Page 81 of Reckless
“I’d beg to differ, but your clean bill of health isn’t the only thing we’re celebrating.”
“What else is there?” Alex asked.
Zoe’s whiskey-colored eyes started to glimmer. “Well, in all the commotion yesterday, I missed a phone call from Emily Collingsworth. In fact, I didn’t even see her message on my cell until this morning.”
Alex said a silent prayer of thanks that he wasn’t still attached to the pulse monitor, because he probably would’ve destroyed the thing from the sheer amount ofno waypumping through his veins. “The grant lady?”
“I think she’d get a kick out of being called that, actually. Yes, the grant lady. She and I had a lovely talk this morning. We actually spent about thirty minutes on the phone.”
“Zoe,” he warned, and she lifted her hands in concession.
“Okay, okay. I’ll get to the good stuff. Mrs. Collingsworth is obviously part of the committee that reviews the applications for her foundation’s grant. She called to tell me that while Hope House wasn’t chosen for the money, she was very impressed with the plans we set forth in the application, and the support we rallied within the community to raise awareness of the program. She wants to meet with me next week to talk about some smaller charity projects and other financial assistance Hope House might qualify for. She felt really confident we’d be able to make the changes we proposed in the application if we put our minds to it.”
“That’s amazing,” he said, and his chest filled with happiness at the look of sheer hope on her face. “It’s everything you wanted.”
But Zoe shook her head. “Not everything. I want you, too, Alex, right here next to me. Without you, I never would’ve had the nerve to get reckless.”
Alex leaned down to kiss her, unable to hold back his cocky smile. “Just you wait, Gorgeous. If it’s reckless you want, I’ve got nothing but time to give it to you.”
EPILOGUE
Four months later
Cole Everett staredat the string of bright orange flames reaching up from the six-burner cooktop with a whole lot of business as usual filling his chest. Okay, so at least there was an actual fire at this fire call—unlike the last three he and the guys from Station Eight had responded to. But a kitchen flare-up in a hotel restaurant was hardly the high-rise fire they’d expected when they’d hauled balls out of the station, even if the flameshadspread halfway up a small stretch of the grease-streaked wall behind the cooktop.
Cole blew out a steady exhale, aiming a look at his best friend and fellow firefighter, Alex Donovan. “You want to hit it or should I?”
Donovan dropped a calm, cool, and let-me-see-here glance to the commercial-grade fire extinguisher sitting between their booted feet on the kitchen tiles. “Be my guest, big shot.”
A cocky grin bracketed his buddy’s mouth, but Cole knew better than to metaphorically whip out his dick for a friendly game of I Can Piss Farther Than You. Screwing with Alex was like stepping in quicksand. The more Cole quipped back, the deeper they both sank, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, keeping the peace by keeping his cakehole shut was so much easier than the alternative. Plus, knowing how much a non-response would hack Donovan off was worth the price of admission. He’d deal with the good-natured ration of shit the guy was trying to dish up later. Right now, they had a fire to put out. Albeit a small one.
Instead of giving Donovan the friendlyoh fuck youthe guy damn well deserved, Cole turned to Station Eight’s rookie, Mike Jones, who stood behind him in the narrow aisle of the galley kitchen. “Okay, Jonesey. Knock this one out so we can go back to the house for lunch, would you? I’m starving.”
“Copy that,” Jones said, keeping his usual quiet efficiency as he reached down for the fire extinguisher. Pulling the pin and dropping it to the floor with a metallic clink, he focused his blue-eyed stare on the cooktop, dispatching the flames in a few minutes’ worth of decisive movements. A healthy dose of airborne chemicals stung Cole’s nose and lungs from the spot where he stood near the rookie, but it was better than the smoke beginning to clog the kitchen around them. Small-time fires still burned, and putting out the flames was the best part of the job.
Even if Cole had barely broken a sweat over this one.
“All right.” He took a step back, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and swaying back and forth so the motion alarm on his pass device wouldn’t let out an ear-shredding screech. After delivering an all-is-well update over the radio strapped to the shoulder of his turnout gear, Cole opened his mouth to remind Jones of the standard protocol for making sure the fire stayed out—after all, flare-ups could be a tricky bitch, especially with grease fires—but the guy was two steps ahead of him.
“Someone wants to impress the rest of the class,” Donovan said, raising a blond eyebrow to the brim of his helmet as he stepped back to watch Jones secure the scene.
But Cole just laughed. “Right. Because you were a total slack-ass as a rookie.” Even now, eight years removed from Fairview’s fire academy, Alex jumped into pretty much everything he did with both boots first and all of his questions on the flip side.
Hell if that didn’t make the two of them polar freaking opposites in terms of how they grabbed their ambition. But it also made them a kickass team, and had since they’d been recruits at the academy themselves. The only thing Cole knew he could rely on more than a good, solid game plan was that Donovan—or any man at Station Eight, on engineorsquad—would always have his back.
Even if, for the last year straight, Cole’s biggest career wish had been to transition from engine to squad, no matter what it took.
Alex’s less than polite snort echoed through the galley of the smoke-hazed kitchen. “You’re a good one to talk about ambition, you goddamn overachiever,” he said, and hell, Cole should’ve known better than to think Donovan would let the conversation he’d overheard this morning between him and Lieutenant Crews ride.
“You really want to do this now?” Cole asked, keeping his easygoing smile in place as they both kicked their boots into motion to exit the kitchen.
The return smirk tugging at the corners of Alex’s lips marked his intentions loud and clear. “In a word? Fuck yes.”
“That’s actually two words,” Cole pointed out, although he knew the distraction strategy wouldn’t save him from the raft of crap Donovan had clearly been holding at bay.
“It’s cute that you think you’re going to get out of this on a technicality. But no chance in hell am I going to treat you all special once you move over to squad.”
Cole metered his breathing to match the precision of his footsteps.Focus.“Nobody said anything about me going anywhere.”
