Page 26 of Reckless
“You became a chef so you could feed people, and you didn’t want to go halfway.”
Holy crap. Not only had Alex filled in the blanks of her sentence with freakish accuracy, but his easy nod suggested that he hadn’t just taken a lucky stab at what he thought she might say.
For a split second, he looked like he actuallygotit.
Zoe pulled in a fortifying breath, but it got stuck in the vicinity of her windpipe. “You know, most people think I’m crazy when I tell them I left one ofWashingtonian’s Top 100 Restaurants so I could come back to my hometown to start a soup kitchen in the projects on half a shoestring.”
“First of all, I think we’ve already established that I’m not really the most accurate barometer for deciding what’s crazy. Secondly, what do you think?”
“Huh?” Great. Now she was confusedandineloquent. But even in the face of her verbal bumbling, Alex remained completely even keeled.
“It’s not a trick question, Zoe.” His eyes glinted in the over-bright fluorescent lights, and sweet baby Jesus, since when did the king of recklessness have an innocent look? “I just want to know what you think about leaving the restaurant circuit to run the kitchen at Hope House.”
Something broke free in her chest, letting the words bubble out one over the other like a stockpot left to simmer for too long. “I think that when I went to culinary school, I just wanted the truth of the food, to make a difference by feeding people. The reality of working in a restaurant, with all that focus on the bottom line rather than the big picture never felt like it quite fit me. But working at Hope House does. Even if it isn’t upscale or glamorous, it’s still mine. It’s what I love.”
Alex froze into place, not moving against the dark sheen of the climbing wall. “Wanting to do what you love doesn’t sound crazy to me. It sounds like you’re not waiting around to live your life. It sounds honest.”
Zoe blurted out her answer before she could lock it down inside her mouth. “You want to know the really crazy part? No one’s ever asked me what I thought before. I mean, I’ve told my former boss and my parents what I felt plenty of times.” Not that they’d ever really heard her. “But they were all so lasered in on what I was leaving and what they thought I was throwing away that they missed the part that mattered the most. None of them actually asked me why I wanted to run a soup kitchen.”
“Leaving the primrose path is actually a little risky,” he said, wrapping his fingers around his belay line and navigating his body around hers just enough to lock her left leg into place with his right. “Want to know what else is risky?”
Zoe blinked, remotely aware of Alex’s arm snaking back around her waist. “What?”
“Look down.”
For a second, his words didn’t register. But then she dropped her gaze from his face to the floor, and a wave of freezing cold fear went skidding through her gut.
They were more than halfway up the wall. Three stories. Thirty feet.
And she hadn’t been scared.
No, scratch that. She’d been so at ease, she hadn’t evennoticed.
“Oh, my God.” Zoe’s muscles seized without her permission, her grip going from easy does it to a thermonuclear crush in about two seconds flat. As if he’d anticipated her reaction, Alex firmed his grip on her rib cage, enough to hold her steady but not so much as to alter her position or throw her off balance. He dropped his chin to the spot just above her ear, his slow, easy exhale tickling the back of her neck as his voice threaded past the soundtrack of oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit being pumped out by her heart.
“Zoe, take a breath. All the way in.”
Miraculously, she did. “We’re really high off the ground.”
“We’re a good ways up,” Alex agreed, and his honesty hooked her attention just enough to get her to stop clutching. Okay, mostly. “But you’re perfectly fine, just like you were a minute ago. In fact, you’re actually doing great.”
She chanced a peek over her shoulder. Kyle stood in the exact spot where they’d left him, with her belay line wrapped carefully around both of his hands, and she slid one palm over the smooth nylon of the harness keeping her in check. Her peek became a longer look, and a strange sensation infused her chest before moving outward to her limbs.
“I feel great. Also, a little terrified,” Zoe qualified, because hello, they were still dangling above the ground at the equivalent height of a three-story apartment building. “But it’s maybe not as horrible as I thought it would be.”
“Well, then. I guess that leaves me with just one thing to say.”
Although Zoe had regained her balance on the hand and footholds in front of her, Alex didn’t scale back on his proximity. The warmth of his murmur coasted over her neck, settling in at her belly as she braced for the gloating that would surely follow.
Only it didn’t.
“Up or down?”
“What?” She blinked, certain she’d misunderstood, but Alex just released her with a wide-open grin.
“Do you want to keep climbing up, or should we head back down to the ground?”
Although the cocky gleam in his eyes told her he’d merely tabled his victory dance, right now, in this moment, with her muscles humming from use and her bloodstream soaked with a double dose of bulletproof endorphins, Zoe didn’t care.
