Chapter Nine
Zoe had been so busy concentrating on how to keep herself balanced and upright that she didn’t see Alex’s smile until it caught her right in the solar plexus. Although she’d been starting to get the hang of at least some of the climbing movements, being this close to the off-limits firefighter was a completely different ball of wax. Between the utter confidence in Alex’s bright blue eyes and the warmth of his lean, hard muscles wrapped tight over her rib cage as he’d guided her against the climbing wall, Zoe was about ready to spontaneously combust.
She didn’t even want to get started on the weird pang she’d felt from her chest to her caution meter as he’d sworn to keep her safe.
“A long story, huh?” Alex let go of the climbing wall with one hand, gesturing grandly to the space between them before easily replacing his grip. “As it turns out, I’m a captive audience with nothing but time. So come on, Gorgeous. Wow me.”
The laughter that barged past Zoe’s lips took her by complete surprise, and judging from Alex’s expression, she wasn’t the only one. But her reasons for leaving Kismet weren’t exactly a secret. Even if they were largely unpopular among both her former colleagues and her family. “Okay, fine. I guess the easiest way to explain it is that working in a professional kitchen just wasn’t what I thought it would be.”
“Yeah, I remember my first year in the house.” Alex slid the toes of his black climbing shoes to a new foothold, pressing his way up the wall with the ease of someone who had done it no less than a billion times. “Jobs with breakneck hours on top of breakneck workloads are a bitch to get used to. I’m guessing that being a chef isn’t exactly a nine to five.”
She tried—unsuccessfully—to keep her snort in check as she did her best to copy his upward movements. “Definitely not. But I was actually fine with the schedule and the workload. It was the bottom line that ended up driving me crazy.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I spent three years clawing my way through culinary school because I love food. The smells, tastes, the textures, the way simple ingredients can come together to create something so vital.” Zoe paused to let the pure goodness of the thoughts in her head push a smile over her mouth. “God, I even loved the scut work, and believe me when I say, in a professional kitchen, there’s plenty.”
Alex’s laugh was all low, warm rumble. “Like coring lettuce?”
“Please. Talk to me once you’ve chopped onions for vegetable stock. For like a month straight.”
“I don’t mean to be a jackass, but that pretty much sounds like hell on earth.” He shuddered, although the glint in his eyes made both the gesture and his words more mischievous than malicious. Zoe didn’t even think twice as she shrugged and took another tentative step up the climbing wall.
“For someone who’s not a chef, I’m sure it does. But it’s just like keeping your equipment in check at the firehouse. You want your irons ready to go when you need them, right?”
“Uh, yeah.” Alex tugged his sun-kissed brows into a nonverbal is that even a question? and Zoe responded with an equally silent exactly.
“So you take good care of your ax and your Halligan bar and you put everything where it belongs even though the inventory you do at the top of every shift is a pain in the ass. When you love your job, even the boring stuff isn’t, well, quite so boring.”
“I guess that makes sense. But if you didn’t mind the grunt work, the long hours, and the weird schedule, what made you want to leave? Wasn’t the place pretty upscale?”
She pushed her toes over a new foothold, but struggled to lock in her balance. “Very. I worked in the kitchen at Kismet for two years. Busted my butt to get an apprenticeship under the head chef, actually.” Whoa, the peg under her foot was a lot narrower than she’d thought. Damn it. “But despite all that hard work and the thousands of dishes I made in that kitchen, do you know how many people I fed who really needed it?”
“Here. Try using your instep rather than your toes. Like this.” Alex shifted his hips back to give her a clear line of sight on his feet as he demonstrated the new maneuver before returning to her question with attention that hadn’t even skipped a pulse. “How many?”
“None.” Zoe angled the inside curve of her arch across the slim ridge of the foothold, and wow, that sure did the trick on her wobbly balance. “Don’t get me wrong. As much as I love being in the kitchen, I understand that restaurants are businesses. They have to make money. But working at Kismet felt so commercial, like the thing I loved most about being a chef was getting lost in the translation of doing as many covers as possible during any given shift. Like despite all my hard work and all the heart I was putting into the food, none of it really mattered.”
She hesitated, filling the silence with a reach for the large handhold an arm’s length above her. This was right about the point in the conversation where she usually lost everyone. Hell, if she’d had this conversation with herself three years ago, she’d have thought she’d lost her crackers.
But Alex just waited, his expression completely unvarnished, from the strong set of his jaw to the tropical-ocean blue of his stare, and it prompted the rest of the story right past Zoe’s lips.
“At first I thought I was just restless working the line. While I don’t mind doing straight labor and prep, potential chefs aren’t exactly taught a lack of initiative in culinary school. Working in a kitchen is extremely competitive.”
“Cutting your teeth as a rookie can suck pretty bad,” he agreed with a laugh. “For us, at least, a decent chunk of the first year is training and dress rehearsal so you can get used to the work and learn how to manage your adrenaline. It’s tough to do the watch-and-learn when you’ve been eating ambition for breakfast all the way through school, though.”
Forget culinary school. Zoe had been lining up goals and knocking them down like bowling pins ever since middle school. Her parents had never expected anything less, and she’d never delivered anything but the best, for them and herself. “Exactly. I was sure that if I earned my way off the line and studied under one of the best chefs in DC, I’d make more of a difference as a sous chef and my unease would let up.”
“But?” Apparently, patience wasn’t one of Alex’s virtues. Not that she’d expected it to be.
“But a year later, all I’d done was the same dance with different steps. I know it sounds sappy and idealistic, but I don’t just love food for me. I want to nurture people, and I became a chef so I could make an impact with my cooking. I tried to gut it out at Kismet, I really did, but—”
“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 actually got it.
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 of Washingtonian’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 confused and ineloquent. 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 even noticed.
“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.
“A little farther wouldn’t hurt. After all, I promised you an honest go, and you’re right. I’m a woman of my word.”