Spark Of Desire (5 page)

“Kevin.” The captain sat down on the bench bolted to the floor in front of the lockers.

That was a bad sign. The captain never wanted to have heart-to-hearts like this. Either he’d screwed up bad, or somebody else had and he had to clean it up.

“I understand you’re going to help a woman train for the department exam.”

Kevin’s mouth went dry. It wasn’t against regulations to help outsiders train. A couple of guys he knew almost made a hobby of it. The department encouraged women to join too. Was that why the captain wanted to talk to him privately? Did he want him to discourage Jessica? Kevin knew he couldn’t do that to her. Not after the look in her eyes when she realized he had offered to help her.

“I don’t quite know how to say this.” The captain steepled his fingers under his nose. “There isn’t really a regulation against couples being in the department, but if the two of you are an item, it’s going to be harder for her to get in.”

Kevin blinked. A couple? His heart started beating again. They weren’t going to ask him to break her. They assumed he had an ulterior motive. Which he didn’t. He hoped. “We’re not a couple.”

“There’s nothing between you?”

“No.” Kevin wondered if he was lying again.

“Then why the heck are you training her?” The captain stared at him, baffled. “You’ve never shown any interest in recruiting for the department before.”

Kevin shrugged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. And I figured I could use a refresher.” He needed to think of a good answer for that question. Too many people were asking it.

“Ha.” The captain slapped Kevin’s shoulder. “Well, now that we’ve got that cleared up, get a move on. They’re waiting.” He stood up and walked out the door.

Kevin followed the captain out to the back courtyard for calisthenics. He couldn’t be attracted to Jessica. She wasn’t his type.

But if she wasn’t his type, why couldn’t he get the sound of her laughter out of his mind?

Chapter 3

Jessica stood in front of Meechan’s Kitchen watching the road for Kevin. She was at least ten minutes early, and she wouldn’t recognize his car if it ran her over, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking. Her head felt as if it would never stop spinning. Three days ago she’d been shelving reference, bemoaning her fate, and now she was about to start training to join the fire department. Diana and Sonya waved from the other side of the street before strolling into the grocery store. This morning she’d borrowed all three of the study guides from the store, but they were sitting in her car at her apartment. She’d got home from work and not bothered to even go inside before hurrying down here to be too early. Since he offered to help her, she hadn’t been able to sleep from the excitement, and she almost had herself convinced it was the fire department and not the firefighter that was keeping her awake. She saw him walking down the street and stepped into the middle of the sidewalk.

There was a woman with him, tall and thickly built with short curly blond hair, and she was laughing. Jessica suffered an unwelcome stab of jealousy. When Kevin said he’d asked a female friend to help, she’d envisioned a hatchet-faced, grizzled woman with a gray crew cut, not a pretty blonde. Jessica envied how the other woman carried herself with such grace and confidence. Jessica had always felt a little uncomfortable with her size. This woman seemed to have no such problem. She also seemed to have no problem chatting with Kevin, who grinned and shook his head at something the woman had just said.

“Jessica, you’re here.” Kevin smiled. “This is Bobbie Kelly. I told you she might help us out.”

“Hi, Jessica.” Bobbie shook her hand. “Why do you want to be a firefighter?”

Jessica blinked. She’d been considering the question in quiet moments, expecting someone to ask, but hadn’t expected to be asked so soon. “I want to help people?”

Bobbie raised one eyebrow. “What, don’t you like sirens?”

“That’s a perk.”

Bobbie laughed.

“Ladies, can we go inside?” Kevin asked.

“Ladies? Marshall, do you have a fever? I don’t get that out of you unless I’m wearing a dress.”

Kevin rubbed his forehead and reached for the door handle. “Come on. All the good tables are going to be gone.”

Meechan’s was a neighborhood fixture. Most of the residents ate at least one meal a month there, if not more, despite the cramped dining room and lack of air-conditioning. The three of them jostled around a too-small table. Jessica hung her purse from the back of her chair and noticed Bobbie hadn’t carried one. She wasn’t sure if it mattered or not, but it made her uneasy.

Bobbie picked up a menu from the rack on the center of the table and studied it. “Nice place here, Marshall. You always take me to the best greasy spoons.”

“Kelly, quit complaining.” Kevin put his elbows on the table, looked at their position relative to her, and dropped his hands into his lap.

Jessica noticed Kevin didn’t look at a menu. Regulars knew it by heart. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed him in here before. Glancing around the packed dining room, she saw all the usuals. The woman who tried to bum a cigarette off every person she saw every time she saw them, even when they’d repeatedly told her they didn’t smoke. The old man with the fedora he wore rain or shine all year long and doffed to every woman he met. The weird artist girl with the piercing blue eyes.

“So.” Bobbie snapped her menu closed. “You want to be a firefighter. Let me tell you the single most important thing about being a woman firefighter. Never wait to take a leak.”

“What!” Kevin protested.

“It never fails, you gotta wiz and you get a call. There is no place at a fire for a chick to take a p—”

“Bobbie!” Kevin slapped his hand on the table, rattling the condiments in the center. “Oh my God. You are so crude.” His face was bright red.

“It’s a hazard of the job. Crudeness.” Bobbie shrugged. “You’ll get used to it.” She patted Jessica’s hand.

A waitress sidled up to their table and took their orders.

“Have you ever started a chain saw?” Bobbie blurted out as soon as the waitress turned to leave. The waitress hesitated, decided the question wasn’t directed at her, and left.

Jessica blinked at Bobbie. “A c-chainsaw?” She shook her head. “With a rip cord? No.”

Kevin dropped his head into his hands, groaning. Jessica eased back in her chair so he wouldn’t elbow her in the chest.

“You better learn. The guys can just rip that sucker.” Bobbie jerked her hands apart above the table demonstrating and nearly smacking Kevin’s head. “But most women can’t. I was in training with a woman who couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t get it. She quit. I have to put it on the ground and brace it with my foot. For some reason women can’t jerk it like the guys do.”

Kevin groaned again.

“It’s a lack of upper body strength,” Jessica said. She thought she’d been dizzy before, but Bobbie was the human equivalent of the Tilt-A-Whirl. “Most of a female’s strength is centered in her hips. Men’s strength is in their shoulders.”

“Really? That’s neat. Did you know that, Marshall?”

Kevin shook his head without lifting it up. Jessica noticed the tips of his ears were red. Was he embarrassed or angry? Was she failing some kind of initiation?

“There’s a way you can do it. I’ll show you.” Bobbie started spinning her butter knife on the table.

Kevin looked at Bobbie. “Are you finished?”

Bobbie shrugged.

He sighed, staring at Bobbie for a minute before he spoke. “Okay, this is what I found out. I got you an application when I was down at the office the other day—”

“Wasn’t that sweet?” Bobbie batted her eyelashes at him. “Did you go all the way down there just for that?”

“No,” Kevin said. “Jack needed to go in, and I drove him. While I was there I checked a few things. I thought you were finished.” He turned back to Jessica, pulling the application out of his pocket along with a second piece of paper. “You need to fill this out and return it to the office. The address is at the top. The next round of tests starts on September first. That’s the written. The physical is on September third and the oral is on September seventh. There are fifteen openings.” He double checked the notes he’d written before folding the paper into his pocket.

Bobbie whistled. “That’s bad.”

“Why?” Jessica asked, looking from one to the other. She folded her hands into her lap, trying to keep from jostling one or the other of them. Glancing over her shoulder, she discovered if she moved her chair back more than two inches she’d be sitting at another table. She was surrounded.

“You’re gonna have a hundred fifty, two hundred guys going for those fifteen spots. Some of those guys are going to be vets so they’ll get extra points added to their score. Pretty slim odds.”

“There won’t be that many vets. Maybe fifteen,” Kevin grumbled.

“Fifteen is enough to soak up the openings,” Bobbie said.

“There’s no way all of them are going to pass the test. Half are going to fail outright and half the guys that pass aren’t going to score high enough.”

“There’s one other minor thing you seem to be overlooking, Marshall. She’s a girl.” Bobbie pointed at Jessica without looking at her.

“So?” Kevin grumbled.

“Do you know how many women have tried to get into the department? Sixty-four. How many made it?” Bobbie held up two fingers. “Me and Peggy Spinelli.”

“But what’s the percentage of men who’ve succeeded?” Kevin shot back. He leaned across the table, caught up in the argument.

“Probably better than eight percent,” Jessica murmured.

Kevin dropped back in his chair.

Bobbie folded her arms. “It’s not going to be a piece of cake, and you’ve only got a couple of months to train.”

“Six percent chance of success at best. Five, really,” Jessica mumbled looking at the table.

“It is?” Bobbie asked.

Jessica looked up, catching the last flickerings of surprise on their faces before they hid the expressions. She didn’t know what had surprised them, but didn’t think this was a good time to start asking questions. The odds weren’t inspiring, but it was better than nothing, and she didn’t want to give up before she started, not with Kevin defending her so ferociously. “That’s not zero percent, so I might as well try. What do I have to do?”

“Do you run?” Bobbie asked.

“Bobbie, why are you so wound up today?” Kevin growled. “You’re like a caffeine transfusion.”

Bobbie grinned at him and turned back to Jessica. “So, do you run?”

“I jog.”

“How much?”

“Three or four times a week for about a half hour. Two and three miles each time.” Jessica glanced at Kevin. She’d rested her elbow on the table and now his arm was brushing hers, interfering with her ability to pay attention to this woman. There was a test happening here. She couldn’t start failing this early, but with Kevin this close she could barely manage to keep her eyes on Bobbie. Forget where her mind was.

But she wasn’t attracted to Kevin. He was too old.

Bobbie nodded. “You need to up that to about six miles in that half hour. You need to do weight training, too.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” a familiar voice hissed behind her.

Jessica squeezed her eyes closed before turning around to face Mindi. They were watching her. Kevin was watching her. He would want to know how she reacted in a crisis. Mindi freaking out in a restaurant was a crisis of magnificent proportions. Of course he didn’t know Mindi, so he didn’t know what she could get like. Jessica hoped he would never know. “Mindi, calm down.”

“Calm down? Calm down?” Mindi’s voice rose to an unpleasant screech that rang off the narrow restaurant walls, causing half the patrons to stop eating so they could devote full attention to the floor show. “I can’t believe you’re even thinking about doing this.”

Jessica stood up. “Excuse me.” She seized Mindi’s arm and pulled her out of the restaurant before she could start in on a serious temper tantrum.

* * * *

Kevin watched Jessica tow the cute but distressed blonde outside.

“Maybe she’s an idiot savant with numbers,” Bobbie suggested.