“Don’t move,” he said. “Not an inch. We’re on borrowed time here and I don’t want to have to stop before you cry out my name.”

  “I’m not going to”—she had to pant for breath—“cry out your name. I don’t do that.”

  He didn’t argue with her, nor did he talk again for a few minutes. Instead he licked his way to her center, doling out sucking little kisses that drove her wild, but ignoring The Spot until she started to sit up.

  The coffee mug next to her, the one so close to the laptop, sloshed a little. Parker’s hands tightened on her thighs, a silent warning. With great effort, she stilled.

  Parker went back to his ministrations.

  And then he made her cry out his name.

  Twenty-two

  As Zoe left for work, Parker mentioned he’d be out that night late, and though he didn’t say and she didn’t ask, she knew it was job related. And for a minute, just a minute, she’d let herself entertain the thought of them meshing their lives together. The realities of his job were fairly terrifying, but she could work with that.

  What she was starting to realize was that what she couldn’t work with was being without him—a problem. A big one.

  At the airport, Joe was all business for their weekly production meeting, but as soon as the room cleared out, he asked Zoe to stay.

  They hadn’t had a single spare moment to talk one on one since their date. She didn’t know if he wanted to discuss that, or the offer to partner in with him on the business—which she still wasn’t sure about—but she blew out a breath and faced the music. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I ended our date abruptly.”

  “No,” he said. “I wanted to thank you. My mom and sister saw me with you and they are now officially satisfied that I can get my own dates. They said I did good, finding a ten to my six.”

  She laughed. “I’m no ten,” she said.

  He grinned and gave a playful tug of her hair, leaning in close to say huskily against her ear, “And I’m no six. In bed, I’m an eleven. Your loss, sweet cheeks.”

  She smiled. “An eleven, huh?”

  “Want to change your mind about me now, don’t you?”

  She opened her mouth, but before she could figure out how to let him down gently, he shook his head. “Too late,” he said. “You’ll have to forever live with the fact that you moved too slow to catch me.”

  “Is that right?” she asked.

  “I’ve been after my sister’s best friend, Stacey, for five years. She’s never given me the time of day—until she heard about my hot date with you. Suddenly she’s all into me.” He chortled and rubbed his hands together. “She asked me out for tonight. Good times ahead for Big Joe and Little Joe—not that Little Joe is little, if you know what I mean.”

  She grimaced. “How about we not talk about Little Joe?”

  “Sure, how about we talk about you making me some money today?”

  “I’m not ready to talk about the business offer, either. But soon,” she promised. “I’m not being coy—”

  “Zoe,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve known you for years. You don’t have a coy bone in your body. Nor have you ever rushed a decision.”

  True. Until the one where she jumped into bed with Parker . . .

  “Take your time,” Joe said, serious now. “I’ll be here. But for now, you’ve got a lesson and two flights scheduled. What do you say about getting outta here and bringing in some dough today?”

  Parker spent the better part of the day up at Cat’s Paw, stealthily replacing batteries in his cameras. It wasn’t easy. There was a new set of guards and these guys were better than the other shift.

  He’d had to park the Jeep two miles back and hike in, dodging the surveillance team when he could, waiting them out when he couldn’t.

  Halfway through, twenty-five feet up in the air, stretched out on a branch to reach one of his cameras, he heard an engine coming his way. Several vehicles.

  There were four, with a Land Rover in the lead, the top off.

  He’d been made, he thought, and remembering what had happened the last time he’d had a run-in with one of Carver’s trucks, he froze and did his damned best to be the tree.

  No. Not made. They were leaving the ranch, en masse.

  He’d bet his last dollar Carver was among them.

  The convoy came through the brush with the Land Rover in the lead, weaving to steer clear of the growth. They were about a hundred feet away from Parker when he heard an ominous little creak from the branch he’d balanced himself on.

  And then a CRACK.

  Shit. Now the convoy was at fifty feet.

  And then twenty-five. There were two men in the front seat of the Land Rover, both heavily armed by the looks of them.

  Another crack from his branch and Parker started to sweat. Fuck, he was too old for this shit. He couldn’t move or he’d be seen, but if the branch broke, he’d fall to the ground practically at their feet, and that was going to go over like a fart in church.

  Just hold, he prayed to the damn tree. Just for another thirty seconds.

  But then the convoy slowed. And stopped.

  Sweat dripped into Parker’s eyes, but he didn’t dare even blink. He focused in on the men in the Land Rover and realized they were on their comms, communicating with the other vehicles.

  Parker literally held his breath. Any second now he was going to fall right on top of them.

  Finally they hit the gas, passing almost directly beneath him, one vehicle at a time. They were no sooner out of sight when Parker took his first deep breath—just as the branch creaked and cracked one last time and . . .

  Dumped him to the ground.

  It was the end of the day before Zoe decided she needed something to keep her mind off Parker, so she’d stopped at the hardware store on the way home from the airport and had purchased a new lock mechanism for her back door, which had been broken forever.

  The guy in the store had sworn that even an idiot could handle the installation, but that he’d be happy to make a house call if she needed him.

  Since he’d accompanied this with a brow waggle and a wink-wink elbow jab to the ribs, she’d decided she’d need a house call from him never. Yes, he had a job but he was lacking her core requirements—and that wasn’t even counting the fact that he’d been chewing tobacco and may or may not have been in possession of all of his teeth.

  And of course there was the real problem—she was now using Parker as a ruler to measure all the other men up against. Which meant she was certainly setting herself up for failure.

  But she didn’t care at the moment. She had other things to worry about. Such as the new lock on the back door. She worked on it for an hour before sitting back on her heels and admitting defeat.

  Replacing the lock—like falling successfully in love—wasn’t in her wheelhouse.

  Shaking that off, Zoe moved to the counter next to the fridge, where she’d left herself some banana bread she’d been given by a client.

  It was gone.

  She looked at Oreo.

  Oreo held her gaze but his ears went down.

  “You didn’t,” she said.

  He gave one thump of his tail and tried to look innocent.

  He failed.

  She sighed and turned away, her gaze catching on the motion detector camera on the far counter, the spare that Parker had said she could use. “Okay, big guy,” she said to Oreo. “It’s time to put you to the test.”

  She set up the camera on top of the refrigerator, relieved to find it easy to use. “There,” she said when she was finished, and turned to Oreo. “I’ve got eyes on you, buddy.”

  Oreo pretended to be asleep.

  Around her, the house was quiet. Or as quiet as it could get with two wild, batshit-crazy kittens on the loose. She told herself she liked quiet, but she missed the comforting presence of a man in the place.

  And not just any man. She missed Parker. She wondered where he was.

  She cooked herself her favorite dinner—which was breakfast. She put on her pj’s. She tiptoed down the hall and peered into Parker’s room.

  Yep. Empty.

  Get used to that, she told herself, and got into bed. She snuggled with Oreo and the silly kittens, whom she’d decided to name after all—Bonnie and Clyde.

  She woke up at some point around midnight and knew she was going to have to read to make herself tired enough to go back to sleep. She picked up her phone to search for a new book to download, but realized she had a notification on the app connected to the motion detector camera.

  This wasn’t good. Hugging her phone to herself, ready to call 911, she waited for the feed to load and reveal her kitchen.

  Not dark as one would expect at midnight. This was because the lights were on. In stunned disbelief she watched as Parker fixed the lock on her back door.

  In like five minutes.

  “I don’t know what to do about that,” she said to Oreo. “Or him.”

  Oreo had no answers, either.

  Parker slept like shit, and not just because he hurt from fucking head to fucking toe thanks to falling out of the fucking tree up at Cat’s Paw.

  Luckily he hadn’t broken anything but his own damn ego. He did have a new slice through his eyebrow, and okay, his left thigh had been nearly stabbed straight through by a branch, but he considered both of those things collateral damage. He’d live.

  Nope, what was keeping him up were some unusual concerns, at least for him. As he’d proven today, keeping his head in the game was hard. Harder than it had ever been, and the reason why didn’t reassure him.

  For the first time he didn’t want a job to end. He realized he wasn’t officially on any job at all, was in fact actively jeopardizing his job, but he’d started this and he intended to finish it. He just wasn’t in a hurry to move on.

  In fact, he didn’t want to move on at all, but he knew his lifestyle wasn’t good for the people he cared about.

  Not that caring was all that good for him, either. It distracted him, and being distracted could get him killed, like it had nearly done up at Cat’s Paw.

  He needed to focus. Not easy when he felt all twisted up over Zoe. He knew damn well it was going to come down to choosing her or the job. He couldn’t have both and he knew it.

  When dawn finally hit, he showered and dressed and then walked—okay, maybe limped slightly—into the kitchen to find Zoe pacing. Whirling to face him, she put her hands on her hips, her pissy look firmly in place.

  He knew it couldn’t be the cut above his eyebrow, because he’d worn a baseball hat to cover it for exactly that reason. He had no idea what had crawled up her ass, but that look on her face only made him want to kiss it right off her. It made him want to drag her off to his bed, where he’d put her into a different mood entirely. “We out of caffeine?” he asked mildly.

  “What’s this?” she asked, gesturing to the back door and the shiny new lock he’d installed.

  “Huh,” he said. “You did a nice job.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Like I did on the fireplace? And the electrical? Or on any of the other millions of things that have suddenly gotten fixed?”

  “I’ll pour you some coffee,” he said, heading to the pot.

  “Do you ever just answer a question?” she asked his back. “No, you don’t. Ever.”

  “Overexaggerating much this morning?” he asked. “And I answer your questions to the best of my ability.”

  “Yeah? Well, then answer this one—how do you nicely tell someone that sometimes you want to hit them in the head with a brick?”

  He poured a cup of coffee and added a healthy serving of vanilla creamer—her favorite—before holding it out to her. “You could say that you’d like to rearrange their facial features with a fundamental material used to make walls,” he suggested. “That does have a certain ring to it. Drink, Zoe. Fuel up.”

  She took the proffered mug, drank generously, and sighed. “Probably I shouldn’t talk before I’ve had caffeine.”

  He refrained from agreeing.

  She sighed again. “I’m sorry. I’m a morning shrew.”

  Again, he thought his restraint was remarkable and deserving of a medal.

  Her lips twitched. “How many live-in girlfriends have you driven right out of their minds by being so morning perfect?” she asked.

  He choked on his coffee and very nearly snorted it out his nose.

  “So all of them?” she asked.

  He smiled. “You’re fishing.”

  With a shrug, she went back to sipping her coffee, but it didn’t take a genius to see that she was trying so hard not to push him. “I’ve never had a live-in girlfriend,” he admitted.

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  She considered this for a long moment. “Well then, women the world over are missing out. You’re a good roomie. Thanks for fixing the lock, Parker. And for all the other little fixes, too. I appreciate it.”

  “What makes you so sure it was me?” he asked.

  She gestured to something above the refrigerator.

  His motion detector camera.

  He stared at it and then her and cocked a brow. “You’re spying on me?”

  “As I told you when I borrowed it, I meant to spy on Oreo. You were an added bonus,” she said.

  For a guy who guarded his privacy, this admittedly threw him. “You’ve had the camera for days,” he said. “Where else have you set it up?”

  She stared at him, looking surprised at the question.

  “The shower?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, looking horrified that he’d think so. “I swear.” But then her curiosity apparently got the better of her. “Why?” she asked. “What do you do in the shower?”

  “Well, this morning I jacked off to the memory of you crying out my name.”

  She swallowed hard and looked like she might be having trouble breathing. “You . . . really?”

  “Really.”

  Abruptly setting down her mug, she walked out of the kitchen.

  What the hell? Not nearly finished with this conversation, not even close, he followed her out, through the living room, and up the stairs to the bathroom he’d been using. It was still a little foggy from all the hot water he’d used.

  She stood in the middle of the room and stared through the glass.

  “Zoe?”

  “Shh. I’m picturing it,” she whispered, like it was too naughty a conversation for a normal speaking voice.

  Behind her back, he found a smile. “Seems only fair since I picture you all the time. You have a handheld in there. Do you ever use it when you think of me?”

  She gasped. “I don’t . . . I don’t use it like that—and I don’t even use this shower.”

  He turned her to face him and found her blushing and biting her lower lip. “But you do think of me in your shower, where you also have a handheld.” Leaning past her, he flicked on the water.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, sounding more than a little panicked.

  Smart woman.

  “I want to see you do it,” he said. “I want to see you doing yourself while you think of me.”

  “I’m not going to—I have things to do, I have a flight later this afternoon—”

  “Plenty of time, then.” He smiled and tugged off her blazer. “And besides, all you need is twenty minutes, remember?” He started to unbutton her blouse and leaned in to kiss her. “Which we both know I can cut down to seven if I’m on my game,” he whispered against her lips. “And I’m feeling very on my game at the moment, Zoe.”

  She stared at him for a beat through the steam filling the bathroom and then kicked off her shoes. “All right, fine,” she said with gracious defeat, “but only because you got me all hot and bothered and I have to be able to concentrate today.”

  “Duly noted,” he said, his mouth watering as she shimmied out of the rest of her clothes.

  “Less staring and more stripping,” she said, nodding her chin toward his clothes. “We’re on the clock here.”

  He was laughing as he did her bidding and stripped, completely forgetting his injuries.

  She gasped at the gash on his forehead and then her attention drifted southbound, right past his favorite body part, and locked in on the gauze he’d wrapped around the wound on his thigh.

  She dropped to her knees and set her hands on either side of his leg. “What happened?”

  “You got on your knees in front of me,” he said, voice unintentionally gravelly.

  She stared up at his erection and choked out a laugh.

  “It’s not polite to laugh at a naked man, Zoe.”

  “I didn’t mean—” She closed her eyes for a beat and then opened them. “Tell me why you have a cut on your head and you’re bleeding through a bandage.”

  “Later,” he said, and scooped her up and stepped into the shower with her.

  She turned to face him, letting her heated, appreciative gaze run down his body again, slower this time, and not in alarm but arousal. She smiled. “You like me.”

  “Hard for a man to hide it,” he agreed, smiling back.

  She bit her lower lip again. “Show me?”

  He arched a brow. “You mean—”

  “Yes,” she said. “Show me what I missed this morning. If you’re . . . up for it.”

  He snorted and reached for the soap, running it down his body while she watched avidly. When he was good and soaped up, he wrapped his hand around himself and stroked.

  All laughter gone, Zoe’s eyes glazed over. She might have drooled, it was hard to tell, but her expression was gratifying to say the least. It had been a long time since he’d had this kind of intimacy with a woman. He’d not even realized how much he’d missed it.

  Damn, he had it bad. He’d never meant to put himself at risk with her, but he had. He’d put his heart on the line and he hadn’t even realized it.

  So much for being aware of his surroundings.

  He let her watch for a minute and then, tired of playing solitaire, reached for her. “Your turn.”

  She was breathless. “But you’re not done.”

  “Ladies first.” To ease her sudden anxiety, he pulled her in and spent a few minutes nuzzling and touching and kissing her, and when she was kissing him back, breathless and frantic, he turned her away from him so that the warm water cascaded down her front.