“I passed it yesterday.”
“Good. See you tomorrow.”
Parker got out of the car carefully; if she’d been stiff yesterday, she was practically crippled today.
Eyeballing the house in front of her, Parker decided it looked even worse than last night, if possible. It had a water view, yes. The cove spread out before her, Douglas Point to the north, the harbor to the south. So that was a plus, the view. The house…eesh.
Well, nothing to do but face the music. She got her toiletries bag from her suitcase and, pushing through the long grass, went inside. Her bird friend from last night seemed to be gone, thank God. She left the door open just in case.
Clearly she’d need to rent a Dumpster and buy some seriously sturdy trash bags. Almost everything in here would need to be thrown away. She winced, picturing trash stuffed in her beloved Volvo. But cleaning the house out would show her what she had to work with, at least. Maybe it could be a jewel. She really needed it to be a jewel.
She went into the bathroom and turned on the faucet. Right. No water. Sighing, she brushed her teeth dry and combed her hair, trying not to touch anything in the bathroom. This would be first on her list of things to scour.
She turned to leave, figuring she’d put on a clean shirt in the car, rather than inside, when she felt something at her ankle…a tickle.
She looked down. Nothing there. Just an itch, she decided, from being in this house of crap.
Nope, there it was again, right under her ankle bone. A mosquito? She shook her foot. Nothing.
Then, horribly, the tickle moved. Moved up.
“What the hell?” she hissed, shaking the leg of her jeans. If that was a cockroach, she’d die.
The tickle moved up again. Faster this time, toward her knee.
“Shit!” Parker said, flapping her pants. “Get out!”
The tickle was now past her knee…and it had a lump. It was a lumpy, warm tickle.
“Nooo!” Parker shrieked, jumping up and down. The lumpy tickle zipped around to the back of her leg, then across her ass and around to the other side, and with that, Parker ripped open her pants and there it was, a mouse in her pants. Its eyes were huge and terrified and Parker heard a scream rip through the air—her scream—and the tiny rodent—rodent!—leaped, practically flying through the air, and landed in the pile in the tub.
Parker ripped off the jeans, dimly hearing herself shrieking, and ran out of the house, through the grass and right up onto the hood of her car. “Bugger! Bugger! Jeesh!” she yelped. Her jeans were clutched in her hand. What if there were more in there? What if a whole family of rodents was in her jeans right now? Once there was a family of mice who loved to snuggle up against the warm flesh of an unwitting human. She whipped the pants against the car, cracking them against the hood again and again and again, shrieking at the remembered feeling of tiny claws. On her leg. Her skin. On her ass!
“Hey, Parker” came a voice. She kept cracking. “Parker?”
She looked up, her breath stuttering in and out of her chest.
Thing One. Thing One was here.
“Hi,” he said, as if she wasn’t murdering her jeans against the hood. “How’s it going?”
“There was a mouse in my pants.”
He raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Lucky mouse.”
Her breath caught. Wrong thing to say. Wrong. “It’s pretty traumatic to have a rodent in your pants, Thing One,” she snapped. “Unless you like that sort of thing.”
“Oh, hey, sorry, princess,” he said, approaching her car. “Didn’t mean to make light of your tragedy.”
“There was a mouse in my pants,” she blurted. “It’s bad enough, okay? I mean, do you see that house? That’s mine! I own it! And I was doing fine, I wasn’t panicking or anything, even when that fricking bird flew into my hair last night but a mouse— I…I can’t have Nicky here! That place is infested!”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Settle down. You are aware that you’re not wearing pants, right?” Another quirked eyebrow. “Not that I’m complaining.”
She looked down at him, her throat working. She could murder him and throw his body in the water. Or she could put on her pants. She took a shaky breath. “I’m not…eager to put them back on. In case the mouse had cousins.”
“Well, here. Let me check.” Thing One took the jeans from her and turned them inside out, then shook them vigorously. Checked the pockets, too. “Nothing.”
“I saw it. It was there. It ran all the way up this leg, then across my butt, then God knows where it was headed.” His mouth twitched. Did he think this was funny? This was not funny! “It’s not funny, Thing One.”
“Well. It’s gone now.” He looked down. She suspected he was smiling. Idiot.
“It’s in the tub,” she said, giving the jeans a last shake before pulling them on. “You can go find it. Maybe it’ll crawl up your pants and we can compare notes.”
“How was your trip up?” he asked, and really, what kind of a question was that when they were sitting in front of a hovel?
“It was lovely, Thing One. This house, however, is a sty.”
He looked at the house for a long moment, then back at her. “Well. Good thing I’m here, then.”
Right. It suddenly dawned on her that he was here. A familiar face, at least. Something moved in Parker’s chest. She looked away, but no, there was the mouse-infested house. The harbor. Better. Nice view.
“All right. Let’s see what we’re up against.”
Thing One went into the house, and Parker heard a few clunks and thunks. She sat on the hood of the Volvo, her panic fading gradually into the occasional shudder. A rodent running up her leg…there was a sensation a person wouldn’t forget, right up there with an episiotomy.
Her father’s attorney emerged a minute later. Now that she wasn’t screaming, she noticed he looked…different. It took a minute to figure out why.
He wasn’t wearing a suit. First time ever she’d seen him out of— Well, this was the first time ever she’d seen him in jeans and a T-shirt, that was for sure.
Parker looked away and cleared her throat. “So what are you doing here, Thing One?”
He sat on the hood next to her. “Since I’m devoting the next few weeks to overhauling this dump, Parker, you think you could call me by my real name?”
“I seem to have forgotten it.” There. She was getting her old vibe back. Good.
He smiled slowly, his dark eyes crinkling. Dangerous, those eyes. “Again?”
“Is it John? Jason?”
“It’s James. James Francis Xavier Cahill.”
Goose bumps broke out along her arms. It was chilly. Or something. “So what are you doing here, James?”
“Your father asked me to come up.”
Right. James was an obedient pet; she’d give him that. She didn’t say anything for a minute, just pulled her knees to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s okay.”
She’d bet her left arm James got more than three minutes on the phone with her father. She sighed. “So. This place. Did you know how bad it was?”
He shook his head. “I called my uncle this morning to ask about a security code, and he told me it