Spark Of Desire (8 page)

“Do you think that bathing suit would slice her in half if she stood up straight?” Julie snickered.

“No, but she’d probably need to go to the emergency room to have it removed.” Jessica felt her lip curl with disgust. Never in her life had she thought of working out for the sole purpose of working out. “I don’t think I’ll end up like that. Bobbie Kelly isn’t this bulky. This chick is built.”

Julie looked over Jessica’s arm at the magazine. “You could look just like her, though. Think of all the hotties you could pick up. All those great big guys who talk about creatine and protein shakes.”

“Is this really attractive?” Jessica asked.

“Not to me.”

Jessica jumped at the sound of that velvet voice over her shoulder. She tried to close the magazine too quickly, and it flipped out of her hands. Julie leaped backward. The armload of magazines she’d been carrying slipped out of her grasp onto the floor. Julie cursed and knelt down to pick up the magazines.

“Uh, hi. I didn’t see you come in,” Jessica stammered.

“I noticed.” He glanced down at Julie, who was working around his feet, and looked back at Jessica. His face was blank. Like he had woman crawling on the floor in front of him all the time. Maybe he did. Maybe Bobbie didn’t know him as well as she thought she did.

Jessica crouched down to help Julie clean up the mess and pull herself together, but Julie waved her away.

“No, go on. It’s your lunch hour, and if I don’t pick up mass quantities of magazines at least once a day I go home unfulfilled.” She glanced up at Kevin. “
Fire Apparatus Journal
should be here in about two weeks. I’ll tell Jessica.”

“Thanks. You ready?”

Jessica nodded.

Kevin held the door for her as they left the store. The switch from the cool air-conditioned store to the baking sidewalk was almost suffocating, but Jessica hadn’t been breathing right since he’d snuck up behind her. He didn’t say anything and walked with his hands in his pockets.

“Hot out,” Jessica offered.

Kevin nodded. “It looks like it’ll be a toasty one.”

Jessica folded her arms, and they stuck together. She wished she hadn’t left her purse behind so she’d have something to fiddle with. He seemed angry or something. Jessica couldn’t put her finger on it. What if he had changed his mind about helping her and now felt obligated? She didn’t want him to feel trapped. She wanted him to do this because he wanted to. If she let herself get down to brass tacks, she wanted him to help her because he wanted to spend time with her. “I filled out the application. I’m going to take it downtown Monday after I meet Bobbie.”

“Good. They’ll send you some information after you turn in your application and you’ll have to sign a record search. They will want to make sure you’re clean.” He stared straight ahead, once again not meeting her eyes.

“I am,” she murmured. She looked in the windows of the furniture store. All those beautifully arranged rooms tumbled together and not a soul in any of them. “Are you upset about something?”

“No.”

“You just seem awfully quiet.”

“Did you eat lunch yet?”

Jessica wasn’t prepared for the subject switch. People didn’t like to answer those kinds of blunt questions, but they didn’t flip into another subject, either. “No.”

“Let’s stop at the bagel place, then. It’s not a good idea for you to start skipping meals.”

“Okay, Dad.”

He turned and glared at her.

“What?”

He shook his head, his mouth twitching into a frown. “Nothing.”

Jessica stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Kevin took a couple more steps before he realized she wasn’t beside him anymore. Tears burned behind her eyelids, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

“What?”

“What is wrong with you today?” Jessica demanded.

“Nothing.”

“You know, a couple of days ago when you were bothering me in Reference, I couldn’t get you to shut up, and now you can barely string two words together. I’m supposed to think nothing’s wrong based on that?” Jessica felt her jaw tightening against the tears. If he’d changed his mind, she might be able to do it on her own. Or Bobbie might help her.

“I’ve just got stuff on my mind.”

Jessica didn’t want to ask in case it involved a woman. Or she’d been right and he didn’t want to train her. She could find other help, but she didn’t want other help. She wanted Kevin. “Are you sorry you offered to train me?”

“No.” He shifted back a step, tucking his hands behind his back. “I just don’t have anything to say.”

She watched the movement. He had something to say, but he wasn’t saying it. Why not? What was he hiding? “Don’t you think I can do it?”

“Of course I do. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be giving up my free time like this.”

“So why are you so crabby?”

“I’m not crabby.” He put his hands up in front of him.

“Then what’s on your mind?”

He opened his mouth and closed it. For a minute he grumbled under his breath before announcing, “My best friend is getting married in two months, and I don’t have a date to the wedding.”

He didn’t put his hands behind his back again, so she guessed it was at least partially true. Partially true and absolutely not an invitation. “Oh. Well, I do work in a store full of single females if you want me to ask around.” Jessica wanted to bite off her tongue. Find him a date? Was she insane? Had the heat cooked her brain? Had all the running bounced her senses right out of her head?

He didn’t look enthused by the offer. “Thanks, but I think I can handle it.”

“I wasn’t trying to be insulting.”

“I know.” He started walking toward the bagel shop.

Jessica caught up with him. “So why don’t you ask Bobbie?” She kept the sour expression her face wanted to form to herself. Why did she keep asking questions she didn’t want to know the answers to?

Kevin laughed bitterly. “No, I don’t think I’ll do that. Besides, she’ll be invited anyway.” He pulled open the door for her.

Jessica stepped inside the cool restaurant. He wasn’t worried about not having a date to a wedding. Not for a wedding two months away. In her experience, men started worrying about those things when the wedding loomed within a week. Something else was going on, but she didn’t know the magic words to make him talk. She doubted saying “open sesame” would work. At the counter she ordered lox on a plain bagel and watched the kid make it.

“What is lox?” Kevin asked. He’d stopped right next to her, where he could watch her lunch being made too.

“Smoked salmon.”

“Is it good?”

“Sure. I like it. It’s really fatty, though. Mindi says it tastes like waxed paper to her.”

“What do you think it tastes like?” He watched the kid behind the counter slice the package of salmon in half.

“Really fatty smoked fish? You’ve never tried it? I thought you were into all things Irish.”

He seemed calmer now. Maybe he had needed to get out of the heat. That didn’t click either. What kind of firefighter couldn’t take a little heat? Maybe it was the neutral topic of conversation.

“I am.” He watched the counter kid layering the pink-orange slices of fish on her bagel.

“Don’t be a coward. Try it. You’re Irish. You’re genetically predisposed to like salmon.” She accepted her bagel from the counter girl and went to the register to pay. When he arrived at the table, she realized he’d ordered the salmon.

He peeled a small section away and tasted it. For a moment he looked uneasy, then less so.

“How does it taste?” she asked when he didn’t offer a verdict.

“It’s not terrible.”

“Just wait. It gets better with each taste. I wasn’t so sure the first time I had it either. But I was in a restaurant overlooking Galway Bay at the time, and that’ll improve the flavor of anything.”

“Really?” He leaned forward with his sandwich lost in his big hands. “When were you there?”

Jessica tore her gaze from his hands to meet his shining eyes. She smiled in response to his eagerness. “Three years ago in March. I was on Galway Bay about halfway through the trip. I had just walked down from the Burren, which is this huge area of exposed limestone with a famous standing stone on it. It’s not a cairn. This one is three stones standing upright supporting a fourth stone. They call them wizard’s tables sometimes.”

“Poulnabrone Dolmen,” Kevin supplied.

“Yes. It’s funny because there’s this megalithic stone structure and over the years people have built little ones from the loose limestone. As far as the eye can see, there’re little dolmens.” She held her hands about a foot apart to demonstrate the size of the miniature dolmens. “And it’s really windy. It took me half an hour to comb out my hair that night, and I’d had it pulled back all day.”

“You were on foot?”

Jessica leaned toward him to bask in his excitement. He seemed more enthusiastic about her trip than she remembered being herself. “Yes. I took the train where I could, but the only way to get to the dolmen was on foot. It took me about half a day to get down into this little town right on the bay. I walked right into town and booked myself a bed and breakfast, and then I went out to find dinner. The sky was gray, the stones on the shore were gray, the water was gray. It all looked like it might disappear. Like I had imagined it. I found a little stone building with beautiful golden hardwood floors and the obligatory upright piano. It had a bar across the entire back wall with a mirror behind it and a couple of old salts drinking their pints. That’s where I first had smoked salmon.” She took a bite of her sandwich.

“That sounds incredible.” Kevin ate the last of his sandwich. “What was the weather like? It was gray?”

“I had freakishly good weather. The locals were commenting on it. I went in March and they told me the weather was better that March than it had been all the previous summer. The day I spent in Galway was the only rain I saw.”

“Did you get to many of the megalithic structures?”

“Not as many as I would have liked. You need a car for that, and all I had was a train pass and my feet. I got to several of the usual tourist spots, but anything off the beaten path was difficult.”

“Are you going to go back?”

Jessica shrugged. “I want to. I don’t know if I can afford it.”

“Why did you go alone in the first place?” Kevin shoved his tray aside and leaned his elbows on the table.

“My mother told me it would be too hard.” Jessica rolled her eyes. “My mother thinks everything is too difficult. To hear her, you’d have thought it was the 1850’s and I was going to America on a steamer from the old country to settle the Wild West.”

Kevin laughed. “Is your mother always overprotective?”

“No, she’s not overprotective. I think it has more to do with learned helplessness. She’s never challenged herself, so she thinks everything is too hard to even try.”

“What does she think about you training to join the fire department?”

Jessica shoved the last bite of her sandwich in her mouth to buy some time. The second to last thing she wanted to do was lie to him. The very last was explain why she couldn’t tell her tiny mother what she was doing. Chewing, she considered her options. Lie and tell him what her mother would do when she found out, as if she already had. Tell the truth and explain how her mother would react when she found out. Blow off the question by telling him a half lie like the ones that had led her mother to think she was dating him. Every option sucked. He sat across the table from her, looking at her attentively. Right now he liked her. She wanted to keep it that way.

“She doesn’t know.” Jessica waited for his response.

“Chickened out, huh? Couldn’t tell her? I didn’t tell my parents until I had already passed the test and was about to start training. My mother didn’t know whether to be proud or spank me.”

Jessica smiled. She’d picked the right choice. They now had one more thing in common than they did five minutes ago. Later she could jump for joy when no one was watching. “Why?”

“She had uncles in the department. It sort of runs in my family on her side, but skipped a generation. I think she would have joined if she could have, but back then women didn’t join the department. Her family was surprised when she didn’t marry a firefighter.”