Flirting with Fire (Hot in Chicago #1) (4 page)

Violent
and
paranoid. She’d let the CFD psychiatrist sort that one out.

“My job is to show how important the Chicago Fire Department is to the lifeblood of this great city—”

“Sounds like you’re reading from a press release.”

Her throat worked over a swallow. It did
sound like that. A PR professional learned quickly to speak in guarded statements, though she was beginning to realize that keeping her bodily defenses in place around Luke Almeida might be the true challenge.

Willing her hand to move deliberately, she flipped through a pile of file folders on her desk until she found the one she needed. From it, she extracted a multisheet document. Her ideas for rehabilitating the rep of Engine 6.

“So I thought we could host a community party. Kids could visit the firehouse, climb on the fire engine while supervised of course, hang with real-life heroes.”

Luke rounded the desk and leaned beside her, an action that strained the suit fabric over his thighs.
His strapping thighs.
His clean, male scent topped with a hint of—was that smoke?—curled through her blood. God, he smelled incredible.

She blinked and returned to her list.

“We could host a barbecue and set up a bouncy house—”

“A bouncy house?”

She studied him past her lashes. “Yes, you know, a bouncy house. My nieces love bouncy houses.”

Why had she mentioned her nieces? So what if Josie had nieces and Luke had spent a few moments poring over that photo and—dammit, she had nothing to prove here.

Competitiveness isn’t very feminine, Kinsey.

Oh, shut it, David.

“A bouncy house,” he repeated dazedly, as if his entire life had been distilled to this one moment and he couldn’t believe his rotten luck.

She pressed her lips against a smile. “I also think your connection to the foster kids would make a great promotional piece. I had lunch with a reporter from the
Trib
today, and she’d love to see the other side of Luke Almeida. The one who gives back to honor his foster father and brother.”

He cut her a look, and she felt it to her perfectly manied toes. “The kids stay out of it. I won’t have them used as pawns to make me or the CFD or your damn mayor look better.”

While it was impossible to predict what would stick in the minds of voters, sad-eyed, underprivileged kids playing softball with firefighters had
win
written all over it.

“It would really be the easiest route—”

“Not happening, Kinsey.” He took the list from her with one hand, her pen with the other, and slashed through that bullet point. “Next.”

Kinsey wasn’t quite ready to give up on that idea, especially as he had used her first name. They were finally getting somewhere, though she couldn’t be sure where exactly. Or if it was a place she wanted to visit.

She tried another tack. “The members of CFD, and Engine 6 in particular, are heavily involved in the city’s community, from their great service and public education to volunteer work and charity drives. Our campaign needs to focus on those efforts so we can minimize the negatives. Maybe even wipe those negatives out of existence.”

Laying the list down on her desk, he stared at her in a way that completely unnerved her. “When the negatives are caught on camera and blasted onto YouTube, sweetheart, there’s little chance of scrubbing the record. It’s out there forever.”

“True—”

“Plus, there’s a place in our society for those negatives, as you call them. Usually, men channel their anger into approved routes of violent expression—the military, sports, a charity boxing match between CPD and CFD. When it’s unapproved, that’s where there’s trouble. But, Kinsey, if I had a chance to do it over, I’d still punch the living daylights out of McGinnis and take my lumps.”

Butterflies dive-bombed in her belly at all that passion and conviction. After working so long with constantly remorseful politicians, it was . . . refreshing.

He ran one large hand over the edge of her desk, mere inches from where her thigh flexed tight at the skirt of her cream-colored suit. Momentarily mesmerized by those masculine fingers, Kinsey worked to drag herself back to reality.

“Are you telling me that men are compelled by the mere fact of their gender to choose violence as their first resort?”

“Partly. It satisfies our sense of justice, it makes us feel good, and it always improves our odds with women.”

He hoisted an eyebrow, drawing her laugh. It had been awhile since she wanted to laugh, and now she was choosing to let loose at Luke Almeida’s argument for channeling his inner Ultimate Fighter.

“It won’t improve your odds with
all
women.”

He considered that for a moment. “No, there’ll always be some who pretend they aren’t turned on by the idea of a man who can defend himself and keep his woman safe. Usually, it’s the same women who wear sexy heels that accentuate their shapely legs or open that top button of their blouse to hint at beautiful, cuppable breasts, then scowl when a guy takes a lingering look.”

Cue lingering look. His gaze fell to the V of her blouse (top button
not
undone, but cut low enough to get things simmering) and continued downward, the intensity in his eyes sending her sex into a clench.

Kinsey knew she looked good, and with that scorching appraisal, she felt better. How long had it been since a man had looked at her with such candid interest? David had stopped looking at her, really looking at her, a long time ago.

“Are you one of those women, Miss Taylor? The kind who showcases her gorgeous assets and then hides behind the electric fence of feminism to keep the animals out?”

Animals.
That word snapped her out of her rev
erie. So she would never consider herself a raging feminista, but she didn’t need a degree in women’s studies to recognize Luke Almeida’s type. He was the alpha predator, a guy who turned to violence to solve his problems, a man who looked like a suit or a job or a woman could never contain him. She needed to get her head in the game and focus on the mission.

Operation Clean Up CFD. And Don’t Let Luke Almeida Distract You.

The first part would be a cinch. As for the second . . .

“I think we’re getting off track here, Mr. Almeida.”

“Luke.” Warm, sexy, inviting. Oh my.

Her mouth felt as dry as the golden sands of Baker Beach back home, the sensitive area between her thighs not so much. She smoothed clammy hands over her skirt. Drawing her palms down her thighs magnetized his gaze to her heat-saturated body. Every cell was on fire.

Maybe she should call CFD.

“Luke,” she said, liking far too much how his name sounded on her lips. “Let’s start with the community block party idea and go from there. I’ll make sure we have media coverage and enough city bigwigs on hand to give it the validation we need.”

“And the foster kids stay out of it?”

For the moment. “We’ll have to add something else, then.” She paused as if she needed time to think. “Maybe the calendar.”

The cold set of his mouth contrasted with the hot flash of annoyance in his eyes. “You were serious about that?”

“As a heart attack. I’ve done some unscientific re
search around the office. The Men on Fire calendar idea was very popular, even with the guys.”

He snorted.

Emboldened, she carried on.

“It’ll take awhile to set up the community event, but I think a photo shoot with the heroes at Engine 6 could be laid up pretty quickly.” Hell, she could sell tickets. The minute word about this wildfired around city hall, she just knew she’d be making a bunch of new friends who wanted in on that sexy action.

Straightening, she took a step backward and into the safety of professionalism. Getting back on the terra firma of the job she was pretty damn good at was the best way she knew to center herself. But she had to admit that his appreciation of her as a woman made her feel just as powerful.

“I need to get ready for my next meeting. Thanks so much for stopping by.”

“And thanks for hearing me out.” The quirk at the corner of his mouth was probably the only acknowledgment she’d get that this round had gone to her—the calendar was the kill shot—and that, more important, he didn’t mind. Wow, how sexy was that? Meathead Luke Almeida had managed to surprise her.

He lifted his big body off her desk and moved lithely toward the door, then turned when he got there. “Your assistant . . . ?”

“Josie?”

“Josie. Is she seeing anyone?”

Her heart leaped into her throat. “Not as far as I know.” Insisting that her quickening pulse was purely a reaction to all the caffeine she’d had today was an
assertion she’d take to her grave. And just when her feelings toward him had crossed into warm fuzzies territory.

Score one for Mr. Almeida.

He nodded and made to leave, but she wasn’t quite done with him yet.

“When’s your birthday, Luke?”

Turning to face her, he speared her with those electric blues, now contracted in suspicion. “July.”

Try as she might, she couldn’t hide her grin. “Mr. July has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

On that, she pivoted quickly to maintain her grip on that precious last word and bent over the desk to grab, oh, the stapler that was a few inches out of reach. She could feel his penetrating gaze on her ass as it shifted under her tight skirt. A cheap thrill, perhaps, but the way her sex life was going, she’d take the thrills where she could find them.

Only when she heard the door close behind her did she let go of the breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding.

 CHAPTER FOUR

“T
he chef here is amazing, Kinsey. He’ll knock your heels off.”

She didn’t doubt it. Though San Francisco had its own thriving food culture, the culinary options in Chicago beat it hands-down. From deep-dish pizza and pierogi to five-star tasting menus and molecular gastronomy, you could eat out at a stellar restaurant every night of the week for a year and still not have exhausted all your options.

Kinsey tried to imagine how the firm, fit body of her dining companion would handle a daily assault of butter, carbs, and sugar. Probably very well, considering Eli “Hot Stuff” Cooper—as Chicago’s female denizens referred to their disruptively handsome mayor—usually ran six miles to work and back instead of taking the car that his predecessors had seen as their due. Every morning, Kinsey checked Facebook and found photos of the mayor high-fiving other joggers on his run along Lake Shore from the tony streets of Lincoln Park. Occasionally, he took the “L” so he could glad-hand commuters while proclaiming the CTA the best transit system in the country. It was far from it, but ridership had skyrocketed as hopeful women vied to rub shoulders (and other
body parts) with the most eligible bachelor east of the Mississippi.

“Well, Mr. Mayor—”

“Kinsey, I’ve told you to call me Eli. Mr. Mayor was the last guy.”

“Eli,” she said, not yet wholly comfortable with the informality. Having worked for a board supervisor and numerous big shots in San Francisco after earning her communications degree at Berkeley, she found this loosey-goosey style of her new boss disconcerting. Marching into her office without going through her assistant was standard. Texting her before she had made it to work at eight was par for the course. He called whenever he felt like it, including this morning’s 5 a.m. wakey-wakey with an idea to win the hearts and minds of Chicago’s public librarians. In recent months, they had been raking his ass across the coals over his threat to cut their funding.

“Cupcakes with cat-face icing, Kinsey. Those bookworms love cupcakes and cats.”

Why the mayor had lately singled her out for special attention was hard to say. Working under two other members of the Media Affairs team—John Hernandez, aka “Porn Stache John,” and Mark Baker, senior to her in position, junior to her in age—usually kept her out of Eli’s orbit. Since starting in February, her daily grind revolved around press releases about the city’s parking app or the popularity of Divvy, the bike share system. The puff pieces. The feel-good stories. That all changed a few weeks ago when the mayor began soliciting her opinion in the morning meetings. This CFD-CPD bust-up was the first meaty project she’d been given in her four months on the job.

Tonight he had invited her to a late dinner at Smith & Jones, a trendy new addition to Restaurant Row in the west Loop. She had agreed, hoping Eli’s motive was just business, because despite the fact that she could cut a steak with that jawline, sleeping with the boss was not an option. Anyway, the man wore far too much product in his hair.

A plate of meat appeared before them. “The sausage bonanza with lamb merguez, pimiento-cheddar chicken sausage, and fennel kielbasa. Compliments of the chef,” their hipster-Goth server tossed off with just the right amount of practiced indifference.

Glancing over his shoulder, Eli gave a one-fingered salute in the direction of the kitchen and the white-jacketed chef who stood sentry at the entrance. His thick, inked arms, folded like armor across a barrel chest, gave the impression of a man who had ways of “making” people like his food. With a curt nod, he spun around and headed back into his culinary sanctum.

“Someone you can’t work your charm on?” Kinsey teased.

“We got unsolicited sausages, didn’t we?” Eli slathered one encased meat tube with stone-ground mustard and took a bite. A little grease spattered on his French blue shirt and the suspender bisecting one of his broad shoulders. Yes, the mayor wore suspenders.

“Chef Brady Smith and I go way back,” he said around his chewing. “Served together in Afghanistan.” He inched the meat platter toward her.

“No, thanks. I’m a vegetarian.”

She might as well have asked
him
to go veg, if the
horror that crossed his brow was any indication, but he quickly recovered and caught the attention of the server.

“You eat cheese, Kinsey?”

“Like it’s going out of style.”

“Bring her the goat cheese and sweet corn dumplings,” he said to their server, “and I’ll take the bone-in rib eye, medium rare.”

Well, that was unexpectedly thoughtful, if a little high-handed. Not at all like her ex-fiancé, who had never really made peace with her vegetarianism, usually going out of his way to take her to steak houses where the only option was the slim-pickins salad bar. Strange now to think of how she had let pass his sly digs about her life choices. How she’d made excuses for him and allowed him to take the lead in their relationship because his ego was as big as all outdoors.

Then came the ultimate insult. She moved here.
For him.

A woman in love should not be allowed to make life-altering decisions at the behest of the fiancé who thought his career was more important. She had left behind her family, her friends, and a great job working for the city of San Francisco for a man whose spine was so soft he needed scaffolding to stay upright. Not that her new job wasn’t decent—it was—but the bitterness of compromise was a tough pill to swallow.

She had thought they were the golden couple. The handsome cardiac surgeon and the savvy media professional, a match made in the pages of a glossy lifestyle magazine. So maybe she spent more time hosting catered parties for David’s colleagues than enjoying
the fruits of their high-powered pairing, and maybe the sex had waned to zilch in the last year of their relationship, but moving to Chicago a month after he was appointed chief of cardiac surgery at Northwestern Medicine was supposed to fix it. For all his complaints about her lack of support and self-absorbed focus on her own career, he had sounded so pleased when she said she’d found a job in Chicago.

But within two months of her cross-country move—and less than three weeks before their May wedding—the rat bastard dumped her for a soft, feminine nurse with shoulders broad enough to prop up his fragile ego. Ten years together and—
poof!
—it was over. The replacement understood his needs, David had explained in his reasonable voice. She wasn’t always trying to engage in power plays and one-upmanship. She
got
him. A man in his position just wanted to come home to a double Lagavulin, not a ball buster—or worse, an empty house and no dinner on the table because Kinsey was out working an event for
her
job.

Ooh, she wished she’d taken a rusty spoon to his ’nads. See how reasonable his voice sounded then.

Setting her fury aside until later when she could feed it with Cherry Garcia, she looked up to find the mayor’s knotted expression fixed on a spot at the end of the densely packed bar. Or more particularly, on an Amazonian brunette with a rumpus of red-streaked curls and an unimpressed expression, which she was using on . . . well, well, well, if it wasn’t Gage “Baby Thor” Simpson.

Gage was enthusiastically waving his hands to explain something
really important
. With each in
creasingly dramatic gesture, the woman’s eyebrows hitched higher in skepticism until finally he shook her shoulders impatiently and she laughed. Their easy camaraderie and obvious bond radiated off them, even from paces away. If those two weren’t related, Kinsey would sacrifice her meat virginity to the sausage bonanza.

“Do you know Gage Simpson?” she asked Eli, who was still riveted by the exchange at the bar.

“Who?”

“That’s Gage Simpson, one of the Dempseys. And if I’m not mistaken, the woman with him is his sister, Alexandra.”

“Tell me how it went with Almeida.” There was a snappishness to his tone as he tore his gaze away from the Dempseys, or more specifically, from Alexandra. Interesting.

“Nothing to worry about. The wheels of rehabilitation are in motion.”

“Sam Cochrane is making a bigger fuss of this than I expected,” Eli said, with not a small amount of weariness in his voice. “He’s siding with the police.”

One of the mayor’s biggest campaign donors, Chicago real estate baron, media mogul, and Trump-style billionaire Sam Cochrane owned the
Chicago Tribune
. His paper had gone to town with a scathing editorial on the video and repeated calls for head rolling every day since. Cochrane had also made clear his intentions to neither endorse nor support financially his reelection bid if Eli didn’t come down hard on anything that carried the faintest whiff of scandal.

“However it goes, he comes out a winner,” Kinsey said, knowing full well how sharks like Cochrane op
erated. “Calling out the bad behavior of public servants allows him to preach from the mountain while selling more newspapers and tightening the vise on you.”

“Didn’t take you long to figure out the lay of the land.” Eli’s smile was wry. “There’s a bit more to it, though. Cochrane has history with the Dempseys. Used to co-own that bar of theirs with Sean Dempsey before they fell out. Now his daughter, Darcy, is shacked up with Beck Rivera.”

The Dempsey foster brother she had yet to meet. This just got better and better. “And let me guess? He and Firefighter Rivera get along like a house on fire.”

“Exactly. Darcy’s a sweet kid, though, and Rivera’s got a great left hook. Helluva boxer. I won a packet on him at the last Battle of the Badges.”

Marvelous, another Dempsey with homicidal tendencies.

“So, Almeida and McGinnis,” the mayor prompted. “What do we know?”

“The fight was apparently over Alexandra Dempsey. She’s a probationary firefighter with six months’ service at Engine 6. Her report said McGinnis had too much to drink and was getting handsy with some of the female patrons, including her, but I have a feeling there’s more to it.” That significant look Luke had shared with his brothers said there was a mile-deep root of “more to it” underneath that iceberg of silence.

Mr. Mayor—
Eli
—sighed. “
Cherchez le femme.
Where there’s trouble, look for a damn woman.” His gaze slid to Alexandra at the bar and turned brooding. “And Lord save us from women who think they
can do everything a guy can do. The female firefighters are the worst.”

Every hair on Kinsey’s neck shot to indignant attention. “How enlightened of you, Eli. I’m sure your substantial female voter base would love to hear this.”

“Hush, now. It’s all well and good to rage about sex equality, Kinsey, but there are just some jobs a woman is not cut out for.”

Pulse sputtering, she fought for calm. Not once had she ever felt that her vagina disqualified her to do anything, but there was always some dunderhead who believed the glass ceiling should be lowered instead of smashed.

“Remind me again how you got elected.”

He grinned, and his dimple did a quickstep in his dark-shadowed cheek.
That’s how.
Sometimes she had no idea if he believed half the crap he spewed or if he was just testing the limits of employee loyalty. Perhaps it was a unique attribute of Chicago men. Luke Almeida had certainly enjoyed pushing her buttons. Bet he was good at pushing all sorts of buttons.

“I promised to be tough on crime, to curb spending, and not stand for bullshit,” Eli said, as if her request for information had not been rhetorical. Like all politicians, he loved to list his accomplishments. “Since I’ve been elected, the White Sox have clinched the World Series again and the Blackhawks have won the Cup two out of three years.”

“What about the year they lost?”

“I was out of town during the playoffs. And while I’m good, even I can’t lift Billy Goat’s curse to help
the Cubs.” An arrogant smile touched his lips. “I’m happy to say women are my strongest supporters. They like what they see.”

Screw the formalities. “God, could you be any more of an ass— Oh, hello!”

Gage Simpson had materialized at their table like a grinning, golden god.

“Miss Taylor, fancy seeing you here. Of course, your
connections will get you the best tables. My
connections only get me as far as the bar.”

“Meet my connection,” she said, gesturing to Eli, who thrust out his hand, eager to parlay with another voter even if he was one of those pesky Dempseys. “Mayor Cooper, Gage Simpson, one of our finest with Engine 6.”

Gage shook the offered hand. “Mr. Mayor. Pleasure.” Kinsey detected the slightest lowering of Gage’s vocal register to bedroom level on that last word. An equal opportunity flirt, apparently.

He turned to the woman behind him. “This is my sister, Alex Dempsey. Alex, this is Kinsey Taylor and, of course, you recognize the mayor from his innumerable TV appearances.”

Alex’s smile was brief and in no way unfriendly, but she seemed more reserved than her brother. On the statuesque, curvy body of a swimmer, she wore red cowboy boots, dark-wash jeans, and a T-shirt emblazoned with “Gandalf Hates the Yankees.” Kinsey liked her immediately.