Flash Point - Savannah Kade Page 0,43
Now she was horrifyingly curious.
“So I stole my parents tractor when I was sixteen.”
Didn’t everyone out here do that? She motioned for him to keep going. No way was that bad enough.
“I drove it on the freeway …”
How many times had she been caught behind someone on a tractor, taking up the road? She had to be frowning at him. This needed to get bad, fast.
“I drove it to my girlfriend's house.” The red creeped a little higher and it was damn cute, but she didn’t say so. “And then I stole her father's car.”
“What?” Jo leaned forward. “You what?”
He nodded in admission. “She convinced me it was okay. Said that she had the keys and she was allowed to drive it, but she wanted me to drive. It was one of those things where you know it's wrong. But none of it was wrong enough to make you stop doing the thing you really wanted to do.”
Jo knew.
“So I’m driving her father’s car. I thought I kind of had permission, but I got pulled over for having stolen the car.”
“You little thief.” Jo grinned at him.
“Oh, wait, it gets better.”
Now she was laughing openly. She was definitely awake and he'd won that round. Though she was still exhausted and in dire need of a bed, she wanted the rest of the story. “So what's worse than that?”
“The cop who pulled me over pretty quickly identified that I had forged my own license.”
Her mouth fell open. He’d stolen a car and forged a license? Not the Leo Evans she was expecting. It made her slamming a coworker into a wall a little less scary to talk about. But his transgression was at sixteen. Hers was less than sixteen weeks ago …
Jo paid attention to the story.
“See, the thing was, I wasn't sixteen. I was fourteen. I was tall and I thought because I was tall for my age that I could pass as being older. If you ever get a chance to see a picture of me at fourteen, you’ll understand just how mistaken I was.”
She tried to fight the silly grin at the thought of a gangly teenaged Leo.
“I don't think the cop pulled me over for a stolen car. I think now that he did it because he saw a kid who was clearly far too young to be driving.”
“Did you tell your girlfriend you were sixteen?” she asked.
“Oh yeah. And she bought it … or she seemed to. It turned out I really had stolen the car, because she’d lied to me, too. She was only fifteen, and not allowed to drive.”
“That’s why she talked you into it.”
“Uh-huh. So I was underage, in a stolen car—”
“With an underage girl.”
“D—all of the above.” He looked so chagrinned!
“So why did this make you want to be a park ranger?”
“Because a park ranger who knew my dad—”
“Oh,” she interrupted. “So fourteen-year-old you had connections?”
“I guess I did. I didn't see it then, but I do see it more now for what it is. But I was sweating bullets and the ranger talked the officer into letting me off. It was the ranger who drove me back to my tractor. And I had to drive the damn tractor home at fifteen miles an hour in complete and utter embarrassment. It was pretty bad.”
For a fourteen-year-old, she thought.
“Did you ever have a fake ID?” Leo asked her.
She shook her head. “Nobody carded me.”
He motioned up and down her warming skin as if to say, Well, why would they?
But she hadn't always been an adult. She'd simply always been a Huston, but instead what she told him was, “I'll go one better ... I've practically been handcuffed on the side of the road for impersonating myself.”
“How?” He was grinning at her, nearly laughing, and it pulled her in. She would have said yes if this man had picked her up at a bar. She was going to have to work hard to stay neutral and this stupid bath wasn’t helping, but dying of hypothermia in her own apartment or even just getting pneumonia would be stupid. The entire FD would make fun of her and she would have deserved it. So she told Leo her embarrassing story.
“I had my driver's license done as my mother always told me to. I got dressed up for my picture. Hair, all the makeup.”
She wondered what Leo might think if he saw her like that. She’d been raised in charity event ball gowns and she could do