He nodded. “Arabic, too, although I’m not nearly as fluent.”
“That’s an interesting skill set,” she said, her curiosity bubbling enough to finally override her libido.
“I also sing a mean karaoke version of Springsteen’s ‘Born In the U.S.A.’, and on occasion, I cook,” he quipped back.
“Hmmm.” Isabella spared him a quick glance before turning onto a side street to head deeper into North Point. “Now it’s even more interesting. I assume you learned Arabic overseas?”
“Baghdad. Most of the Spanish is from high school, and Kylie taught me the kitchen skills.” Although Walker didn’t skip a beat with his cadence, he aimed the words out the passenger window, the small action grabbing every last bit of her attention. He clearly meant to slip around the topic of his deployment, and for a second, she nearly caved. But Isabella had never been anything other than brash, with him or anyone else. Changing her stripes now seemed stupid, and anyway, she couldn’t deny the truth.
She wanted to know more about the dark, sexy firefighter sitting next to her in the shadows.
“Nice try with the bait and switch,” she said. Hell, she knew every evasive maneuver in the book. And even a couple that weren’t. “Too bad for you I’m not that easy.”
Walker’s laughter deepened both her curiosity and her surprise. “You are a lot of things, Moreno. Easy doesn’t even make the top twenty.”
Isabella laughed too. After all, he wasn’t really wrong. “So you were stationed in Baghdad as a Ranger?”
He paused, but then he said, “For part of my first tour. But I actually spent most of my time in Afghanistan. Kabul and Kandahar.”
This time, she managed to check her shock before it made the trip to her face. Two tours as a Ranger were definitely no pleasure trip down Main Street. “That does explain the Arabic. You got any other hidden talents I should know about?”
He lifted one dark brow. “Not unless you’ve got an MK24 you need me to assemble or field strip.”
Isabella knew she shouldn’t flirt with him, with that dangerously distracting smile and those deep-ocean eyes, but God, the words slid out as if they’d been well-oiled and waiting to go. “Be careful, Walker, or I might start to blush.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” he said, the corners of his mouth edging up. “It figures you’d be the type to get all giddy over high-end weaponry, though.”
She lifted one hand off the steering wheel to signal guilty as charged. “I did some extra tactical training with the Remington 700 last year, but those MKs are pretty badass.”
“They get the job done.” Walker watched the grungy neighborhood scenery for a minute before his own curiosity seemed to get the better of him and he added, “The Remington 700 isn’t your run of the mill hardware. Where’d you get your hands on one?”
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?