And yet, even as he mentally dissected all the ways she'd changed, all the reasons they were more different than ever, his body was telling him to get over there, to pull her tight against him and kiss her until they were both gasping for air.
What the hell was he thinking?
Her friend moved first, standing up and holding out her hand. "Hello, I'm Ellen Ligurski, Dianna's best friend. Her producer, too."
One of the woman's eyebrows was raised in question. She had to be wondering who the hell he was.
"Sam MacKenzie," he said. "Dianna's ex-fiancee."
Ellen's eyes went round like saucers, and she mouthed, "Oh my," at the same time that Dianna gasped.
Well, that confirmed what he'd suspected all along; Dianna had completely buried her past when she'd moved to San Francisco. Especially the part about him.
But before latent anger could get the best of him, he told himself to get over it. They'd both started fresh. They'd both come out of the relationship just fine. He still had his wildfires. And she had the whole world at her feet. Neither of them had a damn thing to complain about--apart from her car accident, of course.
"I saw you on the airplane," her friend said. "If I'd known that you were coming to see Dianna, I would have given you a ride."
She turned to Dianna and whispered, "This is the guy I was telling you about," loud enough for him to overhear.
Dianna and her friend had been talking about him? Interesting.
He let one side of his mouth quirk into a charming half smile. Ellen responded as expected, her eyes and mouth growing soft, an answering smile on her lips.
She was clearly still trying and failing to cover her shock at hearing that he and Dianna had once been an item. Practically husband and wife, with a white picket fence and everything.
"I heard Dianna was in a car accident," he said to the woman. "And I wanted to see for myself that she was all right."
"I'm fine," Dianna said, her warm, slightly husky voice washing over him, making a beeline for his groin.
Her colorless face and tightly pinched lips belied her relaxed words and he was selfishly glad to know that he wasn't the only one having a hard time with their impromptu reunion.
"I'm glad to see that," he said, even though the truth was, he hadn't expected to come all this way to find her sitting on the edge of the hospital bed in designer clothes that probably cost more than he made in a week.
What an idiot he was for actually thinking she needed him.
At the same time, he wanted to drop to his knees to give thanks that she'd survived the head-on, that she wasn't wrapped head to toe in bandages, that there weren't doctors hovering over her, pumping blood into her, stitching up her organs while they tried to keep her alive.
The air in the room was strained and heavy. Ellen's eyes jumped between the two of them, back and forth several times, as if they were playing a tennis match.
Finally she offered, "I've got some phone calls to make for this week's lineup. I'll give you two some privacy."
Dianna nodded, her lips still pursed tightly, two pink spots of color emerging beneath her cheekbones.
"Sounds like a good plan."
"Call my cell when you want me to come back," Ellen told Dianna before she squeezed past him out the door.
Closing it behind her, Sam finally moved toward the bed.
Dianna's scent used to be fresh soap. The green Irish Spring bar. Now, she smelled expensive. Foreign. Out of his reach.
He didn't like it.
As much as he didn't like the inch of makeup she'd applied to her face with a spatula. She'd never needed anything to "fix" her beautiful, golden skin. Maybe all that makeup worked on TV, but it looked all wrong to Sam.
Those months they were together a decade ago, he'd thought he knew her. But when she left, he'd questioned everything. Seeing her now only confirmed those doubts. The old Dianna would have been simply glad to be alive after the car crash. The new one was clearly concerned with looking pretty.
Moving his gaze back to her face, he could see her mind racing behind her clear, apparently calm green eyes. She was trying to figure out how best to deal with him.
Hell, he was working out the same thing.
"What are you doing here, Sam?"
He didn't know how he'd expected her to react to his showing up unannounced, but given the sparkling jewels on her fingers and ears he'd have bet on cold and distant, that he was merely one of the many peons coming to worship at her feet.
He was surprised by the heat beneath her words, the unspoken accusation that he shouldn't have come--and that she didn't want him here.
Didn't she realize he hadn't had any other choice but to get on the next plane to Colorado? That hearing about her accident had sent him into a tailspin, into his own head-on collision with the past?
He'd never been one for telling lies. He wasn't going to start now.
"I needed to make sure you were okay."
He wasn't saying anything she couldn't have figured out for herself and he didn't feel as if he was giving away a deep dark secret. But when her eyes suddenly softened and she unclamped her jaw, he found himself adding, "Connor told me about your accident and I was worried about you. I couldn't sit at home without knowing how you were doing, without seeing you for myself. Considering how bad they said the crash was, you look good."
He desperately wanted to reach out to her, to touch her skin, to see if it was still silky soft.
"You don't just look good, Dianna. You look amazing. Simply amazing."
Dianna was stunned not only by his presence, but by everything he was saying.
She didn't know what to think. What to say. Where to look.
She wanted to stare at him, drink in his tanned skin, the sexy new lines on his face. She wanted to continue studying him until she figured out when and how he'd changed from the hot young firefighter she'd loved to this mature man, who looked rough and hard in all the right places and soft in none.
She forgot everything as she looked at him, her worries about April and the accident shrinking to a small glimmer in the back of her mind. All this time she'd convinced herself that she'd left her past behind her, but simply seeing Sam was pushing every last one of her painful emotions back up to the surface.
She was frightened by the attraction that still simmered between them. But most of all, she was alarmed by how much she loved seeing him, by how much it mattered to her that he came all the way to Colorado to check on her.
The last time she'd cared this much about Sam, he'd broken her heart.
Somehow, she needed to stop herself from falling all over again.
Thus far, she hadn't managed to play it cool, which was crazy. She was a master of cool. She'd been in a hundred uncomfortable situations on her TV set. She needed to draw on those experiences and pull herself together.
So although she was dying to know every last detail about the last ten years of Sam's life, she wouldn't allow herself to give in to her curiosity. Instead, she'd assuage it by asking about his brother. She'd be polite. Interested, of course, because she'd always liked Connor. But she'd pull back before the conversation had any chance of going too deep.
"You mentioned Connor. How is he?"
Sam's expression went from hot to cold so fast her head spun.
"None of us heard from you for ten years. You didn't leave a telephone number. Or an address. You didn't send Christmas cards to the station. You just disappeared."
The force of his words pushed her back against the pillows. She opened her mouth to defend herself, but no words came.
"I gave you what you wanted, Dianna. I let you be gone. So what do you care what happened to Connor?" She was reeling from the anger--and hurt--behind his words. But she couldn't ignore the red flag of danger that told her something had happened to Connor. Something bad.
"Something happened to him, didn't it?"
His lips tightened and the muscle in his jaw jumped. She held her breath, desp
erate now to find out what had happened to Connor, even though she already knew she wasn't going to like what she heard.
"He was burned. Last summer in a blowup in Desolation Wilderness."
"Oh God," she breathed, remembering the news reports from that wildfire. "Every time I heard about a bad fire in the Sierras, I thought about you," she said softly.
His face registered surprise and she mirrored it back at him. Suddenly it seemed important that he know just how difficult it had been--both then and now--to stop worrying about him and the rest of the men she'd known on the Tahoe Pines crew.
"Just because I left Lake Tahoe didn't mean I could pretend your job wasn't dangerous. I thought about everyone on the crew. About Connor. And I prayed that all of you would make it through unscathed."
When she stopped talking, she realized she'd broken her own vow to keep her distance. The beautiful man standing in front of her was too dangerous for such recklessness.
"We all came out of it fine," he said. "Everyone except Connor."
The thought of how much pain Connor must have been in sent a new wave of nausea through her.
"Where was he burned?"
"His hands and arms," Sam said in a cool, almost clinical voice. "His chest and the back of his head a bit."
She could only imagine how hard it must have been for Sam to watch his brother get hurt. To be so close and yet just far enough away that he couldn't save him, couldn't keep the fire from taking its spoils.
On the verge of saying this, she realized he was staring at her hands. Looking down, she realized she was cracking her knuckles and made herself pull her hands apart. The cracking was a sign of weakness. Dianna hated showing weakness to anyone.
Especially Sam.
"Tell me what happened, Sam. Please."
He was silent for a long while and she thought she understood why. Firefighters weren't big talkers, especially when one of them got hurt. Sam had explained it to her once, telling her that the most important thing was getting back out and doing their job, not stewing on what had gone wrong.
In truth, this trait had been one of the things about Sam that had driven her crazy: He'd always had her on a "need to know" basis. And as far as he'd been concerned, she simply didn't need to know the gory, scary details of his day-to-day, which meant she'd known next to nothing about his job and had to get her information from the newspaper like everyone else.
Sensing that more questions would only put him more on guard, she gently observed, "I just can't picture Connor getting hurt. He always seemed so invincible."
Sam finally sat down on the chair beside her bed, so close that the hair on her arms stood on edge, and goose bumps covered her skin.
Late at night, when she was exhausted and her defenses were down, she'd dreamed a thousand times about being with him again, but she never thought she would experience this closeness live and in person. She wanted to reach out and touch him to see if he was real or if he'd disappear like he always did in her dreams right before she pressed her lips against his.
"Logan, Connor, and I were working on clearing a patch of brush a quarter mile from the blaze."
He spoke quickly, as if he had to get the words out before it became too difficult to recount the event.
"Sparks must have jumped over us in the wind, and before we knew it, we were on top of the fire. Logan realized it first, even though Connor and I were closer to the fire. Logan should have made a break for it. He should have saved himself. Instead he came down the hill and saved our lives."
Dianna wasn't surprised by what Logan had done. Like the rest of the men on Sam's crew, Logan had been gorgeous and fearless, and yet he'd stood out to her. Not because she was attracted to him, but because she knew a kindred spirit when she met one. He hadn't needed to tell her that his life hadn't always been easy. She'd seen it in his eyes, in the set of his jaw, in the way he carried himself.
"I always liked Logan."
"He just got married."
Again, she was surprised by Sam's intensity. And the fact that there was no mistaking his meaning of, "Back off, he's taken."
Well, she wasn't going to rise to the bait.
"I'll make sure to send his new wife something pretty for the house." Getting back to Connor, she asked, "So the three of you ran up the mountain? And then what?"
His eyes clouded over and she wondered if he was back there in Desolation Wilderness with Logan and Connor, breathing in hot, black smoke.
"Death was right there, right behind us. We were almost out, when the breeze kicked up and the flames sucked Connor down."
She took a shaky breath. "It must have been horrible."
She knew the Forest Service sent in psychiatrists whenever there was an accident. She also knew that hotshots rarely talked to the suits, that they weren't willing to risk getting kicked off the crew later on because of a momentary weakness recorded in their official files.
"Have you talked about this with anyone?"
Sam shook his head once, firmly. The urge to take him in her arms and heal his bottled-up pain was so strong that she had her hand on his arm before she could corral her compulsion.
He stiffened and she immediately yanked her hand away. The skin on her palm and fingers felt like she'd grabbed on to a hot platter right out of the oven.
"I should have insisted on bringing up the rear," Sam finally said in a hard voice.
Clearly, guilt still weighed him down. Even though he'd almost died saving his brother, he obviously wished he could have done more.
"It should have been me getting burned. Not my little brother."
It was painful, this reminder of how much they both loved their siblings, an unbreakable bond that a part of her wished they didn't have. Still, she needed him to know that he wasn't to blame.
"He's alive, Sam. You pulled him out of the fire. It must have been so hard on you, having to go back out there and fight wildfires without Connor. You two have worked together for so long. And he's such an asset not only to you, but to the entire crew."
When he remained silent, she asked, "What's his prognosis? Will he fight fire again?"
"He's doing everything in his power to convince the Forest Service that he belongs back on the crew. He's gone through hell and back with skin grafts and physical therapy and never complained. Not once."
She wasn't surprised. The MacKenzie brothers had more than good genes in common. They were both strong.
Unbreakable.
"I'll bet he's still a swashbuckling ladies' man through it all, isn't he?" she said, forcing a smile.
But instead of smiling back, Sam turned the questions around on her.
"What about April? I've always wondered if you were able to pull her out of the foster system."
Regardless of how things had gone wrong between them, Dianna had never forgotten Sam's unwavering support during those first months when she was wading through paperwork and red tape.
"I got her, Sam."
Finally, he smiled back and she lost her breath.
She fiddled with the blanket as she gathered her composure, knowing it was only fair to tell him as much about April as he'd told her about Connor, even though it wasn't easy for her to talk about it.
"She's lived with me for the past six years."
He whistled softly. "It took you four years to get her back, huh?"
She'd never completely shaken off her frustration from those endless months of battling with the state.
"Every time I thought they were going to say yes, they found another reason to say no."
"But you got them to change their mind."
His clear admiration was surprising. She liked it far too much.
How could it still matter what he thought about her after all these years? After all her success?
"She must have been fourteen by the time she came to live with you," he said, doing the math. "How was it, living with a teenager?"
It was tempting to let everything pour out, to pretend that
the past ten years hadn't happened, that they were sitting together in his apartment talking at the end of a long day.
Thankfully, she still had some sense of self-preservation, a little voice in the back of her head warning her not to say too much or let him in any closer.
"It was hard at first," she said honestly. "I don't think adolescence is easy for anyone. It certainly wasn't for me. I'm sure she'll find her way eventually."
He raised an eyebrow as if to say he knew there was far more to the story than she was telling him, but fortunately, he let it go.
"I'm glad it worked out for you. For both of you."
Despite her warnings to herself, Dianna couldn't take her eyes off of his beautiful face. She wanted to stare at him for hours just to watch his expression change by degrees and admire the way his muscles flexed beneath his T-shirt.
Her feelings scared her. Really scared her.
All these years, she'd tried to convince herself that she'd fallen in love with a fantasy hero. That they were just kids fooling around. That the miscarriage had been a narrow escape.
She wanted to believe that there had been nothing real between them.
So then, why did it all feel so damn real?
------
Sam couldn't believe how much he wanted to stay with Dianna. She'd barely touched on April, but he also knew that she was right in keeping the details to herself. They were treading dangerous waters. Instead of keeping to the surface, they were diving down far deeper than they should.
She'd barely had to push him for details about the Desolation Wilderness incident and he'd crumbled. And yet talking to her about it felt unbearably right, as did her touch, when she'd reached out in empathy and placed her hand on his arm.
He couldn't believe how hard it had been to keep from reaching out and pulling her against him.
Hadn't he learned a damn thing ten years ago?
During their conversation, his brain had been working overtime to try to get used to her glossy veneer, to her perfectly white teeth and much blonder hair, to her perfectly manicured nails and soft, expensive-looking clothing. Interestingly, what helped most was watching her pop and crack her knuckles. He was thankful that at least one thing about her had stayed the same.
The bad habit stood out in sharp relief against the backdrop of her perfect, shiny beauty.
For the first time since he'd met her, he felt out of place, like the two of them didn't belong in the same room. Ten years ago, she'd been a poor, embarrassed girl with a drunk mother. She'd needed him to save her.