“Ah, man, come on,” Mick whined. “You know I can’t talk to you no more if I want to keep breathing.”

  “Tell me enough to catch the Butcher and you have nothing to fear,” Parker countered.

  “Jesus, you’re killing me. Did you go to the Rocky Falls area? Cat’s Paw?”

  “Yes,” Parker said. “And why Cat’s Paw? Only locals know about that place.”

  “Carver grew up there. He’s still got connections.”

  “There’s nothing there,” Parker said. “Except a possible militia hideout.”

  “Yeah, his brother’s militia,” Mick said. “And that asshole’s as mean as Carver.”

  Parker felt his temper stir. “And you left all this out before because . . .?”

  “Because you didn’t ask.”

  “Or because you were trying to fuck up the investigation,” Parker said. “A federal crime, by the way.”

  “No, I wasn’t trying to fuck you up, I swear!”

  “Or maybe you were trying to get me killed.”

  “No! Man, you’re touchy. It’s nothing like that,” Mick rushed to assure him.

  “Then why don’t you tell me what it is like.”

  “You asked and I told you, he’s there in Idaho. It got too hot with you guys, specifically you, so he went home to hide out until things cooled off. He knows that entire area inside and out. And it’s a great place to lay low because it’s tough to get to and nearly impossible to sneak up on him. Plus, having grown up on that mountain, he’s got friends and relatives who’ll protect him to the end.”

  “By friends and relatives, you mean the people he’s now using as a screen for protection?” Parker asked.

  “Well, it’s not like they’re innocents,” Mick said. “His family tree belongs on the walls of post offices and cop shops across the country, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “What else am I missing?” Parker asked.

  “Nothing! Now do me a favor and lose my number.”

  Parker disconnected. Then he called his only other contact in the area besides Wyatt. Kel was a local sheriff and a good one. If anyone knew anything about this, it would be Kel.

  “Been a long time,” the sheriff said when he answered. “You’ve been busy, I hear.”

  Law enforcement, all divisions and agencies, were like the quad at any high school. Filled with gossip. “Little bit,” Parker said. “And you?”

  “I’m thinking you didn’t call to chitchat.”

  Directness. Parker appreciated it. “I need to know what’s going on up at Rocky Falls.”

  “Why?”

  Fair enough question. “A few years ago we arrested what we thought was a small onetime-operation kind of guy for endangered species poaching. He worked the Pacific Northwest, selling skins and other illegal items to a bigger organization. Small fries, but we wanted the bigger cartel so we cut him loose under certain terms.”

  “Certain terms,” Kel repeated. “You recruited him as an informant.”

  “To help us catch his former boss, Tripp Carver, also known as the Butcher.”

  “The guy who killed one of your agents,” Kel said.

  “Yeah, and now we’ve got rumors of four point five million dollars in skins and ivory being readied for sale.”

  “And you think this Carver is in Rocky Falls with the goods?”

  “Specifically at Cat’s Paw.”

  There was a beat of silence. “Thought you were on medical leave,” Kel finally said.

  Parker pleaded the fifth, and Kel laughed softly. “Okay, so that’s not going to slow you down, I get it. You got anything more than rumors?”

  “I’ve gone further on less. What can you tell me?”

  “That you’re not the only one with eyes on the prize.”

  Parker read between the lines on that one. “Local law’s on it?”

  “Bigger,” Kel said. “We were told to stay out of it. I can nose around some if you need.”

  “I need.” Parker heard Zoe coming in the front door, heard the sounds of Oreo scrambling off the spot on the couch he wasn’t supposed to nap in and go skidding to the foyer with a welcoming woof! He thanked Kel and disconnected, and then ambled into the living room.

  Zoe had dropped her things and crouched down to give Oreo a doggie treat from her purse. “Who’s a good boy?” she murmured.

  “Well, I don’t like to brag, but I’ve been pretty good,” Parker said.

  She lifted her gaze to where he’d stopped in the doorway between the kitchen and living room, leaning against the jamb. “Do you want a cookie, too?” she asked.

  “Depends,” he said. “Did you bake them?”

  She rolled her eyes and pulled Oreo in for a full body hug, giving him a loud smooch on top of his snout.

  “I wouldn’t say no to one of those, either,” Parker said. She ignored this, too, except for the flush that stained her cheeks. She looked beat to hell. Her hair was tousled and she had what might have been a grease stain across her jaw. At some point she’d ditched her blazer and wore just the white silky tank top, also sporting a stain across one breast.

  Catching him looking, she shrugged. “Dougie, our mechanic, was moving too slow on the Cessna Caravan. I was giving him a hand.”

  “You can work on an airplane but you can’t fix anything here at the house?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m an enigma,” she said. “An annoying one. Just ask anyone in my family.”

  Pushing off the jamb, Parker moved close to her, watching as her breath caught and her eyes locked on his mouth.

  It was a relief, really, to know that he caused the same baffling reactions in her as she did in him. “I’m not annoyed by you,” he said.

  “No?”

  He smiled. “No.”

  “What are you?” she whispered, still staring at his mouth.

  “Lots of things.” He pulled her up and rubbed his thumb over the stain on her jaw, feeling a surge of satisfaction when her breath caught again. “Including turned on.”

  Her gaze flew to his. “I turn you on?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at him some more. “We’re not doing this. We’d be stupid to do this.”

  “I agree. But that doesn’t seem to mean a damn thing to me.”

  She didn’t say anything and he raised his brows. “Am I alone in this, Zoe?”

  Appearing to wrestle with that, she hesitated, and he wondered if she’d lie.

  “No,” she finally said. “But that’s only because I haven’t actually . . . Well.” She grimaced. “Let’s just say it’s been a while for me. With someone else. Together.” When he smiled, she groaned. “You know what I mean!”

  “And that’s the only reason you want me, because it’s been a while?”

  She busied herself with gathering up her things.

  But Parker hadn’t gained his investigator skills by accident. He’d started as a teen trying to figure out how to get out of the life that had been set in stone long before he’d been born, and he’d only honed his ways of ferreting out the truth in the years since. He’d long ago learned the value of holding his silence, and sure enough his patience was rewarded.

  “Okay, that’s not the only reason,” she finally said. “My current theory is that it’s because you’re sweet to my big, silly dog.” She paused. “And also maybe a little bit because you have nice eyes.” She closed hers.

  He laughed. “I like where you’re going with this.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” She fanned her heated cheeks. “Except to the shower.” She popped open her eyes. “Alone.” She headed up the stairs.

  Parker was trying really hard not to imagine her stripping out of her clothes when he heard the bathroom door yank back open.

  “Hey,” she yelled down the stairs. “Why does this lock work?”

  Oreo looked at Parker.

  Parker put a finger to his lips, and Oreo seemed to grin at him.

  The door slammed again.

  And a brick fell out of the fireplace.

  The next morning Parker found himself at the local gym being beat all to shit by Wyatt’s good friend AJ. Wyatt had recommended the guy for PT, and AJ was putting Parker through his paces when his cell buzzed.

  Sharon.

  “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.