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?
Excerpt
Zoe paused, her ponytail swinging in
a blond arc over her shoulders as she dropped her chin by just a fraction. “Why
don’t you finish up with these dishes and grab the rule book for some extra
reading. Clearly, you need to review the food service guidelines again before
you’ll be ready to work in the dining room.”
The heel of her shiny black and
silver clogs gave a squeak as she turned back toward the kitchen, but she’d
barely gotten past the swinging door before Alex had caught up with her.
“You didn’t answer the question.”
Somewhere, way in the back room of his brain, he knew picking at her probably
wasn’t the brightest idea he’d ever sprouted. But he’d never been too partial
to holding back, and anyway, he couldn’t deny his irritation at the extra
assignment or his ripping curiosity at how fast she’d been to swerve around the
subject.
Zoe had been unapologetic about
standing her ground since the minute he’d laid eyes on her yesterday, to the
point that she’d marched him around the kitchen like a lieutenant doing stair
drills with a squad full of rookies. No way would she scale back over something
like a refill rule. Unless he’d hit a nerve.
“No, I didn’t.” She crossed the
kitchen tiles, propping the dry goods pantry door open with one denim-wrapped
hip before sliding a wooden doorstop into place. Alex followed her into the
warm, tightly packed space, the residual sounds from the kitchen receding into
a distant thrum of background noise as they moved farther into the galley-style
storage room.
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
“A day and a half ’s worth of
zipping your lips and walking around here like you don’t care about anything,
and you want to break your code of silence over a cup of coffee?”
Zoe’s hands moved just a fraction
too quickly as she searched the open-air metal shelves in front of her, and
just like that, Alex left propriety in the dust.
“Obviously,” he pointed out, taking
another step toward her until he was close enough to feel the vibration of her
surprise. Her movements slid to a halt, her fingers halfway over a carton of
vegetable stock, and he didn’t waste any time taking advantage of the hitch.
“So humor me. Are you really so bound and determined to go by the book that you
can’t give a poor old man a second cup of coffee? I thought the whole point of
a soup kitchen was to feed people when they’re hungry, not turn them away
because of some stupid rule.”
In a hot instant, Zoe knocked the
surprise directly back to his court. “You really don’t get it, do you?” She
turned to face him, her chin tipped defiantly so she could meet his gaze
despite the seven-inch height differential between them. “It’s not that I don’t
want Hector to have a second cup of coffee. Hell, Alex, I want to give him
enough refills to float him to China. But I can’t.”
Something Alex couldn’t label with a
name flickered in her caramel-colored stare, replaced by her standard-issue
seriousness before he could even be one hundred percent positive he’d seen a
change. “Why not? You’re the director.”
“Exactly,” she said, the softness of
her voice refusing to match the sternness of her expression. “I’m the director.
It’s my job to feed as many people as possible so no one goes without. And if
Hector gets two cups of coffee, someone else gets none, so yeah. I have to be that
tight with the rules.”
His gut sank in sudden
understanding. “Your funding is really that thin?” he asked. The flicker in her
eyes made a repeat performance, and Alex was unprepared for the vulnerability
in Zoe’s answer.
“I treat feeding people the way you
treat being a firefighter. Do you really think I’d pull up on doing it for one
second unless I didn’t have a choice?”
Oh
hell. He opened his mouth, but before he could
form an answer, her eyebrows tugged into a deep furrow.
“Wait . . . what’s that smell?”
Alex blinked, trying to process the
question despite all the whaaaaaat running
rampant in his melon. “Don’t look at me,” he said, holding up his hands in mock
surrender. “I took a shower this morning.”
“Not you.” Zoe frowned, pressing up
to her toes to scan the pantry’s top shelf. Rocking back on his heels, Alex
mimicked her movements on the other side of the narrow storage space, and come
to think of it, now that they were all the way inside, the pantry did seem to
be giving off kind of a funky odor.
With their argument seemingly
forgotten, Zoe turned toward the deepest stretch of the corridor-like room,
where she’d had him unload all those endless cartons of who knows what
yesterday. “You double checked the contents of these boxes before you put them
on the shelves, right?”
He swallowed hard, his throat
tightening into a knot full of very bad things. “You said to unload them and
put them in the pantry, not open them up.”
“I said to unload them per the
guidelines, which means they should’ve been checked. Did you not read any
of the book?”
“Not to move a bunch of boxes,” Alex
argued. “And anyway, that thing is a doorstop.”
“That thing is important!” Zoe’s
eyes flashed with the color and intensity of double-batch bourbon as she
started shushing boxes over the metal wire shelves, popping them open and
muttering something unintelligible under her breath. A few seconds later, she
jerked back from the ominously stained cardboard carton in her grasp, turning
to throw a hard cough into the crook of her elbow.
“Ugh.” The pungent smell of
something rotten hit Alex right in the gag reflex, and he squeezed his eyes
shut against their involuntary watering. “What is that?”
“That
appears to be one of the boxes that should have
been
sorted with the meat delivery and put in the walk-in for today’s lunch and
dinner service,” Zoe bit out, her lips flattening into a hard seal as she swung
her gaze from the soggy box to his face.
“But it was on the kitchen counter
with all the other stuff during yesterday’s dry goods delivery.” It had to have
been, otherwise he never would’ve shoved the thing back here with all the
others like she’d told him to.
“The individual boxes aren’t always
marked with what’s inside, which is exactly why whoever unloads them is supposed
to do an inventory of each one to make sure the items go to the right place,
especially on days when we have multiple food deliveries. The procedures are
very clearly outlined in the manual.”
All of a sudden, the very bad things
in the pit of his belly grew into something even worse. “I guess I must have
missed this one. I’m sorry.” Alex took a few steps toward the kitchen for a
trash bag to just suck it up and take care of the mess when the harsh burst of
Zoe’s exhale stopped him dead in his Red Wings.
“Sorry’s not going to cut it,” she
said, meeting him toe to toe on the dark brown pantry tiles. He could admit to
screwing up—hell, he just had, and
he’d offered a genuine apology to boot. What else could she possibly want?
“Look, I get that you’re mad, Zoe,
but it was a mistake. I didn’t knowingly put that box back here.”
“You also didn’t knowingly
do your job like you were supposed to. It’s one thing for you
to put out minimal effort while you do your community service.” A muscle ticked
in her jawline, punctuating the absolute certainty of her words as she added,
“But I don’t have room in my kitchen for blatant screw ups, and I certainly
can’t babysit you every second of the day. Sorry, Alex. But you’ve got to go.”
Alex took a step back, and Zoe had
to give him this. The shock on his ridiculously handsome face actually looked
genuine. “What do you mean, I’ve got to go?”
“It’s pretty self-explanatory, don’t
you think? You just cost me money and resources I can’t afford to lose. I have
no way to feed everyone for the rest of the day, and there’s nine kinds of a
mess back here where this stuff leaked through the cardboard. Not only is it a
clean-up job I don’t have time for, but I could probably wallpaper my office
with the health code violations I’d rack up if an inspector walked through that
door right now. Add all of that together, and it looks like a pink slip to me.”
My Review
Reckless is Book #1 in the Rescue Squad Series and boys did it kick off the series with a bang. There is nothing better than a sexy firefighter and Kimberly Kincaid delivers on all the right things.
Alex is the kind of guy where he takes life by the horns and goes by the saying "Life's too short", he is an adrenaline junkie who already has a very risky job as a firefighter.
Zoe is the complete opposite of Alex, she doesn't like taking risks she follows all the rules and is very straight laced, but when herself and Alex are suddenly thrown together as Alex has to do 4weeks community service and it so happens he ends up in her soup kitchen, now that's when the sparks start to fly. For Alex Zoe is like the forbidden fruit as she is his Captain's daughter, and no matter what the captains daughter is always always off limits!!
Zoe doesn't like the way Alex is a bit Reckless, Alex doesn't like the way Zoe sticks to all the rules. With all the time they are spending together we see a softer side to Alex and a little of Zoe's take a risk side.
This was an awesome read, it had plenty to give and the way it was written makes you want more from this series, there's plenty of humour, smokin' HOT scenes and you will want to keep reading till the very end!!!
Alex is the kind of guy where he takes life by the horns and goes by the saying "Life's too short", he is an adrenaline junkie who already has a very risky job as a firefighter.
Zoe is the complete opposite of Alex, she doesn't like taking risks she follows all the rules and is very straight laced, but when herself and Alex are suddenly thrown together as Alex has to do 4weeks community service and it so happens he ends up in her soup kitchen, now that's when the sparks start to fly. For Alex Zoe is like the forbidden fruit as she is his Captain's daughter, and no matter what the captains daughter is always always off limits!!
Zoe doesn't like the way Alex is a bit Reckless, Alex doesn't like the way Zoe sticks to all the rules. With all the time they are spending together we see a softer side to Alex and a little of Zoe's take a risk side.
This was an awesome read, it had plenty to give and the way it was written makes you want more from this series, there's plenty of humour, smokin' HOT scenes and you will want to keep reading till the very end!!!
BUY NOW
Amazon | B & N | Google
Play | iTunes | Kobo
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment