Page 60 of Reckless
Zoe dropped her wooden spoon to the worktable with a clatter. “You came out here to help me cook?”
While she and her father had hooked up at Scarlett’s this week for several marathon sessions to chip away at her proposal for the Collingsworth Grant, he’d stayed noticeably absent from Hope House itself. On one hand, his avoidance—especially when nearly every firefighter from Station Eight had showed up to help in the kitchen for at least a few hours this week—had stung. But on the other, Zoe wasn’t about to deny that she still feared for her father’s safety every time he strapped on his helmet. She couldn’t exactly fault the man for wanting her to be safe, or disapproving of the job that he felt kept her from being that way.
“Ah, well…” Her father ran a hand over his military-precise gray-blond hair in a move Zoe had long since recognized as a nervous tell, and her gut tightened out of habit. This crossroads between emotion and denial had been the sticking point for every one of their conversations since she’d come back home to Fairview.
But rather than clamming up or stuffing his emotions away like he had for the last few months, her father shocked the hell out of her by saying, “The first thing I teach my firefighters when they walk through the door to Station Eight is to look out for one another, above all else. I know I’m just your old man.” His shoulders lifted on a shrug that was far from indifferent. “But if my firefighters are going to have your back, then the least I can do is come in here and show them how it’s done.”
“Oh,” Zoe breathed, her smile welling up and taking over her face completely of its own accord. “Well, in that case, I guess you’ll need an apron.”
“Thanks.” A rare shot of raw emotion whisked through her father’s eyes, landing right in the center of Zoe’s chest.
But she was his daughter, through and through. “Don’t thank me yet,” she said, lifting an apron from one of the nearby hooks and handing it over with a squeeze. “You weren’t wrong about there being a lot of work to do around here. If you want to help, we need to get cracking.”
“Well, then, by all means. Put me to work, ma’am.”
Their laughter lasted for just a minute before being interrupted by a loud sniffle, and Zoe pivoted on her heel toward the sound. Tina stood by the swinging doors, one hand pressed over the front of her blouse and the other swiping at her cheeks. With the sheer surprise of her father’s arrival in the kitchen, Zoe had totally forgotten Tina had escorted him in.
Realizing that both Zoe and her father had turned their attention in her direction, Tina lifted her chin, waving one hand in purenothing to see herefashion, and Zoe couldn’t help it. She cracked a grin.
“You okay, Tina?”
“What? I have something in my eye, okay?” Tina let out another sniffle before heading to the door in defeat. “Just…make lunch, you two!”
Zoe’s father met her chuckle with one of his own. “So, what’s on the menu today?” he asked, cocking a finger at the stockpots simmering away on the stove. She split her attention between the cooktop and the kitchen island, treating the vegetable stock to one last stir before aiming herself at the ingredients piled high on the worktable.
“Unfortunately, our budget doesn’t let us get too fancy over here, so I try to stick with healthy versions of comfort food. Today it’s vegetable soup and good, old-fashioned grilled cheese. The soup is nearly done, but we’ll have to make a lot of sandwiches. Think you can manage that?”
“Manage it? Please.” Her father rolled up the sleeves of his light blue button-down shirt, meticulously turning the cuffs over each forearm once, then again, before donning his apron. “Grilled cheese sandwiches were the only thing you let past your lips the entire year you were four. I could probably still make them in my sleep.”
Zoe’s laughter escaped in a sharp pop. “Really?”
“You don’t remember?” Her father gestured toward the butter, and Zoe answered the wordless question with a nod.
“I don’t think so.” Biting her lip in concentration, she sifted through her memories, but came up empty.
Her father picked up a butter knife, sliding one of the sheet pans Zoe had filled with bread slices in front of his workstation and setting his hands to purposeful motion. “God, I remember it like it was last week. The first time you asked your mother to make you one, you strung the words together. We spent three days trying to figure out what on earth a ‘grouchy sammich’ was.”
Zoe tucked her smile between her lips, reaching toward the other end of the cooktop to snap the griddle to life. “How did you finally figure it out?”
Her father wasn’t so cautious with his smile. “After three days of us making you peanut butter and jelly and serving it with frowns on our faces, you marched right on over to the refrigerator and took out the ingredients.”
“I did not!” As soon as the laughter-laced protest fell from her lips, Zoe knew it wouldn’t stick. Although she couldn’t remember the incident, going the practical routedidsound like something she’d do. Maybe even at four.
“Oh yes, you did,” her father replied, emphasizing the words with a lift of his butter-smudged knife. “You handed over the cheese and the bread, no muss, no fuss, and you and I ate grilled cheese sandwiches that very night in front of the hockey game.”
An image, time-fogged and fragmented, bubbled up from deep in her memory, and her hands froze into place over the slices of cheese she’d been separating on the counter. “Oh, my God, Idoremember that! We had that awful chair in the rec room. The really ugly one, with the plaid cushions.”
Her father lifted a brow. “I’ll have you know those Barcaloungers are timeless pieces of high-quality craftsmanship.”
“Daddy, that thing was a monstrosity.” Zoe laughed, sliding in next to him to start assembling the bread and cheese into sandwiches for the griddle.
“That thing was a classic,” he argued, completely without heat. “There’s nothing quite as good as the tried and true things in life.”
Zoe’s heart thumped against her sternum. But her father had taken a leap of faith by coming to Hope House. The least she could do was leap back to meet him square in the middle.
“Kind of like sharing a grouchy sandwich with someone you love?”
“Yeah, kiddo.” Her father’s eyes crinkled at the edges, the warmth of his stare melting all the way through Zoe’s chest as he nodded. “Exactly like that.”
