Reckless

by Kimberly Kincaid

  Like right now.

  Choking back the sob squeezing the back of her throat, Zoe forced herself down the hallway. She needed to focus, to breathe, to take the panic rising in her chest and get rid of it.

  She headed for the kitchen.

  The grocery bags she’d handed off when she’d arrived stood in a precise row on the stainless steel counter next to the refrigerator, and she emptied them one by one. Jones had put the trays of mac and cheese in the fridge, but pulling them out to get them in the oven seemed kind of pointless since she didn’t know when everyone would be back.

  Or if.

  “Stop it,” she chided, and fabulous, now she was talking to herself. She turned toward the pantry—there had to be something in there she could chop, mix, or bake—when the flash of the muted TV caught her eye from across the common room.

  Everyone had hauled out to respond to that fire call so fast, they must’ve forgotten to turn the thing off. Zoe crossed over to the pair of couches arranged in an L shape in front of the television, where a quick pat-through of the cushions yielded the remote.

  But the image on the screen turned her blood to ice water, and instead of hitting the power button to turn the television off, she jammed her finger over the volume, cranking it loud enough to vibrate in her ears.

  “. . . Breaking news at the scene of a fire in the one hundred block of Windsor Avenue, where firefighters have made dramatic attempts to put out the massive blaze now taking over four units of a row home. Moments ago, our very own KTV crew witnessed a breathtaking rescue that left at least one person critically injured. . . .”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Zoe gasped, fear slamming through her with enough force to knock the air from her rib cage with a cry.

  In the background, over the reporter’s shoulder, O’Keefe and Rachel scrambled to take care of the lifeless figure strapped to the gurney, their faces as ash white and serious as she’d ever seen them. The man stretched out between them, prone and unmoving, was fully decked out in turnout gear, with one exception.

  His helmet was missing, and Zoe would know that sun-kissed blond head anywhere on the planet.

  The remote had barely hit the floor before she tore out of the fire station with her keys in her hand and her heart shattering into a million pieces in her chest.

  By the time Zoe had made the ten-minute drive to Fair-view Hospital, her panic had grown six rows of razor-wire teeth and sunk them all the way into her bones. Barging past the hiss of the automatic double doors, she flung herself over the linoleum toward the information desk. Her breath hitched at an unnatural pace, tumbling her words together in a rushed mess.

  “The man . . . the firefighter hurt at the fire on Windsor. Please. I need . . . I need . . .” Absolute terror clotted the rest of her request, and the woman behind the desk leaned forward with obvious concern.

  “Are you a family member?” she asked, and Zoe froze.

  “I, uh . . . I . . .”

  “She’s with us,” came a familiar voice from her left. Her heart vaulted into her windpipe as she swung around to see Cole walking toward the desk, his face streaked with sweat and soot and seriousness as he came to a stop beside her.

  “Oh my God, Cole.” Zoe threw her arms around him, choking on the pervasive stench of smoke clinging to his turnout gear. “What’s going on? I saw the fire on the news and they said—”

  “Come on. Let me take you to the waiting room down the hall, okay?”

  A wave of nausea roiled in the pit of her belly. “Please just tell me,” she whispered, wiping away the tears wobbling on her lashes.

  Cole motioned her toward a quiet corner of the hospital’s lobby. “We just got here five minutes ago. Alex was injured during a rescue. They’re assessing him in one of the trauma rooms right now.”

  Zoe locked her knees to keep herself upright. “Injured,” she repeated, and God, if she didn’t get a straight answer, she was going to lose her ever-loving mind. “How bad? Come on, Cole, talk to me here. I need to know.”

  The firefighter hesitated, only for a second, but with Cole, it might as well have been a screaming admission of things gone wrong. “Part of a ceiling beam collapsed across his back and shoulder. He lost consciousness, and Jones and I dragged him to the ambo. Rachel said he woke up just briefly on the way here, but . . .”

  “But?” Zoe rasped.

  “The docs have to check him out, Zoe,” Cole said, his voice canting lower with concern and the sharp undercurrent of fear. “He’s hurt pretty bad, but I don’t know any more than that.”

  Every ounce of despair that she’d stuffed into her chest in the last few hours came surging up in a hot rush, the absolute irony of Alex’s voice echoing through her head.

  “Fighting fires might be risky, but I’ve got the best team on the planet with me. I’ll be all right.... I promise. . . . I promise. . . .”

  Except the promise had been a lie. Just like all the other ones that had come crashing down on her today.

  Zoe exhaled, and her fingertips and toes tingled with numbness that started working its way inward. “Is everyone else in the waiting room?”

  Cole nodded, just one lift of his cleft chin. “Everyone except for your father. He said he needed some space. Last I saw he was by the ambulance bay.” He paused. “Do you want to try to talk to him?”

  “No,” Zoe said, her arms heavy with the prickle of non-feeling. “I’d like to sit in the waiting room with you guys, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course,” Cole said, ushering her toward the double doors marked EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT.

  By the time she’d reached the tiny room filled with stony-faced firefighters, her heart had gone as numb as the rest of her.

  Alex swallowed past the steady stream of fire ants in his throat, and God damn, whoever was playing the samba in his skull needed to lay off the fucking percussion.

  “Mr. Donovan. Nice to see you made it back.” The voice was just as unfamiliar as Alex’s surroundings, and wait . . . where the hell was he?

  “Thanks,” he croaked, shocked to hear that his own voice vaguely resembled forty-grit sandpaper. “Where . . . ?”

  “Take it easy.” The voice was joined by the face of a gray-haired man in a white coat. “My name is Dr. Ward, and I’m the attending physician here in the Emergency Department at Fairview Hospital. Do you remember being brought in?”

  Alex squinted, which proved to be a stupid move because now there were two guys in front of him, and he was pretty sure the doc didn’t have a twin. Clips of memory swirled in his mind’s eye, surging and then slipping away. Narrow stairs, a smoke-filled hallway, backing up Everett on the nozzle . . .

  “There was a man in that bedroom.” Alex froze in realization for only a second before bolting upright against the mattress where he lay. The move sent a shock wave of pain on a nasty route from his left shoulder to his fingers and back, and what was with the sling on his arm?

  “Take it easy, Mr. Donovan.” Dr. Ward’s voice tacked on an unspoken or I’ll restrain you, but Alex didn’t really give a shit. “You’ve sustained a few injuries. You need to be still so you don’t make them worse.”

  Yeah, yeah. Alex shook his head even though the move made throwing up a distinct probability. “I pulled a man out of that fire. Where is he?”

  “He’s here at the hospital, too.” Dr. Ward’s expression stayed completely neutral, but he moved forward to look Alex in the eye. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Are you feeling any pain right now?”

  Even though he wanted to barrel past the Q & A, it was clear from the look of things that getting chippy wouldn’t take Alex very far. “The back of my shoulder hurts a little.” Okay, so by a little, he really meant a butt ton. But still. “And my head feels kind of weird, but otherwise, I’m fine.”

  “I see.” Dr. Ward took a hard look at the monitor by Alex’s bedside, following up with the whole stethoscope-flashlight thing. “Well, you were brought in by ambulance with injuries to your
head, your upper back, and your shoulder.”

  “Really?” Shock prickled a path up his spine. How did he not remember being in the ambo?

  “You sustained a moderate concussion. It’s not unusual for people to have memory gaps immediately following a traumatic brain injury,” Dr. Ward assured him, as if he’d sensed Alex’s concern. “Fortunately your gear kept you from sustaining any burn damage, and your colleagues got you here very quickly, but you did lose consciousness at the scene, and you’ve been in and out during your assessment.”

  “Good to know,” Alex said, the joke falling flat. Holy shit, how much time had he lost?

  The doc continued. “We’ve cleared you of any immediate spinal injuries, although you sustained some blunt force trauma to the back of your shoulder and neck, apparently from a falling ceiling beam. X-rays don’t show any significant damage to the bone in your upper arm or shoulder.”

  “So I’m fine,” Alex said. His arm throbbed in protest, so he tacked on, “Mostly.”

  “What you are is lucky. And I imagine, what you will be in the coming days is very sore.”

  Alex matched Dr. Ward’s raised brow, shifting against the overstarched sheet on the gurney beneath him. “That’s not a no.”

  The corners of the doc’s mouth tipped upward in a touché-like smile. “We’ll have to monitor you overnight per concussion protocol, and I’d like to run a CT scan and a few more tests just to hedge our bets. But yes. Your prognosis is for a full recovery eventually, provided that you follow your standards of care.”

  “What about the man from the fire?” Concern peppered Alex’s gut. The guy had barely been breathing, and God, he’d been so limp when Alex had picked him up to get him out of that room.

  Dr. Ward shifted his weight, his internal debate raging clearly on his face. “Hospital policy dictates that I can’t share patient information with nonfamily members. However, I can tell you that every patient brought to Fairview Hospital’s ED gets the very best care we can offer.”

  God damn it, why had Alex hesitated when he’d first seen the guy in that doorway? “So he’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “He’s being extremely well attended,” Dr. Ward said, the subtext of his nonanswer screaming through loud and freaking clear. “At any rate, you’ve got a room full of firefighters outside who are champing at the bit to see you. I’ll need to restrict visits to one at a time, and only for a few minutes each, but I can apprise them of your condition if you’d like.”

  Oh hell. The last time any of them had been hauled off in an ambo, their captain had been critically burned, and the time before that, they’d lost a man. Knowing everyone at Eight, they were probably flipping out. “Please. Make sure you tell them the prognosis part first.”

  He sat back against the gurney, his head and neck duking it out for the title of I Hate You More. Everett had needed backup on the nozzle—there was no denying those stairs had been ridiculous, and not in the good way. But Jones had been there, too, and just because he was a rookie didn’t mean he was an idiot. If Alex had gone down that hallway earlier, even by a minute or two, he might’ve gotten the guy to safety.

  But he hadn’t. He’d hesitated, and that caution could’ve cost a man his life.

  Movement in the door frame by the foot of his gurney captured Alex’s attention, his surprise quickly becoming a bolt of pure goodness as the sight of Zoe registered in his fog-filled brain. Even if she did look like she’d been through the wringer.

  “Hey, Gorgeous.” He lifted his arms to reach for her, but between the sling on his left side and the IV tubes snaking up from his right, it was pretty much a no-go. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you kind of look terrible.”

  “After everything that’s happened, you’re going to joke with me?” she asked, her lips pressing into a pale, practically nonexistent line, and shit. Shit. Her news about the grant—along with the argument they’d had with her father—came crashing back into focus.

  “Zoe, I’m sorry. I know today’s been rough, but we’ll find a way to help Hope House. And to patch things up with your father.” Eventually. Maybe. Damn, Cap had been so angry. But at some point, Alex would convince him that what was going on with Zoe wasn’t fast and furious.

  He was in love with her. And he didn’t even care if Westin, or everyone at the station, or everyone in the whole goddamn galaxy knew it.

  “That’s not what I mean.” Zoe wrapped her arms around her body as if she were holding on for dear life, but she didn’t move past the three steps she’d taken into the trauma room. “I saw the fire on the news, and then Cole told me what happened, how that ceiling beam just came down right on top of you, and I thought . . . I thought . . . God, Alex, I thought you were dead.”

  The shell-shocked look on her face took a slap at his sternum, and he gestured to himself with his right arm in an effort to reassure her. “But I’m not, see? Totally fine.”

  Disbelief bled into her expression, taking over her tear-stained face. “You suffered a traumatic brain injury and blunt force trauma to your shoulder.”

  Ah, she sort of had him there. “Okay, I guess you’re right. I did get a little banged up. But my shoulder’s not even broken.” He didn’t voice his probably, because really, she looked frightened and furious enough.

  “Do you honestly think this is no big deal?”

  Alex paused, his gut going tight. “I think getting hurt is part of the risk involved in my job, but I promise, Zoe. I’m no worse for wear.”

  “You promise,” she whispered, her eyes flashing with a sharp flare of anger before the emotion dulled into sadness. “You promised me you’d be fine to begin with. Just like you promised that sinking all my time and resources into applying for the Collingsworth Grant would be worth the risk.”

  “I didn’t try to get hurt at this fire, Zoe. And we both know you deserved the hell out of that grant.” There was only so much of life you could control. Fuck, he’d learned that lesson at the ultimate cost when he’d lost his parents twelve years ago, then again when Mason had been killed in that apartment fire.

  Still, she shook her head. “I understand that you made those promises to me in good faith, Alex. I really do. But it doesn’t change the fact that they turned out to be wrong.”

  His chin snapped up, and even though it scrambled his vision a little, his determination didn’t budge. “Have I ever been wrong when I said I had your back?”

  “No, but—”

  Even though he knew it would likely piss Zoe off to no end, Alex interrupted her anyway. “And have I ever been wrong when I told you I’d be fine?”

  “You’re not fine now!” The fiery glint returned to her stare, and yup. Pissed.

  But again, Alex pressed. “This will heal. Have I?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Zoe’s voice wavered, her arms curling even tighter around her body. “You can’t promise me you’ll always be okay.”

  A dark ripple of frustration pulsed through his blood. “I’m a firefighter, Zoe. There are no absolute guarantees. You know that’s not how it works.”

  “And I also know I can’t live like this.”

  The words were no more than a feather-soft whisper, but they ripped through every part of Alex as if she’d screamed, and impulse had him answering, hard and fast and with everything in his heart.

  “Yes, you can,” he said, leaning forward in the bed just to bring himself closer to her. “You just have to take the risk and believe in me. In us.”

  “I can’t take any more risks!” Zoe cried, stabbing her feet into the floor as her face hardened with determination Alex knew all too well. “Don’t you see? They all fail. I wasted all that time and energy that could’ve gone toward feeding people who depend on me. I put something that mattered on the line and I lost. I risked my relationship with my father, who won’t even speak to me right now. And I . . .” She broke off, her chest shuddering on a swallowed cry. “You let me believe that all of this would be okay. That the risks were worth tak
ing. But they’re not. You could’ve died today, Alex, just like you could die every time you’re on shift. And I can’t take risks when all they do is fail.”

  Just like that, Alex’s last thread of control snapped. “They don’t always fail. Sometimes, risks save lives. If I’d taken one today, the man I pulled out of that fire wouldn’t be in the shape he’s in now. But I hesitated, and it cost valuable time.”

  Zoe blinked in surprise, but she didn’t say anything, and hell if he was stopping before he’d unloaded his piece. “I get that you’re raw right now, and I know taking risks scares you. But the flip side scares me. Every day that we have is a gift—a goddamn treasure. Not living my life because of what-if is the one risk I’m not willing to take. If you want to go live in a bubble, I can’t stop you. But I can’t go with you either. Please, Zoe. Stay with me. Take the risk.”

  Alex looked at her, willing her with all he had to take a step toward him, or even to make the slightest move that said she’d trust him enough to stay.

  But instead, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  And then she turned and walked out the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Zoe made it all the way through the Emergency Department, past the double doors and over the stretch of asphalt in the parking lot before the tears she’d been fighting told her stubborn pride to kiss their ass. Wiping her face with the back of one hand, she used the other to get into her Prius, shutting the door so she could cry in peace.

  Peace. On second thought, just crying would have to cut it for now.

  She started the car, cutting a careful path over the handful of streets between Fairview Hospital and her apartment. Even though the drive wasn’t terribly taxing or terribly long, by the time she’d parked her car and reached her threshold, her throat burned as much as her eyes.

  Neither one of them came within a trillion miles of the hole in her chest.

  Dropping her keys to the kitchen counter with a lackluster clank, she surveyed her favorite room. The kitchen had always been the cure-all for her frustrations, for her anger and her sadness and her doubt.