All I Want(63)

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 f*cking head to f*cking toe thanks to falling out of the f*cking 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.