Flirting with Fire (Hot in Chicago #1) (22 page)

Ugh.
Her skin still crawled with having to play nice with McGinnis on orders from the mayor. The good detective—yet another guy who acted like his dick should have its own zip code.

But no matter how mad Luke Almeida made her, what he had said about Alex struck a chord in her heart. His sister had screwed up, but Kinsey did not like how the influence of one powerful man was determining Alex’s future. Or how Eli Cooper was refusing to sac up and take a stand against Cochrane.

Josie popped her head around the door. “Kins—”

“What?”

The poor girl blinked at Kinsey’s grouchy tone.

She sighed. “I’m sorry, Josie. It’s just been one of those days.” And not even nine thirty yet.

Kinsey, down here
.
That was the bottle of Grey Goose in the bottom drawer of her desk, letting her know she had a friend.

Her assistant smiled her sympathy. “The fifth floor called down wondering if you were going to the meeting. You’re running eight minutes late.”

“Tell them I’ll be there in five. No, ten.” Those fifth-floor jackasses could wait. A wide-eyed Josie backed out slowly.

The scent of smoke lingered in the air, and Kinsey felt that familiar flutter down south. Damn her hormones. Damn Luke Almeida.

On her phone, she hovered over Luke in her contacts list, but then scrolled back up and hit another four-lettered name. As she waited for the recipient to answer, her heart careened around her rib cage like a pinball. This was the right thing to do, she insisted. The only thing to do. Once connected, she hauled air into her lungs and started talking before she could lose her nerve.

“Hey. I need a favor.”

 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

K
insey knocked on the door of Gage and Alex’s house and waited, bone-shaking fear hurtling through her veins. She had made a decision and put a plan into action, and now she had to live with the consequences for her career, her future, and, well, maybe her love life. But that was not why she had done this.

Keep talking the talk, Taylor.

Gage opened up and yanked her inside. “Did you get ahold of her?”

Kinsey nodded. Earlier, she had called Gage looking for Darcy Cochrane’s number. The time difference between Chicago and Thailand meant she had caught the woman as she was heading to bed—a very active bed judging by the husky Spanish murmurs in the background. Beck Rivera, another Dempsey who apparently knew how to rock a woman’s world. Those damn Dempsey men. They had a way of sneaking into your blood and heating it so much your heart boiled over.

“Now we wait,” Gage said.

“Not for long.”

Alex stood up from her spot on the sofa as Kinsey walked into the living room. “Gage told me what you did.”

Kinsey held up a warning finger. “Not me. The moment it was taken, there was always a risk that it would escape into the wild. But if it gets into the right hands and gains maximum coverage, then as a concerned citizen, I am grateful.”

Eli would skewer her head on a pike if he found out she had been the source. When he found out. But it wasn’t as if the video was a lie. She didn’t agree with him that putting a lid on it was the right strategy. Bullies like Cochrane deserved to be exposed, which is why she had called Darcy and explained what was on the line. Gage’s instincts not to shame his future sister-in-law’s father were noble, but when faced with the prospect of setting back reconciliation with her father versus Alex’s career, Darcy had not hesitated in her support of the Dempseys. She had chosen her side.

Like Kinsey.

“Turn on the TV,” she said to Gage.

The video led the local news on NBC, just as Kinsey had been promised when she met anchorwoman Marisa Clark for a late liquid lunch that afternoon (extra-dry martini, Ketel One, two olives). There was no sugarcoating Cochrane’s language, the bleeps making it sound even more profane. More perfect. With every piercing cover-up of a not-suitable-for-network-TV word, Kinsey could feel the meter of public opinion tipping to Alexandra’s side.

But the best was yet to come.

Marisa laid it out:
“The firefighter in question, Alexandra Dempsey, is currently on suspension and her administrative hearing is scheduled for Tuesday. Sources inside CFD say it’s unlikely that Firefighter
Dempsey will escape with her job intact. However, a petition demanding that she be allowed to keep her position on the grounds that she acted overzealously under extremely difficult circumstances is now available online.”

A Web address pulsed on the screen.

Marisa’s male coanchor snuck a glance at his counterpart.
“A woman scorned. That’s one way to handle it,”
he said with a suggestive wink.

A class act all the way, the Emmy Award–winning newswoman rewarded him with the brittlest of smiles before bringing the spot home.
“Think I’d want to have a firefighter like that on my side. How about you, Chicago? Before you check out the petition, vote in our online poll. Should Firefighter Dempsey lose her job over this?”

Kinsey stood and cheered. Score one for the home team!

“Is your hot tub harboring a silent killer? Find out after the break.”

Gage muted the TV, his expression stunned. “There’s a petition?”

“Releasing the video was just part one,” Kinsey explained as she paced with fists clenched on hips. “All campaigns need a call to action. There’s no guarantee it’ll work or that Alex will keep her job, but—”

Alex launched her Amazonian body at Kinsey and pinned her to the sofa. “I can’t believe you did this for me. I can never, ever, ever thank you enough, K. Never.”

“I don’t like to see jerks like Sam Cochrane getting their way.” Kinsey squirmed, looking for a more comfortable position. Alex Dempsey was not exactly
a delicate flower. “But we’re not out of the woods yet. The petition is far from binding.”

“It’s already got . . . five hundred and fourteen signatures,” Gage said, holding up his phone. He tapped it a few more times. “And the video has six—no, seven thousand views already. Might overtake Luke’s fifteen minutes of fame before the night is out.”

“Because that’s just what we need. Another video of a Dempsey behaving badly.” Everyone turned to the source of the voice.

Luke. He stood at the door, hands shoved deep in pockets, body language taut and menacing. Completely badass.

“We had to do something, bro,” Gage said. “We tried to use it as leverage without releasing it but it didn’t work. It was time for plan B.”

“And you didn’t think to discuss it first? As a family?”

Alex sat up and shared a guilty look with Gage. “We wanted to take care of it. You’re always getting us out of hot water. This time, we wanted to solve it ourselves.”

“I see.” Luke’s face was a stone wall as he stared at Kinsey accusingly, making every cell in her body tingle.

It was good to be reminded of why she wanted to punch him in the penis with a fire extinguisher.

She stood, annoyed to discover her legs swaying like reeds. “I’d better go. I have a feeling I’ll be getting a call from my boss very, very soon.”

“Kinsey, thank you so much,” Alex said, her eyes glossy with gratitude. “I owe you big time.”

Boom!
Kinsey’s phone exploded with the
1812
Overture
, her bombastic ring tone for Eli. “I’ll take this outside.”

She brushed by Luke, who refused to stand aside as she passed. Ruggedly handsome jerk. Out in the Dempseys’ backyard, she stared at Eli’s name flashing like a red alert on her phone screen. Music swelled. Cannons exploded. She half expected SWAT teams to descend and haul her off to screw-with-the-mayor jail.

There was an excellent chance she had lost her job here.

Coward that she was, she let the call go to voice mail. Only to have it promptly start up again a moment later, because this was the mayor and the guy was annoyingly persistent like that. Time to pull on her big-girl panties.

“Mr. Mayor,” she said, her tone aiming for casual but falling somewhere north of high, squeaky, and guilty.

“Kinsey,” came the clipped reply.

Lying was not her intention. She had known it would be obvious that she was the source and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. “Eli, I’m sorry—”

“I told you to kill it, Kinsey, but we all know that it’s like locking the stable door. I can’t blame Simpson for doing everything in his power to save his sister.”

True, but . . . that was unexpected. What she wouldn’t give to be in the same room as him, checking his expression for clues. He couldn’t possibly think she had nothing to do with this, could he?

The urge to come clean warred with her instincts for self-preservation. Honesty won out. “Well, he wasn’t working alone—”

“I don’t doubt it. The Dempseys are well connected, so I’m sure they had plenty of people telling them how to play this. We just have to figure out how
we’re
going to play it.”

That mention of
we
flushed up another well of guilt. If she continued to play dumb, how the hell would she look him in the eye? She actually liked Eli, liked working for him, and she owed him the truth.

“Eli, I have a confession to make.”

He snorted. “Are you finally going to fess up about your relationship with Almeida? Because I already told you I know and I don’t care. Listen, Kinsey, this isn’t an automatic ‘get out of jail free’ card for Dempsey. There’s still the hearing, but this puts a different color on it. Should we expect marches in her defense on city hall?”

Only if the petition didn’t work. Plan C.

Kinsey cleared her throat. “I doubt it’ll go that far. I think people appreciate her exuberance in trying to extract one of the city’s favored citizens under such trying circumstances. As long as the voters feel they’re being listened to by their representatives.”

She could almost see Eli rolling his eyes at that, but she knew that deep down he cared what the voters thought, especially his key demographics of women and gays. In the background, the choppy noise of a TV indicated he was channel surfing.

“They’re already calling her America’s Favorite Firefighter over on CNN. Where
do
they come up with this stuff?”

From the brain of Kinsey Taylor, that’s where. She’d worked with Gage to ensure the moniker was planted on several firefighters’ Web boards and so
cial media, knowing the brotherhood would spread it quickly. The twenty-four-hour news cycle was always desperate for new content, and the combination of a woman doing a man’s job and a prominent media kingpin behaving like a jackass was a match made in news coverage heaven.

And the fact that she had engineered this whole damn thing needed to be told!

“Eli, this is all my—”

“Prepare a statement and have it on my desk by seven a.m. tomorrow.” She heard a soft click. “That’s Cochrane on the other line. I’d like to let him stew but it’ll just get ugly if I do. Night, Kinsey.” He ended the call.

She stared at her phone, feeling like she had been bludgeoned over the head by Steamrolling Eli. Perhaps that was his sneaky intention. The situation had plausible deniability written all over it, so maybe that was the angle Eli was taking? A classic politico’s gambit.

Tomorrow she would talk to him and set the story straight. If he didn’t fire her on the spot, he might be curious to know why she risked everything she had worked for, and she would trot out her defense about Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Maybe throw in something on the inalienable rights of women and gays with a few nods to the Constitution. Because the real reason she had taken this leap off a cliff was something she was not yet prepared to examine.

But as is so often the case, sometimes we have no choice but to face head-on what we try so hard to ignore. Her core had started to hum, her body already hyperaware of a raw, physical presence.

She turned . . . right into an intractable wall of muscle named Luke Almeida.

He was so
there.
That rock of strength, the heart of his family, who now clearly felt threatened by her lady kick-assery yet again. She was beginning to think there would be no satisfying him—or any man for that matter.

“Kinsey, we need to talk,” he said gravely.

Kinsey’s eyes almost popped out of her head. He was going to scold her yet again? She had worked her butt off to clean up his world: first the fist-shaped mess of his own making, and now his sister’s bid for self-destruction. She had walked a fine line between peacekeeper and bulldog. She had risked losing her job, and indignation at his assumptions about her since this fiasco with Alex rose to score her chest—and mutate into the beginnings of a thumping migraine.

Basically, she’d had quite enough.

“Listen up, caveman,” she said, pointing a finger in his chest. “If you think for a single second I’m going to stand here and take whatever you’re-on-my-turf bullshit you feel like spouting today, then you need your Neanderthal skull examined. Gage brought that video to me because he knew your first instinct would be to go berserk and throw it online. We wanted to try a more subtle tack, and when that didn’t work, we wanted to control the release. And it looks like it might have paid off, so get off your high horse, get your head out of your ass, and get on board with the solution.”

“You finished?”

She fisted her hands on her hips, took a fighter’s stance with a rock back on one heel, and squared her shoulders. “I haven’t even started.”

“Good. As long as you finish with me.”

That self-congratulating, macho asshat. He thought he could just—

Wait.
What?

In one swift motion, Luke curled his hand around her waist and jerked her into his body. His mouth greedily took control and stole her bubbling outrage with a kiss so dizzying it left her breathless.

Yeah, this.

Drawing back after a few moments, he searched her face, his eyes flaring with naked desire, his mouth swollen and wet. “Are you still employed?”

“For the moment.”

“But you could have lost your job.”

“There was always that chance.” In fact, she wouldn’t write off the possibility just yet. “I tried to come clean, but Eli kept cutting me off and—”

He kissed her hard, fierce, pushing her back against the gable of the house as he worked over her mouth. “You did this for me.”

Oh, the arrogance! Of course he had found a way to bring it back to him. So what if she had, he needn’t be so damned sure about it.

“I didn’t do it for you.” She kissed him again with her dirty lying mouth, loving how the hard ridge of his erection slotted into her body perfectly and made every part of her go soft. “I just don’t like bullies.”

“You did this for my family.”

“No,” she insisted, her resolve melting into the warm night. “I did it for gay rights and gender equality and for everyone who’s ever felt small in the face of unlimited power.”