Enter to win a print copy of Reckless
Reckless
Rescue Squad #1
Kimberly Kincaid
Releasing on January 26, 2016
Zebra
Someone’s Bound To Get Burned…
Zoe Westin may be a fire captain’s daughter, but feeding the people in her hometown of Fairview is her number one priority. Running a soup kitchen is also the perfect way to prove to her dad that helping people doesn’t always mean risking life and limb. But when she's saddled with a gorgeous firefighter doing community service after yet another daredevil stunt, the kitchen has never been so hot.
Alex Donovan thrives on adrenaline, and stirring a pot of soup doesn’t exactly qualify. He’s not an expert at following the rules either, not even when they come from the stubborn, sexy daughter of the man who's not only his boss, but his mentor. Determined to show Zoe that not every risk ends in catastrophe, Alex challenges her both in the kitchen and out. One reckless step leads to another, but will falling for each other be a risk worth taking, or will it just get them burned?
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | B & N | Google Play | iTunes | Kobo
“See?” Alex leaned a sculpted
shoulder against the door frame, 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 door frame, 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, and damn it, that smile
of his was infectious. Zoe knew better than to buy into his boyish charm—after
all, sweet talk was Alex’s bread and butter, 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 man power lately that even before this morning’s rotten food
debacle, the pantry had needed 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 . . .” He
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?”
“Well,
the main ingredient was elbow grease, but I wasn’t without help. You remember
Tom O’Keefe, right?” Alex asked, and she did a quick Station Eight roll call in
her head.
“Sure.”
The paramedic had been with the FFD for the last few years. She didn’t know him
quite as well as she did Alex and Cole and the other guys, but her father had
always spoken highly of him, and in the handful of times she’d seen the guy at
softball tournaments and department barbecues, O’Keefe had always seemed to
live up to the praise. “But what on earth does he have to do with my pantry?”
Alex
laughed in a low, butterscotch-smooth rumble, and the sound took another chip
out of Zoe’s doubt. “As luck would have it, O’Keefe is really good at
sanitizing small spaces. I guess you could call it a product of his occupation,
with all those health and safety guidelines on the ambo. Anyway, I told him I
needed a deep clean on the fly, so he walked me through a couple of tricks over
the phone. And before you ask”—he paused to lift both hands in concession—“yes,
I double-checked his advice against the food safety section of your kitchen
doorstop, and yes again. Both the methods and the chemicals I used are all
legit.”
“Oh,”
Zoe said, the word a lame replacement for the already answered question she’d
had preloaded on the tip of her tongue. But the last thing she’d expected was
for Alex to come through, let alone hit a grand slam on the last-ditch
curveball she’d lobbed in his direction.
“You
didn’t think you could rely on me to get this cleaned up right, did you?” The
question arrived without gloating or accusation, his smile turning wistful as
he pushed his hands into the pockets of his broken-in jeans. Zoe tugged at the
hem of her apron, smoothing the fabric even though it was already perfectly in
place, but screw it. She’d never been a fan of dancing around the truth, and it
wasn’t as if Alex didn’t already know the answer, anyway.
“To
be honest, no. I really didn’t.”
One
brow arched up toward his sun-bleached hairline. “I don’t believe in wasting
time on anything other than honesty,” he said. “As for the rest, I’m glad I
surprised you.”
She
pulled in a deep breath to counter the bump in her pulse. Alex might be
charming as hell right now, with that aw-shucks expression beneath the
sprinkling of rugged stubble on his face, but he’d only helped her to help
himself. Plus, she had bigger fish to fry—namely, that she had no fish, or
protein of any kind for the rest of the day’s meal service.
“Well,
a deal’s a deal. While I don’t expect you to repeat your mistakes, or make any
new ones because you’re unprepared, this gets you off the hook for this
morning’s mess.” Zoe shifted her weight over the floor tiles, her ponytail
brushing over one shoulder as she tipped her head at the pantry door. “But if
you’ll excuse me, I’ve still got to go figure out how to get through the rest
of today’s meal service without the food we lost.”
Rather
than taking a step back to let her pass, Alex straightened, keeping himself
planted directly in her path. “No, you don’t.”
“I’m
sorry?” She’d been scraping like mad for the last hour to come up with
replacement options for the ruined ingredients, to little avail. Did he
seriously think her job was so easy that she could work up lunch and dinner for
a hundred hungry residents on a wing and a Hail Mary?
“You
don’t have to worry about coming up with plan B. Not for lunch, anyway. I’ve
got it covered.” Alex turned and jerked his chin at the pantry door in a clear
request for her to follow, and the shock of his words had her so dumbfounded
that she was powerless to do anything other than oblige.
“Okay.”
She extended the word with the tone of a question as they crossed back into the
brightly lit kitchen, coming to a stop by the stainless steel prep table acting
as a makeshift island in the center of the room. “Meal service starts in an
hour and a half, and we have nothing to prepare. Do you have access to some
sort of magic food genie I don’t know about?”
“Something
like that, yeah.” Alex pulled an iPhone out of the back pocket of his jeans,
tapping the screen to life. After a handful of easy moves, he extended the
phone in her direction, waiting silently as she took in the Web page he’d
opened.
Zoe’s
jaw unhinged. “You ordered pizza?”
“Look,
I’m not even going to pretend I know how to make anything other than a mess in
the kitchen, but you needed the food. I go skydiving with one of the guys who
owns the pizza place over on Atlantic Boulevard, and he owed me a favor, so—”
“Wait.”
She held up one palm in a wordless stop right there, although the
free-for-all of questions flying around in her brain
made practicing what she preached a complete and total
no-go. She’d known he was slick, but . . . “You got twenty pizzas
by cashing in a favor?”
“I
got a deal
on
twenty pizzas by cashing in a favor,” Alex amended, propping one hip against
the prep table and gesturing toward the swinging door. “But yeah. They’ll be
here at eleven forty-five.”
Zoe
handed his phone back over, unsure whether she should cry with relief or tread
with extreme caution. “You know, if you’re not careful, I might actually start
to think there’s a decent guy underneath all that attitude.”
Heat
laddered up the back of her neck as she heard the implication of the words, but
rather than take offense or trot out said attitude for a test run, Alex just
laughed.
“Well.
We can’t have that, now can we?”
Zoe’s
smile appeared before she could stop it. “Is there anyone in Fairview you can’t
fast talk into giving you what you want?”
“You
mean besides you?” His blue eyes glinted teasingly, but it lasted for only a
second before he said, “Listen, just because I don’t want to be here doesn’t
mean I’m out to torpedo your kitchen, either. This community service thing
might not be what either of us wants, but you gave me a second chance. And
while I realize delivery pizza isn’t the meal you had in mind, I owed you one,
and it really is the best I’ve got.”
An
odd sensation twisted in her chest, welling up in a soft, involuntary laugh.
“Was that supposed to be endearing?”
“That all depends,” Alex said, one corner of his mouth
lifting into a dark and forbidden version of his all-American smile. “Did it
work?”
Fun and sexy, I was hooked from beginning to end! Alex and Zoe are opposites when it comes to taking risks and living life to its fullest. She sees as Alex as reckless, but she learns that he has a very good reason for living the way he does. The only thing she can't get over is the risk he takes every time he's at work as a firefighter. Zoe is all about making plans and being careful. Alex helps her break free of her mold a bit and shows her that being reckless every once in a while is actually a good thing. They had really good chemistry and you could see the feelings growing as they found their way as a couple. The firehouse crew were great supporting characters and I'm sure will have equally good stories. Another great read from Kimberly Kincaid!
I received an ARC via NetGalley for the purpose of an honest review. I was not compensated for this review, all conclusions are my own.
Kimberly Kincaid writes contemporary romance that splits the difference between sexy and sweet. When she's not sitting crosslegged in an ancient desk chair known as “The Pleather Bomber,” she can be found practicing obscene amounts of yoga, whipping up anything from enchiladas to éclairs in her kitchen, or curled up with her nose in a book. Kimberly is a 2011 RWA Golden Heart® finalist who lives (and writes!) by the mantra that food is love. She resides in northern Virginia with her wildly patient husband and their three daughters.
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads
Lovely review. Thank you for hosting RECKLESS today!
ReplyDeleteCrystal, Tasty Book Tours