All I Want

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.