She softened slightly. “I’m glad it worked out for you,” she said genuinely.
“I resigned, Zoe.”
She blinked. “What?”
He’d walked away and then taken the job with the ATF. Right here in Idaho. He’d have cases much like he’d had for the FWS, but it would be regional. Close to home.
He’d gone his entire adult life not wanting to be like his parents and yet in the end, that was exactly what he’d become. He’d visited with them for a day and realized something else—they had each other, always. He’d realized how much he wanted that, wanted to let someone in.
Zoe.
The job here with the ATF would challenge him and keep him on his toes, but there was a balance to be found between work and a personal life.
And he’d found it.
And then walked away from it.
He’d been a boneheaded dumbass, and all he could do was hope that he wasn’t too late because when it came right down to it, all he really wanted was for Zoe to be his.
And for him to be Zoe’s.
The sound of a vehicle coming down the street had Zoe giving him another push. “You’ve got to go,” she said quietly. “I’ve got a date—”
The car drove right by.
“Kel’s not coming,” Parker said.
“Why not?” She narrowed her eyes. “You messed it up somehow, didn’t you?” Giving up trying to push him away, she poked him in the pec. “You know that I manage to mess up these things all on my own. I don’t need your help. Dammit, I needed that date tonight, Parker. I needed it to get you off my mind. You had no right to—”
“I’m your date, Zoe.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I’m your date tonight,” he repeated. And if things went okay in the next few minutes, he was hoping to be her date until the end of time.
But she was shaking her head. “We don’t date. We just f—”
He hauled her up to her toes and covered her mouth with his. He kissed her until she sagged against him, until she sank her fingers in his hair and wrapped herself around him with a soft moan that went straight through him. Only when they were both breathless did he pull back, just a fraction of an inch, because he needed to see her.
“You walked away from me,” she said softly, her pain like a knife to his gut.
“I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.” He dropped his forehead to hers. “I wanted you to have the life you deserve, Zoe, not a guy who would come and go at the mercy of his job, who might not be reachable for long stretches of time or be able to help you if you needed him. I wanted you to have a guy whose job doesn’t come with the potential of criminals tracking him down and threatening the people he cares about.”
“So you gave up the job for me?” she asked. “No. No, I can’t live with that, Parker, I—”
He kissed her again, more softly this time. “I gave it up,” he said against her lips, “because I realized that without you in it, my life means squat.”
She let out a low breath and poked him in the chest again. “But the job made you you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be the job anymore,” he said.
She took that in. “What do you want to be?”
“Yours.” Cupping her face, he stroked her jaw with his thumbs and looked her in the eyes. “I took the ATF job. I’ll be working right here in this county.”
She sucked in a breath.
“I was hoping you could live with that,” he said, wishing she’d say something. Anything.
“What I want is to be with a guy who can let me decide what I can live with and what I can’t.”
“I know,” he said. “And I intend to be that guy.”
Another poke, this one even harder, but he manfully held in his wince.
“Really?” she asked. “Because if you were that man, you’d already know that I could live with the travel that comes with a job you love. You’d know that I can live with being more security smart if that takes a weight off your mind. You’d know that what I can’t live with—” Her voice caught and she swallowed hard before sliding her fingers into his hair and fisting them there, holding his face to hers, “is being without you.”
“I hear you,” he said softly. “And I can’t live without you, either.”
A few tears spilled from her eyes and he felt like she’d stabbed him. “Zoe.” He reached for her but she backed away, swiping at the tears angrily before whirling on her heels and vanishing inside the house.
He stared at the still-open door. What had just happened? He started to follow her, but suddenly Darcy was there blocking his way.
“You’re back?”
“How much did you hear of our conversation?” he asked.
“All of it.”
“Then you know I’m back,” he said.
She studied him for a long beat. “So, you going to stand here all night or go after her? Wyatt said you were a sharp one, but I gotta say, not sure I see it.”
Zoe turned on the oven and was heading straight for the freezer for the lasagna she’d made the day before when two big hands snaked around her. She was pulled into Parker. “Hey,” she said. “I need some cheese and trans fat, stat.”
Parker whipped her around to face him and then proceeded to melt her brain with a blistering kiss. “I’ve got something better than trans fats.”
She rolled her eyes.
He smiled and pushed her hair back from her face in that warm, familiar gesture she loved. “I’m all in with you,” he said. “You know that, right? The good, the bad, the ugly, all of it.” He stared at her like he’d never get enough. “All in,” he repeated. “I love you, Zoe.”
Oh God. Those words. She’d wondered if she’d ever hear them directed at her. Wyatt and Darcy loved her, to the bone, she knew that. But the three of them had grown up with parents who hadn’t used the words, and as a result none of them were all that good with them, either. She closed her eyes. Closed her mouth, too, because she was afraid to let anything out, afraid she’d humiliate herself.
Parker merely adjusted, shifting so that his mouth slid over her earlobe to press a kiss there in the spot that he knew damn well melted her bones every single time. “You’re gonna have to talk to me eventually,” he murmured.
“I’m confused on your need to talk at all,” she managed. “It’s unlike you.”
“You’re right. But as I said, things change. I’ve changed.” He tipped her face up to his and looked into her eyes. God knows what he saw there. Most likely a good amount of stubbornness because his gaze lit with wry humor . . . and damn. She’d missed him so much. She had to bite her lip to keep the words. He wasn’t getting her words, none of them, not a single one.
“Okay,” he said gently. “How about this instead—I’ll talk, you listen.”
She lifted a shoulder, as if to say: Look at me not caring, even as her pulse pounded as though she’d been running uphill.
He smiled; she could feel it against her jawline where he bent to nuzzle her, making her knees weak, damn him.
“You’re right,” he murmured. “I’m not an open book, not even close. You’re not the only one who carefully guards their heart, Zoe. It’s my default mode and it’s going to take me some time to get this right. I’m going to need some patience here, and you might even have to smack me upside the back of the head once in a while.”