by Jill Shalvis
“Sorry,” Parker gasped to AJ. “Gotta take this.” He moved aside for privacy. “Hola.”
“I told you to back off,” Sharon said.
Parker didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Backing off isn’t a strong suit of mine.”
“How about being unemployed?” she asked. “Is that going to be a strong suit of yours?”
“He’s here, Sharon,” he said quietly. “Carver’s hiding out until the heat on him dies down.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No, but—”
“Parker—”
“We can nail him.”
“No,” she said flatly. “We can’t.”
“But—”
“Listen to me very carefully,” she said in her someone’s-gonna-die tone. “Don’t be stupid and jeopardize your career.”
“You think this is about my career?” he asked in disbelief.
She sighed. “No. But this is bigger than us. Okay? That’s all I can say. Now back the fuck off and walk away so I don’t have to come out there and kick your ass myself.”
And then she hung up on him.
Parker stared at his phone.
“Problem?” AJ asked.
“No,” he said automatically. But yeah, there was a problem, a big one. Walk away? Kel had hinted that another agency was involved in this thing. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives? FBI? Homeland Security?
And why?
And even more importantly, how the hell was he supposed to ever walk away from this case?
Very late that night, Zoe sat on the couch in some serious pain—and shame. As a rule, she ate fairly healthily but all bets were off during times of stress. Proving the point, she’d just polished off an entire bag of pizza rolls by herself and was covered in crumbs and questioning her choices in life. Plus, she’d screwed up another batch of cookies, burning this bunch, so the place was a little smoky.
Oreo sat with her, taking up more than his fair share of the couch, snoring audibly.
She hadn’t turned on any lights. Not because she was trying to save money on her electric bill, although she could do with a little saving there. Earlier she’d attempted to change the lightbulb in the hallway and most of the downstairs had gone dark. Not all of it. She could, for instance, turn on a light in the living room, but she didn’t need a light in here. She needed one in the kitchen to clean up her mess.
And to forage for more food.
But try as she might to figure out the electrical problem, she couldn’t. It would have to get in line with all the other things that needed fixing.
In any case, the only glow came from the TV, where her Friends season ten marathon was coming to an end.
Until the lamp suddenly came on.
Gasping in surprise, she blinked up at Parker. “What are you doing?”
“Checking on the odd sounds of a woman sobbing at three in the morning,” he said.
Oh God. She hadn’t been sobbing. Had she?
Parker sniffed the air. “You burn something?”
“I think the oven’s defective.”
“Do you?” Parker asked.
She let out what she meant to be a laugh but sounded horrifyingly close to a sob. Dammit.
“Hey.” Parker came close. “What’s wrong?”
She swiped at a few residual tears. “Nothing.”
“Zoe,” he said softly, with far too much empathy.
“Just never mind! You won’t understand.”
“Try me,” he said.
She sighed. “Rachel got off the plane for Ross.”
Parker turned in a circle, casing the room. “Who’s Ross?”
She let out a choked laugh and wished for a tissue. She also wished that she weren’t in her beloved King’s College sweats that were so battered and threadbare she might not be one hundred percent decent. Oh hell, who was she kidding? She was scrubbed free of makeup and had her hair piled up on top of her head and she was wearing Shrek slippers. She wasn’t even close to decent. “Ross from Friends,” she said. “He and Rachel got back together and it was . . .”
Sweet. Sexy. Romantic.
Not one of which was in her life and hadn’t been in a long time. And damn if her eyes didn’t fill again. She did her best to blink them back, but that only made it worse.
Parker studied her for a beat and then turned and walked off.
Seven
Smart man, Zoe thought with a soggy sniff. She told herself she was actually relieved that Parker had walked away from her. He definitely shouldn’t talk to the crazy lady—
The lights came on throughout the house with a hum of electricity.
And a minute later, Parker reappeared.
She stared at him. “You fixed the lights.”
He looked around. “Were they broken?” he asked, his tone just a little too innocent.
She narrowed her eyes. “I tried to change a lightbulb and everything went out. I even changed the fuse but that didn’t work, either.”
“Huh,” he said noncommittally.
Oh, she was so on to him. “And my kitchen sink isn’t dripping anymore,” she said. “And the shower isn’t clogged.”
He shrugged those broad shoulders. “Guess you’re better at plumbing than you thought.”
They both knew she wasn’t.
But he was. “Thanks,” she said quietly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She sighed. “And also, you’re way too good at that.”
“At what?”
“Lying.”
“Here,” he said, ignoring that comment entirely and dropping the roll of paper towels from the kitchen into her lap. She tore off a piece and blew her nose, expecting him to leave. Instead he crouched before her, grimacing as he did so.
“You’re still hurting?” she asked.
“Nah.”
“Right,” she said. “And I can bake cookies like Martha Stewart. Lift up your shirt.”
“Didn’t you see enough the other morning?”
No, actually, she hadn’t, and the truth was she could stare at him all day long and not see enough, but that was another thing entirely. “Your shirt,” she said with an impatient do it gesture.
With another shrug, he lifted his shirt.
Momentarily stunned by his perfection, she had to work at finding her voice, and even then her mouth disconnected from her brain. “It’s like you’ve been Photoshopped.”
“See, you do like something about me,” he said, and gave her a slow, slaughter-a-million-brain-cells smile.
She squirmed a bit but hell, she couldn’t make much worse of a first impression, right? After all, she’d already mistakenly kissed him, slammed the door on his nose, and walked in on him in the shower. And now she was sitting here in her pj’s and crumbs, no makeup, a tear-streaked face, and possibly also a snotty nose—not exactly at her best. She spent a lot of time letting people see only what she wanted them to—a hardworking professional woman on top of her game. And yet somehow in a matter of days she’d revealed herself to him, letting him see someone else entirely.
The real her, maybe.
In any case, she was so far outside her comfort zone with him, she couldn’t even see her comfort zone. And that made her wonder about his comfort zone. Did he even have one? She doubted it. He seemed like the kind of guy who could find his zone anywhere, comfort or otherwise. “How are you even moving around?”
He’d let his shirt drop back down. “It looks worse than it is.”
“Really?”
“Really.” He was still balanced effortlessly on the balls of his feet, looking up at her.
Really looking. This close up she could see the stubble on his jaw, which was an appealing mix of every hue of brown under the sun and made her fingers yearn to touch him.
Bad fingers.
In the low lighting, his eyes seemed to glow and she dropped her gaze to his mouth, which made her remember the taste of his kiss.
/> “I smell something burning,” he said.
“It’s the cookies.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s your brain. What’s going on, Zoe? You’re not upset over a sitcom.”
Tomorrow night she was going to go with a harmless Saturday Night Live marathon. “It’s nothing,” she said.
“Nothing’s got you wearing pizza sauce and crying over some guy on TV?”
“Not some guy,” she said. “Ross. As in Ross and Rachel.” When Parker just shook his head, clearly clueless, she sighed. “Never mind.” Tipping her head down at herself, she eyed her sweatshirt and the stain on it. “And how do you know this is pizza sauce? Maybe it’s blood from my last tenant who asked too many questions, you ever think of that?”
While he laughed softly, she rubbed a paper towel on the stain that was regrettably not blood but indeed pizza sauce. That was always the danger with perfectly cooked pizza rolls—they tended to explode all over you.
Not that it had ever stopped her.
“You told me that I was your first tenant,” he said.
“You always remember everything?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I also saw the empty pizza roll bag on the kitchen counter when I got the paper towels. That shit’ll kill ya, you know.”
“Hey, I eat healthy six days a week,” she said in her defense. “And then I get one eat-whatever-I-want day. I just believe in making the most of that day.”
His mouth twitched. “Not judging.”
“Good. And I wasn’t crying.”
“Okay,” he said so easily that she had to wonder who’d trained him on how to deal with a woman’s tears so well because he’d navigated through her emotion and the aftermath with shocking ease.
“I wasn’t,” she said. “I just had something in my eye.”
“Whatever you say.” He rose to his feet in one fluid motion, wincing only a little.
She opened her mouth to say something about being careful when she realized that he was fully dressed in the same clothes from earlier in the evening. “You weren’t sleeping?” she asked.
“I was.”
“You sleep in your clothes?”
“No,” he said. “I sleep in nothing.”
Oh boy. Images of that filtered through her head, really great images, too, because since the Shower Incident she didn’t have to imagine him naked; she’d seen the real thing and it was now burned in her brain. The images effectively chased away some of tonight’s odd and inexplicable melancholy, and remembering that, she closed her eyes and breathed for a moment. When she opened them, she was once again alone in the room.
For the best, she decided. The other night she’d apparently scared away the dentist before he’d even shown up. Tonight her tenant. Quite a roll, even for herself—
“Here.”
Parker materialized in front of her, this time a bottle of vodka dangling from his fingers. “Made you some laced hot chocolate.” He paused, flashed a smile. “Without the hot chocolate.” He held out the bottle.
She let out a low laugh and tossed a sip back before she could think about it, and then promptly choked. It burned going down, but at least it had the consideration to leave a trail of delicious warmth in its path, completely eradicating the rest of her odd and inexplicable sadness.
Or maybe Parker had done that.
She offered him the bottle back. He took a pull, though he didn’t cough or react other than to let out a breath, as if he were finally relaxing after a long time of being tense, reminding her she hardly knew anything about him.
“You make some pretty excellent laced hot chocolate without the hot chocolate,” she said.
He flashed a smile and gave her back the vodka. “Told you I was good in the kitchen.”
She had a feeling he’d be good in any room of the house, most especially the bedroom. That was when she remembered what he’d said on his first day here, that he was good in the kitchen when he wanted to get laid.
“You just turned beet red,” he said. “Care to share?”
“No.” She gulped another shot before once again handing the bottle over.
He just grinned. He knew, the ratfink bastard.
“So what happened to this new batch of cookies?” he asked.
She sighed. She’d tried a different recipe of her grandma’s, but this had been one of those done-by-memory things and she’d clearly done something wrong, which had made her miss her warm, funny, loving grandma like she’d miss a limb. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How about the dirt stains on your knees?”
She looked down at herself. “Turns out my talents don’t lend themselves to electrical work, either. Besides the bad fuse, there’s something wrong with the cable and Internet. I was outside looking in the cable box.”
“I can take a look.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve—”
“Got this?” he asked, only slightly sardonic.
“Yes,” she said. And she’d really believed it, too. Before the Friends marathon she’d watched an hour of YouTube cable and Internet troubleshooting tutorials.
Clearly they hadn’t helped.
“Wyatt warned me you were stubborn,” he said.
“Hmph,” she said. “What did he say about our baby sister, Darcy?”
“That she’s batshit crazy.”
Zoe laughed.
“And amazingly brave,” Parker added.
Zoe stopped laughing because this was true. After what Darcy had been through, anyone and everyone who knew her would describe her as amazingly brave. “What else did he say?”
“About you?” Parker asked.
“Yeah.”
Apparently pleading the fifth, Parker just smiled.
“Come on, don’t be shy now,” she said.
He laughed, the amusement coming from his gut and . . . damn. It looked good on him. Especially since she got the sense that he hadn’t laughed a lot, at least not recently.
“Been a long time since anyone called me shy,” he said.
“Nice subject change.”