Page 7 of Reckless
“Now you’re speaking my language.” His charming smile made its way back home in less than a breath, but Zoe met it with a frown.
“Right, I forgot. You just want to get this over with.”
Alex shrugged, following her down the main aisle in the dining room and mirroring her movements as she began to flip the chairs from their upside-down perches on the tabletops. “You’re not really surprised that I want to get back to Eight as soon as possible, are you? I mean, no offense, but if I had my heart set on doing community service, I’d volunteer of my own accord.”
Well, at least his slick charisma came with a side order of no bullshit. Zoe shook her head. “I guess not. What’d you do to get yourself four full-time weeks of mandatory CS anyway? That’s a pretty long assignment.” In fact, it was the longest one she’d seen since she’d come back to Fairview.
“I told you, it was stupid. I had a difference of opinion with a captain at another house.” He curled his palms over a pair of chairs, one-handing each of them to the time-scuffed floorboards with aclunk. The long, lean muscles in his forearms flexed and released as he repeated the process once, then twice, and Lord, she really needed to get out more.
“Sounds like a little more than a difference of opinion,” Zoe said, her field-tested caution sensors thankfully dousing her libido with a giant bucket of ice colddon’t be stupid.
“Well, obviously the department agrees with you, which is why I’m here.” Alex finished clearing the table next to hers, his no-bones-about-it shrug making an encore performance. “We were second on scene at an abandoned warehouse fire four days ago. Not far from here, actually.”
Recognition tugged at her mind. “The old chemical place over on Roosevelt.” According to Tina, the place had been boarded up for at least a year.
“Yeah. Anyway, the captain over at Thirteen was being a dick about us searching ahead of the water lines.” He paused, inspecting the floor beneath his boots as he cleared his throat. “Uh, pardon my language.”
Zoe huffed out a laugh, although the back of her neck heated upon its exit. She wasn’t in middle school, for God’s sake. “I’m familiar with the worddick, Alex.”
“Right. Of course.” He kept his gaze on the floor for a beat longer before continuing. “So, Captain McManus told us we didn’t need to sweep the warehouse, but I thought it was a bad call. He and I got into it and I went in anyway, and I guess the rest is history.”
Hold on… “So, you ignored a direct order from a captain in an already dangerous situation.” Jesus, that took brass.
Alex’s shoulders became a rigid line beneath the thin layer of his T-shirt, but he didn’t stop flipping the dining room chairs into place. “It wasn’t that big a deal. McManus just blew it out of proportion because he was pissed I knocked him down.”
Zoe took it back. Brass didn’t even begin to cover this. “You knocked himdown?”
“Well, yeah, but not intentionally,” he argued. “The situation got heated and I just shoved past him to get to the scene. There could’ve been squatters in that warehouse. It’s my job to get them out, period.”
“You didn’t find anyone, though, did you.” No way she wouldn’t have heard about a rescue like that in this part of town, especially one where her father’s firehouse had responded, and the tight silence filling the dining room hammered her suspicion home.
Of course, Alex wouldn’t stand down in the face of a little thing like common freaking sense. “Making absolutely sure the building was empty was a risk I was willing to take.”
“But you were clearly told it was an unnecessary risk. Captain McManus must’ve felt sure no one was in there if he told you not to go inside, plus, there was obvious danger. The place was on fire.” A sudden burst of realization had her chin snapping up. “Did you go on this little recon mission all by your lonesome?”
“Of course not.” He turned to look at her, his hard, blue stare narrowed in confusion. “You know the drill. Everything in pairs. Cole went with me.”
“So not only did you go all commando against another captain’s orders, but you risked Cole’s ass, too.” The words flew past her lips, brazen and unchecked, but come on. There could’ve been forty-seven kinds of danger in that warehouse, and Alex had not only barged right into the middle of it against a fire captain’s better judgment, but he’d rolled out the red carpet for another man to take the same impetuous gamble.
And Zoe knew all too well how much a risk like that could cost.
“Let me make something perfectly clear, Zoe.” Alex set the last chair over the floorboards with an impetuousclunk, crossing the room until he was close enough to make her heartbeat hijack her lungs. “I’m in this soup kitchen because I have to be, not because I want to be. No amount of rehabilitative community service, including judgment from you, is going to change who I am or how I do my job. So, do yourself a favor. Don’t try.”
With that, he turned and walked through the swinging doors to the kitchen, not even sparing her a backward glance.
3
Alex sat back against his bar stool, his mood in the shitter despite the cold beer in his hand and the warm smile of the pretty server who’d brought it. But the ten hours he’d spent hitting the bricks in Hope House’s kitchen today had done their level best to kill both his stamina and his patience.
The grunt work, however, couldn’t even hold a flamethrower to his new boss.
Alex tilted his bottle to his lips, swallowing a long, smooth sip of pale ale to cover his frown. Yeah, he’d cop to the fact that he hadn’t come out of the gate with a stellar first impression, but it wasn’t as if he’d meant to drift off to dreamland while he’d waited for Zoe in the dining room. With the circadian rhythms that went hand in hand with Alex’s job, five minutes in the dark meant one of two things—either he was falling asleep or getting laid. He had to admit, when he’d first seen Zoe standing there in Hope House’s dining room, with those blazing brown eyes and jeans that showcased more curves than a Grand Prix racetrack, the option behind door number two had seemed awfully freaking appealing.
Until he’d realized who she was, anyway. But how the hell was he supposed to know his captain’s only daughter had ditched out on her fancy career as an up-and-coming chef to direct a small-time soup kitchen in Fairview’s projects? Or that she seemed to have been living on a steady diet of no-risks, all-rules since he’d last seen her five years ago?
Or that despite the fact that she’d pulled a Judge Judy on his ass over the way he’d landed his community service sentence, then met his cold shoulder with an equally arctic counterpart as she’d worked him into the kitchen tiles, he still found her unbelievably and unequivocally hot as hell.
God, he was screwed. And not even in a way that would leave a smile on his face.
