Spark Of Desire (21 page)

“What was that all about?”

“What? Bobbie?” Jessica frowned, bewildered.

“No. You and Bartlett. You two looked awfully cozy.” Kevin glanced back at the doorway Bartlett had gone through. At least he wasn’t still hanging around. He had expected the other guys to start sniffing around Jessica the moment she showed up, but the captains too?

Jessica blinked and shook her head. “What are you talking about? Neil has been watching—“

“Neil?” She knew his first name? How chummy had they gotten in the few minutes before he’d arrived? Was she just attracted to power? A captain had more power than a lieutenant. What would she do the first time she encountered a chief?

“Neil. That’s how he introduced himself. What is wrong with you?” Jessica put her fists on her hips.

“Nothing. It just seems a little strange. Every time I walk in here you’re surrounded by admirers, and today it happened to be a captain.”

“This isn’t a jealousy thing, is it?” Jessica narrowed her eyes at him.

“No, I just wondered how you got to be so tight with a captain you met this morning.” Tight? Kevin’s entire body felt tight. He wanted to grab her and kiss her. When she was angry she really did get more beautiful. Her eyes sparkled and her face tensed into hard, clean lines.

“I don’t know how I got to be so
tight
with a captain I just met, and I didn’t realize I was surrounded by admirers every time you arrived. Gee, maybe I’m arranging it that way.” She smirked. “I’m using my considerable feminine wiles to bind you into my web.”

Kevin heard a tang of harshness in her voice and regretted his reaction. Bartlett could be pretty charming when he wanted to be, and Jessica wasn’t known to be a shameless flirt. She wasn’t using him and she wasn’t going to jump ship for Bartlett. If she were attracted to power, she wouldn’t be looking in the fire department. Even cops got to carry guns. Once again, he felt like a complete heel, but this time it was his own fault. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. What did you say about Bobbie?”

Jessica studied him. “I haven’t heard from her since Monday when we worked out. Have you talked to her?”

“No. I’ll call her and see what’s going on.” If he could just touch her, pat her shoulder like Bartlett had or brush his fingers through the stands of hair that had already worked loose from her ponytail. This morning he’d been ready to start over with her, but he’d blown it as soon as he walked through the door. He needed to go back in time a couple of weeks and start this whole relationship over again as a relationship. “Did you get the day off for the wedding?”

“Part of it. Your message said the wedding starts at one, can you pick me up at work at noon? There isn’t anybody to open the store.” She stood less than an arm’s reach away watching him.

“That’s fine.” Kevin considered reaching out and taking her hand. How would she react? She might like it. She also might deck him.

“Are we going to get to work at some point or just stand here contemplating the floor?” Jessica asked.

* * * *

Jessica felt the brick grab her foot and knew the exact moment when she had no chance of recovering her balance. She fell face first into the street, attempting to catch herself with her hands and succeeding in tearing up her arms as well as her cheek and her knees. Lying in the street, she clenched her teeth against tears of anger and frustration. She could feel the scrapes on her cheek, her arms, her hip and thigh.

“Are you okay?”

She rolled onto her back and looked up at Kevin. “Fabulous.” She groaned.

“Did you hit your head?”

She rolled her head back and forth on the street. “Just scraped my cheek.”

“Here, let’s get inside and get you cleaned up.” He reached for her.

She pulled away. “I’m fine.”

He flinched. “Okay, but you need to get bandaged up. You’re bleeding.”

Jessica touched her cheek. It felt sticky. A wedding to go to in less than three weeks and she’d torn up her face. “Great.” She sat up. “I just need to get cleaned up, and we can get back to work.”

“No. You haven’t tried that knee yet. You could have damaged it. Let me help you up.” He held out his hands again.

“I can stand.” She didn’t trust herself to rest her hands in his right now. This day of training had been a comedy of errors. After Kevin’s bizarre behavior in the gym yesterday, she hadn’t been able to sleep so she felt like a limp rag. The day had dawned brutally hot. All her normal workout clothes were dirty. One of her shoelaces broke when she put on her shoes, requiring her to stop on the way here and making her late. If she took his outstretched hands now, she might break and fall into his arms. That wasn’t going to improve the day in the long run. Sure, the short run would be fun, but she didn’t want to start out at the fire department as
the easy one
.

She rolled onto her hands and knees. When she fell, she’d twisted so she didn’t take the brunt of the impact in her knees, but on the side of her leg. From the way it felt, she’d torn her sweat pants to the hip. Good thing all her running pants were dirty or she’d have taken off a nice layer of skin instead of ruining a pair of pants. As she worked her way to her feet, she sensed Kevin standing right beside her, ready to catch her if she slumped. The fact that he didn’t trust her to know how badly she’d hurt herself irritated her, but that was cancelled out by the warm fuzzy feeling of having someone watching out for her. By the time she’d stood up completely, Kevin had stepped back as if he hadn’t been a foot away the entire time she’d been working her way upright. He lifted the duffel bag over his shoulder and followed her to the house.

“Are you hurt bad?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet.” She watched her feet as she walked up the porch steps. “I don’t think I damaged the joint. It just looks cool.” She tried to smile, but he frowned at her.

“The bathroom is at the top of the stairs to the right. Bandages and stuff are under the sink.” He dropped the duffel on the living room floor with a thump.

Jessica worked her way up the stairs. Her leg stung, but mostly just felt exposed. She had torn the material from knee to hip. In the mirror over the sink she checked the scrape on her face. It wasn’t as bad as it felt. The peroxide, cotton balls and bandages were under the sink where he’d said they would be.

“You need any help?” Kevin asked from the door.

Jessica looked at his reflection in the mirror. She could see how much he wanted to help, and it almost matched how much she wanted him to help her. “I guess.” She swallowed. Outside she hadn’t wanted him to lay a hand on her, and now she was inviting him to bandage her upstairs in his house? Where had her common sense wandered off to?

Kevin dampened a washcloth and cradled her cheek with his other hand as he tried to brush the dirt and brick shards out of the scrape. She hissed and pressed her face against his palm. “I’m sorry.” He lifted the cloth away from her face.

“Not your fault. I’m the one who can’t keep my feet.” Jessica tried to laugh, but it came out tight and weird because she couldn’t think beyond his hand on her cheek.

Kevin brushed the cloth across her scrape again. The cool water accented the heat welling inside her. Dropping the cloth in the sink, he doused a cotton ball in peroxide. A delicate movement for such powerful hands. Jessica tried to take a deep breath, but her chest was strapped in iron. His big, warm hand cradled her cheek, making her entire body shiver with the contact. She wanted to feel that hand everywhere. He dabbed the peroxide on her cheek. The sharp clear pain made her squeeze her eyes closed and cringe away.

“Jessica,” he whispered.

“Go ahead. I’m not that big a baby.” His hand trembled against her face. Licking her lips, she tried to breathe again with as much success as last time. The desire to lean forward and press her uninjured cheek against his shoulder so he could put his arm around her waist and finish cleaning the wound. When she opened her eyes, she found him watching her. For a long moment they stared at one another. All the reasons she shouldn’t do this still held true. Nothing had changed. No matter how much she wanted it to.

She reached up and put her hand on his wrist. “Maybe I better do this myself,” she said.

“Jessica…” he said again.

“No. Let’s not just now.” She stepped away from him, slipping his hand off her cheek as she did. “Perhaps next time if you ask nice, but not now.”

His face clouded for an instant. Then he set down the cotton ball. “I’ll be downstairs,” he said, backing out of the bathroom.

Jessica stared at herself in the bathroom mirror trying to decide if she’d lost her mind or if she’d just found it. She took her time cleaning herself up, hoping her heart rate would settle back to normal. By the time she went downstairs, Kevin had stretched out on the couch.

“Ready to get back to work?” she asked.

“You’re done for today.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

Jessica put her hands on her hips. She felt a little more at home with this conversation since they had it so frequently. “Since when has that been a good enough answer for me?”

She thought she saw a smile flicker across his face. “You’ve been off your stride all day and now you’re dressed in rags. You need a half day of rest. There’s lemonade in the fridge.”

In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass before going back to the living room and dropping onto the mismatched easy chair. “So how am I doing?” The notebook he used to keep track of all her records was on the table, but she didn’t have anything to measure against so the numbers meant nothing.

“You’re doing fine. You’re making good progress. Slow and steady wins the race.” He took a long swallow from his glass. Jessica watched his throat work, fascinated.

“By the way, you’re out of peroxide,” she said before anything else could come out. “I can bring some more over, next time I come.”

“I think I can spring for first aid supplies.”

“It’s poker night, isn’t it?” she asked, trying to get as far away as possible from the incident in the bathroom.

Kevin nodded.

“If we’re done, I’ll head home before the guys get here.” She started to sit up.

“I’ll drive you. Relax. I just want to wait until somebody shows up so everybody isn’t locked out of the house.”

He wasn’t rushing her out before the guys arrived. Her crack about him being ashamed to be seen with her must have sunk in. Leaning back in the chair, she clutching the cold glass. Maybe she’d been wrong in the bathroom. Maybe something had changed. What if Diana, Julie and Sonya were right, and the invitation to the wedding did mean something?

“I bet it never gets this hot in Ireland,” Kevin groaned.

“No, from what I understand it’s lukewarm or chilly and damp. It ranged between those two when I was there. When you go, pack layers.”

“If I go.”

“What happened to
sometime before this day next year
?” Jessica grinned. She could remember every instant of that first conversation. For the past five weeks, she’d been reviewing it in her mind daily.

He shrugged, still focused on his lemonade. “Just doesn’t sound like fun going alone.”

“There are drawbacks, but on the plus side, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. If you don’t want to go to the National Gallery, you don’t.”

“Did you?” He set down his glass to focus on her.

“No. I had to pick between the National Gallery and the National Museum. I picked the National Museum. I didn’t have enough time to do both. Especially after the unfortunate trip to the Guinness brewery.” She smiled. Until now they had managed one conversation that hadn’t been fraught with sexual tension or anger. This made two. Both about Ireland.

He smiled. “I can’t see you getting that drunk.”

“It only happens when I’m being plied with the heavy European stuff. It isn’t so bad going alone, you know. Tours pick what you’re going to do for you, and friends or family can get under foot.”

“But weren’t you ever standing on a train platform in the middle of the night wondering where you were going to sleep?”

“Almost. I got off a bus at about eleven at night in a little town that had already rolled up its sidewalks not knowing where I would sleep, but I found a place.”

“Didn’t you wish you had someone to share it all with?”

Jessica thought for a minute. She had photo albums full of pictures and a journal she’d kept while she was there, but he was right, there were things that needed another person to really enjoy. “I guess. The whole falling down the side of a mountain in Carrowkeel would have been funnier with an audience.”