Alex shrugged. He’d had the same philosophy for the last twelve years, and while it might’ve gotten him into a bunch of scrapes, his all-in, all-the-time mindset was definitely better than the alternative. “From where I sit, there’s really no other way to be. After all, Cap’s not running a knitting circle. We either take risks or people get hurt.”
“You’re preaching to the choir. Believe me, I remember what goes down on shift.” Brennan plucked a specials menu from between the salt-and-pepper shakers on the table to give it a nice, long look-see, and even though his expression didn’t vary from its terminally easygoing status, guilt poked holes in Alex’s chest all the same. Brennan had been injured the same night they’d lost Mason in that gut-twisting apartment fire. One minute, they’d all been clearing the building, business as usual. The next, part of the third floor had collapsed, Brennan’s career had been shattered along with a pair of his vertebrae, and Mason was gone.
And wasn’t that one more balls-out reminder that life was short.
“Yeah.” He finished the last of his beer, the empty bottle finding the polished wood table with a thunk, and Brennan leaned in, his voice notched low against the music spilling down from the overhead speakers.
“Listen, Teflon, I get where your head is, but do you think maybe—”
“Well, well, look who it is! I heard this guy’s gonna be the next Martha Stewart.” Tom O’Keefe, one of Station Eight’s paramedics, arrived at the table, clapping his palm over Alex’s with a wry laugh. Cole followed behind him, sending a thread of relief beneath Alex’s breastbone. While he’d never disrespect Mason’s memory, giving his emotions airtime—especially in the middle of a moderately populated sports bar—wasn’t part of Alex’s game plan. The past was past. What mattered was the moment you were in, and not a whole hell of a lot more.
After all, if you weren’t busy living, you were busy dying, and no way was he going out with a fizzle instead of a slam-fucking-bang.
“You’re hilarious, O’Keefe. Really. Asshole,” Alex tacked on, but his buddy just lifted his brows in an exaggerated waggle.
“Oh, now you’re just flirting with me.” O’Keefe shrugged out of his dark blue quilted FFD jacket as the waitress delivered Alex and Brennan’s beers, and he twirled his finger in a tight circle over the table as he put in an order to make the round complete. “So,” he said, commandeering the bar stool across from Brennan and next to Cole. “All kidding aside, the house is too quiet without your mouthy ass. What’s the word with this community service thing?”
Alex rolled his eyes, suddenly grateful for the fresh beer in his hand. “The word is, the next four weeks are going to be an exercise in futility.”
“You’re actually going to do the whole four weeks?” Brennan’s dark brows winged upward, and as much as it burned, Alex met his buddy’s shock with a resigned nod.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not planning on any circle-of-love transformations while I log my time. But as far as the community service goes, I don’t have a choice.” Christ, this whole thing was such a waste of time and resources. He should be out there fighting fires, not serving up dry sandwiches in some cafeteria line because that idiot McManus was suffering from a bruised ass and an ego to match. “I’ve got four weeks before I go in front of the fire chief for my review. Until then, it looks like the department has got me by the short and curlies. I either do this community service as penance, or I lose my job. And I’m not losing my job.”
“Yeah, but if you do the whole four weeks, you’re also not getting paid,” O’Keefe said. “That’s got to sting.”
“I’m good there,” Alex replied, the words firing out just a little too fast. Ah, damn it. This situation was sideways enough without having to dig into the truth behind his statement. There were only three people at Eight who were privy to all of his sticky particulars, and Alex wasn’t about to bump the number higher, not even by one.
He forced his shoulders into their loosest setting, dialing his expression up to damage control status. “I’ve got some scratch saved up from my part-time gig. It’ll last.”
“Right. I forgot about that.” O’Keefe propped both forearms on the table, tilting his head as he thankfully switched gears. “Still. You spent all day at this soup kitchen place. You haven’t tried to sweet-talk the director into giving you a shorter assignment, maybe moving the whole thing along so you can get back in-house? This is you, after all.”
An image of Zoe with her hands locked over her lush, denim-wrapped hips as she ran him in circles around Hope House’s kitchen ricocheted through Alex’s brain, and he barely managed to cough out a humorless laugh with his answer. “Uh, yeah, no. As much as I want to trim some time off my assignment, sweet-talking the director isn’t going to be a viable strategy.”
Cole’s brows slid together, his gaze darkening in confusion under the low light of the bar. “Talking your way out of things is always your strategy. What’s so special about this director that makes her a game changer?”
“Well, let’s see. For starters, her last name is Westin.”
The stunned silence at the table lasted for a breath, then another, before O’Keefe finally broke it with a low whistle. “Ho-ly shit, Teflon. Zoe Westin is the director of Hope House’s soup kitchen? That’s the hush-hush project she came back home to work on?”
Alex’s sip of beer went down way more sour than smooth, and he made a face to match. “Unfortunately, yes.”
Cole frowned, and hell if it wasn’t the sentiment of the day. “Didn’t she land an apprenticeship with some high-profile chef or something last year? Why would she come back to Fairview to run a soup kitchen?”
“I didn’t ask, and she wasn’t exactly forthcoming with her life’s details. But not only is she the soup kitchen’s first in command, the place is so freaking understaffed, she’s the only one in command.”
“Well, that explains why sweet talk is off the table,” Brennan said. “Zoe is Cap’s golden child. I know you’ve got balls of solid steel, but . . .”
“I’m reckless, dude. Not brainless.” There were only a handful of hard and fast rules that Alex stood by, but he stood by them hard. Always have another firefighter’s back, live every second like it could be your last, don’t piss into the wind unless you can handle the mess....
And the captain’s daughter is hands down, one hundred percent off-limits. No questions. All the time.
Especially since barely four days ago, Captain Westin had gone to bat to save the career Alex desperately needed, and Alex had sworn above all not to let the man down.
O’Keefe narrowed his eyes in obvious thought, leaning back against his bar stool. “So flirting your way to less time is a no-go, clearly. But Zoe is still Westin’s daughter, and even though she hasn’t been around much lately, it’s not as if she doesn’t know all of us from being around the station. You can’t get her to throw you a mercy bone for being in-house?”
Alex fought the urge to let loose a rude snort, but just barely. “Despite her heritage, I’m pretty sure Zoe is unfamiliar with the concept of mercy. She’s as serious as a sledgehammer, especially when it comes to getting things done at Hope House.” Hell if Alex didn’t have the screaming muscles and throbbing feet to prove it. Running a kitchen wasn’t supposed to be literal, for Chrissake.
“Okay,” Cole said, ever the calm, cool strategist. “If you can’t catch a break in the soup kitchen with Zoe, how about trying to switch to a different placement?”
Unease took a tour through Alex’s gut as he did a mental revisit of the phone call he’d placed on his fifteen-minute lunch break. “Already ahead of you, brother. But apparently these placements are one and done. You either take what they give you, or you don’t take a thing.”
The rep from the fire chief’s office had been summer-sunrise clear. The only way Alex was getting out of being placed at Hope House was if the director booted him, and if that happened, there would be no parting gifts at the door. As bitter as the communi
ty-service pill was on his tongue, his only available option was to grit out his time in the soup kitchen with his head down and his eyes forward.
No matter how curvy Zoe’s hips looked beneath that freaking apron.
Alex shook his head in an effort to dislodge the mental picture—and all the heat that went with it—from his frontal lobe. Aside from the fact that, hello, she was his captain’s freaking daughter, she was essentially his boss for the next four weeks. Okay, so it was more theory than technical fact. After all, the FFD still signed his paychecks—or at least they would when he got his job back. But Zoe was one hundred percent in charge of Hope House’s soup kitchen, and by default, his fate lay smack in the center of her iron fist. Thinking about her curves, or anything other than punching the clock and getting this ridiculous sentence done as fast as humanly possible, was a crap idea of the highest order.
Especially since the last time he’d seen her at the annual barbecue, Alex had damn near obliterated one of the few rules he lived by and kissed Zoe Westin senseless.
“Damn,” O’Keefe said, remarshaling Alex back to the crowd noise and clinking glassware at Bellyflop’s bar. “That sucks, man. At least maybe the department will let Cole do his community service there with you.”
Alex’s thoughts screeched to a stop like an old record being yanked from a turntable, his thoughts of Zoe disappearing in a hard snap. “What community service?” He divided his stare between O’Keefe’s foot-in-mouth wince and Cole’s well-crap grimace, his knuckles turning white over the amber bottle in his grasp. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s not that big a deal,” Cole said, although Alex knew better than to take the qualifier at face value. The guy was levelheaded even in his sleep, and all the unspoken communication flying between him and O’Keefe turned the words into fertilizer anyway.
“Uh-huh. Start talking.”
Cole shifted against his bar stool, his palm taking a slow trip over the back of his neck. “Cap gave me the news when we were on shift yesterday. I was assigned fifteen hours of community service for following you into the warehouse fire against McManus’s orders.”
“Are you shitting me?” Alex asked, the question spiked with both anger and disbelief. “It was my decision to blow off what he said and go in.”
“Yeah, but it was my decision to follow you, even after I’d heard him tell you to stand down. You may have led the way, but I didn’t think twice about following, and McManus was definitely bent enough to make a point.”
Cole’s matter-of-fact response glued the rest of Alex’s diatribe to his throat. Captain McManus had gone all piss and vinegar, to the tune of Alex getting screwed with four whole weeks in Hell’s Kitchen. But he’d never thought for a second that Cole would get caught in the crossfire of the guy’s posturing.
“I can’t believe McManus stooped low enough to drag you into this,” Alex said, a shot of unease weaving through the free-flowing aggravation in his chest. “The complaint’s not going in your file, is it?”
Another dose of silent eye contact between Brennan, O’Keefe, and Cole was all the answer Alex needed, and damn it, this situation was just turning into more of a train wreck every time he turned around. He and Cole had just been doing their jobs, for Chrissake. And while Alex didn’t really care if his own personnel file had a few dents and dings, Cole had never made it a secret that he wanted a coveted spot on Fairview’s rescue squad.
Damn it. Damn it!
“Look, Donovan, while I might not agree with your methods, above all else, we have each other’s backs. McManus made a bad call. Someone could’ve been trapped in that warehouse, and anyway, I heard what he called you, and I know he knows the score.” Cole paused, his expression going territorial and tight. “The douche bag deserved to get knocked on his ass.”
Alex stuffed the echo of McManus’s sneer to the dark hallways in the way back of his brain, because really, he was torqued up hard enough already. “Okay, but this is still on me. You don’t deserve any of the fallout.”
Cole lifted one plaid-shirted shoulder, his shrug as unvarnished as the rest of his expression. “I made a choice, fallout and all. But seriously, I’m not worried about the fifteen hours. You shouldn’t be either.”
The conversation drifted to hockey scores and burger orders, and for the most part, Alex went along for the ride. But the news of Cole’s sanction just crystallized the certainty that had built all day long in his gut, layer by layer. This latest kick in the teeth was all the more reason for him to keep his head down and get this ridiculous community service over with.
The faster, the better.
Zoe punched in the security code for the interior door connecting Hope House’s soup kitchen to the shelter, waiting for the familiar beep and buzz combo to signal her authorized entry before heading down the hallway. Breakfast service was on the downswing, and with her two regular volunteers holding things steady on the service line and Alex on dish duty in the kitchen, she could finally grab a much-needed meeting with Tina. Although Zoe tried to hook up with her codirector daily, yesterday’s session had fallen prey to the time she’d spent training Alex—a task made monumentally difficult by the fact that he’d spoken maybe nine words to her in as many hours. He’d been equally tight-lipped this morning, doing the barest of minimums to get through breakfast prep, and although his lack of effort hacked her off to no end, Zoe probably shouldn’t be surprised.
After all, Alex wasn’t the first firefighter who didn’t take her job at this soup kitchen seriously.
She pulled in a stabilizing breath, blanking both the pang in her chest and her thoughts of her father before poking her head past the lavender and yellow door frame of her friend-slash-coworker’s office. “Hey, Tina. Do you have a sec?”
“For you, sugar plum? Of course.” Tina’s half-dozen plastic bangle bracelets clacked out a happy rhythm as she waved Zoe all the way over the threshold. She pushed her reading glasses to the crown of her head, where they promptly got lost in the waves of her dark auburn hair. “I missed you yesterday. I popped into the dining room during lunch, but Millie and Ellen said you were up to your elbows behind the lines.”
Zoe sank into the secondhand chair across from Tina’s desk, tracing a finger over the bold geometric pattern printed on the fabric armrest. While the room boasted the same dollhouse-sized dimensions as Zoe’s office on the other side of the building, between the colors and the clutter, the resemblance definitely stopped there. “Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to connect with you. We had perishable and dry goods deliveries back to back, and let’s just say things weren’t exactly a slice of pie with my new community service volunteer.”
“I know you’re not talking about Tall, Blond, and Holy Crap in there,” Tina said, popping her chin toward the hallway and waggling her brows from behind the mountainous stack of file folders piled high on her desk.
Shock bounced Zoe’s ponytail against the shoulders of her loose, white peasant blouse. “Who told you about Alex?”
“Are you kidding? My morning volunteer texted me before I was even halfway here yesterday, wanting to know when we started recruiting from Hot Guys R Us. Then Millie gave me the rest of the scoop when I stopped over.” Tina paused, measuring Zoe’s expression with open curiosity. “Anyway, he showed up two days in a row, his paperwork is all in order, and he certainly looks able-bodied, if you know what I mean. How bad could the situation really be?”
Zoe’s libido pumped out a white-hot reminder of exactly how able-bodied Alex had looked as he’d unloaded yesterday’s dry goods delivery, but she cleared her throat in an effort to show it who was boss. There were conservatively a thousand items on her List of Important Things that trumped the way Alex Donovan’s flawlessly broken-in jeans pressed over his even more flawless ass.
God, his ass really was perfect.
Zoe snapped her spine as high as it would go, replacing the image in her head with one of a big, bright fire truck, and funny, that killed
the sudden shot of heat in her veins, lickety-split. “Well, first off, he’s a firefighter.”
Tina lowered her red rhinestone-studded pen to the top of her desk, her breath escaping on an audible sigh. “Look, honey, I know you and your dad haven’t been on the same page since your parents split up last year, and I definitely know how you feel about his chosen line of work. You’ve got good reasons to be cautious. But don’t you think you’re jumping the gun by judging Hot Stuff based on his pedigree alone?”
Oh, if only it were that easy. “Did I mention Alex’s home station is the number between seven and nine and that I’ve known him since I was a sophomore at Fairview College?”
“Whoa,” Tina said, her shoulders hitting the back of her creaky pleather desk chair with a thump. “I mean, I saw on his paperwork that he’s a firefighter, and I figured you might not be in love with the fact given your family history. But I had no idea the guy was from Station Eight, or that you’d know him.”
Zoe’s frown tasted like day-old coffee and felt just as cold as it crossed her lips. “I know him, all right. Don’t let the pretty packaging fool you. He’s a firefighter, through and through. Right down to the reckless attitude and the refusal to put the job anywhere other than first, no matter who might get hurt. It’s going to be a huge energy suck to rein him in for the next four weeks.”
Tina paused, her brown eyes narrowing. “Wait . . . I know these assignments are supposed to be strictly according to need, but your father’s worked in the department for twenty-five years, and he’s got a hell of a lot of clout. You don’t think he got Alex assigned here on purpose, do you?”
Her movements froze at the same time her heart jacked to ninety miles an hour behind her sternum, and she sat momentarily poleaxed to her chair. “No,” Zoe finally managed, easing up on the death grip she’d involuntarily locked over the multicolored armrest. “The only reason my father would throw me and Alex together on purpose is if he’d gain something from it. He and I might not agree on much anymore, but I’ve made it clear how serious I am about making a difference with this soup kitchen, and it’s wildly obvious that serious isn’t anywhere in Alex’s operating system. My father has to know that despite Alex’s penchant for sweet-talking his way out of things, I’m not going to go easy on him just because he’s in-house.”
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