Page 253 of Her Reluctant Hero
“An apartment. No one’s there to take care of it when I’m gone.”
“Your family doesn’t live there?”
“No.”
“So why do you live there?”
He scrubbed his hand over his face and glanced in the rearview mirror, the move telegraphing his impatience with her questions. “Because it’s beautiful. It suits me.”
“Where’s your family?”
He blew a breath out through his nose. “My dad died, and my mom doesn’t remember me.”
Her heart wrenched. She didn’t have the best relationship with her parents, couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her dad, but for his mother not to remember him had to be devastating. “Oh, Gabe, I’m so sorry. Alzheimer’s?”
“Yeah.” He changed lanes unnecessarily. More of that energy with no place to go.
She started to reach toward him, wanting to give him some show of support, but realized he would brush her off. “Is she in a home?”
“Yeah.”
Damn, back to those one-word answers again. “Where?”
“South Carolina. Where I grew up. She’s in Sumter.”
“Do you ever see her?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Every now and then. I don’t see the point. It only upsets her and frustrates me.”
It would make him nuts, having something so out of his control. “Do you have any other family there?” She hoped he had a buffer, someone who could share his burden, though he wouldn’t admit it was a burden.
“My aunts visit her, see she’s taken care of. I send them money.”
“But you don’t have any brothers or sisters?” she asked, uneasy now. He was answering her questions without evading her. He wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t holding back. So she couldn’t stop. She wanted to understand the man beyond the Hot Shot, the man who shared her bed.
The man she was terrified she loved.
“No. I was an only child, late in life. A mistake, I guess.” He shrugged. “My parents already had their careers and I was incidental.”
“What did they do?”
“Doctors, both of them.”
That stunned her more than anything she’d learned about him to this point. He didn’t act like a man who’d lived a life of privilege. “Really? Is that why you became an EMT?”
One corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk. “A far cry from medical school, as far as they were concerned. I just—I’m not cut out for the bureaucracy of working in a hospital.”
“Were they upset?”
“Oh yeah. Worse, I became what amounts to a manual laborer. Me being good at it didn’t matter to them.”
She felt a twinge for the man whose parents didn’t value who he had become. Her parents hadn’t always understood her choices, but they’d never made her feel like a failure.
No, she hadn’t needed help there.
“Neither of them supported your decision?”
“Hell no.” He chuckled humorlessly. “They were of like mind on that account, at least. Maybe the only thing in their marriage they agreed on. And then fifteen years after leaving home, I met Jen, who had her own ideas of making me better than I was.”
