Firefighter Daddy Read Free Page B

such bad taste when it came to dressing their bridesmaids? On the bright side, she only had to be a bridesmaid one more time, providing Jess let down her guard long enough to let a man into her life.
    “Listen, sweetie, I have a million things to do,” Nic said. “Have to run, but I’ll see you on Saturday.”
    “See you then. Bye.” Rory tucked her phone into her bag and glanced up at the house one more time. In the big scheme of things, being a bridesmaid wasn’t so bad. She only had to put up with a bad dress for one day—and avoid catching one more bouquet. Not such a big deal, since life as a single woman in San Francisco was turning out to be pretty much everything she’d hoped for.

Chapter Two
    In the grocery-store parking lot, Mitch held the rear car door open for his daughter, and, after she climbed into her booster seat, he tried to help her buckle the seat belt.
    She snatched it out of his hand. “Dad! I can do it myself.”
    “I know you can, princess. I’m just trying to help.” But she was right, and her protest brought Miss Sunshine’s silent reprimand to mind.
    No helping.
    On some level he knew that, but the need to do things for Miranda and be sure they were done right was not easy to overcome. As she fumbled with the seat belt, he noticed a tear in her jeans. “What happened to your knee?”
    She slapped a hand over the hole. “Nothing.”
    “It doesn’t look like nothing.”
    “I fell, okay?”
    His inclination to reprimand her for being disrespectful was overshadowed by concern for her well-being. “Did you hurt yourself?”
    “Da-ad! Just drop it. It’s no big deal.”
    Let it go, he told himself, resisting the urge to roll up her pant leg and make sure she really was okay. He reluctantly closed the door and walked around to the back of his SUV. He’d picked up Miranda after school and they’d stopped to buy the things on the list his mother had given him. As he loaded bags of groceries into the back, two college-aged women walked by, all coy smiles and making a point of catching his eye. Apparently they hadn’t noticed the child sitting in the backseat.
    After making brief eye contact with one of them, he quickly looked away. He had enough of an ego to realize it wasn’t all the uniform, but mostly it was. Other than going to work, he rarely wore it in public, and this was why. The uniform did not blend into a crowd, and that’s all he wanted to do. Blend in and get by. People kept saying things would get easier, but so far, those people were wrong.
    And, as if he didn’t feel lousy enough already, he had to toss in a healthy measure of guilt. He’d sat in Miranda’s classroom that morning and lusted after a pair of feet. What the hell had that been about? For the life of him, he couldn’t conjure up an image of Laura’s feet, and he couldn’t ever remember thinking they were sexy.
    If he were being honest, he’d lusted after more than the feet today, but guilt seemed to do strange things to a guy’s ability to be honest. He was just having a normal reaction to a beautiful woman. Still, he shouldn’t have given her his phone number, and he shouldn’t be secretly hoping she’d call. He got behind the wheel, did up his own seat belt and pulled out of the parking lot.
    Mind you, he told himself, there’s a lot of territory between admiring a woman’s assets and acquiring them. Besides, he had his daughter to think about. He couldn’t imagine telling Miranda that he was interested in a woman who wasn’t her mother. How could a seven-year-old even begin to understand something like that?
    “Can we go for ice cream before we go home?” Miranda asked, her annoyance over his questions about the ripped jeans already forgotten.
    “Sorry, princess. Not today. We need to get these groceries home to Grams before dinnertime.”
    Little girls were terrible at hiding their disappointment, and his daughter was no exception.
    “Tell you what,” he said. “Saturday’s my