For a moment, she looked like the girl he’d remembered, standing all alone on the sidewalk, unsure of herself, hands clutched in front of her. “Say ‘hi’ to Tommy the next time you see him.”
“I will,” she called, her gaze still fixed to his.
The truck rumbled to life behind him and Ken Carmichael honked the horn impatiently. “Maybe I’ll see you around,” Dylan added.
“Your jacket!” she called, slipping out of it.
He waved. “We’ve got extras in the truck.”
He hopped inside the cab and took a spot behind the driver, then pulled the door shut. As they drove away from the scene, sirens wailing and lights blazing, Dylan glanced up and found Artie and Jeff grinning at him. “Gee, Quinn, what happened to your jacket?” Artie asked. “Did you lose it in the fire?”
Dylan shrugged.
“We could be fighting a fire on the moon and you’d still manage to find a woman to charm,” Jeff said. He leaned forward and shouted to the driver. “Hey, Kenny, we have to go back. Quinn left his jacket behind again.”
Carmichael chuckled, then yanked on the horn as he maneuvered through afternoon traffic. “That boy has a nasty habit of losing jackets. I’ll just have to tell the chief to take it out of his pay.”
Dylan pulled the extra jacket off the hook beside his head and slipped into it. This time he wasn’t sure he wanted it back. Meggie Flanagan wasn’t like the other women for whom the ploy had worked so well. For one thing, she didn’t gaze up at him with an adoring look. From what he could tell, she pretty much hated him. And she certainly wasn’t the kind of girl he could just seduce, then leave. She was the kid sister of a very old friend.
He drew a long breath, then let it out slowly. No, it would be a long time before he retrieved his jacket from Meggie Flanagan.
A THIN COAT OF GRIMY soot covered every surface in the shop. The grand opening of Cuppa Joe was scheduled for the day after Thanksgiving and Meggie was overwhelmed by the task in front of her. She still had to train eight new employees and finish up with the last details of the decor. A call to the insurance company assured her of a check for both a cleaning crew and a new machine. But she didn’t have time to wait for the crew to come. Tables and chairs were due to be delivered tomorrow. If they expected to open on time, she and her business partner, Lana Richards, would have to get the place in shape on their own.
The smoke hadn’t been the worst of yesterday’s fire. The destruction of her espresso maker had been a crushing blow. “Three months,” she muttered. “Three months until they can deliver another machine. I even offered to pay them extra for a rush order, but they said they couldn’t do it. Every coffee shop wants one of those machines.”
“Can you please stop with the machine?” Lana struggled to her feet and tossed a dirty rag into the bucket of warm water, then brushed her blond hair out of her eyes. “We’ll just buy two Espresso Master 4000s. Or four Espresso Master 2000s. Anything so we don’t have to talk about the espresso maker anymore.”
In truth, she’d had to force herself to think about the machine. It kept her from lapsing into daydreams about the handsome firefighter who had ordered it destroyed. How many times over the past 24 hours had she caught herself adrift in a contemplation of Dylan Quinn? And how many times had the contemplation ended in a surge of well-remembered humiliation.
“This is our business,” Meggie said softly. “We didn’t spend the last five years saving every penny we made, working at jobs we hated, begging the Bank of Boston for a loan, just to have some overenthusiastic firefighter end it all with one swing of his ax.”
Any woman might be fascinated by Dylan Quinn. After all, it wasn’t every day you met a real life hero, tall and imposing in his firefighting gear. He seemed made for his job, dauntless and determined…strong and… Meggie sighed softly. There was probably a Dylan Quinn in every woman’s life, a man who was the subject of an endless string of “what ifs.”
What if she hadn’t been such a geek in high school and he hadn’t been such a god? What if she’d gotten her braces off a year earlier? What if she’d been able to talk to him without giggling uncontrollably? A moan slipped from her lips. Though she’d come a long way since those days, the memories were still acutely embarrassing.
Over the past years, she’d thought about Dylan Quinn every now and then, wondering what had happened to her first love. On lonely nights or after disastrous dates, she’d even conjure up a fantasy of what it might be like to meet him again. After all, she was different now. The braces and thick glasses had been replaced by perfect teeth and contact lenses. Her once lackluster hair color was now enhanced by one of Boston’s best hairdressers. And most importantly of all, she’d grown curves in all the proper places.
Still, there were a few things that hadn’t changed. She still wasn’t very good with the opposite sex. Though she’d accomplished a lot in her professional life, her personal life left a lot to be desired. It probably had more to do with the men she chose to date, but Meggie just wrote her bad luck off as a lingering effect from too many years as a geek.
Dylan, on the other hand, had been one of the most popular boys in high school. With his dark and dangerous good looks and his devastating charm, he’d been every girl’s dream date. But he’d still been a boy and her memories of him had always held an image of a tall, lanky, high-school Casanova with a killer smile. That image had shattered the moment she met those strange and beautiful eyes again.
All the Quinns had those eyes, gold mixed with green, a shade too unique to be called hazel. Those eyes that held the power to turn a girl’s knees weak and make her pulse race. And to send Meggie right back to the pain and humiliation of that one night, the night of the Sophomore Frolic.
“The fire wasn’t all bad,” Lana said. “You got to see Dylan Quinn again.”
“I needed that like a sharp stick in the eye,” she said.
She and Lana had been friends since their college days at the University of Massachusetts, so there was very little that Lana didn’t know about the men—or lack of them—in Meggie’s life, both past and present. But the picture of Dylan Quinn she’d painted for her friend hadn’t been very flattering—or entirely truthful. Had Lana been asked she probably would have described him as a cross between Hannibal Lector and Bigfoot.
The bell on the front door jingled and Meggie popped up from behind the counter, hoping that her new Espresso Master 4000 Ultra had arrived from the restaurant supply house. But it wasn’t Eddie, the usual driver, who walked in the door. This man was tall and good-looking and…Meggie swallowed hard. This man was Dylan Quinn!
With a tiny groan, Meggie dropped back down behind the counter, then tugged on the leg of Lana’s jeans. He was the last person she wanted to see! “It’s him,” she said.
Lana shook her leg until Meggie let go. “Who?”
“Dylan Quinn. Tell him to leave. Tell him we’re not open. Tell him there’s another coffee shop over on Newbury.”
“Oh, my God,” Lana murmured, staring toward the front of the shop, stunned by the revelation. “That’s Dylan Quinn? But he doesn’t look—”
Her words were stopped when Meggie slammed her fist down on Lana’s big toe. Lana yelped in pain. “Get rid of him. Now!”
Her partner muttered a quiet threat, then stepped out from behind the counter. “Hello. I bet you’re here looking for a good cup of coffee. Well, as you can see, we’re not open yet. Our grand opening is in three weeks.”
“Actually,” he said. “I didn’t come for coffee.”
The warm rich sound of his voice seemed to seep into her bloodstream as Meggie cowered on the floor. She wondered what it might be like to listen to that voice for an hour or two. Would it become so addictive that she couldn’t do without it?
“But I’m sure I could make something for one of Boston’s finest,” Lana continued. “We’ll be one of the few places that serves Jamaican Blue Mountain. Would you like to try a cup? It’s like nectar of the gods. An appropriate drink for you, I’d say.”
Meggie groaned, then grabbed Lana’s leg as she moved to the coffeemaker. “Don’t serve him the Jamaican,” she whispered. “It’s the most expensive thing in the shop. Just get rid of him!”
Lana scooped some beans from a plastic container in the refrigerator, then dumped them in the grinder. “You’re Dylan Quinn, aren’t you?”
“Do I know you?” Dylan asked.
Just by the tone of his voice, Meggie could tell that he’d turned on the charm full force. And Lana, an accomplished flirt, was lapping it up like a sex kitten with a bowl of cream. He’d give her that boyish smile and those little crinkles at the corners of his eyes would make him look so appealing. And Lana would toss her perfect blond hair over her shoulder and laugh in that deep, throaty way she had. And before Meggie could stop them, they’d be rushing to the drugstore for a box of condoms.
“No,” Lana said. “But I’m sure we can remedy that fact. I’m Lana Richards, Meggie’s business partner. Meggie told me how you saved her life yesterday—and our shop. We’re very grateful. Very. I hope there’s a way I—I mean, we—can repay you.”
Meggie cursed softly. Lana was doing this on purpose, teasing and taunting her, tweaking her jealousy until she’d be forced to stand up and show herself. Grudgingly, she stood up, then brushed her hair from her eyes. Dylan, who was now leaning over the counter, stepped back in surprise. “Meggie!”
She forced a smile. “I’m sorry, I was just…there was a thing I was…I had my head in the cooler and didn’t hear you come in.” She cleared her throat. “I’m afraid we’re not open for business yet,” she said, smoothing her hands over her jeans.
“The poor man has been fighting fires all day long. We could at least offer him something,” Lana said.
Meggie crossed her arms beneath her breasts and watched Dylan warily. He’d changed out of his firefighting gear and now wore faded jeans, a T-shirt and a leather jacket, but he looked as rakish as ever. His hair, thick and dark, was still damp at the nape of his neck and she couldn’t help but wonder how long ago he’d stepped out of the shower…wet…and naked.
She swallowed hard, then grabbed a rag and began to polish the copper-clad counter. “Gee, I would have thought you’d still be out pillaging,” Meggie murmured.
Lana walked behind her and Meggie felt a sharp pain on the back of her arm as her partner pinched her. She cursed softly and rubbed her skin, then spun around and sent Lana a withering glare.
“Be nice,” Lana whispered. “I’m going to do some bookwork in the office.”
“I don’t have to be nice,” Meggie muttered. “I detest the man.”
“Then you go do the bookwork and let me be nice. He’s gorgeous. And you know what they say about firefighters.”
“What’s that,” Meggie murmured.
Lana leaned closer and whispered in her ear. “It’s not the size of the hose, but where they point it that counts.”
An unbidden giggle burst from Meggie’s throat and she gave Lana a gentle shove toward the office. When they were finally alone, Meggie sent Dylan a sideways glance, then pulled a paper cup from beneath the counter and set it in front of him. He’d be getting this cup of coffee “to go.”
He observed her intently as she waited for the coffee to dribble down into the tall carafe. A smile quirked the corners of his mouth, so easy and confident in his power over her. God, he was even more gorgeous than she remembered. All her friends in school had crushes on the New Kids On The Block, but Meggie had held out for the real thing—Dylan Quinn. Though he was two years older and a high school senior, she’d somehow deluded herself into believing that the feeling was mutual, that Dylan was in love with her. After all, every time he saw her, he’d smiled. And once or twice, he’d even called her by name.
And then it happened. Her brother, Tommy, had mentioned that Dylan was interested in taking her to her Sophomore Folic. It was the first big dance of her high school career and she’d just assumed she’d be staying home like most of the other wallflowers in her class. But then, Dylan, the most handsome boy in all of South Boston High School, had agreed to escort her to the dance.
She could barely contain herself and she had told all her friends and they told all their friends until the entire sophomore class at Southie knew that Meggie Flanagan had a date with the Dylan Quinn. She’d bought a new dress and had shoes dyed to match. And when a corsage arrived earlier in the afternoon, she’d been so excited she’d nearly burst into tears. Then Dylan arrived, dressed in jeans and dragging his little brother, Brian, behind him. Brian, who was dressed in the tux and wearing a goofy grin.
At first, she hadn’t understood, but then it became clear—Brian was her date, not Dylan. Though Brian was a Quinn, he hadn’t really reached his full Adonis-like potential yet. He was still at least six inches shorter than she was and his idea of charm was staring at her dreamily while he tugged at his bowtie. She would have been better off going with her cousin or even her brother Tommy.
“I suppose you’ve come to apologize,” she said, her back still to him.
