Page 15 of Reckless
The cool, manufactured air of the walk-in cemented Zoe’s thoughts into marching order, although she couldn’t quite keep her smile from resurfacing just a little as she stepped all the way inside the frosty space. “I said creative, Alex. Not crazy. But if we borrow the garnish from tomorrow night’s hamburgers and some of the carrots from Saturday’s chicken pot pie, we should have just enough ingredients to make a salad.” Naked burgers weren’t the most appealing thing on the planet, but at least she had ketchup and mustard packets tucked away in the pantry. She’d certainly made do with worse.
“Looks like you’ve done this kind of shuffle before.” Alex reached out for the carton of lettuce Zoe had slid from the metal shelving, hefting it in front of his chest as she turned back to unearth two oversized bags of carrots from the box next to the now-empty slot.
“Most of the people here won’t get fruit or vegetables any other way, so I try to put as many natural ingredients into the meals as I can. Produce is expensive, though, and my budget is pretty slim, so I have to get creative to make the ingredients last.”
His feet kept time with hers, first over the polished steel of the fridge floor, then the clay-colored ceramic tiles as they moved back into the kitchen and regrouped again at the prep table in the center of the room. “I had no idea running a soup kitchen was so involved.”
The muscles in Zoe’s shoulders unwound from the spot where her apron looped gently behind her neck. She might not be particularly graceful at tackling personal conversations, or okay, even at polite chitchat, but feeding people in a way that mattered? That, she could talk about.
“Once you get past the menu planning and the set number of meals served almost exclusively buffet style, the mechanics of managing a soup kitchen aren’t all that much different from running the back of a restaurant,” she said, placing the carrots on the table in front of her. “Good planning and solid prep are half the battle.”
She opened one of the storage drawers set beneath the top of the prep table-slash-island, sliding out the small handful of tools she’d need in order to take the salad from concept to reality. Each movement fell neatly into the foundation of the one that had come before it, all of them smoothing the last jagged edges of her morning.
“You ran the kitchen at that restaurant in Washington, DC?” Alex’s shock ghosted over his features, and she met it with some holy crap of her own.
“You know about my apprenticeship at Kismet?”
He nodded. “Your father talked about it for two years straight. He said it was a once in a lifetime kind of thing, but I didn’t realize you were in charge of the place.”
“Oh, I wasn’t,” Zoe said, trying as deftly as possible to steer the conversation away from her father. She’d just lost the tension in her shoulders, for God’s sake. “But after culinary school, I spent two years there, one on the line and one under the head chef. There’s a lot of baptism by fire on the restaurant circuit. You learn how to tame the animals pretty quickly, even if you’re not running the zoo.”
“Yeah, that sounds familiar, actually.”
Although Alex’s demeanor remained completely neutral, right down to the detached, one-shouldered shrug he’d been giving up ever since he’d arrived in her kitchen yesterday morning, the words arrived with just enough scrape to catch Zoe’s attention and hold.
He wasn’t detached at all. He was displaced. And hell if she didn’t know exactly how that felt.
“Well, let’s get you started, then.” The idea launched itself on a direct route from her chest to her mouth, completely bypassing the blast ofbad planpumping from her brain. Working in her kitchen clearly wasn’t going to change Alex’s stance on how to live his life or do his job. But at the very least, she could teach himsomethingof value while they were stuck here together.
And knowing how to feed people was the most valuable thing Zoe had.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, taking a step back from the prep table as if it had suddenly grown a forked tongue and fangs. “I already told you, I can’t cook.”
“You can, you just won’t.” Without waiting for a reply, Zoe bent down low to grab an oversized metal mixing bowl from the shelf beside the storage drawers, and how about that. The king of fast talk was actually speechless.
“You think you can dare me into learning how to cook?” Alex’s eyes were the only thing that moved, traveling over her in an impenetrable blue stare, but she refused to give in to the clatter behind her sternum. She scooped up the vegetable peeler from the table in front of her, a strange thread of hope uncurling in her belly as she extended it just out of Alex’s reach.
“First of all, it’s salad, not advanced biochemistry. Secondly, I don’t think you’re going to learn good kitchen skills any other way, so yeah. I dare you to learn to cook.”
For a second, then ten, then sixty, Zoe simply stood there in front of him, with the white noise hum of the walk-in and the waterlogged groan of the dishwasher serving as the background for her heartbeat in her ears. Finally, just when she was about to open her mouth to renege on the whole stupid, impulsive idea—what had she been thinking, shooting her mouth off like a two-dollar pistol, anyway?—Alex smashed the silence between them into bits.
“Fine. It’s your kitchen, Gorgeous. Just do me a favor, and be careful what you wish for.”
6
How the hell Alex had gone from his remote post at the dishwasher to a red-carpet spot in the heart of the kitchen, he had no freaking clue. But somewhere between the sexy-sweet smile Zoe had let slip in the pantry and the chin-up sizzle she’d dished out along with her cooking dare, Alex had taken his eye off his who-cares kitchen mantra for just a second.
And now he was hanging proper with the carrots and the cutlery. He might have saved his job from imminent doom with a little bit of hard work and a whole lot of quick thinking, but all this domestic goodness was a crash and burn just waiting to go down.
Not that Zoe seemed to notice. “Okay. We’ve only got a few ingredients here, so this shouldn’t be too tough. Like I said before, planning and prep are really the foundation, and we’ve already got the planning done.”
Sliding the box she’d pulled from the walk-in to the neutral zone on the table between them, she popped it open with one hand while unloading the leafy green contents with the other. Alex eyeballed the full heads of lettuce, his trepidation growing to a full squeeze in his gut. He didn’t have much experience with roughage to begin with—salad was one of those things that tended to stand in the way of the main event, as far as he was concerned—but this stuff was a far cry from the neat little bags of greens all prettied up and ready to go at the grocery store.
He readjusted the threadbare dish towel over his shoulder, finally giving up as he asked, “So, if next up is prep, we just what? Chop these into pieces and call it a day?”
Okay, so it had probably been a question straight from the stupid file, especially with her cream-of-the-crop training and experience. But Zoe had made it wildly clear that the ingredients she’d cobbled together to round out this meal were at a premium. While looking clueless wasn’t on his list of favorite pastimes, it was better than screwing up what little stuff she had left for lunch. He’d just gotten his assoutof that sling, thank you very much.
Zoe tilted her head, the tiny gold hoops in her ears glinting in the bright fluorescent kitchen light, and if she was unimpressed with his simple question, she hid it like a champ. “Well, we’ve got to core these heads of lettuce and run them through the spinner a couple of times to make sure they’re good and clean first, but yeah. That’s the idea.”
