Christmas on 4th Street (Fool's Gold Romance) by Susan Mallery Page A

second beer for each of them. “You were close to the front line, weren’t you?”
    “Sometimes.”
    She remembered what Felicia had told her. “You were also the doctor on the plane, right? The one who flies with those being medevaced to Germany?”
    He nodded cautiously.
    She could tell he didn’t want to talk about it. She would guess he’d seen a lot of horrible injuries on those flights. From what she’d read and seen on news reports, the injured were in pretty bad shape when they were flown out. Gabriel and his team would have been doing their best to keep everyone alive while working in really cramped conditions.
    “It must have been intense,” she said.
    “My work mostly is. I see the soldiers when they’re first injured. Get them stabilized and ready for whatever surgery they’re going to need.” He relaxed a little. “The hours are long and when I was in a field hospital, the injuries just kept coming.”
    “How did you unwind?” she asked.
    She was waiting for him to say volleyball or video games, or maybe make a joke. Instead, he stiffened and seemed to be looking at everything except her.
    Her brain processed the change in him and tried to fill in the blanks. Then she felt herself starting to grin.
    “Sex?” she asked, not bothering to hide her amusement. “Are you saying that there’s sex in the military?”
    “I was on a softball team,” he grumbled.
    “Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
    He met her gaze. “Yes, sometimes sex was a way to escape.”
    “Horndog,” she said cheerfully. “So is that why you never married? Because I think you’re going to need to give Ana Raquel an answer on that one. Not to mention your mother. Not that she’s going to want to hear what you’ve been doing in your spare time.”
    “I don’t care what Ana Raquel thinks about me, you won’t tell my mother and no, that’s not the reason I’m not married.”
    He opened his mouth as if he were going to say more, then closed it.
    “Gabriel?” she asked quietly, wondering what he was thinking about. “What happened?”
    He looked at her. “There was a woman. A doctor. I liked her a lot. We’d been dating for a few months. It was...different.”
    “You cared about her.”
    He nodded. “A few of her friends were going out in a Humvee. Just the girls. She went with them.” His mouth twisted. “One second they were driving away, laughing and the next they were hit by a rocket.”
    Noelle gasped. Her stomach clenched and she regretted all the pizza she’d eaten.
    “They were gone,” he said, staring past her. “All of them. Just gone. It happened so fast.”
    “I’m so sorry. That must have been horrible.”
    “It was. Everything about it. But it also affirmed what I’ve always believed. That there’s no point in getting married.”
    She stared at him. “Excuse me? You’re dismissing the entire institution?”
    “Sure. Life is tenuous at best. We could all be dead tomorrow. I’ve seen it again and again.”
    “I know what happened is a tragedy, but you learned the wrong lesson.”
    “No. I didn’t.” He glanced around. “I’ll admit it’s less likely to happen here than where I was, but we still don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. Why risk it?”
    “All the more reason to risk it,” she told him. “We should grab happiness while we can, because you’re right. There’s no promise of more time.”
    “I’m not saying other people shouldn’t get involved and get married. Just not me.”
    “What about a family? Don’t you want kids?”
    For a second, his expression turned wistful, but then the softness was gone. “I don’t see that happening.”
    “You’re going to be one lonely old guy.”
    “Ana Raquel will enjoy being right about me.”
    She wanted to say more, to tell him he was wrong, but she knew there was no point. Gabriel was an intelligent man who had obviously thought a lot about his future. He’d seen that life was tenuous and had