Page 25 of Reckless
Surprise colored Zoe’s eyes in a burnished brown flicker, but hell if he hadn’t grabbed at her attention just enough to get her to breathe.
“I, uh. Well, it’s kind of a long story.” She took a second to set her fingers into a pinch hold, the back of her tank top smoothing out over her spine as she relaxed into the move and tugged herself up another step.
While Alex didn’t want her to lose focus on what was in front of her, over-focusing, especially when the path to success was to stay loose, was equally problematic. If one thing could not just chill Zoe out, but keep her that way, it was talking about Hope House’s kitchen. And as much as he wanted her to find her happy place so he could win this bet, a deeper, darker part of him also wanted to rediscover that reckless-abandon smile she’d let slip the other day in the kitchen.
And Alex wasn’t going to stop until he got both.
9
Zoe had been so busy concentrating on how to keep herself balanced and upright that she didn’t see Alex’s smile until it caught her right in the solar plexus. Although she’d been starting to get the hang of at least some of the climbing movements, being this close to the off-limits firefighter was a completely different ball of wax. Between the utter confidence in Alex’s bright blue eyes and the warmth of his lean, hard muscles wrapped tight over her rib cage as he’d guided her against the climbing wall, Zoe was about ready to spontaneously combust.
She didn’t even want to get started on the weird pang she’d felt from her chest to her caution meter as he’d sworn to keep her safe.
“A long story, huh?” Alex let go of the climbing wall with one hand, gesturing grandly to the space between them before easily replacing his grip. “As it turns out, I’m a captive audience with nothing but time. So come on, Gorgeous. Wow me.”
The laughter that barged past Zoe’s lips took her by complete surprise, and judging from Alex’s expression, she wasn’t the only one. But her reasons for leaving Kismet weren’t exactly a secret. Even if they were largely unpopular among both her former colleagues and her family. “Okay, fine. I guess the easiest way to explain it is that working in a professional kitchen just wasn’t what I thought it would be.”
“Yeah, I remember my first year in the house.” Alex slid the toes of his black climbing shoes to a new foothold, pressing his way up the wall with the ease of someone who had done it no less than a billion times. “Jobs with breakneck hours on top of breakneck workloads are a bitch to get used to. I’m guessing that being a chef isn’t exactly a nine to five.”
She tried—unsuccessfully—to keep her snort in check as she did her best to copy his upward movements. “Definitely not. But I was actually fine with the schedule and the workload. It was the bottom line that ended up driving me crazy.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I spent three years clawing my way through culinary school because I love food. The smells, tastes, the textures, the way simple ingredients can come together to create something so vital.” Zoe paused to let the pure goodness of the thoughts in her head push a smile over her mouth. “God, I even loved the scut work, and believe me when I say, in a professional kitchen, there’s plenty.”
Alex’s laugh was all low, warm rumble. “Like coring lettuce?”
“Please. Talk to me once you’ve chopped onions for vegetable stock. For, like, a month straight.”
“I don’t mean to be a jackass, but that pretty much sounds like hell on earth.” He shuddered, although the glint in his eyes made both the gesture and his words more mischievous than malicious. Still, Zoe didn’t even think twice as she shrugged and took another tentative step up the climbing wall.
“For someone who’s not a chef, I’m sure it does. But it’s just like keeping your equipment in check at the firehouse. You want your irons ready to go when you need them, right?”
“Uh, yeah.” Alex tugged his sun-kissed brows into a nonverbalis that even a question?and Zoe responded with an equally silentexactly.
“So, you take good care of your ax and your Halligan bar and you put everything where it belongs even though the inventory you do at the top of every shift is a pain in the ass. When you love your job, even the boring stuff isn’t, well, quite so boring.”
“I guess that makes sense. But if you didn’t mind the grunt work, the long hours, and the weird schedule, what made you want to leave? Wasn’t the place pretty upscale?”
She pushed her toes over a new foothold, but struggled to lock in her balance. “Very. I worked in the kitchen at Kismet for two years. Busted my butt to get an apprenticeship under the head chef, actually.” Whoa, the peg under her foot was a lot narrower than she’d thought. Damn it. “But despite all that hard work and the thousands of dishes I made in that kitchen, do you know how many people I fed who really needed it?”
“Here. Try using your instep rather than your toes. Like this.” Alex shifted his hips back to give her a clear line of sight on his feet as he demonstrated the new maneuver before returning to her question with attention that hadn’t even skipped a pulse. “How many?”
“None.” Zoe angled the inside curve of her arch across the slim ridge of the foothold, and wow, that sure did the trick on her wobbly balance. “Don’t get me wrong. As much as I love being in the kitchen, I understand that restaurants are businesses. They have to make money. But working at Kismet felt so commercial, like the thing I loved most about being a chef was getting lost in the translation of doing as many covers as possible during any given shift. Like despite all my hard work and all the heart I was putting into the food, none of it really mattered.”
She hesitated, filling the silence with a reach for the large handhold an arm’s length above her. This was right about the point in the conversation where she usually lost everyone. Hell, if she’d had this conversation withherselfthree years ago, she’d have thought she’d lost her crackers.
But Alex just waited, his expression completely unvarnished, from the strong set of his jaw to the tropical-ocean blue of his stare, and it prompted the rest of the story right past Zoe’s lips.
“At first I thought I was just restless working the line. While I don’t mind doing straight labor and prep, potential chefs aren’t exactly taught a lack of initiative in culinary school. Working in a kitchen is extremely competitive.”
“Cutting your teeth as a rookie can suck pretty bad,” he agreed with a laugh. “For us, at least, a decent chunk of the first year is training and dress rehearsal so you can get used to the work and learn how to manage your adrenaline. It’s tough to do the watch-and-learn when you’ve been eating ambition for breakfast all the way through school, though.”
Forget culinary school. Zoe had been lining up goals and knocking them down like bowling pins ever sincemiddleschool. Her parents had never expected anything less, and she’d never delivered anything but the best, for them and herself. “Exactly. I was sure that if I earned my way off the line and studied under one of the best chefs in DC, I’d make more of a difference as a sous chef and my unease would let up.”
“But?” Apparently, patience wasn’t one of Alex’s virtues. Not that she’d expected it to be.
“But a year later, all I’d done was the same dance with different steps. I know it sounds sappy and idealistic, but I don’t just love food for me. I want to nurture people, and I became a chef so I could make an impact with my cooking. I tried to gut it out at Kismet, I really did, but?—”
