All I Want(22)

“He said that without you, he’d be dead a few times over,” Parker said. “It seems like you never really got a chance just to be a kid.” He wasn’t kidding or smiling now, and though his voice didn’t hold pity—she might have had to beat him over the head with her empty plate if it had—he was very serious.

“He said your parents put way too much on your head with consequences you shouldn’t have had to pay,” he said, and suddenly she needed another sip of that vodka and held out her hand for it.

He obliged, and while she knocked back another shot, he gestured toward her sweatshirt. “So you went to King’s?”

“Yes.”

“A long way from Sunshine, Idaho,” he noted.

“I was born in Paris,” she said. “Which was an accident, by the way. My mother miscalculated. She meant to be back in Belize, where she was stationed at the time.”

Parker nodded. “Wyatt once said something about living in fifteen different countries in as many years.”

“We were children of foreign diplomats,” she said. “It was life.” A life that had been as vagabond and full of wanderlust as it could possibly be. As a result, Wyatt had been the kid who’d yearned to get to stay in one place long enough to join a baseball team and have a dog. Darcy had acted out, running away, going wild, and then as punishment had often been sent to boarding schools, far away from all of them.

Zoe had simply gone along with the lifestyle, unable to imagine anything else. That is, until she started coming here to Sunshine for the summers to live with her grandparents.

Suddenly she’d had normal hours and home-cooked meals and warm, loving authority figures in her life. It hadn’t been until her grandma and grandpa had died within six months of each other a decade ago that she’d felt true loss and devastation and grief.

After college she’d come back here and found that as much as she’d loved being a child of the world, it was lovely, really shockingly lovely, to have a home base. “My grandparents were born and raised right here in Sunshine and never left,” she said. “Not once.” She shook her head. “I always had a hard time imagining such a thing.”

“And yet here you are,” he said.

She shrugged. “Turns out I like having a home base more than I could’ve imagined.” She looked around at the warm, comfy living room that she hadn’t changed much. “Though the home base is a little emptier than I’m used to.”

Those sharp, assessing eyes of his met hers again, softer now. “You lonely, Zoe?”

“Nope.” At least not that she was going to admit. “I have Oreo.”

They both looked at the dog, snoring away.

“What about you?” she asked.

“What about me?”

“You know what,” she said. “You’ve learned a lot about me in a short time. My job, where I live, my story . . .” Plus other things like how she’d been stood up, that she couldn’t bake or fix anything to save her life, that she cried watching Friends . . . “And yet I know next to nothing about you.”

He smiled, like that was good with him, and actually got up to leave.

“Are you serious?” she asked his back, feeling brave and daring thanks to the alcohol. “Give me something more than you’re here for a vacation, in the middle of Nowhere, Idaho. Which, by the way, I don’t believe at all. Time to fill in some blanks, Mr. Mysterious.”





Eight




Zoe watched as Parker slowly turned to face her, his mouth twitching at the corners, no doubt amused by her curiosity.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

Just about everything. “Where did you grow up, do you have family, how would they describe you, where do you live, what’s your job like . . .” She trailed off, not wanting to scare him away.

“I’m not sure I imbibed enough vodka for all of that.”

“I can fix that,” she said, and offered him the bottle.

He came close again and took it slowly. Zoe got the feeling that in his world not a lot of people challenged him. And yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself from doing that at every turn. She wanted to know more about him.

“My life’s not all that exciting,” he warned.

“I bet otherwise,” she said, and added what she hoped was an enticing smile.

Again she got the almost-smile, but no words.

Was he being evasive on purpose, she wondered, or was he simply not into talking about himself? The alcohol hadn’t changed him at all. Even though he’d had his share, his eyes were still sharp and assessing.

Evasive, she decided. Which put her on guard because unlike most red-blooded women, Zoe didn’t like evasive, mysterious men. Or at least she didn’t like evasive, mysterious men anymore. And honestly, this was almost a relief because it gave her yet another fail-safe reason not to get involved with him.

Not that she’d ever planned to in the first place.

“I grew up in a small copper mining town in northern Arizona,” he said, surprising her. “If you’re born there, you live and die there, working in the mines in between.”

“Not you, though,” she said.

“Not me.” He paused, as if hoping that’d be enough for her.