or any cooking appliances in your dorm?”
He nodded. Probably, as a firefighter, he understood better than most anyone. Jo hadn't—at the time.
“It was my sophomore year and I had one of those lovely suite dorms with my own room and a main area kitchen that the four of us shared.”
“Of course, you did. Any good debutante would.”
Jo appreciated that he used the term mockingly but didn't seem to look down on her for it. She couldn't help that she'd been born into money any more than people could help that they hadn't. It had taken a long time before she looked any further than her own social sphere. In fact, it had been firefighting that had done that for her.
“Well, one of my suitemates decided to have a toaster in her room. I don't know what she did, but the toaster caused a spark or she put something stupid in it or that kind of thing. Anyway, the spark caught fire, the fire caught the curtains—”
“Were they a nice sparkly gossamer?” he asked.
And she knew why he knew that. “Oh yes! They went up in a lovely woosh! And, of course, we had fluffy area rugs.”
“Ooof!”
He must be picturing the damage. They hadn't known it at the time, but the four girls had made a dorm perfect batch of kindling just waiting for a spark. And, honestly, looking back, Jo was more than surprised that her roommate who smoked hadn't been the cause of it. “Anyway, everything went up. I ushered everybody out, ran across the hall, banged on the door, directed them to run for the extinguisher. Then I made the guys give me a towel which I soaked in the shower and ran back into the apartment to get my roommate out. Honestly, she wasn't trapped. She just decided she was and that she would scream about it.”
She remembered trying to coax TaraLyn out of the room. It was just smoke, but … “As I was hauling her back out into the hallway, along with my purse, which I had decided to save, the guys showed up with the extinguisher from downstairs. They were yelling that they’d called 9-1-1. So as I pulled the pin and went back in, the firefighters showed up.”
She didn’t mention that she’d been in her shorty pjs. Or that she’d just been too pissed at Lara to even think about the danger she’d put herself in. Jo had been going along but then, maybe a little unnaturally, cut the story off.
Should she even tell him the last part? Even just telling the story had been a stretch, she was so used to work being just work. But she didn’t have to tell it.
“Let me guess. They told you you did a good job and that you'd make a good firefighter.”
That was close enough. Jo touched her finger to her nose. “You know it.”
“And you were hooked.”
“Hell, yeah,” she replied with a phrase she'd only learned after leaving home and getting into the fire station. “All the adrenaline—turns out I’m a junkie.”
This time he was the one who said, “You know it.”
She was almost laughing. It sucked looking for a four-year-old. But they'd all learned to compartmentalize. If they let the worry take over, they would panic just like everyone else and the job wouldn't get done. So she enjoyed the moment, one she hadn’t had at work since the first station when she’d been naive and thought the guys would be her friends.
Sebastian swept his light back and forth again. “So, you were in college, and you suddenly decided you want to be a firefighter, what did you do?”
She was opening her mouth again, to say she'd gotten her degree. That her mother wanted her to go to Wellesley. She’d wanted MIT. They’d compromised on Harvard. Jo almost told Sebastian that “Harvard doesn’t offer Fire Science degrees,” but it seemed so snobby that she held her tongue, even if it was just a statement of truth.
She opted for the truth, but simpler. “I changed my major to Chemistry—”
She was searching for something else to fill the space—not a lie, but not the snobby “I graduated Harvard cum laude” either—when the comm crackled to life.
“Searcher down. I repeat, searcher down!”
Chapter Ten
Leo wanted to scream into the sky. Had Bethany not been standing right next to him he might have done it.
The last thing they needed was a searcher down. Hell, they were on a skeleton crew as it was, and it was still three