A/N : Hello!... I am back with more Leverage stuff... I was pleasantly surprised by your feedback on my first Leverage fic so here i am trying my hand at more of it... This time it is going to be a series of short chapters focusing on... yeah you guessed it right... my fav couple Eliot and Parker... So.. without further ado... let's get to the story...

P.S. Would love it if you could review your thoughts and ideas on this and other fics...

Disclaimer : Do not own any part or character of Leverage... even though I want to... so badly. :(

Chapter 01

It was right after the San Lorenzo Job and they were returning back to the United States... first class. Nate had figured that after all the action they'd been through the last week or so, they deserved a little R and R and had asked Hardison to book first class tickets for them.

That was how Parker found herself relaxing in a huge cushy couch type airline seat with no one in the seat next to her. Nate and Sophie had been quite inseperable after the night they'd spent together... or was that supposed to be a secret?... Oh well... its not like anyone didn't know...

But yeah... Nate and Sophie had finally woken up (both literally and figuratively... hee hee) and started acting like the proper couple they'd tried to be and she had to say... it was unbearably sweet... almost toothache inducing.

On the other hand, there was the new and improved Eliot Spencer. Parker hadn't known what to make of it... or him when she'd met him first thing in the morning. She'd been busy pushing her little (shyeah!... right...eye roll) box of souvenirs and hadn't noticed him walking up with Hardison till they'd been a couple of meters away. The happy, almost carefree smile lighting up his face, the blue, blue eyes sparking with energy, his swagger that said that for now atleast, he didn't have a care in the world...

This was the southern gentleman, the cowboy in Eliot Spencer that she was seeing. The normal Eliot Spencer she'd come to know and... well... let's just stop at that... for now atleast, would never smile so widely that she was afraid his face would remain stuck that way.

She knew the second he saw her by the even bigger, brighter smile along with a rare teasing expression settling onto his face. What unsettled her was her instinctual reaction to his smile. Parker hadn't known she had smiled back at him until she felt her cheeks start to ache from the wide grin adorning her face. She'd even turned to look at herself in the reflective surface of the elevator doors to make sure that she wasn't actually smiling... but... she had been. No one... I repeat, no one had ever made her react in such a way.

Parker consoled herself by saying that she was just happy that her team mate, her partner was happy... and it was true... Eliot did seem happier and some how freer than she had ever seen him before. But this was an Eliot she had no idea how to react to or deal with... Or that's what she told herself.

Parker had become an expert at hiding and forgetting feelings that made her uncomfortable and what she had felt when Eliot at smiled at her that morning, was best tucked away in that box, tightly locked up and left there to be forgotten in time. It was a good plan and might even have worked had it not been for the multitude of feelings - those icky, uncomfortable and inconvenient things that kept poking their heads up at exactly all the wrong times, hadn't been swirling around her brain for a long time now.

She wasn't even sure when she'd started looking at the retrieval specialist in a different way... all she remembered was that she was stuck in the middle of all her inconvenient feelings even before she knew that they were there. She'd tried... Oh yeah... She'd tried and tried to get herself to ignore those pesky feelings and emotions, tried to lock them away in an uncrackable safe in her mind but they'd proved as wily as the hitter himself. No sooner had she gotten rid of one set of them, Eliot would go do something else and make her have to work on a whole new set of feelings... all aimed at him and his perfectly imperfect self.

A/N : Please review people... reviews are like life blood that keep me alive... :) Plus I love hearing whatever it is that you guys have to say... So keep reading and reviewing...

Lotsa luv

Macy Bear