Page 14 of Reckless
“Well, the main ingredient was elbow grease, but I wasn’t without help. You remember Tom O’Keefe, right?” Alex asked, and she did a quick Station Eight roll call in her head.
“Sure.” The paramedic had been with the FFD for the last few years. She didn’t know him quite as well as she did Alex and Cole and the other guys, but her father had always spoken highly of him, and in the handful of times she’d seen the guy at softball tournaments and department barbecues, O’Keefe had always seemed to live up to the praise. “But what on earth does he have to do with my pantry?”
Alex laughed in a low, butterscotch-smooth rumble, and the sound took another chip out of Zoe’s doubt. “As luck would have it, O’Keefe is really good at sanitizing small spaces. I guess you could call it a product of his occupation, with all those health and safety guidelines on the ambo. Anyway, I told him I needed a deep clean on the fly, so he walked me through a couple of tricks over the phone. And before you ask”—he paused to lift both hands in concession—“yes, I double-checked his advice against the food safety section of your kitchen doorstop, and yes again. Both the methods and the chemicals I used are all legit.”
“Oh,” Zoe said, the word a weak replacement for the already answered question she’d had pre-loaded on the tip of her tongue. But the last thing she’d expected was for Alex to come through, let alone hit a grand slam on the last-ditch curveball she’d thrown in his direction.
“You didn’t think you could rely on me to get this cleaned up right, did you?” The question arrived without gloating or accusation, his smile turning wistful as he pushed his hands into the pockets of his broken-in jeans. Zoe tugged at the hem of her apron, smoothing the fabric even though it was already perfectly in place, but screw it. She’d never been a fan of dancing around the truth, and it wasn’t as if Alex didn’t already know the answer, anyway.
“To be honest, no. I really didn’t.”
One brow arched up toward his sun-bleached hairline. “I don’t believe in wasting time on anything other than honesty,” he said. “As for the rest, I’m glad I surprised you.”
She pulled in a deep breath to counter the bump in her pulse. Alex might be charming as hell right now, with that aw-shucks expression beneath the sprinkling of rugged stubble on his face, but he’d only helped her to help himself. Plus, she had bigger fish to fry—namely, that she hadnofish, or protein of any kind for the rest of the day’s meal service.
“Well, a deal’s a deal. While I don’t expect you to repeat your mistakes, or make any new ones because you’re unprepared, this gets you off the hook for this morning’s mess.” Zoe shifted her weight over the floor tiles, her ponytail brushing over one shoulder as she tipped her head at the pantry door. “But if you’ll excuse me, I’ve still got to go figure out how to get through the rest of today’s meal service without the food we lost.”
Rather than taking a step back to let her pass, Alex straightened, keeping himself planted directly in her path. “No, you don’t.”
“I’m sorry?” She’d been scraping like mad for the last hour to come up with replacement options for the ruined ingredients, to little avail. Did he seriously think her job was so easy that she could work up lunch and dinner for a hundred hungry residents on a wing and a Hail Mary?
“You don’t have to worry about coming up with Plan B. Not for lunch, anyway. I’ve got it covered.” Alex turned and jerked his chin at the pantry door in a clear request for her to follow, and the shock of his words had her so dumbfounded that she was powerless to do anything other than oblige.
“Okay.” She extended the word with the tone of a question as they crossed back into the brightly lit kitchen, coming to a stop by the stainless steel prep table acting as a makeshift island in the center of the room. “Meal service starts in an hour and a half, and we have nothing to prepare. Do you have access to some sort of magic food genie I don’t know about?”
“Something like that, yeah.” Alex pulled his cell phone out of the back pocket of his jeans, tapping the screen to life. After a handful of easy moves, he extended the phone in her direction, waiting silently as she took in the app he’d opened.
Zoe’s jaw unhinged. “You ordered pizza?”
“Look, I’m not even going to pretend I know how to make anything other than a mess in the kitchen, but you needed the food. I go skydiving with one of the guys who owns the pizza place over on Atlantic Boulevard, and he owed me a favor, so…”
“Wait.” She held up one palm in a wordlessstop right there,although the free-for-all of questions flying around in her brain made practicing what she preached a complete and total no-go. She’d known he was slick, but… “You got twenty pizzas by cashing in a favor?”
“I got adealon twenty pizzas by cashing in a favor,” Alex amended, propping one hip against the prep table and gesturing toward the swinging door. “But yeah. They’ll be here at eleven forty-five.”
Zoe handed his phone back over, unsure whether she should cry with relief or tread with extreme caution. “You know, if you’re not careful, I might actually start to think there’s a decent guy underneath all that attitude.”
Heat laddered up the back of her neck as she heard the implication of the words, but rather than take offense or trot out said attitude for a test run, Alex just laughed.
“Well. We can’t have that, now can we?”
Zoe’s smile appeared before she could stop it. “Is there anyone in Fairview you can’t fast talk into giving you what you want?”
“You mean besides you?” His blue eyes glinted teasingly, but it lasted for only a second before he said, “Listen, just because I don’t want to be here doesn’t mean I’m out to torpedo your kitchen, either. This community service thing might not be what either of us wants, but you gave me a second chance. And while I realize delivery pizza isn’t the meal you had in mind, I owed you one, and it really is the best I’ve got.”
An odd sensation twisted in her chest, welling up in a soft, involuntary laugh. “Was that supposed to be endearing?”
“That all depends,” Alex said, one corner of his mouth lifting into a dark and forbidden version of his all-American smile. “Did it work?”
Did. It. Ever.Zoe’s lips parted, and for just a fraction of a second, she wanted nothing more than to rain check everything else around her to find out if his smile tasted as wicked as it looked. But then her eyes dropped to the four-armed crest emblazoned over the top left of his T-shirt, complete with the wordsFairview Fire Department, Station Eightprinted in bold, bright red letters, and the sight yanked her right back to reality.
Alex might’ve gone above and beyond to correct his mistake, and he might be hitting sexy out of the park with that flirty little half grin, but she couldn’t lose track of what was important, especially not when she had people to feed.
And double especially not with a risk-happy firefighter who didn’t take her seriously anyway.
“It’s a good start,” she said, giving herself one last mental thump before turning toward the walk-in refrigerator. “According to city nutrition guidelines, we’ve got to offer at least one serving of fruit or vegetables per meal, though, so we’ll have to get a little creative to pull this off entirely.”
He followed her to the back of the kitchen, reaching out to hold the oversized stainless steel door she’d just popped open. “I take it the tomato sauce doesn’t count.”
