That felt pretty goddamn outstanding.
Isabella moved her fingers to the small of her back, sliding a two-inch ceramic blade from its hiding spot in the fabric of her belt and putting it safely in her purse. Ah, he should’ve known she wouldn’t come to this party unarmed. He had to admit, the weapon was pretty slick—not only would it not trip metal detectors, but the tiny, razor-sharp knife was small enough to be hidden in any one of a dozen places, even as scantily dressed as she was. Hell, she could be damn near naked and still be armed enough to do some serious damage.
The thought of Isabella naked slammed into him in an oh-so-sexy slideshow, and okay, yeah, he needed to focus on something else. Now would be good.
They took a handful more steps over the well-tended sidewalk before she finally set aside her grin. “Tonight might’ve been a total win on recon, but I’m still mad at you, you know. You completely ambushed me.”
“You didn’t give me much choice,” he argued, albeit with more reason than heat. “I’d never run into a fire without Shae and Gamble and Slater on my six. Not even if the place was burning down at my feet.”
She examined him with a sidelong glance. “No offense, but how does that make you a good firefighter? It’s your job to run into burning buildings.”
“It’s my job to fight fires,” Kellan corrected. “And I can’t do that if I’m dead.”
He knew the adrenaline still pumping through his system was making him loose-lipped, just like he knew he was going to crash like a semi on a steep grade as soon as he got home. But as mad as Isabella might be that he’d showed up unexpectedly tonight, she still should’ve trusted her team, or hell, someone to back her up.
“You want to know the absolute hardest part of my job?” Kellan asked, her silent, surprised expression giving him the leeway to answer his own question. “When I can’t go into a building that’s burning down at my feet.”
Isabella’s brow folded. “I’m not sure I follow.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, giving up a shiver against the nighttime air around them, and he slid the jacket from his shoulders to place it around hers.
“One of my first big fire calls was at a warehouse down on Edgemoor. Huge, three-story building, and the place was showing flames from every freaking window it had. Of course, we all wanted to run inside like gangbusters.” God, he could still see Hawk and all the guys from squad practically jumping out of their boots to vent the roof and bust down the door. “But Captain Bridges took one look at the scene and gave the order to stand down.”
“What?” Isabella came to a stop beside her street-parked Mustang, disbelief coloring her shadowy features as she pivoted to face him. “But you just said the fire was huge.”
“Yup.” Kellan nodded. That damned blaze was still one of the biggest he’d ever seen, even two years later. “I couldn’t believe it. In fact, I was so pissed that I tried to go in anyway.”
“You did? What happened?”
He let his gaze take an ingrained up-and-down tour of the sidewalk where they stood and the street beyond it before telling her, “Bridges stepped right in my flight path and said, ‘Son, you know what happens if I don’t stop you from going into that warehouse right now?’”
The sheer curiosity glittering in her pretty brown eyes under the light of the streetlamp prompted him to continue, and so he did. “When I mouthed off with a ‘what?’ Bridges just looked at me and said, ‘Your whole team runs in after you, and then whoever gets here next pulls us all out in body bags.’ Three minutes later, the roof collapsed. Warehouse came down like a house of cards.”
“Holy shit,” Moreno said on a soft exhale. But her lack of mettle didn’t last for long. “I know you think that what I did tonight was stupid. But there are lives on the line here, Walker. What if someone had been trapped in that warehouse? Then what would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” Kellan admitted. “But what I do know is that whatever we’d have done to save them would’ve been done as a team. Look”—he stepped in, his body only inches from hers, and even though he knew it was impulsive, he really didn’t care—“I don’t think you trying to help those girls is stupid, Isabella. In fact, I think it’s really fucking brave. But you’re working without backup, and sooner or later, no matter how brave you are, that’s going to blow up in your face if you don’t let someone help you.”