Rolling her eyes, she got to her feet. “You coming?”
“Think you can go get the car and bring it over here to get me?” he asked hopefully.
Some of the annoyance left her face. “That bad?” she asked, her voice softer, her eyes softer, too, as she offered him a hand up.
Liking that, not above using that, he accepted her help but then groaned at the movement.
“What the hell did Wyatt do to you?” she murmured, slipping an arm around him. “Here, lean on me.”
Hell, yeah, he’d lean on her. Slipping an arm over her shoulders, he turned his face into her hair—which smelled grade-A amazing—and let his lips skim her ear.
She jumped a little and whipped her face toward his.
Their mouths brushed.
He groaned again—not in pain this time—but she pulled back with a frown. “Why did you push yourself so hard?” she demanded.
“Gotta get better,” he said. “Get back in the game.”
“What game?”
“Game of life.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “Life’s not a damn game. And you’ve got to give your body time to heal. What better time than now while you’re on a break from work?”
A break indeed . . . They walked through the animal center. Peanut was undead and telling off a cat, who was sleeping through the whole thing, curled up next to the printer. Gertie was snoozing in a sunny spot, a puddle of drool beneath her face.
Out front, Parker slid into Zoe’s passenger seat and set his head back. Zoe shoved her car into gear and hit the gas. Parker enjoyed watching her handle the road, but mostly he enjoyed how when she worked the clutch, her long legs shifted, forcing her skirt up higher on her thighs.
“You ever going to tell me how you really got hurt?” she asked.
“I already told you.”
“Fine.” She shook her head. “You don’t want to tell me, that’s . . . whatever. But you don’t have to make stuff up. No wondering, no worrying, no wishes, remember? Live in the moment?” She glanced at him. “Or was that all bullshit?”
He met her gaze, surprised to find her eyes flashing with temper and . . . hurt. Well, hell. “Not bullshit,” he said. “That’s how I live my life.”
“Uh-huh.” Her jaw was tight, her body language tense.
And he couldn’t keep himself from asking. “Who was he?”
“He who?”
“The asshole who put you so on guard all the time. What did he do?”
She sent him another long look. “He lied to me.” She turned back to the road before speaking again. “About everything.”
And clearly she’d put him in the same category. “I haven’t lied,” he said. He’d just let certain assumptions stand.
“Right,” she said. “Wrestling big-game poachers?”
“Hey, that’s true,” he said. “We were . . .” Closing in on the ringleader of an international smuggling conspiracy . . . “Going after a wildlife poacher, someone we’d been after for a long time. I had a team with me, but we got separated in the takedown.” He could still feel the sweat breaking out on his skin as his instincts screamed they were all about to be fucked. They’d been outnumbered, but they might’ve been able to hold their own if the Butcher hadn’t gone for his truck. “The guy came at us in his truck.”
Horror was all over her face. “To run you over? Oh my God, what did you do?”
“Dove out of the way.” Parker’s stomach clenched at the memory of feeling himself get clipped, flying through the air, and landing next to Ned, who hadn’t been as lucky as Parker. “But not fast enough,” he murmured.
She gaped at him. “He got you. That’s how you got hurt.” She paused and her voice was low and shocked. “You were telling me the truth; you really did get hit by a wildlife poacher’s truck.”
“Me and another man on my team,” he said, and rubbed his aching ribs. Shoveling horse shit had been a stupid idea. But hey, he was still breathing. “Ned didn’t make it.”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry, Parker.”
So was he. He still burned with fury, which was why he couldn’t walk away from this knowing Carver might be at Cat’s Paw.
“I had no idea that being a game warden could be so dangerous,” she said softly.
Something twinged inside Parker.
Guilt.
She thought he was a game warden, but that was how it had to be. He told himself he was good with the deception. Working as he did, traveling at the drop of a hat, sometimes going deep undercover for weeks, his plan did not include falling for a cutie-pie pilot—albeit a pretty tough, fascinating cutie-pie pilot—no matter what.
But damn. Sometimes his job and life sucked.
Zoe pulled into her driveway and turned off the engine. Then . . . didn’t move. Sensing she was debating with herself over something, Parker stayed still.
Staring ahead, hands on the wheel, Zoe spoke to the windshield. “I was engaged,” she said, surprising him. “Kyle turned out to be . . .” She sighed. “Not the man I thought.”
Ah, shit. He wasn’t going to like this story, he could tell. “He hurt you?” he asked quietly, feeling anything but quiet.
“Yes,” she said. “He hurt me. But not in the way you think.” She shook her head. “I met him in college. For a girl who’d grown up a child of the world, I was . . . incredibly naïve.”
Parker thought of Amory, how naïve she was, too, how he constantly worried someone would get the best of her. How he’d probably kill anyone who did.
He hoped like hell Wyatt had taken care of Kyle the Asshole.
“Kyle was as exciting as I could imagine,” she said. “Tough and mysterious and . . . well. When I met him, he’d been investigating some thefts on campus.” She paused. “He was an undercover cop so it was a while before he told me, and in the meantime, we fell hard and fast. He was going to change divisions, stop the undercover work. We talked about buying a farmhouse in the country and having a bunch of kids and the proverbial white picket fence.” She paused, clearly lost in the memories. “We found the place we wanted before we could get married, but he didn’t have the whole down payment. So . . .” She closed her eyes. “I liquidated a trust fund and borrowed from my grandparents. And then he . . .”
Ah, hell. Reaching out, he took her hand. Her fingers were cold. “Zoe, you don’t have to—”
“It was a scam,” she said calmly, though she was still talking only to the windshield. “The whole thing,” she said. “All of it, one big scam. He wasn’t an undercover cop at all. And he didn’t have any of the down payment. In fact, he’d had no intention of buying that house, or marrying me, or anything.” She shrugged. “He took the money—hell, I gave it to him, really—and then he vanished. And that was that.”
Parker squeezed her hand, hating how calm she was. He wanted to see her mad. “Tell me you caught up with him and ran him over with a big-game truck.”
“No. I looked for him but he was long gone. I never heard from him again,” she said flatly, showing no emotion at all. It was so unlike the wildly passionate Zoe that he was coming to know.
“Bet I could find him,” he said, eyes on her face. “And I’ll be happy to run him over for you.” Right after I beat the living shit out of him.
A very small smile curved her lips, relieving him. She liked the thought of him helping her. Progress. “Just tell me what you know about him and it’s done,” he promised.
“Wait.” She turned and stared at him, the smile fading. “You’re . . . not kidding.”
“Fuck no,” he said. “At least Wyatt went after him for you, right?”
Something crossed her face. Guilt? “Why aren’t you telling me that Wyatt went after him for you?”
“Because he didn’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
She squirmed a little and dropped eye contact. And he knew. “You never told anyone,” he breathed.
“Well, it’s not like I was in a hurry to let everyone
know I’d been a complete idiot,” she said grumpily, yanking her hand from his.
He took it back and squeezed it. “You should’ve told someone,” he said, pissed for her that she’d gone through that alone, that in so many rough times in her life she’d been alone.
“My parents would’ve expressed profound disappointment,” she said, “and then never let me forget it.”
“But Wyatt—”
“Was killing himself to get through vet school at the time,” she said. “I couldn’t, wouldn’t, take him from that. And Darcy . . .” She shook her head. “She had her own problems.”
“What about your grandparents?”
She shook her head. “They would’ve been sympathetic and way kinder than I deserved,” she said. “I couldn’t do it.”
“So you—”
“Took an extra job to earn back the money I’d borrowed. They never knew.”
“Jesus, Zoe,” he said, sick for her. “You shouldn’t have had to go through that by yourself.”
And he’d just lied to her. Just like that asshole. It was all he could think about and it was making him sick.
“It was a long time ago,” she said. “I was young and stupidly naïve, and believed everything everyone said. I learned my lesson.”
She still wasn’t looking at him. Tired of that, he reached out to turn her face to his. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Hmm,” she said, like maybe she was used to such things. And then he remembered the dentist who’d stood her up and realized she was used to such things from men.
Dammit. And then there was him. No, he hadn’t stolen money from her or specifically set out to screw her over, but he’d sure as hell lied by omission. “Zoe—”
“I swear, if you’re feeling sorry for me I’ll run you over.”
He smiled in appreciation for the sass. He loved a woman who, when backed into a corner, came out fighting instead of giving up. But she was looking at him with those honey-colored eyes that somehow managed to reach right through him, and his smile faded quickly enough. Shit. Was he really going to do this?
She started to get out of the car, but he grabbed her wrist. When she looked at him, he said, “There’s something you need to know about me.”
Her eyes went shadowed and guarded, and he hated himself a little bit. “I’m not a game warden.”
She continued to stare at him, still as stone now. Hell, he wasn’t even sure she was breathing.
“I do work for U.S. Fish and Wildlife,” he said. “But not as a game warden. I’m a supervisory special agent. We’re law enforcement, too, authorized and equipped to perform a full range of criminal investigative activities including search warrants and arrests.”
“So . . . you do chase bad guys,” she said softly. “For real?”
“Yes,” he said. “And occasionally they chase me with a really big fucking truck.”
She didn’t smile.
“Zoe—”
“Are you really on vacation?”
“I’m on leave,” he said. “Supposedly recouping. But I’m really looking for the guy who killed Ned.”
“The wildlife poacher.”
“Actually, he’s more than that. He’s the ringleader of an international smuggling conspiracy and someone we’ve been after a long time.”
“And you think he’s in Cat’s Paw,” she said.
“I do.” He paused. “And you should know, my being here isn’t exactly USFWS sanctioned. In fact, it’s the opposite of being sanctioned.”
She blinked. “You weren’t kidding that you’re not a big rule follower.”
He found a small smile. Reaching out, he stroked a finger along her temple, tucking a runaway strand of hair behind her ear. “We okay, Zoe?”
The question made her smile, though he wasn’t sure why. “You mean the ‘we’ who are living in the moment?” she asked. “The ‘we’ with the three W’s? The ‘we’ who need to remember that you’re only temporary here in Sunshine to begin with?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That ‘we.’ We okay?”
She stared at him. “To be determined.”
Fair enough.
Eleven
When Parker got out of the car, Zoe let out a breath, trying to sort out her feelings. The man had misled her but then had come clean simply because she’d been open with him about herself.
She hadn’t been open about herself with a man since Kyle, so she felt like she was in uncharted waters here. Had Parker been so frank with her out of pity? Or because he really wanted her to know the truth? And if it was the latter, then why?
And did it mean that they really had a little something going on?
You know the answer to that . . .
And then there was his job, which sounded thrilling, exciting, and dangerous as hell.
She supposed the argument could be made that her job was all of those things, too, but she didn’t look at it like that. Flying was just what she did, what she loved to do. In the air her problems dropped away and she felt weightless and free.
A little bit like how she felt with Parker, actually.
Truth was, she had no idea what to think or how to react to him.
She watched him walk inside her house and realized she did know one thing for certain—he had a really great ass.
The passenger car door opened just as the front door shut, and then Darcy settled into the passenger seat and gave Zoe a once-over.
“What are you doing?” Zoe asked.
“Came by to con some food out of you. And also to hear how the dating thing’s going. Imagine my surprise when I had to wait for Wyatt’s hottie friend to get out of your car. Thought he was going to kiss you there for a minute.”
Zoe opened her mouth and then closed it. “I don’t have time to get you food,” she said. “I’ve got flight lessons. And as for the dating thing . . . it’s not really happening.”
“Because you have a thing for Parker?”
Zoe slid her sister a look. The kind of look that quelled even the bravest of souls.
Darcy, who’d never been quelled a day in her life, just grinned. “He’s got a great ass.”
Zoe thunked her head to the steering wheel. “I know!”
Darcy laughed, and the sound was so genuine that Zoe lifted her head. For a very long time Darcy’s life hadn’t lent itself to fun or amusement of any sort. Too long. Wild and restless had been Darcy’s MO at any cost. Then two years ago that wild-and-restlessness had led her to a terrible—and nearly tragic—auto accident. It had been a drawn-out, horrendous recovery, but Darcy had as much grit and inner strength as she did crazy, and though she’d probably always limp, she was back to some semblance of normal. “I love seeing you happy,” Zoe blurted out.
Darcy reached for Zoe’s hand. “Thanks, and it’s nice to be happy, but that’s not going to get you a subject change. I want to discuss your new roommate’s fine ass.”
Zoe couldn’t help it, she laughed. “You do realize that this is Wyatt’s friend you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh. And I’m currently sleeping with and planning on marrying Wyatt’s other good friend. Your point?”
“My point is . . .” What was her point again? “I don’t have time to talk about Parker right now.”
“Well, I do,” Darcy said. “Let’s talk about what I saw between you two.”
“You saw nothing.”
“Oh how wrong you are, my favorite sister. I saw some seriously smokin’ chemistry.” Darcy said this with great delight. She really loved it when she thought Zoe was wrong.
But for the record, Zoe was never wrong.