Lucy And The Loner. Elizabeth Bevarly

as it must have unfolded. Twelve randy firefighters ogling an attractive woman with eyes the color of a tropical sky. Yep. Must have been interesting.

      “They told you I like coffee and doughnuts for breakfast?” he finally asked, somewhat mystified about that particular part of the story.

      She bit her lip a little anxiously. “Actually, um...what they said was that you’d love to have me this morning, because you always like a little something, uh—” She cleared her throat indelicately, and the pink in her cheeks turned to red. “They said you like something, um, hot and sweet...in the morning. I just naturally assumed what they were talking about was—”

      “I see,” he interrupted her before she could finish. Oh, yeah. He was going to have a little chat with his brothers down at the station. Pronto.

      Reluctantly Boone stepped aside for her to enter, and she sailed past him on a breeze redolent of Ivory soap. The scent was appropriate for her. She seemed like the clean-cut, eat-all-your-vegetables, go-to-church-every-Sunday kind of woman. In other words, not at all his type. Not anymore, anyway.

      “Look, lady—” he began as he closed the door behind himself.

      “Lucy,” she corrected him over her shoulder. “Lucy Dolan. Where’s the kitchen?”

      “Lucy,” he repeated obediently. “Keep walking. At the end of the hall turn right.”

      He hesitated for a moment, then halfheartedly followed her to the room in question and found her making herself way too comfortable way too quickly. Without asking for permission to do so, she searched his cabinets until she located his dishes in the one by the sink, and carried two plates to the small oak table. Then she unpacked two doughnuts—presumably one for him and one for her—and took a seat at one of the chairs. Too tired and bemused to protest, Boone pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down, then removed the plastic lid from the cup of steaming, fragrant coffee and brought it to his lips for a sip.

      Fortified by even that small gesture, he lifted his doughnut for consideration before taking a bite. When he swallowed, he said, “This is about that debt you said you owe me last night, right?”

      She nodded as she bit into her own doughnut, but was obviously too polite to speak with her mouth full.

      “I told you that you don’t owe me anything,” he said. “But it was nice of you to bring me breakfast. Thanks.”

      She swiped at a dusting of powdered sugar on her upper lip, then licked a scant dribble of jelly from the corner of her mouth. The gesture, although more than a little stirring—for him, anyway—seemed nervous, but he couldn’t imagine what she might have to feel uneasy about.

      “Actually,” she said, decorously hiding her mouth behind her hand as she spoke, obviously embarrassed by his scrutiny, “this is about that debt, but you can’t possibly think that I’d consider a bag of doughnuts sufficient repayment.”

      “Why not? All I did last night was my job. And I didn’t even do that well enough to save your house. Or much of anything else, for that matter.”

      “You did a lot more than save my house,” she told him. “You saved my family. You saved me.”

      “I saved your cat, you mean. You were almost out the door by the time I got there.”

      She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. Well, as much of his hand as she could cover with those child-sized fingers of hers. They were good hands, though, he noted. Sturdy with short, blunt nails and seemingly no special care. They were working hands, plain and simple. Boone liked that. Genevieve’s hands had Jooked like something out of a diamond advertisement. He’d never been able to understand women who seemed to make a career out of grooming their hands as if they were thoroughbred horses.

      When he looked up at her face again, Lucy was studying him with an intensity that made him uncomfortable. And as much as he wanted to look away, he found that he just couldn’t.

      “Like I said,” she told him softly, “you saved my family.”

      Her cat was her family? he wondered. Her cat? Hell, even he wasn’t that alone in the world. Not really. Not like that.

      He pushed the thought away and focused on Lucy instead. His gaze drifted to the angry blue discoloration on her chin again, and he wished he could have arrived at the scene of the fire sooner—before she had taken her spill. Nothing should mar skin that beautiful, he thought, especially something like a bruise.

      Then he reminded himself that thinking such things had gotten him into trouble in the past. And he could no more afford that kind of trouble now than he had been able to then. Playing the sucker once was bad enough. No way was he going to get taken in like that a second time.

      “I saved your cat,” he reiterated.

      “And me, too,” she reminded him. “You carried me to safety.”

      “I just happened to be the one on the scene,” he said, explaining away the action before she could interpret it as heroic. “I was just doing my job. Anyone else in my situation would have done the same thing. It was no big deal.”

      She shook her head in obvious disappointment, then withdrew her hand from his and wrapped it around her cup again. For a moment she only stared silently down into its dark depths. Then she said softly, “That’s okay. I don’t expect you to understand about me and Mack.”

      When she looked up at him again, a stark sadness glittered in her eyes. “But the fact of the matter is that last night you ran into a burning house—a burning house, for Pete’s sake— to save my cat. A cat that means more to me than you can imagine. And for that I owe you. Big.”

      Boone wondered if she’d feel the same way if he told her the reason he’d returned to that inferno to retrieve her cat last night was because he’d thought he was going back to save a child. What would she say if he confessed that had he known what he was risking his neck for was a cat, he probably would have just sat out on the lawn and let the damned thing be toasted into a kitty waffle?

      Ultimately he decided it was probably better to keep that information to himself. It was one thing to brush off a woman’s concern for a debt that didn’t exist It was another matter entirely to make her want to strangle you with her bare hands.

      “And I’m going to pay you back for what you did,” she told him again. “I promise you I am.”

      When Boone Cagney said nothing in response to her assurance, Lucy fidgeted a bit in her chair. Hoo boy, she thought. She’d really managed to get herself into it this time. Last night, in the chaos and panic of the moment, she hadn’t bothered to pay much attention to her rescuer’s looks. But now, seated here in the picture of domestic bliss at his kitchen table, sharing doughnuts and coffee as if it were something the two of them did every morning, she realized he was a lot more attractive than she had recalled.

      Not handsome, really. His features were too irregular, too unconventional for that. But definitely very attractive. His heavy-lidded eyes gave him a deceptively calm appearance, but there was a fire burning in their green depths that was too vivid, too bright, too hot for her comfort. His thick, dark blond curls might have been considered tousled on another man, but on this man, their dishevelment seemed more the result of anarchy.

      His mouth, however, was what drew her attention most. Lush, mellow and evocative weren’t words Lucy would normally use in relation to a man who seemed so hard and unrelenting, but they all sprang immediately to mind when she gazed at Boone Cagney’s mouth. It spoke promises of incomparable sensuality without him ever having to utter a word.

      She lowered her gaze when she realized she was staring at him. Then she felt her face heat up at the blatant hunger that hummed in her midsection at the sight of his naked chest and the rich scattering of dark blond curls that swirled from his shoulders to his belly and beyond. Lucy had never much gone for the overdeveloped, muscle-bound type. And although Boone Cagney was clearly a man who worked out and took care of his physique, he was no bulging neckless wonder like so many body