Page 24 of Playing With Fire

Ricky’s mouth snapped shut.

“You were saying...” she prompted, but his expression had shut down.

She stared at him. He gave a slight shrug.

Her brain began joining the dots.

“Could be someone sneaking out of school or maybe a dropout. Unfortunately, there are a lot of young people who seem to have no place to go, now that the local manufacturing firms have cut back on apprenticeships. And quite a few small businesses didn’t survive the pandemic.”

She realised that she was thinking out loud.

“Jodi.”

She snapped her head up at his warning tone.

“Whatever you write, don’t mention what I just said. It’s speculative, and I don’t want whoever it is to know where I’m going with this. You can say that the investigation is still in the early stages. And yeah, please include the stuff about fire safety. Most people don’t take it seriously until it’s too late.”

Jodi nodded. She thought about whatever it was that he had pulled from the trash, and the words he had been about to say. Trust went both ways.

“I’ll hold back for now.” Her glance was cool. “Just like you are doing with me. But if this is going to turn bad, people have got to be warned.”

She looked down at her phone, which had been on silent for too long now, glancing through the messages.

“You can tell them the handsome and heroic firefighter Ricky Sharp is on the job,” he said.

Jodie ignored this blatant schmoozing. She stopped scrolling.

“Looks like lasagna again,” she muttered.

“Sounds good. As a matter of fact, I make a great lasagna myself.”

Ricky’s voice was light, conversational.

Jodi smiled like the Cheshire cat.

“That’s good to hear Ricky,” she purred. “Because I just got rostered on to cook for the homeless shelter dinner run by the church every Friday night. I’ll pick you up at your parents’ place after work, then, about five?”

Ricky’s eyes were wide. “Cool,” he said cautiously.

Jodi rose to her feet, picking up the check before he could nab it. Work was calling, and she had what she needed for the story, plus some great photos of the handsome and heroic firefighter peering into the trash can. She paused, pinning a stray lock back into the chignon, and fluttered her eyelashes innocently.

“Needs to feed at least twenty people, so make it a big lasagna. And don’t go picking one up at the supermarket, because they use that plastic cheese and the sauce tastes like ketchup.”

Ricky blinked like a deer caught in the headlights. For a gratifying moment, he looked like that wide-eyed and tousled teenager in the pantry who had just discovered that girls were glorious creatures called women and that he—thanks be—was a man.

She strolled out the door with the light heart of a woman who has escaped a mammoth cooking task, and managed to line up another date with a man who was not only the lead investigator in a breaking front page story—but was more than easy on the eyes.

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