Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)(35)

Isabella grinned. She could talk shop for a month and never get tired of it. “Ah, the guys on SWAT let me sneak in sometimes when they have an open spot in their training schedule. You can never practice too much.”

“That’s pretty ambitious practice,” Kellan said. “Most people just empty a couple of clips at the gun range and call it a day, you know.”

Isabella straightened against the Mustang’s driver’s seat, her pulse knocking against her throat. The last thing she needed right now was to field flak from yet another person over how many hours she put into the job. Hearing the all-work-no-play routine from her mami and papi was bad enough, and there were way worse things to have than a jumbo-sized work ethic.

“Yeah, well I’m not most people. I happen to like a lot of ambition,” she said, brows up and bravado at the ready, but Walker’s decisive nod had her ballsy defenses screeching to a halt.

“I get that,” he said, all quiet truth. “I mean, if I’m going to do a job, it doesn’t make sense to go halfway.”

Holy. Shit. “Exactly,” Isabella answered, giving the word a slow stretch. Her expression must’ve betrayed the shock running rampant in her veins, though, because the next thing out of his mouth was a laugh.

“Don’t look so surprised, Moreno. I’m more than just a pretty face over here. I go all-in at the firehouse just like you do at the Thirty-Third.”

Stone cold busted, she had no choice but to start laughing along with him. “Okay, okay. Point taken. There might not be a whole lot of people who really get my level of job dedication, but I shouldn’t have assumed you weren’t one of them.”

“Speaking of which”—Walker’s stare glinted through the shadows—“I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier.”

“I said a lot of things earlier,” Isabella replied, blinking in an effort to follow the newly forged direction of the conversation. Where the hell was he headed?

“This morning,” Kellan said. “When we were at the scene of the house fire, you said if I thought you wouldn’t take a slim lead and run with it, then I didn’t know you very well.”

She pulled the Mustang to a stop about a block from the park, using the time it took to quiet the engine and cut the headlights to replay their earlier conversation in her mind. “I guess I did.”

Walker dropped his voice to a low rumble, matching the relative quiet and darkness of their surroundings. “And I guess I don’t. So tell me.”

He had to be kidding. “Tell you what?”

“Tell me something about you so I know you better.”

Oh God, he so wasn’t kidding. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. You want me to fork over a running biography in the front seat of my car? That’s kind of personal, isn’t it?”

“Relax, Moreno. I’m not asking for a head count on the skeletons in your closet,” Walker said with a shrug. “But we are about to go put the full court press on some dirtbag to try and catch a lead in your case, so the way I see it, a little insight is probably better than a lot of assumptions. Plus, we’ve got time to kill. So go on. Enlighten me.”

“You first,” her deeply trained defenses made her say, surprise filling her chest as Kellan answered without hesitation.

“Okay. I like my pizza cold.”

Isabella bit her lip two seconds too late to trap her incredulous laugh. “You’re serious. We’re giving up personal information, and that’s what you’re going to lead with?”

“You didn’t really think I was going to give you something juicy on the first go, did you?” He looked at her through the scant ambient light in the car, his gaze still unwavering even as she leaned in closer to pin him with an inquisitive stare.

“Fair enough. Can’t say I pegged you as the cold pizza type, though, what with your sister training to be a chef and all.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” he said, taking off his seat belt and easing a little lower against the passenger seat, melting into the shadows. “I’ll eat it warm, too. After a couple of walkabouts through the Middle East, I learned not to be terribly choosy. But the funny part is, the cold pizza thing is actually Kylie’s fault.”

“Does she know that?” Although his sister was far from stuffy or snobby, Isabella had to imagine cold pizza wouldn’t appeal to her culinary sensibilities.

But Walker nodded. “She does. It was mostly just the two of us growing up. Our mom wasn’t in the picture and our dad worked two jobs, so we had to fend for ourselves in the dinner department a lot of the time. Frozen pizza was my specialty, but one night we lost power during a thunderstorm and I couldn’t warm up the leftovers I’d put in the fridge. We ate them cold because we had no choice, but Kylie ended up liking the pizza better that way. After a while, we both started looking forward to the cold leftovers more than the hot meals.”

Isabella laughed, picturing the two of them camped out with their pizza straight from the fridge. “How old were you then?”

“I guess I was about fifteen and Kylie was maybe ten that first time,” he said after a pause. “But we shared a lot of pizza in those days, just me and her.”

“No wonder you two are close,” Isabella said, and the pared-down, God’s honest smile on his face slid through her like a summer breeze.