“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.
“I was.”
“You sleep in your clothes?”
“No,” he said. “I sleep in nothing.”
Oh boy. Images of that filtered through her head, really great images, too, because since the Shower Incident she didn’t have to imagine him naked; she’d seen the real thing and it was now burned in her brain. The images effectively chased away some of tonight’s odd and inexplicable melancholy, and remembering that, she closed her eyes and breathed for a moment. When she opened them, she was once again alone in the room.
For the best, she decided. The other night she’d apparently scared away the dentist before he’d even shown up. Tonight her tenant. Quite a roll, even for herself—
“Here.”
Parker materialized in front of her, this time a bottle of vodka dangling from his fingers. “Made you some laced hot chocolate.” He paused, flashed a smile. “Without the hot chocolate.” He held out the bottle.
She let out a low laugh and tossed a sip back before she could think about it, and then promptly choked. It burned going down, but at least it had the consideration to leave a trail of delicious warmth in its path, completely eradicating the rest of her odd and inexplicable sadness.
Or maybe Parker had done that.
She offered him the bottle back. He took a pull, though he didn’t cough or react other than to let out a breath, as if he were finally relaxing after a long time of being tense, reminding her she hardly knew anything about him.
“You make some pretty excellent laced hot chocolate without the hot chocolate,” she said.
He flashed a smile and gave her back the vodka. “Told you I was good in the kitchen.”
She had a feeling he’d be good in any room of the house, most especially the bedroom. That was when she remembered what he’d said on his first day here, that he was good in the kitchen when he wanted to get laid.
“You just turned beet red,” he said. “Care to share?”
“No.” She gulped another shot before once again handing the bottle over.
He just grinned. He knew, the ratfink bastard.
“So what happened to this new batch of cookies?” he asked.
She sighed. She’d tried a different recipe of her grandma’s, but this had been one of those done-by-memory things and she’d clearly done something wrong, which had made her miss her warm, funny, loving grandma like she’d miss a limb. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“How about the dirt stains on your knees?”
She looked down at herself. “Turns out my talents don’t lend themselves to electrical work, either. Besides the bad fuse, there’s something wrong with the cable and Internet. I was outside looking in the cable box.”
“I can take a look.”
“No,” she said. “I’ve—”
“Got this?” he asked, only slightly sardonic.
“Yes,” she said. And she’d really believed it, too. Before the Friends marathon she’d watched an hour of YouTube cable and Internet troubleshooting tutorials.
Clearly they hadn’t helped.
“Wyatt warned me you were stubborn,” he said.
“Hmph,” she said. “What did he say about our baby sister, Darcy?”
“That she’s batshit crazy.”
Zoe laughed.
“And amazingly brave,” Parker added.
Zoe stopped laughing because this was true. After what Darcy had been through, anyone and everyone who knew her would describe her as amazingly brave. “What else did he say?”
“About you?” Parker asked.
“Yeah.”
Apparently pleading the fifth, Parker just smiled.
“Come on, don’t be shy now,” she said.
He laughed, the amusement coming from his gut and . . . damn. It looked good on him. Especially since she got the sense that he hadn’t laughed a lot, at least not recently.
“Been a long time since anyone called me shy,” he said.
“Nice subject change.”
His eyes turned dark and sultry. “Fierce,” he said.
Her heart skipped a beat at the heat in his gaze. “What?”
“Wyatt said you were fierce. Fiercely loyal, fiercely smart, and fiercely protective of those you care about. He said you’d always had to be, that even though you’re only a year older than him, you were the only warm, caring authority figure he ever had.”
She slid him a long look. “Wyatt said I was warm and caring?” she asked, disbelieving.
Parker flashed white teeth, and she blew out a sigh. “He said bitchy, didn’t he?”
“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.”