Reckless

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “Sorry’s not going to cut it,” she said, meeting him toe to toe on the dark brown pantry tiles. He could admit to screwing up—hell, he just had, and he’d offered a genuine apology to boot. What else could she possibly want?

  “Look, I get that you’re mad, Zoe, but it was a mistake. I didn’t knowingly put that box back here.”

  “You also didn’t knowingly do your job like you were supposed to. It’s one thing for you to put out minimal effort while you do your community service.” A muscle ticked in her jawline, punctuating the absolute certainty of her words as she added, “But I don’t have room in my kitchen for blatant screwups, and I certainly can’t babysit you every second of the day. Sorry, Alex. But you’ve got to go.”

  Alex took a step back, and Zoe had to give him this. The shock on his ridiculously handsome face actually looked genuine. “What do you mean, I’ve got to go?”

  “It’s pretty self-explanatory, don’t you think? You just cost me money and resources I can’t afford to lose. I have no way to feed everyone for the rest of the day, and there’s nine kinds of a mess back here where this stuff leaked through the cardboard. Not only is it a clean-up job I don’t have time for, but I could probably wallpaper my office with the health code violations I’d rack up if an inspector walked through that door right now. Add all of that together, and it looks like a pink slip to me.”

  She might need all the man power she could get to run Hope House’s kitchen, but she couldn’t put up with Alex’s ho-hum attitude about community service. Not at the price he’d just cost her, not when it was her job to make a difference. She couldn’t feed people with unsafe kitchen conditions and rotten meat. And she would feed everyone today, despite the lost food and the mess behind her on the shelves.

  Somehow.

  “Okay, but you can’t just boot me.” Alex reached into the back pocket of his jeans, producing a pale yellow slip of paper from his wallet as if it would solve the problems of the universe. “The fire chief’s office put in the order, and the city assigned me to you, just like it says right here. My community service is mandatory.”

  “Maybe.” Zoe inhaled long and slow, her decision made as Alex replaced the form he’d clearly thought would change her mind. “But I sure don’t have to let you perform it in my soup kitchen.”

  She angled herself to move past him and head for daylight, but the pantry space was barely wide enough for both of them to stand side by side. Alex slipped around her with one deft move, stepping directly into her path as he blocked both her forward progress and the door frame with his body.

  “Oh!” Her hands flew upward to avoid a complete collision, palms landing smack over the leanly muscled expanse of his chest. Without skipping a beat, Alex reached beneath her elbows, wrapping his fingers over the backs of her arms and pulling her close to keep her steady.

  Talk about a plan destined for epic failure.

  “Could you just put your machete down for one minute so we can talk about this?” he asked, his exhale moving past her ear in a warm puff as he lowered his chin to look at her. His heart thumped, fast and steady against her fingertips, and the unexpected intimacy of the contact sent a streak of heat all the way down Zoe’s spine. Her pulse jumped to match his, and she refused to look away even though her face prickled with what had to be an obvious blush.

  “This is simple risk analysis. I need people I can rely on in my kitchen. If you can’t take this job seriously enough to get it done right, then we have nothing to talk about.” She pushed out a couple of rapid-fire blinks, grounding herself in reality despite the fact that Alex’s callused fingers showed no signs of imminent departure from the backs of her arms.

  “And what if I can?”

  “You can’t,” Zoe argued, and God, she should’ve known better than to think that her soup kitchen would mean anything to a firefighter like Alex.

  Still, he didn’t relent. “If I can fix this mess, will you give me another chance?”

  She shook her head. “Alex, I—”

  “Zoe, listen.” His voice dropped, brittle and tight. “I’ll find a way to get it done. But I can’t lose my job, which means you can’t boot me. Please.”

  The words took a straight path to her sternum, kicking the air from her lungs without the argument she’d intended to use it for. Alex’s eyes glittered, dark blue and determined in the dusky light shining down from the bare bulb over their heads. His normally cocksure demeanor was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by an expression so oddly intense, Zoe’s pulse sped even faster through her veins.

  For just a stop-time sliver of a second, Alex Donovan was vulnerable.

  And she could either give him one last chance, or she could sign his walking papers out of her kitchen.

  Chapter Five

  Zoe shifted her weight to the heels of her kitchen clogs, scanning, then rescanning the pantry for even the tiniest hint that merely an hour ago, the place had been a food-borne bacteria factory just waiting to prove the old adage that sharing was caring.

  But she couldn’t find a single one.

  “See?” Alex leaned a sculpted shoulder against the door frame, his cocky smile back in place and even brighter than before. “One hundred percent clean and sanitized, just like I promised.”

  “Hmm.” She ran her fingers over the edge of the shelf in front of her, a ripple of shock working its way through her chest at the freshly scented air and the smooth, scrubbed surfaces. Ruler-straight rows of cartons and canned goods stood organized and ready to go, and as she dropped her gaze, even the buffed brown floor tiles seemed to gleam under her feet. “Well, it certainly looks up to code.”

  “Wow, Zoe. Don’t oversell it.” Alex’s grin remained perfectly intact as he pushed off the door frame, gesturing grandly through the light shining down from overhead. “Come on. Don’t even try to tell me that the best you’ve got is ‘it looks up to code.’”

  “It’s pretty clean,” she said, and damn it, that smile of his was infectious. Zoe knew better than to buy into his boyish charm—after all, sweet talk was Alex’s bread and butter, and he was clearly only trying to save his own skin.

  Trouble was, he’d saved hers in the process. Her standards might be sky high, but she’d been so lean on man power lately that even before this morning’s rotten food debacle, the pantry had needed some TLC.

  And Alex had given it a complete overhaul, all the way down to the baseboards.

  “This pantry is a masterpiece,” he corrected, delivering her back to the snug confines of the shelf-lined space. “I bet you’d get perfect marks if the city health inspector walked through that door right this minute. In fact . . .” He broke off, sauntering to the center of the freshly scoured room. “I’d even go so far as to say you could serve a four-course meal, right on this very spot.”

  Zoe bit back the involuntary laugh tempting the edges of her lips, her curiosity bypassing her caution filter as it made a beeline for her mouth. “Okay, I have to ask. How did you get it so clean in here?”

  “Well, the main ingredient was elbow grease, but I wasn’t without help. You remember Tom O’Keefe, right?” Alex asked, and she did a quick Station Eight roll call in her head.

  “Sure.” The paramedic had been with the FFD for the last few years. She didn’t know him quite as well as she did Alex and Cole and the other guys, but her father had always spoken highly of him, and in the handful of times she’d seen the guy at softball tournaments and department barbecues, O’Keefe had always seemed to live up to the praise. “But what on earth does he have to do with my pantry?”

  Alex laughed in a low, butterscotch-smooth rumble, and the sound took another chip out of Zoe’s doubt. “As luck would have it, O’Keefe is really good at sanitizing small spaces. I guess you could call it a product of his occupation, with all those health and safety guidelines on the ambo. Anyway, I told him I needed a deep clean on the fly, so he walked me through a couple of tricks over the phone. And before you ask”—he paused to lift both hand
s in concession—“yes, I double-checked his advice against the food safety section of your kitchen doorstop, and yes again. Both the methods and the chemicals I used are all legit.”

  “Oh,” Zoe said, the word a lame replacement for the already answered question she’d had preloaded on the tip of her tongue. But the last thing she’d expected was for Alex to come through, let alone hit a grand slam on the last-ditch curveball she’d lobbed in his direction.

  “You didn’t think you could rely on me to get this cleaned up right, did you?” The question arrived without gloating or accusation, his smile turning wistful as he pushed his hands into the pockets of his broken-in jeans. Zoe tugged at the hem of her apron, smoothing the fabric even though it was already perfectly in place, but screw it. She’d never been a fan of dancing around the truth, and it wasn’t as if Alex didn’t already know the answer, anyway.

  “To be honest, no. I really didn’t.”

  One brow arched up toward his sun-bleached hairline. “I don’t believe in wasting time on anything other than honesty,” he said. “As for the rest, I’m glad I surprised you.”

  She pulled in a deep breath to counter the bump in her pulse. Alex might be charming as hell right now, with that aw-shucks expression beneath the sprinkling of rugged stubble on his face, but he’d only helped her to help himself. Plus, she had bigger fish to fry—namely, that she had no fish, or protein of any kind for the rest of the day’s meal service.

  “Well, a deal’s a deal. While I don’t expect you to repeat your mistakes, or make any new ones because you’re unprepared, this gets you off the hook for this morning’s mess.” Zoe shifted her weight over the floor tiles, her ponytail brushing over one shoulder as she tipped her head at the pantry door. “But if you’ll excuse me, I’ve still got to go figure out how to get through the rest of today’s meal service without the food we lost.”

  Rather than taking a step back to let her pass, Alex straightened, keeping himself planted directly in her path. “No, you don’t.”

  “I’m sorry?” She’d been scraping like mad for the last hour to come up with replacement options for the ruined ingredients, to little avail. Did he seriously think her job was so easy that she could work up lunch and dinner for a hundred hungry residents on a wing and a Hail Mary?

  “You don’t have to worry about coming up with plan B. Not for lunch, anyway. I’ve got it covered.” Alex turned and jerked his chin at the pantry door in a clear request for her to follow, and the shock of his words had her so dumbfounded that she was powerless to do anything other than oblige.

  “Okay.” She extended the word with the tone of a question as they crossed back into the brightly lit kitchen, coming to a stop by the stainless steel prep table acting as a makeshift island in the center of the room. “Meal service starts in an hour and a half, and we have nothing to prepare. Do you have access to some sort of magic food genie I don’t know about?”

  “Something like that, yeah.” Alex pulled an iPhone out of the back pocket of his jeans, tapping the screen to life. After a handful of easy moves, he extended the phone in her direction, waiting silently as she took in the Web page he’d opened.

  Zoe’s jaw unhinged. “You ordered pizza?”

  “Look, I’m not even going to pretend I know how to make anything other than a mess in the kitchen, but you needed the food. I go skydiving with one of the guys who owns the pizza place over on Atlantic Boulevard, and he owed me a favor, so—”

  “Wait.” She held up one palm in a wordless stop right there, although the free-for-all of questions flying around in her brain made practicing what she preached a complete and total no-go. She’d known he was slick, but... “You got twenty pizzas by cashing in a favor?”

  “I got a deal on twenty pizzas by cashing in a favor,” Alex amended, propping one hip against the prep table and gesturing toward the swinging door. “But yeah. They’ll be here at eleven forty-five.”

  Zoe handed his phone back over, unsure whether she should cry with relief or tread with extreme caution. “You know, if you’re not careful, I might actually start to think there’s a decent guy underneath all that attitude.”

  Heat laddered up the back of her neck as she heard the implication of the words, but rather than take offense or trot out said attitude for a test run, Alex just laughed.

  “Well. We can’t have that, now can we?”

  Zoe’s smile appeared before she could stop it. “Is there anyone in Fairview you can’t fast talk into giving you what you want?”

  “You mean besides you?” His blue eyes glinted teasingly, but it lasted for only a second before he said, “Listen, just because I don’t want to be here doesn’t mean I’m out to torpedo your kitchen, either. This community service thing might not be what either of us wants, but you gave me a second chance. And while I realize delivery pizza isn’t the meal you had in mind, I owed you one, and it really is the best I’ve got.”

  An odd sensation twisted in her chest, welling up in a soft, involuntary laugh. “Was that supposed to be endearing?”

  “That all depends,” Alex said, one corner of his mouth lifting into a dark and forbidden version of his all-American smile. “Did it work?”

  Did. It. Ever. Zoe’s lips parted, and for just a fraction of a second, she wanted nothing more than to rain check everything else around her to find out if his smile tasted as wicked as it looked. But then her eyes dropped to the four-armed crest emblazoned over the top left of his T-shirt, complete with the words Fairview Fire Department, Station Eight printed in bold, bright red letters, and the sight yanked her right back to reality.

  Alex might’ve knocked her for a loop by going above and beyond to correct his mistake, and he might be hitting sexy out of the park with that flirty little half grin, but she couldn’t lose track of what was important, especially not when she had people to feed.

  And double especially not with a risk-happy firefighter who didn’t take her seriously anyway.

  “It’s a good start,” she said, giving herself one last mental thump before turning toward the walk-in refrigerator. “According to city nutrition guidelines, we’ve got to offer at least one serving of fruit or vegetables per meal, though, so we’ll have to get a little creative to pull this off entirely.”

  He followed her to the back of the kitchen, reaching out to hold the oversized stainless steel door she’d just popped open. “I take it the tomato sauce doesn’t count.”

  The cool, manufactured air of the walk-in cemented Zoe’s thoughts into marching order, although she couldn’t quite keep her smile from resurfacing just a little as she stepped all the way inside the frosty space. “I said creative, Alex. Not crazy. But if we borrow the garnish from tomorrow night’s hamburgers and some of the carrots from Saturday’s chicken pot pie, we should have just enough ingredients to make a salad.” Naked burgers weren’t the most appealing thing on the planet, but at least she had ketchup and mustard packets tucked away in the pantry. She’d certainly made do with worse.

  “Looks like you’ve done this kind of shuffle before.” Alex reached out for the carton of lettuce Zoe had slid from the metal shelving, hefting it in front of his chest as she turned back to unearth two oversized bags of carrots from the box next to the now-empty slot.

  “Most of the people here won’t get fruit or vegetables any other way, so I try to put as many natural ingredients into the meals as I can. Produce is expensive, though, and my budget is pretty slim. I have to get creative to make the ingredients last.”

  His feet kept time with hers, first over the polished steel of the fridge floor, then the clay-colored ceramic tiles as they moved back into the kitchen and regrouped again at the prep table in the center of the room. “I had no idea running a soup kitchen was so involved.”

  The muscles in Zoe’s shoulders unwound from the spot where her apron looped gently behind her neck. She might not be particularly graceful at tackling personal conversations, or okay, even at polite chitchat, but feeding people in a wa
y that mattered? That, she could talk about.

  “Once you get past the menu planning and the set number of meals served almost exclusively buffet style, the mechanics of managing a soup kitchen aren’t all that much different from running the back of a restaurant,” she said, placing the carrots on the table in front of her. “Good planning and solid prep are half the battle.”

  She opened one of the storage drawers set beneath the top of the prep-table-slash-island, sliding out the small handful of tools she’d need in order to take the salad from concept to reality. Each movement fell neatly into the foundation of the one that had come before it, all of them smoothing the last jagged edges of her morning.

  “You ran the kitchen at that restaurant in Washington, DC?” Alex’s shock ghosted over his features, and she met it with some holy crap of her own.

  “You know about my apprenticeship at Kismet?”

  He nodded. “Your father talked about it for two years straight. He said it was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, but I didn’t realize you were in charge of the place.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t,” Zoe said, trying as deftly as possible to steer the conversation away from her father. She’d just lost the tension in her shoulders, for God’s sake. “But after culinary school, I spent two years there, one on the line and one under the head chef. There’s a lot of baptism by fire on the restaurant circuit. You learn how to tame the animals pretty quickly, even if you’re not running the zoo.”

  “Yeah, that sounds familiar, actually.”

  Although Alex’s demeanor remained completely neutral, right down to the detached, one-shouldered shrug he’d been giving ever since he’d arrived in her kitchen yesterday morning, the words arrived with just enough scrape to catch Zoe’s attention and hold.

  He wasn’t detached at all. He was displaced. And hell if she didn’t know all the lyrics to that song.