“It’s one of my biggest regrets,” Gina Pinos said. “I never got to tell him.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, her fiancé, James Pappageorge, went to work at Midtown’s FDNY Engine Co. 23 not knowing that Gina was pregnant with their much-wanted baby. She planned to tell Jimmy, as he was known, the good news that evening when the 29-year-old returned to their Yonkers home.

After the first plane hit the North Tower, she called Jimmy. “I could hear the emotion in the firehouse. I heard the alarms,” she recalled.

“Gotta go, they’ll leave without me,” he told her. “I love you.”

“So I never got to say it,” said Gina, now 49. “I don’t know if that would have made a difference. I always carry it with me.”

After Jimmy’s death, she suffered a miscarriage.

“The grief, the agony, not sleeping, crying all the time because he wasn’t found right away — my body didn’t react well,” she said.

Gina and Jimmy first met at a Flushing gym and had a whirlwind summer romance before splitting up. A personal trainer, Jimmy “wanted to make something of himself” before settling down with her, she said.

Once he became an EMT, he knocked on Gina’s door dressed in his uniform. She was pregnant by another man “who wasn’t the love of my life,” she said. As for Jimmy, though, “our love was undeniable.”

“You’re the one for me,” Jimmy told her. “I’m going to take care of you and [the baby] for the rest of my life.”

He was in the delivery room when Justin was born and treated the boy as his own — so much so that Jimmy’s colleagues were stunned to learn at his wake that the 5-year-old wasn’t his biological son.

He joined the FDNY’s EMS division in 1996, becoming a paramedic in 1999. “He loved helping people, and he loved medicine,” Gina said.

He took the city test to become a firefighter for one reason: “He wanted to have more time for his family. We wanted to have another child.”

Jimmy graduated from the Fire Academy on July 23‚ 2001, joining Engine Co. 23. Less than two months later, he was killed in the terrorist attack.

Gina later married a firefighter Jimmy had met during training. They had two sons, Liam and Stephen, but the marriage ended after four years.

“The firefighters were going through pain as well, from losing so many people on the job, and the guilt of surviving,” she said. “We were brought together under the wrong circumstances.”

Twenty years later, Gina feels she is finally emerging from the darkness of 9/11. She recently met someone.

“I have never fallen in love again after Jimmy,” she said. But now, “I am open to the possibility of love again.”