Reckless

by Kimberly Kincaid

  Everything about Alex froze but his pulse. “Your shoulder.” God, he was such an ass. How could he have slept with her when he’d known full well she was hurt? “Here, let me look.”

  “It’s really . . . oh. Okay then.” Zoe’s protest faded as he levered them both to a sitting position in her bed. Reaching through the shadows, he clicked on her bedside lamp, not even pausing to blink before returning his fingers to the buttons on her shirt.

  “Alex,” she started, her voice still thick with residual sleep. “I’m just a little sore. The doctor at urgent care said I probably would be, remember?”

  “I remember.” He scooped up the hem of the quilt, tucking it over her chest to keep her covered and warm before sliding the shirt from her arms.

  It took every last ounce of his willpower not to swear out loud.

  Alex forced a deep breath through his windpipe. The finger-shaped smudges on Zoe’s upper arms were bad enough. But the purple bruise blooming like an angry, softball-sized starburst across the back of her shoulder made him want to find the guy who had muscled his way through Hope House and beat the snot out of him.

  Not wanting to freak her out, he dialed back his expression even though his chest felt like it was chock-full of thumbtacks. “I’m going to get some ice from your freezer. That should help the swelling.”

  “If you give me just a second, I’ll come with you.” Zoe reached for her discarded jeans, and instinct had Alex in motion before he could fully register his hand on her quilt-covered knee.

  “You need to rest, Zoe.”

  She shifted from beneath the covers, putting on first her panties, then her jeans before grabbing a tank top from the nearby dresser. “What I need is to eat something, and you probably do, too.” A smile flitted over her face, but her slow, clumsy movements as she worked the tank top over her head canceled the humor right out. “So can you please do me a favor and stop going all Cro-Magnon man for just a couple of minutes so I can finish getting dressed and make that happen?”

  Good Lord, this woman was certifiable. “You’re not cooking,” Alex said, but the lightning-fast lift of Zoe’s brows had him rephrasing just as quickly. “What I mean is, if you’re sore, you should take it easy. Especially if you want to make it through your day at Hope House tomorrow without that shoulder locking up.”

  Zoe paused, a frown unbending on her lips, and he took the ball and ran like hell. “Why don’t I help you get dressed, and then we can order something for dinner? In the meantime, you can ice that bruise. Fair?”

  She reached for the hoodie draped over the chair at her bedside, her frown intensifying as Alex slid out of the bed to guide it over her hurt shoulder before letting her do the rest. “Hmph. You’re lucky you know how to talk your way into getting what you want.”

  “And you suck at letting me have your back.” Okay, so he hadn’t really meant to tease her—it had just slipped out. But Zoe laughed, and the sound scattered the tension pulling tight at Alex’s muscles.

  “All right, all right. Chinese or pizza?”

  He followed her out of her bedroom and down the narrow hallway, shouldering his way back into his own T-shirt as he went. “Pizza. I can call my buddy and have it here in twenty minutes, tops.”

  Zoe laughed again. “Of course you can.”

  Five minutes later, he’d put the call in to his friend who owned the pizza place and filled a bag with ice from Zoe’s freezer. Turning toward the spot where she stood on the threshold, he nodded her into a kitchen chair. “You know your father’s probably going to hear about what happened today.” He met her partly panicked you wouldn’t dare expression with raised palms. “The paramedics who responded to check Damien out were from Station Four. Your father is pretty tight with Captain Lewis. There’s no way the dots won’t connect if your name got mentioned somewhere down the line.”

  “Lovely. Just what my father needs is another reason to hate my job.” Zoe slumped, the bag of ice she’d propped between her shoulder and the back of her chair crinkling.

  Alex’s gut dipped, but not enough to keep his words at bay. “You can’t really blame him for wanting you to be safe.”

  “I can when his desire for that safety is a double standard,” she said, her light brown eyes flashing beneath the glow of the kitchen lights. But her fire didn’t last. “Ugh, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be difficult. I know he wants me safe, and I get that—after all, part of why I’m so mad at him is because I don’t think he’s being smart about his own self-preservation. But I’m not a kid anymore. We should be able to at least talk about it without fighting, but every time I try to explain that Hope House isn’t some death trap, and that he risks his safety at every shift, too, he just argues and then clams up. Keeping all this tension inside makes me so . . . frustrated.”

  “I’m not sure I’m an unbiased ear,” Alex admitted, dragging a rough hand through his hair. As much potential as this conversation had to turn sticky, that didn’t mean they shouldn’t have it. “Look, Zoe, I have a zero-tolerance policy for bullshit, so I’m going to be honest. I didn’t intend for this to happen between me and you. I’m not saying I didn’t want it,” he qualified, straightening his spine against the back of his chair. “Because I did. I do. It’s just—”

  “I’m still my father’s daughter.”

  Her words stopped the rest of his in his throat. Damn it. The him-and-her part of the conversation, Alex could have, no sweat. The chunk that involved the history between him and her father? Not so freaking much.

  Not that his silence stopped Zoe from pushing back. “Alex, you and I are adults. We mutually agreed to have sex. Together. The two of us.”

  A muscle pulled tight across his jaw. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “But there isn’t,” she countered. “Look, I understand your sense of loyalty. But I’m twenty-seven years old. At a certain point, that’s got to factor in.”

  “Of course it does. But your father has been my captain for eight years, Zoe. That makes things complicated.”

  Zoe paused, and for a minute, he thought she’d let the topic drop. Part of him was relieved—he might not tolerate a whole lot of runaround, but there was a difference between saying what needed to be said and airing out too much. The past was the past, over and done. Nothing could be said or done to change it.

  So why were the events he’d tried so hard to leave behind still burning to come out?

  “Okay,” she said. Only instead of changing the subject, or lapsing into silence, or doing any of the other things she could’ve done to let Alex off the hook, Zoe slid into the chair next to him to scoop up his hand.

  “So uncomplicate it for me.”

  Alex pulled back, staring at her through the soft overhead light and the softer evening shadows beyond. The fact that she’d blown his goddamn mind in bed had been reason enough to give him pause. But now that he sat next to her, in her kitchen of all places, not just ready but willing to green-light all the things he usually kept on emotional lockdown?

  Yeah. This couldn’t fucking end well.

  He opened his mouth anyway.

  “You were surprised the other day, when you picked me up at my house.” He’d seen it on her face as soon as she’d gotten out of her car, and she certainly hadn’t been the first person to go brows-up over his zip code. “Probably wondering why I live in suburbia, right?”

  Zoe’s forehead furrowed in confusion, although the blush that said Alex was spot-on with his assessment didn’t get by him, either. “Well, yeah. Most young, single guys live a lot closer to the city.”

  He nodded, his rib cage going tight as he thought of where Brennan lived, and Cole and O’Keefe and even Crews, who had a family. “They do. But I live in my neighborhood because that house belonged to my parents.”

  Her confusion turned to clear surprise. “You bought your parents’ house?”

  “No.” The truth crowded up, shoving its way out of his mouth despite the rust on the words. “I inherited it.
”

  “You . . . oh.” Zoe froze, her copper stare going wide. “Oh my God, Alex. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It happened a long time ago, so not a lot of people do. My parents both died in a car accident, coming back from a long weekend on Sapphire Island.” He took a deep breath, waiting for the rest of the story to logjam in his throat. But instead, the words spilled out. “It was late, but they decided to come home at night rather than get up early the next morning to make the three-hour trip. A guy driving a tractor trailer fell asleep behind the wheel and crossed the center line on Route Seventeen to hit their SUV head-on. All three of them were killed instantly.”

  Zoe’s breath released on an audible exhale, and Alex steeled himself for the inevitable pity party that always accompanied the story on the rare occasion that he actually told it. But Zoe didn’t offer one, and hell if that didn’t make him want to talk even more.

  “How old were you?” she asked, and his gut twisted hard before dropping toward his knees.

  “The accident happened two months after my eighteenth birthday.”

  She paused, her fingers tightening over his on the dark wood of her kitchen table. “Oh, Alex. I don’t know what to say. That must have been really hard for you.”

  “It was,” Alex replied with honesty instead of heat. “Our family was just the three of us, aside from my great-aunt and uncle who I’d seen maybe six times in my life. Even though I was legally an adult, my parents left everything to me in a trust. For all intents and purposes, I was pretty much an orphan.”

  He shifted, his chair scraping softly over the ceramic tile. As if she’d grasped his need to do anything other than be still, Zoe let go of his hand, tilting her head slightly toward the center of the kitchen in a nonverbal c’mon.

  Alex followed her to the counter, a thread of relief spreading out in his chest as he continued. “College was really important to my old man, and he and I were close. Although he had a good job with the city, he’d never gone to college, and he always regretted it. My parents left me everything they had, with the one stipulation that I had to earn my degree. So I started at UVA that fall.”

  “That must have been difficult, going to college so soon after they passed away.” Zoe reached into the fridge for a pair of beers, handing one over. The simple act of uncapping the bottle, then trading it for the other to repeat the process, chilled him out, and he rolled his shoulder in a shrug.

  “Actually, it saved my ass in the long run. I’d already been accepted, and I landed a decent baseball scholarship. My parents had thankfully planned for a lot of the rest. In truth, without that stipulation in their will, I probably wouldn’t have gone to college after their accident, and I damn sure wouldn’t have stuck through it for all four years to get my degree like my dad wanted me to.” God, those first few years after his parents had been killed had been a blur, just motions to get from one step to the next. College had been the last freaking thing on his mind.

  Alex took a sip of his beer, letting the smooth flavor linger for just a second before continuing. “Even though I knew enough people from baseball and stuff like that, I never really fit in. All they cared about was getting through exams and hanging out and drinking. Meanwhile, I was going home over Christmas break to fix leaky pipes in the bathroom and sort through personal property taxes. Looking back, I probably could’ve tried harder to find a place to belong. But at the time, I just didn’t want to.”

  “You felt like friends would replace your family,” Zoe said, and although her tone didn’t make it a question, he answered anyway.

  “I didn’t realize it then, but yeah. Going to college got me thinking about all the things my parents never got to do. Part of me was so angry that my dad would never be able to go back and get a degree like he’d wanted, or see me get mine.”

  She bit her lip, but didn’t shield her suddenly tear-bright gaze. “All things considered, that anger seems justified.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t even have anybody to be mad at, you know? And after a while, spending all that time angry just seemed like a waste. No matter how hard I tried, or how pissed I got, I couldn’t change what had happened. I couldn’t rewind, make my parents come home earlier, get sick so they couldn’t go at all—I couldn’t do anything. So instead, I decided I was going to do everything.”

  “Oh.” Realization wrapped around Zoe’s single syllable, her beer bottle finding the counter with a muffled clunk. “That’s why you take so many risks.”

  He nodded. “Once I graduated, I was determined to experience every single thing I possibly could, the wilder, the better. I enrolled at the fire academy about fifteen minutes after graduation.”

  “Not a whole lot of places with more opportunity for an adrenaline high,” she admitted, and Alex didn’t even bother biting back the ironic laugh welling up from his chest.

  “Or with so many rules.” He may not have been short on the balls to do active fire drills or haul himself a hundred feet in the air on nothing more than a ladder and a Hail Mary. But scraping up the patience to follow the regs while he did it had damn near killed him. Figuratively and literally. “Even though I nailed both the physical stuff and the written exams, I still didn’t want to fit in or fall in line, and my attitude made that wildly clear. I found plenty of trouble at the academy, and I nearly got tossed out twice. Even though I was at the top of my class, by the time I graduated, none of the captains in Fairview wanted to take a flyer on me. Except for one.”

  Zoe leaned against the counter, a tiny smile of irony playing on her lips. “My father.”

  “Your father,” he agreed. “I graduated from the academy in a pretty good-sized class, and Eight is one of the bigger houses in the city. Although having two candidates is pretty unusual, your father agreed to take me and Cole together.”

  “I remember that,” Zoe said, her eyes sparking as she took an obvious tour down memory lane. “It was the same year the Perfect Church caught on fire. God, that place has been around forever.”

  Alex’s shoulders went tight at her mention of the Fairview landmark that had given Church Street its name, and the fire that had ironically saved his life. “That was the first big fire call I ever went on.”

  “Really?” She pulled back in surprise, and even though his defenses took one last potshot at his gut, Alex still kept talking.

  “Yeah. I’d only been in-house for about three weeks. After a year of training for the real deal, I was completely jacked up. The church is so close to the firehouse, we could practically smell the smoke from the engine bay.” In fact, with her apartment only a handful of streets away, he’d put even money on being able to see the church’s spires from her east-facing window. “We were obviously first on scene. The electrical was ancient, and the old wiring sparked a fire inside the walls and part of the roof. The place was pretty heavily involved even though we got there in minutes.”

  Zoe tipped her beer to her lips before nodding. “I remember the damage being really extensive. With all the wood in the original construction, it’s not too surprising that the fire spread quickly.”

  “I’d never imagined anything like it,” Alex admitted. “Even with what I know now, that fire moved unbelievably fast. Your father was cool as could be, though. Handing out orders like Halloween candy.”

  “That sounds like him,” she said, her smile small and wistful. “I cracked my head on a coffee table once when I was eight and ended up needing fifteen stitches. My mother damn near lost her mind. My dad took one look and said, ‘Guess we’re going to the emergency room, kiddo.’”

  Alex nodded, and Christ, he could still hear Westin’s calm, clear voice telling everyone what to do, as if the fire had gone down yesterday. “Of course, I didn’t want any part of playing it safe. Your father paired me up with Oz for search and rescue.”

  “Jeez. That’s a hell of a first run.”

  “Tell me about it.” Dennis Osborne was about as old school and salty as firefighters came. He’d been
Station Eight’s squad lieutenant since before Alex had even arrived in-house, and the guy had been a firefighter for nearly as long as Westin himself. “Oz definitely lives by the whole my-way-or-the-highway mantra. Needless to say, he pretty much told me to stay on his hip and not to so much as burp unless he said so.”

  “And knowing you, I’m sure that didn’t go over well.” Her gently raised brows told Alex she knew exactly how the next part of the story played out, and he didn’t disappoint her by watering down the truth.

  “Oh, it was a pissing contest from the word go. Between the gables and the church spires, squad had their hands full venting the roof, so we had to split up water lines and search and rescue until another engine could respond. I knew Oz and I would cover more ground if we broke off for search and rescue, but he wasn’t having it. I was so antsy to get my hands dirty that I told him to go screw.”

  Zoe’s eyes went round and wide as she pulled back against the counter to pin him with a stare full of shock. “You broke ranks in the middle of that huge fire? On your first fire call?”

  God, the stupidity of it still rang in his ears, even if the feelings that had motivated his actions still ran bone deep. “I thought that if someone was trapped in there, splitting up to find them was smarter.” He hadn’t realized at the time how fast fire could spread, or that Westin was so adamant about his men pairing up for damn good reasons. “But I got turned around in one of the storage rooms in the back of the church and couldn’t find my exit path. I ended up making it out before the fire flashed over, but just barely.”

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Alex, you could’ve been killed.”

  He washed down the bitter tang of irony with a long sip of his beer. Funny how scraping elbows with death had ended up saving his life. “Yeah, well, after Oz went up one side of me and down the other—in front of the entire house, which was a real treat—a part of me was wishing for it. And all that time, your father didn’t say a single word.”