“You ever going to tell me how you really got hurt?” she asked.
“I already told you.”
“Fine.” She shook her head. “You don’t want to tell me, that’s . . . whatever. But you don’t have to make stuff up. No wondering, no worrying, no wishes, remember? Live in the moment?” She glanced at him. “Or was that all bullshit?”
He met her gaze, surprised to find her eyes flashing with temper and . . . hurt. Well, hell. “Not bullshit,” he said. “That’s how I live my life.”
“Uh-huh.” Her jaw was tight, her body language tense.
And he couldn’t keep himself from asking. “Who was he?”
“He who?”
“The asshole who put you so on guard all the time. What did he do?”
She sent him another long look. “He lied to me.” She turned back to the road before speaking again. “About everything.”
And clearly she’d put him in the same category. “I haven’t lied,” he said. He’d just let certain assumptions stand.
“Right,” she said. “Wrestling big-game poachers?”
“Hey, that’s true,” he said. “We were . . .” Closing in on the ringleader of an international smuggling conspiracy . . . “Going after a wildlife poacher, someone we’d been after for a long time. I had a team with me, but we got separated in the takedown.” He could still feel the sweat breaking out on his skin as his instincts screamed they were all about to be fucked. They’d been outnumbered, but they might’ve been able to hold their own if the Butcher hadn’t gone for his truck. “The guy came at us in his truck.”
Horror was all over her face. “To run you over? Oh my God, what did you do?”
“Dove out of the way.” Parker’s stomach clenched at the memory of feeling himself get clipped, flying through the air, and landing next to Ned, who hadn’t been as lucky as Parker. “But not fast enough,” he murmured.
She gaped at him. “He got you. That’s how you got hurt.” She paused and her voice was low and shocked. “You were telling me the truth; you really did get hit by a wildlife poacher’s truck.”
“Me and another man on my team,” he said, and rubbed his aching ribs. Shoveling horse shit had been a stupid idea. But hey, he was still breathing. “Ned didn’t make it.”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry, Parker.”
So was he. He still burned with fury, which was why he couldn’t walk away from this knowing Carver might be at Cat’s Paw.
“I had no idea that being a game warden could be so dangerous,” she said softly.
Something twinged inside Parker.
Guilt.
She thought he was a game warden, but that was how it had to be. He told himself he was good with the deception. Working as he did, traveling at the drop of a hat, sometimes going deep undercover for weeks, his plan did not include falling for a cutie-pie pilot—albeit a pretty tough, fascinating cutie-pie pilot—no matter what.
But damn. Sometimes his job and life sucked.
Zoe pulled into her driveway and turned off the engine. Then . . . didn’t move. Sensing she was debating with herself over something, Parker stayed still.
Staring ahead, hands on the wheel, Zoe spoke to the windshield. “I was engaged,” she said, surprising him. “Kyle turned out to be . . .” She sighed. “Not the man I thought.”
Ah, shit. He wasn’t going to like this story, he could tell. “He hurt you?” he asked quietly, feeling anything but quiet.
“Yes,” she said. “He hurt me. But not in the way you think.” She shook her head. “I met him in college. For a girl who’d grown up a child of the world, I was . . . incredibly naïve.”
Parker thought of Amory, how naïve she was, too, how he constantly worried someone would get the best of her. How he’d probably kill anyone who did.
He hoped like hell Wyatt had taken care of Kyle the Asshole.
“Kyle was as exciting as I could imagine,” she said. “Tough and mysterious and . . . well. When I met him, he’d been investigating some thefts on campus.” She paused. “He was an undercover cop so it was a while before he told me, and in the meantime, we fell hard and fast. He was going to change divisions, stop the undercover work. We talked about buying a farmhouse in the country and having a bunch of kids and the proverbial white picket fence.” She paused, clearly lost in the memories. “We found the place we wanted before we could get married, but he didn’t have the whole down payment. So . . .” She closed her eyes. “I liquidated a trust fund and borrowed from my grandparents. And then he . . .”
Ah, hell. Reaching out, he took her hand. Her fingers were cold. “Zoe, you don’t have to—”
“It was a scam,” she said calmly, though she was still talking only to the windshield. “The whole thing,” she said. “All of it, one big scam. He wasn’t an undercover cop at all. And he didn’t have any of the down payment. In fact, he’d had no intention of buying that house, or marrying me, or anything.” She shrugged. “He took the money—hell, I gave it to him, really—and then he vanished. And that was that.”
Parker squeezed her hand, hating how calm she was. He wanted to see her mad. “Tell me you caught up with him and ran him over with a big-game truck.”
“No. I looked for him but he was long gone. I never heard from him again,” she said flatly, showing no emotion at all. It was so unlike the wildly passionate Zoe that he was coming to know.
“Bet I could find him,” he said, eyes on her face. “And I’ll be happy to run him over for you.” Right after I beat the living shit out of him.
A very small smile curved her lips, relieving him. She liked the thought of him helping her. Progress. “Just tell me what you know about him and it’s done,” he promised.
“Wait.” She turned and stared at him, the smile fading. “You’re . . . not kidding.”
“Fuck no,” he said. “At least Wyatt went after him for you, right?”
Something crossed her face. Guilt? “Why aren’t you telling me that Wyatt went after him for you?”
“Because he didn’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
She squirmed a little and dropped eye contact. And he knew. “You never told anyone,” he breathed.
“Well, it’s not like I was in a hurry to let everyone know I’d been a complete idiot,” she said grumpily, yanking her hand from his.
He took it back and squeezed it. “You should’ve told someone,” he said, pissed for her that she’d gone through that alone, that in so many rough times in her life she’d been alone.
“My parents would’ve expressed profound disappointment,” she said, “and then never let me forget it.”
“But Wyatt—”
“Was killing himself to get through vet school at the time,” she said. “I couldn’t, wouldn’t, take him from that. And Darcy . . .” She shook her head. “She had her own problems.”
“What about your grandparents?”
She shook her head. “They would’ve been sympathetic and way kinder than I deserved,” she said. “I couldn’t do it.”