Reckless (5 page)

“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.”

In fact, her father probably wanted Alex back at Station Eight as badly as the cocky Casanova wanted to be there, which meant the last place on earth he'd put the guy was her short-staffed soup kitchen, where he'd have to earn every nanosecond of his community service. This whole thing had to be a coincidence.

“There really aren't a whole lot of places that need community service volunteers more than we do,” Tina agreed slowly. “I guess it's not
too
much of a shock that Alex landed in your kitchen.”

“Yeah.” Zoe huffed out a laugh, because it was that or cry, and she'd never been partial to a whole lot of boo hoo. “Even if it is the mother of all ironies.”

“Are you sure there's nothing else between you and Mr. Oooo-La-La?” Tina asked, her obvious spark of curiosity making Zoe clamp down on her lip two seconds too late. “Or do you have something you'd like to share with the class?”

“Of course not,” she said, strong-arming her thoughts into submission along with her words. She and Tina worked closely together—they were friends, even—but no way was Zoe copping to the near-miss-kiss that haunted her like the ghost of Christmas Stupid. Her only saving grace was that somewhere over the course of the last five years, Alex seemed to have blanked on the entire incident. Not that being forgettable was a major boost to her pride, but it was definitely better than being remembered for letting your beer become the spokesperson for your girly bits in an uncharacteristically impulsive moment of I'm-going-off-to-college-so-maybe-you-should-kiss-me weakness.

Zoe cleared her throat. “I mean, come on, Tina. It doesn't really get more ironic than the fire captain's daughter getting stuck with the least serious guy in the house for a very serious community service assignment. It's like somewhere out in the universe, my karma totally exploded, and now I've got to deal with the aftermath for four whole weeks.”

Tina measured Zoe's answer, taking a sip from a coffee mug broadcasting
There's too much blood in my caffeine system,
before she said, “I don't know, sweet cakes. Maybe once Alex gets used to being here, he'll surprise you.”

Please. Zoe was too organized for surprises of any kind, especially ones boasting six feet two inches of nothing but ego. “He's pretty determined to squeak by on as little effort as possible, and he's made it perfectly plain that he doesn't want to be here. Hell, he doesn't even think he did anything to deserve community service in the first place. I highly doubt he'll be shocking me with a change of heart.”

“Well, hands are hands, I guess. At least you can use 'em while you've got 'em.”

“More like use 'em until they screw up,” Zoe countered, her resolve finally snapping back into place in her chest. “I might need help in the kitchen, but I don't have the time or the energy to clean up anyone's messes. If all he wants is to punch the clock, fine. I can't make him love it here.”

The admission took a jab at her breastbone, although she didn't hesitate with the rest. “But Hope House is the only thing I can rely on, and this place means everything to me. If Alex Donovan sets so much as one toe out of line, I'll send him packing. You can bet the bank on it.”

Chapter Four

Alex auto-piloted his way through the swinging doors connecting Hope House's kitchen and dining room, balancing a slotted tray of coffee mugs between his dishpan hands. He'd spent the last three hours alternating between scrubbing what felt like every last pot in the kitchen and getting the ancient commercial dishwasher to (sort of) run without blowing a gasket. While the tasks weren't exactly neurosurgery, the routine was about as thrilling as watching daisies germinate, and damn it. If he was already counting the minutes on the morning of day two, the next four weeks were going to send him around the bend.

Giving up the bare bones of a smile to the two fifty-something ladies working behind the dented-up food service counter, Alex swapped the clean mugs in his grasp for the dirty counterparts that had amassed since his last trip, hefting the tray back up for yet another round of lather, rinse, repeat. But with T minus four steps to go until he reached the swinging door, he clipped the corner of the unwieldy tray on the metal edge of the coffee station counter. Tightening his stance over the rubber floor mats, Alex managed to keep both his grip and his balance, but there was no helping the slosh of cold, leftover coffee that splashed over his wrist and forearm.

“Shit.” He slid the tray to the slim stretch of countertop next to the double-wide bucket sink, giving his hands a quick scrub and quicker pat down on the dish towel he kept terminally slung over his shoulder. Although Zoe had been dead-on accurate about the need for an apron—much to the chagrin of the T-shirt he'd sacrificed during yesterday's shift—he couldn't quite bring himself to do the chugalug with his pride and go grab one from the back. It was a small and fairly ridiculous defiance, but the less of a groove Alex found here, the better. He didn't belong cooped up in a kitchen, wasting his time and energy on some stupid principle.

Christ, he missed the firehouse.

“That's not the right sink for washing your hands.” The words arrived barely one notch above the end of the breakfast din, and Alex shook himself back to the dining room with a frown. But the one-two punch of being at Hope House and
not
being at Station Eight took a quick backseat to the stoop-shouldered old man standing on the other side of the counter, peering at Alex through a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses.

“It's not, huh?” With all the arbitrary rules holding this place together like mortar, it figured there would be some sort of secret code for washing your hands.

“No.” The man clutched his coffee mug between both palms, shaking his nearly bald head as if Alex had made some grave infraction. “You gotta use the small one for your hands. See? Over there.” He nodded to the separate stainless steel sink a few paces away, next to the door to the kitchen. “Miss Zoe gets mad when people use the wrong one.”

“I'm sure she does.” Alex lifted one corner of his mouth in the rough measure of a smile, although there was damn little happiness behind the gesture. A hundred bucks said Zoe had never toed the wild side in her life.

“She has a good reason,” the man added, and okay. Alex had nothing but time. He'd bite.

“And what's that?”

The man's face brightened, his gaze skimming the tidy work space behind the counter. “The big sink is for consumables. You know, filling the coffeepot or rinsing off vegetables. Haven't you read the book?”

Alex thought of the two solid inches of do-this, do-that collated and clipped into Zoe's kitchen manual, and he covered his grimace with a shake of his head. “Guess I missed that part.”

“It's on page one-eighty-six, under the section for the Fairview City Health Code.”

Well, that explained a lot. “No wonder the boss loves it.”

“It always seemed like kind of a stupid rule to me, too,” the old man said, as if he'd periscoped his way into Alex's thoughts. “But then Miss Zoe explained that there are two sinks to keep the germs from people's hands away from anything we might eat or drink. That way no one who eats here gets sick. She even let me borrow the manual so I could read it for myself.”

“Huh,” Alex said, realization finding his brain in a slow trickle. Come to think of it, keeping the sinks separate to avoid cross contamination wasn't the dumbest idea on the planet. “I'll have to remember that from now on. Thanks for the heads-up . . .”

“Hector.” The man brushed a palm over the front of his threadbare button-down shirt before extending it, and Alex's smile took a trip into genuine territory as he reached over the counter to shake the guy's hand.

“Good to meet you, Hector. I'm Alex.”

Hector loaded his expression with curiosity that made his eyes go even wider behind the extra thick lenses of his bifocals. “You're new here.”

“I'm working in the kitchen, but it's just temporary,” Alex said, and hell if the affirmation wasn't the best thing he'd tasted all day. “Four weeks from now I'll be back at my real job. I'm a firefighter.”

“Oh, I see.” Hector swung a glance to the end of the counter where the two service volunteers were dishing up oatmeal and cold cereal, but it only lasted a second before rebounding back to the spot where Alex stood. “Listen, you wouldn't happen to be able to give an old man a refill, would you? I promise not to tell Miss Zoe about you using the wrong sink.” He lifted his coffee mug just a few inches, but the expression on the guy's face was so hopeful that even though Alex was supposed to be on kitchen patrol rather than the front lines, he didn't even think twice.

“You drive a hard bargain, Hector. But you saved my bacon with that sink there, so I've got your back.” He turned to grab the carafe off the burner at the coffee station a few paces away. But rather than zeroing in on the java and getting down to business, he nearly smacked into Zoe instead.

“Whoa!” Alex pulled up about an inch before contact, shock spurting through him at not just her presence, but her proximity. Usually, he was one hundred percent solid on his surroundings, front, back, up and down. Hell, keeping your head on a swivel was pretty much lesson number one at the academy, and God knew it applied in more places than burning buildings.

Of course, Zoe didn't even flinch, and didn't that just throw him even more off-kilter. “What are you doing?” she asked, her arms sliding into what looked like a well-practiced knot over the combo of her apron and her billowy white shirt.

Alex pulled in a deep breath, resetting his pulse to slow and steady. “I'm getting Hector here another cup of coffee.” He shifted to step around her and finish his trip to the coffee station so he could refill Hector's mug and get on with his yawn-worthy day, but Zoe didn't budge from his path.

“Not so fast.”

Alex opened his mouth for a verbal push back—she couldn't seriously pick on him for trying to
serve
someone in a soup kitchen—when her hand brushed over his forearm, promptly scrambling his circuitry.

“Hector, I know you know the rules, even if Alex doesn't,” Zoe said, her voice gentling even though her palm still curved firmly over his skin. God, her fingers were the oddest combination of softness and strength, and the heat of them kept his brewing protest just out of reach of his mouth.

Hector nodded, his expression flavored with apology. “No refills, no exceptions. I know, Miss Zoe. You can't blame an old man for trying.”

“Hmm.” One gold-blond eyebrow kicked up, but there was no heat in the gesture to make it stick. “Still, no dice. You're welcome to grab the very first cup of coffee at lunch, though. Okay?” She let go of Alex's arm, and the sudden coolness replacing her fingers jolted him right back into awareness as Hector thanked her and shuffled away.

“Do you have to be so tight with the rules?” Alex murmured, twisting the words from the side of his mouth so only Zoe could hear them.

She returned the favor with a smile as dry as a desert afternoon. “Do you have to hate them so much that you didn't even bother to read them? Or were you just breaking that one on purpose?”

Okay. He had no choice but to go touché on that one. Still... “So I didn't know about the no refills thing. But would one extra cup of coffee have killed you?”

Zoe paused, her ponytail swinging in a blond arc over her shoulders as she dropped her chin by just a fraction. “Why don't you finish up with these dishes and grab the rule book for some extra reading. Clearly, you need to review the food service guidelines again before you'll be ready to work in the dining room.”

The heel of her shiny black and silver clogs gave a squeak as she turned back toward the kitchen, but she'd barely gotten past the swinging door before Alex had caught up with her.

“You didn't answer the question.” Somewhere, way in the back room of his brain, he knew picking at her probably wasn't the brightest idea he'd ever sprouted. But he'd never been too partial to holding back, and anyway, he couldn't deny his irritation at the extra assignment or his ripping curiosity at how fast she'd been to swerve around the subject.

Zoe had been unapologetic about standing her ground since the minute he'd laid eyes on her yesterday, to the point that she'd marched him around the kitchen like a lieutenant doing stair drills with a squad full of rookies. No way would she scale back over something like a refill rule.

Unless he'd hit a nerve.

“No, I didn't.” She crossed the kitchen tiles, propping the dry goods pantry door open with one denim-wrapped hip before sliding a wooden doorstop into place. Alex followed her into the warm, tightly packed space, the residual sounds from the kitchen receding into a distant thrum of background noise as they moved farther into the galley-style storage room.

“That's all you're going to say?”

“A day and a half's worth of zipping your lips and walking around here like you don't care about anything, and you want to break your code of silence over a cup of coffee?” Zoe's hands moved just a fraction too quickly as she searched the open-air metal shelves in front of her, and just like that, Alex left propriety in the dust.

“Obviously,” he pointed out, taking another step toward her until he was close enough to feel the vibration of her surprise. Her movements slid to a halt, her fingers halfway over a carton of vegetable stock, and he didn't waste any time taking advantage of the hitch. “So humor me. Are you really so bound and determined to go by the book that you can't give a poor old man a second cup of coffee? I thought the whole point of a soup kitchen was to feed people when they're hungry, not turn them away because of some stupid rule.”

In a hot instant, Zoe knocked the surprise directly back to his court. “You really don't get it, do you?” She turned to face him, her chin tipped defiantly so she could meet his gaze despite the seven-inch height differential between them. “It's not that I don't want Hector to have a second cup of coffee. Hell, Alex, I want to give him enough refills to float him to China. But I can't.”

Something Alex couldn't label with a name flickered in her caramel-colored stare, replaced by her standard-issue seriousness before he could even be one hundred percent positive he'd seen a change. “Why not? You're the director.”

“Exactly,” she said, the softness of her voice refusing to match the sternness of her expression. “I'm the director. It's my job to feed as many people as possible so no one goes without. And if Hector gets two cups of coffee, someone else gets none, so yeah. I have to be
that
tight with the rules.”

His gut sank in sudden understanding. “Your funding is really that thin?” he asked. The flicker in her eyes made a repeat performance, and Alex was unprepared for the vulnerability in Zoe's answer.

“I treat feeding people the way you treat being a firefighter. Do you really think I'd pull up on doing it for one second unless I didn't have a choice?”

Oh hell.
He opened his mouth, but before he could form an answer, her eyebrows tugged into a deep furrow.

“Wait . . . what's that smell?”

Alex blinked, trying to process the question despite all the
whaaaaaat
running rampant in his melon. “Don't look at me,” he said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “I took a shower this morning.”

“Not you.” Zoe frowned, pressing up to her toes to scan the pantry's top shelf. Rocking back on his heels, Alex mimicked her movements on the other side of the narrow storage space, and come to think of it, now that they were all the way inside, the pantry did seem to be giving off kind of a funky odor.

With their argument seemingly forgotten, Zoe turned toward the deepest stretch of the corridor-like room, where she'd had him unload all those endless cartons of who knows what yesterday. “You double-checked the contents of these boxes before you put them on the shelves, right?”

He swallowed hard, his throat tightening into a knot full of very bad things. “You said to unload them and put them in the pantry, not open them up.”

“I said to unload them per the guidelines, which means they should've been checked. Did you not read
any
of the book?”

“Not to move a bunch of boxes,” Alex argued. “And anyway, that thing is a doorstop.”

“That thing is important!” Zoe's eyes flashed with the color and intensity of double-batch bourbon as she started shushing boxes over the metal wire shelves, popping them open and muttering something unintelligible under her breath. A few seconds later, she jerked back from the ominously stained cardboard carton in her grasp, turning to throw a hard cough into the crook of her elbow.

“Ugh.” The pungent smell of something rotten hit Alex right in the gag reflex, and he squeezed his eyes shut against their involuntary watering. “What is that?”