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charming and too smart for their own good. But having seen them at their worst as well as their best certainly took some shine off—of them and off of all men. It was very hard to impress Gabrielle Evans.
    She knew a lot of things. She knew poker—she could hold her own at a high stakes table in Vegas and walk out with more than a little pocket change. She knew how to save a life—she could start a line in a trauma victim faster than any paramedic in the city. In a burning building. With gunfire overhead. And a tornado bearing down on the city.
    But there was something Gabby knew even better than poker or being a paramedic.
    And that was men.
    “What did that to you?” she asked, forcing herself to turn away and dig the glue out of the box of supplies Conner had open on the table.
    He hesitated just before he said, “Mac.”
    Glue in hand, she came to stand in front of him again. “Mac? Gordon?”
    “Yep.”
    Gabby avoided Conner’s eyes and concentrated on the gash that bisected his eyebrow and slanted off toward his temple. She applied the glue, then again pinched the edges together and held.
    “So the woman who hit you must have been wearing a ring.”
    She felt Conner’s surprise, but she kept her eyes firmly on her task.
    “You don’t think Mac would hit me?”
    “I think if Mac wanted to hit you, he’d have done it a long time ago. Like when you kissed his wife.”
    She saw Conner’s mouth curl in her peripheral vision.
    Conner had this stupid crush thing going with Sara Gordon. Gabby knew it wasn’t real, but he sure hung on to it. Like when he’d helped pull Sara out of the burning youth center, then planted a big old serious kiss on her.
    Mac hadn’t hit him then.
    “No way he’d hit you for a stuffed pink bunny.”
    Gabby could feel Conner’s gaze. “How’d you know about the bunny?”
    She gave his cut another hard pinch, decided the glue was going to hold and let go of him.
    “Because your nefarious plan worked. All of the nurses were talking about it. I heard about it when I went to get coffee.”
    Conner was full-out grinning now. “Mac will get to hear that talk for days.”
    Gabby sighed. Yep, he was just like her brothers—bigger was always better. Bigger rivalries, bigger contests, bigger arguments, bigger dares.
    She propped a hand on her hip. “So who really hit you?”
    He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”
    “A woman, though. An ex-lover, I’m guessing.”
    He cocked his recently bandaged eyebrow. “Why’s that?”
    “Because you have three types of women in your life—future lovers, past lovers and sisters. Your sisters and your future lovers wouldn’t hit you, so…”
    Of course, one of his sisters—the youngest and sweetest, Olivia— had hit him once. And Gabby had been in the front row for that one. He’d totally deserved it. Still, his sisters generally thought Conner walked on water. The only females more enamored with him were the ones that wanted to date him.
    “Fine, it was a woman. And a misunderstanding. And a big, gaudy ring.”
    Gabby snorted. “I believe the woman and the ring part.”
    He shook his head. “Seriously. A misunderstanding. About…what I wanted.”
    “Uh-huh. Like putting ‘forever’ at the end of all your sentences? Like when you said—” Gabby dropped her voice an octave, “—‘baby, I gotta be with you’, she heard, ‘baby, I gotta be with you forever’?”
    Conner pushed up from where he’d been leaning against the sink. “First of all, that is a terrible impression of me. Second, I never call women ‘baby’ and third, it was more like when I said, ‘suck my cock’, she heard, ‘suck my cock forever’.”
    Gabby didn’t even blink. If Conner wanted to shock her or shut her up with foul language or blatantly graphic or sexual talk, he was going to have to do a lot better than that.
    She had three brothers, a dad, several uncles and a bunch of male cousins. All of the uncles and cousins lived nearby and were a