A smile ghosted over Walker’s mouth. “At fourteen, that was probably a good thing.”
“Since Marisol was three years younger than me, definitely,” Isabella agreed. “Anyway, we ended up sneaking two cups of coffee from my mami’s kitchen one night after a family dinner. We thought we were such a big deal, you know? Drinking coffee like the adults. Of course, we didn’t add cream or sugar because that wouldn’t have been grown up, and my papi’s pretty much notorious in our family for brewing coffee strong enough to kick-start the living dead.”
“I like him already.” Kellan turned toward her, a subtle thing, really, but God, his quiet focus made it all too easy to keep talking.
“Well, he taught me a lesson that night, even if he didn’t know it. Marisol admitted right away how much she hated the coffee, but I was scared we’d get caught sneaking back into the kitchen if we tried to dump out our cups. I couldn’t admit that, though.”
“Because you were older,” Walker said, and her smile was two parts wry, one part bittersweet to go with the memory.
“And because I was stubborn as hell. So I brazened it out and drank both cups of coffee to the very last drop. Marisol had to hold my hair all night while I was sick to my stomach and high as a kite on caffeine. I’ve never touched the stuff since.”
Walker laughed, not unkindly. “Sounds like you two are close.”
The simplicity of the words, the glaring reality that they hadn’t been true for eleven years now, hurtled Isabella back to reality, and she scraped for a breath to temper her suddenly slamming heartbeat. Was she out of her mind? She had a job to do—not a small one—and yet here she was, letting herself get distracted by a sexy firefighter she had no business revealing her feelings to. Focusing on the case in front of her, on the women in those photos, that was the only thing that mattered.
Even if keeping the past inside hurt like hell.
Isabella turned her attention to the city block outside her window, where it should’ve been this whole damned time. Christ, she was slipping. “Yeah. Well, anyway, we should probably get a plan into place for this chat with Marcus. Something tells me it’s not going to be a milk run, and I need to get as much out of him as I can.”
The silence coming from Walker’s side of the car was loaded with hesitation, and please, please, she’d need far more energy than she had if he decided to push his luck. But rather than calling her out, he simply lifted a shoulder, turning his body away from hers to scan the other side of the street as if their conversation had never even happened.
“That’s what we’re here for. So what’ve you got in mind to get this guy talking?”
9
Kellan sent one last glance over Atlantic Boulevard before setting his shoulders and diving headfirst into trouble. Judging by the number of people already beginning to populate the mostly residential area around the park in varying degrees of drunk and disorderly, he wouldn’t find a shortage of the stuff, either. In fact, all he had to do was look less than a foot and a half to his right and he’d get an eyeful of mad, bad, and dangerous to know standing right there next to him on the sidewalk.
Or maybe he should make that difficult to know, because for as wide-open as she was about her passion for work, Moreno sure did play her personal life close to the Kevlar. Not that her fierceness made Kellan any less curious about her. Or any less turned on with each passing minute they spent together.
On second thought, dangerous might be a better fit.
“Okay,” Moreno said, the intensity in her voice stamping the heat from his belly before it could take the quick trip due south. “Remember, this will be a lot different than dealing with Carmen. Once we find Marcus, he’s almost certainly going to give chase. Just stick to the plan and follow my lead.”
Kellan frowned. “About the plan,” he said, but she cut him off with a shake of her head.
“I know you don’t like staying in the shadows once we put eyes on Marcus, but I’m not changing my mind on how to run this.”
Kellan fell into step beside her. Slipping his hands into his jacket pockets, he swept a covert stare over the block before lowering his chin to keep his words close between them. “All I’m saying is that the plan is a little risky. What if it backfires?”
“It’s not going to backfire.”
“And you’re sure because…?”
Her exhale warmed the bare skin of his neck as she turned to look at him. “Because I need it to work.”