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.”