Page 47 of Reckless
“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. “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 lost her mind, crying and freaking out. 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 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.”
“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 firefighters 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.”
Alex broke off, his stomach doing somersaults. But he’d come this far, and telling Zoe the rest even though he hadn’t admitted it to anyone in ages just felt right, like somehow, weirdly, she was meant to know. “Finally, after the paramedics on scene checked me out and gave me a little oxygen for my trouble, we went back to the station and your father pulled me into his office. I thought he’d yell, or write me up, or even boot me. But instead he just looked at me and said, ‘Do you know why I took you on, Donovan?’”
Zoe’s expression outlined her surprise, but she didn’t interrupt, so Alex kept going. “Of course, I told him I didn’t. But then he said something I won’t ever forget, even if I live to be a hundred.”
Alex took a breath, the deep swirl of long-hidden emotions pulling him back, until he heard Westin’s voice, soft yet dead serious in his ears.
“‘I took you on because I think you could be a damn good firefighter, but damn good firefighters are never a party of one. There’s a big difference between recklessness and bravery, and you can’t afford to learn it the hard way. You’re either going to be a firefighter and save lives, or you’re going to get yourself killed, and the second one doesn’t happen on my watch. So, you’d better decide right now, son. Are you going to be part of this house, or aren’t you?’”
“Alex.” Zoe’s voice brought him back to the present, and only then did he realize he’d actually spoken the words from his memory out loud.
“The risk of putting my life on the line never scared me, Zoe. Living out loud is the only way I know how to be. But the part of becoming a firefighter that scared the shit out of me was trusting that if I belonged to a family, that family would always be there, and they’d always have my back. Your father was the only person willing to prove that to me. And I owe him everything for it.”
“Being with me doesn’t betray that,” Zoe said, closing the space between them to fold her arms around his shoulders, and Christ. How could something so off limits feel so purely right? “Look, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year, and there are parts of this that scare me, too. But I’m not going to lie to you. Right now, in this moment, I want to be with you.”
Alex wrapped his hands around her denim-clad hips, want rebuilding all the way through him to cancel out his hesitation. “I want to be with you, too. As far as I’m concerned, you’re either moving forward or you’re moving back. And back isn’t an option for me. Not now. Not ever. But I can’t lose what I have at Eight, Zoe. I belong there. It’s the only family I’ve got.”
She pressed up to kiss him, and despite all the old memories churning through him, Alex didn’t think twice about kissing her back.
“Okay,” Zoe said. “So, let’s just move forward, one minute at a time.”
17
Zoe looked down at the color-coded and tightly ordered page in the day planner spread over her desk, and damn, she’d never been so happy to see a work week hit the past tense. In the plus column, Damien had been booked up to his eye teeth on assault charges, Rochelle and Kenny had boarded a bus to Michigan, and—miraculously—Zoe’s father hadn’t caught wind of the commotion that had rattled through Hope House like a five o’clock freight train. On the negative side, things in the soup kitchen had slid right back to business as usual, with too few ingredients for meal prep, too many tasks for the personnel at hand, and monthly budgets that were tighter than a snare drum on game day.
And somewhere smack in the middle was her personal life, which had gone from zero to oh-my-God in the span of the same week, and as much as it scared the hell out of her, Zoe couldn’t deny one simple fact.
