All I Want Read online

  Something in his voice had her taking a closer look at him. “Your parents forget your birthday and never tell you they love you, too?” she asked.

  He let out a low laugh. “They don’t forget my birthday, but yeah, love isn’t a word they throw around very often. My dad’s a miner to the very bone, which is synonymous with tough and impenetrable. Talking about his feelings isn’t his strong suit—unless he’s disagreeing with you on something. Then he doesn’t hold back.”

  She’d talked herself into believing that she didn’t want to know about him, what made him tick, what had molded him into the man he’d become, but she really did. She wanted to know more. Hell, she wanted to know everything. “And your mom?”

  “She worked in the elementary school’s cafeteria before she retired a few years back,” he said. “She’s very proud of my dad and all his years of hard work. Having a son who not only didn’t want to do the same but yearned for an entirely different life confused her.”

  “Did she try to understand?” Zoe asked.

  He shrugged. “Not a lot of communication went on. I didn’t want to hurt them, but I knew I had to go. I owed it to myself to at least explore the life I wanted.”

  “Were they okay with that?” she asked.

  He laughed. “No.”

  Her heart squeezed. Five minutes ago she’d had her thighs wrapped tight around his head and been close to singing the Hallelujah chorus, but now all she wanted was to have him keep talking to her forever. “Do you have any siblings?”

  “A sister,” he said. “She’s twelve years younger than me.” He smiled grimly. “An ‘oops’ baby that turned into my parents’ entire world.”

  “Tell me she didn’t go into the mines,” Zoe said, hoping not.

  Parker was quiet for a long beat. “No,” he finally said. “She didn’t.”

  Zoe could tell there was a lot more that he wasn’t saying, but he had on that blank face of his, the one that said he didn’t want to discuss it further, and she didn’t know how to push without butting in where she didn’t belong. She clutched the blanket to her, thinking that by now they should’ve been naked on her kitchen floor. The image was hot as hell, because though she wasn’t used to these feelings, there’d been something so freeing about having his hands on her, knowing that they were both in the same place and looking for the same endgame.

  An orgasm.

  Period. Well, in her case it was more of a comma, with a whole bunch after that, but it didn’t matter. The moment had passed and she knew it. “I should get ready for work,” she said reluctantly. “I’ve got a long day ahead. I won’t be back until late tonight.”

  He nodded and gave her a little smile, and damn if she wasn’t sorry that she’d ever answered her phone.

  Seventeen

  Parker sat at the kitchen table with his laptop, the tabby kitten asleep on his lap and Oreo on his feet. The kitchen floor was in shambles thanks to the crazy gray wild-woman kitten who had attacked a roll of paper towels and spilled Oreo’s food and was currently batting a pen across the floor.

  Parker supposed it was fitting. He had a certain brown-eyed brunette currently wreaking such havoc on his life and heart as well. The kitten was just taking after the best.

  She batted the pen past the dog.

  Oreo, trying to sleep, sighed for the fifth time.

  Taking pity on him, Parker grabbed the little terrorist and lifted her to his face to look at her eye to eye.

  She batted at his nose.

  He laughed. “Nap time, Destructo.” And he dropped her next to her much quieter brother in his lap.

  She immediately pounced on her brother with great glee, who opened one eye, gave a mew, and pushed her away.

  Not intimidated, she plopped herself down on top of her brother again and began to knead him with her paws like she was making biscuits.

  The quiet tabby tolerated the abuse and finally she fell asleep, allowing Parker to work. An hour ago he’d been alerted that the motion detector cams had caught something. He’d accessed the feeds and couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  One minute there was a Humvee and the next minute it vanished. Just disappeared into thin air. Parker rewound and slowed things down. This time he could see that the Humvee, colored to blend in, carrying what looked like four men, drove onto the ranch. It was followed by a similarly painted truck, the kind that carries livestock, large livestock, and not all that different from the one that had clipped him with Carver behind the wheel.

  Parker couldn’t see much else as the rest of the daylight faded away. None of them used any lights.

  He called Wyatt.

  “Yo,” Wyatt said. “I’ve got two minutes before emergency surgery. A lab ate its owner’s lace thong and it’s all tangled up in his intestines. She needs to switch to edible undies.”

  And Parker thought his job was interesting. “You ever hear of Cat’s Paw?”

  “No, but hang on, I’m putting you on speaker. Dell,” Wyatt said, and Parker knew he was talking to the owner and head vet of Belle Haven, whom he’d met the day he’d shoveled shit for two hours. “Parker wants to know what we know about Cat’s Paw.”

  “The town or ranch?” Dell asked.

  “There’s a ranch called Cat’s Paw?” Parker asked.

  “Yeah,” Dell said, “it’s an isolated place out at the base of Rocky Falls.”

  “We don’t service it?” Wyatt asked.

  “It’s not in business anymore,” Dell said. “They lost their livestock not too long after the economy took a shit and they couldn’t recover. The place is deserted.”

  “As in the owners just walked away?” Parker asked.

  “Supposedly. The bank took the land back, but like thousands of other properties across the country, the banks are in over their head. Most of those out-of-the-way places are on the back burner.”

  “So no livestock,” Parker said.

  “Not unless it’s wild and squatting on the land.”

  The tabby kitten rolled over and his sister, sleepy now, mewed in protest.

  “You have a furbaby?” Dell asked.

  “I’ve got two kittens for next week’s adoption day.”

  Wyatt laughed. “Zoe know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you don’t have shit for adoption day. She won’t be able to let them go by then.”

  After they’d disconnected, Parker stared at the feeds some more. So if there was no livestock, what the hell was in that truck? If he’d located Carver and the militia he was using to protect himself, the likely answer was that he’d possibly found the storage site for Carver’s illegal gains, his holding place before it was sold.

  He got up, unintentionally disturbing the kittens, who let him know with their soft mews how unhappy he’d made them. He set them down on Oreo’s bed. “Sleep,” he commanded.

  The kittens climbed all over Oreo.

  Oreo gave Parker a baleful look.

  “Like you don’t love them,” Parker said.

  And indeed, Oreo licked each kitten from chin to forehead and then, after turning in a very careful circle—three times—plopped down. His hind end caught the gray kitten, who gave a muffled “mew!”, crawled out from beneath Oreo’s ass, and settled with her brother between Oreo’s two front paws.

  Oreo smiled down at his babies.

  Parker paced for a few moments, brooding over the action he was missing out on. He tried calling Sharon, but either his boss was over him or she was still pissed because she didn’t pick up.

  When his phone finally buzzed, he answered immediately, thinking it was Sharon getting back to him.

  It was AJ. “How are your ribs?”

  “Great,” Parker said, touching them to check. Maybe great was a slight exaggeration, but it would do.

  “We’re short a guy tonight for our rec league football game,” AJ said. “Wyatt says you’re the guy we need. You in?”

  Parker looked around him, soaking in Zoe’s kitchen. It w