Page 13 of Reckless
Alex took a step back,and Zoe had to give him this. The shock on his ridiculously handsome face actually looked genuine. “What do you mean, I’ve got to go?”
“It’s pretty self-explanatory, don’t you think? You just cost me money and resources I can’t afford to lose. I have no way to feed everyone for the rest of the day, and there’s nine kinds of a mess back here where this stuff leaked through the cardboard. Not only is it a clean-up job I don’t have time for, but I could probably wallpaper my office with the health code violations I’d rack up if an inspector walked through that door right now. Add all of that together, and it looks like a pink slip to me.”
She might need all the manpower she could get to run Hope House’s kitchen, but she couldn’t put up with Alex’s ho-hum attitude about community service. Not at the price he’d just cost her, not when it was her job to make a difference. She couldn’t feed people with unsafe kitchen conditions and rotten meat. And shewouldfeed everyone today, despite the lost food and the mess behind her on the shelves.
Somehow.
“Okay, but you can’t just boot me.” Alex reached into the back pocket of his jeans, producing a pale yellow slip of paper from his wallet as if it would solve the problems of the universe. “The fire chief’s office put in the order, and the city assigned me to you, just like it says right here. My community service is mandatory.”
“Maybe.” Zoe inhaled long and slow, her decision made as Alex replaced the form he’d clearly thought would change her mind. “But that doesn’t mean I have to let you perform it in my soup kitchen.”
She angled herself to move past him and head for daylight, but the pantry space was barely wide enough for both of them to stand side by side. Alex slipped around her with one deft move, stepping directly into her path as he blocked both her forward progress and the doorframe with his body.
“Oh!” Her hands flew upward to avoid a complete collision, palms landing smack over the leanly muscled expanse of his chest. Without skipping a beat, Alex reached beneath her elbows, wrapping his fingers over the backs of her arms and pulling her close to keep her steady.
Talk about a plan destined for epic failure.
“Could you just put your machete down for one minute so we can talk about this?” he asked, his exhale moving past her ear in a warm puff as he lowered his chin to look at her. His heart thumped, fast and steady against her fingertips, and the unexpected intimacy of the contact sent a streak of heat all the way down Zoe’s spine. Her pulse jumped to match his, and she refused to look away even though her face prickled with what had to be an obvious blush.
“This is simple risk analysis. I need people I can rely on in my kitchen. If you can’t take this job seriously enough to get it done right, then we have nothing to talk about.” She pushed out a couple of rapid-fire blinks, grounding herself in reality despite the fact that Alex’s callused fingers showed no signs of imminent departure from the backs of her arms.
“And what if I can?”
“You can’t,” Zoe argued, and God, she should’ve known better than to think that her soup kitchen would mean anything to a firefighter like Alex.
Still, he didn’t relent. “If I can fix this mess, will you give me another chance?”
She shook her head. “Alex, I?—”
“Zoe, listen.” His voice dropped, brittle and tight. “I’ll find a way to get it done. But I can’t lose my job, which means you can’t boot me.Please.”
The words took a straight path to her sternum, kicking the air from her lungs without the argument she’d intended to use it for. Alex’s eyes glittered, dark blue and determined in the dusky light shining down from the bare bulb over their heads. His normally cocksure demeanor was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by an expression so oddly intense, Zoe’s pulse sped even faster through her veins.
For just a stop-time sliver of a second, Alex Donovan was vulnerable.
And she could either give him one last chance, or she could sign his walking papers out of her kitchen.
5
Zoe shifted her weight to the heels of her kitchen clogs, scanning, then re-scanning the pantry for even the tiniest hint that merely an hour ago, the place had been a food-borne bacteria factory just waiting to prove the old adage that sharing was caring.
But she couldn’t find a single one.
“See?” Alex leaned a sculpted shoulder against the doorframe, his cocky smile back in place and even brighter than before. “One hundred percent clean and sanitized, just like I promised.”
“Hmm.” She ran her fingers over the edge of the shelf in front of her, a ripple of shock working its way through her chest at the freshly scented air and the smooth, scrubbed surfaces. Ruler-straight rows of cartons and canned goods stood organized and ready to go, and as she dropped her gaze, even the buffed brown floor tiles seemed to gleam under her feet. “Well, it certainly looks up to code.”
“Wow, Zoe. Don’t oversell it.” Alex’s grin remained perfectly intact as he pushed off the doorframe, gesturing grandly through the light shining down from overhead. “Come on. Don’t even try to tell me that the best you’ve got is ‘it looks up to code’.”
“It’s pretty clean,” she said, anddamnit, that smile of his was infectious. Zoe knew better than to buy into his boyish charm—after all, sweet talk was Alex’s native language, and he was clearly only trying to save his own skin.
Trouble was, he’d saved hers in the process. Her standards might be sky high, but she’d been so lean on manpower lately that even before this morning’s rotten food debacle, the pantryhadneeded some TLC.
And Alex had given it a complete overhaul, all the way down to the baseboards.
“This pantry is a masterpiece,” he corrected, delivering her back to the snug confines of the shelf-lined space. “I bet you’d get perfect marks if the city health inspector walked through that door right this minute. In fact”—e broke off, sauntering to the center of the freshly scoured room—“I’d even go so far as to say you could serve a four-course meal, right on this very spot.”
Zoe bit back the involuntary laugh tempting the edges of her lips, her curiosity bypassing her caution filter as it made a beeline for her mouth. “Okay, I have to ask. How did you get it so clean in here?”
