he was sleeping on the floor and then realized he must’ve been frozen after being out in the storm and had wanted to sleep close to the fire—and she’d taken his usual spot. She ought to get up and move to the bedroom, but she was so warm and comfortable that she stayed put and took advantage of the opportunity to observe Landon asleep with the embers from the woodstove casting a warm glow on his handsome face.
Unlike Lucas, who had a beard, Landon was clean-shaven, a look Amanda preferred to the beards so many Vermont men sported. In Amanda’s opinion, it would be a crying shame to cover a face like Landon’s with hair. She would never forget the first time she’d seen him, sitting next to his equally handsome twin, the two of them bombing into her product line presentation at their family’s store. They’d come in still wearing gear after having worked a fire scene.
Both had been covered with soot that hadn’t done a thing to dim their sexy appeal—or their humor.
Amanda had done tons of presentations by then, but they’d helped to make the one with the Abbotts that much more memorable. And when they’d both asked her out afterward, she’d been caught unprepared to handle a double dose of hot male firefighter. Which was how she’d ended up saying yes to both of them, setting off a chain of events that had caused considerable trouble for all of them.
Although for Lucas, the trouble had led to true love. From what she’d been told, he’d been upset about her accepting Landon’s late-March invite to their joint birthday party at the barn where they and their eight siblings had been raised. Looking to clear his mind and steer clear of her and Landon, Lucas had headed out of town for a few days. He’d met single mom Dani and her baby daughter, Savannah, when he rescued them after Dani’s car slid off the road in the snow.
Landon’s sister Hannah had told Amanda that Dani hadn’t left Lucas’s side since the fire at the inn and was nursing him through his recovery from a broken arm and smoke inhalation.
Amanda was happy things had worked out for him and Dani, who had lost the baby’s father in a tragic accident while she was pregnant.
Even after tragedy, some people got lucky a second time. Things worked out for them. Amanda had begun to think she wasn’t one of the lucky ones, because nothing ever seemed to work out for her. Sure, she had a nice job that she enjoyed, and it paid her well enough, but it was really just that—a job, not a passion. She’d studied marketing before she dropped out of college and had fallen into the job with the company her mother worked for, selling intimate products, mostly targeted toward older people who were looking to spice things up in the bedroom.
She’d taken endless amounts of teasing and abuse from her friends when she first took the job, but they’d gotten over that after the first six months when they ran out of jokes about things that go buzz.
Landon let out a quiet little snore and startled awake to find her watching him sleep, like a creeper. “Hey,” he said, his voice gruff. “Are you all right?”
He asked her that ten times a day since the fire. “I’m okay.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“The wind woke me a while ago.”
“Sorry to crowd you, but I needed the heat after being out in the storm.”
“I’m not crowded. It’s fine. Did you find the kids?”
“We did.”
“Oh, thank goodness. Are they all right?”
“Two of them are. The other was in rough shape, but he should be fine once they get him warmed up.”
“That’s a relief. Their parents must’ve been beside themselves.”
“There were a lot of happy tears in the ER.”
“It’s so incredible the way you and your brothers and the others risk your own lives to save people you’ve never met.”
“We like doing it—and we get paid for it, so there is that.”
“Still, you’d probably do it for free if you had to.”
“I have done it for free,” he said with an endearing grin. “And I’d do it again. We know this mountain as well as we know our own backyard at home, and we love battling the elements to rescue someone who didn’t know what they were getting into up here. People think because they’ve seen crazy weather elsewhere they understand it. There’s our kind of crazy, and then there’s all other kinds.”