Today, Landon was sitting upright when she entered his room.

Alex didn't know why the sight startled her as much as it did. He was set to be discharged soon, after all, and completely off anything stronger than a palmful of ibuprofen. He should be up and at 'em. If he were to sleep any more, he might as well enter into hibernation and rouse himself in time for next summer's fire.

Still, there was something almost . . . formal about the way he had positioned himself today.

"Good morning," Alex said as she crossed to his bedside. She pretended like she hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Maybe the feeling was the product of an overworked mind playing tricks on her. She pulled up her usual chair beside his bed and sat down. "How are you feeling today?"

"Better now," was his automatic response. "And you?"

"Better now," she replied with a twist of a smile. Shouldn't have said that, a voice inside her warned, but Alex ignored it. It was the truth. Seeing Landon had become the highlight of her rounds in recent days, and if the man didn't know it already, he deserved to.

She busied herself organizing the supplies in her lap. His eyes were still on her, but she pretended not to notice. Noticing Landon too closely inspired fluttery feelings in her stomach to take wing.

She wondered what Gabby would have to say about this. Actually, she knew what Gabby would say about it, considering the receptionist had laid it all out for her ten minutes ago in the hallway.

"Watch out for Mr. Brenner," Gabby had warned her in passing.

"Why?" Alex had asked curiously. Usually the front desk staff only told the nurses to 'watch out' when a patient was in a bad mood. She couldn't imagine Landon acting any way that wasn't completely gentlemanly and genial—and if he was in a temper, well. That would be something she'd be interested in seeing.

Gabby's eyes had twinkled. The woman had a way of winking without batting a lash. "I think he has a little crush on you."

It was hard to consider anything about Landon as 'little' when she was sitting beside him now. She unwound his old bandages carefully, thinking that they had gone through twice the usual amount of medical tape since he and his firefighter buddies had started getting themselves into trouble on the outskirts of town. She had never seen so much collective male muscle mass in her entire career as a nurse. Landon's bicep alone required twice as much tape and twice as much gauze to cover.

She recalled her response to Gabby's claim now: She had rolled her eyes. You were always in danger if you immediately protested something like that outright. "I wouldn't even dream of it," she’d dismissed. "Men in uniform are off limits, and that goes double for a firefighter like Landon. Besides, a guy with that face—and that body? He has to know he looks good. I bet he goes through women faster than Usain Bolt tackling the four-hundred-meter sprint."

Gabby had cackled at this, but the receptionist's laughter couldn't save Alex from repeating the other woman's sentiment to herself now. Crush. Crush. Crush.

"You all right there, nurse?"

Alex glanced up again, and found Landon had yet to look away. A feeling deep inside her stomach stirred to life beneath his gaze, an inert magma flow heating up just below the surface. "Fine. Why?"

"You seem preoccupied recently."

"Well, if I'm preoccupied, it's because you're a handful." She laughed as he flexed beneath her touch. "Anyway, looks like you'll be out of my hands soon. Your burns are healing nicely, and they should be treatable with ointment from here on out. We could use the spare room, actually, so the sooner the doctor signs off on your release, the better. I'd say that's good news all around."

"Great news for me. I can finally ask Cherise out."

Alex giggled despite herself. Cherise was the night nurse, and well into her sixties—not to mention, she had been married to the same man for the past forty years. "Good luck with that. Really. I wish the two of you every happiness."

"She's wild, that one. I can tell."

"She'd be too much woman for you," Alex remarked as she turned away again to assess his chart. "Cherise is into all sorts of crazy stuff. She was a child of the seventies, you know. Big disco queen, back in the day."

"That's what I'm aiming for. I thought it was high time I dated a queen." Landon sighed dramatically. When Alex peeked at him over her shoulder, she saw that he was even rolling his eyes in exaggerated defeat. "But you're right, Cherise is totally out of my league. Oh, well. In that case, I'd love to ask you out on a date, instead. Keeping in mind that you were my second choice."

Alex had turned fully around to face him without realizing. Her heart fluttered wildly in her chest. Landon's eyes were on her, still kindling that spark of humor in the aftermath of his proposal—but the spark extinguished when he saw her expression.

Oh, God. She had even gone along with his banter. How on earth had she not seen this coming?

"Take you by surprise?" he asked quietly.

Alex wondered whether her face flamed in that moment or bleached of color altogether. She couldn't tell which way her blood was racing when Landon looked at her that way. There was enough circulating to her head, though, to enable her to answer him.

"I'm sorry, Landon. I'm not dating right now."

She watched his expression lift in surprise. She assumed he wasn't a man used to being rejected, but he must have guessed she might shoot him down on principle, considering she was a nurse and he was her patient. Clearly it was her specific answer that startled him.

She could have lied . . . she could have told him she was already seeing somebody. She had done it before, on the rare occasion she’d left the house or hospital long enough to be pursued. She even wore her wedding ring sometimes as a deterrent.

But she didn't want to lie to Landon. Hell, she was lying to herself if she ignored the stab of guilt, the feeling that she had been this close to parting her lips and saying yes.

She wanted to go out with Landon, but she couldn't, and it wasn’t the fact that he was her patient that was holding her back—it was the fact that even thinking about taking him up on his offer made her unfaithful to Henry.

Alex turned away again, ending their conversation abruptly, drawing a swift curtain across her shame. A part of her knew it was ridiculous to think of herself as emotionally cheating on Henry with Landon, which only made things worse. She was a tangle of contradictions, none of them logical, and she couldn't let anyone inside to see until she had it all sorted out.

Henry was gone, and she had to protect his memory. More than that, she had to protect her heart. Another flame would reduce it to a gray, lifeless heap of ash.

And Landon's eyes were too hot on her already.

She knew one thing for certain: She wouldn't survive another burn.