A/N Here we are again with chapter two! I just want to thank everyone who read chapter one and triple thank everyone who took the time to review. Writing stories in new fandoms is always super nerve wreaking for me so the feedback means the world to me :D

And once again I need to thank Alexandra926 for all her invaluable help and feedback with this chapter... I hope you all enjoy!

It was not just for one night.

He really should have seen it coming.

If you gave Parker an inch, she'd steal a mile and your wallet.

For the first few weeks, everything had gone back to how it had been before. Occasionally she would just show up for dinner, and sometimes she hung around around for awhile before she went home. Eliot had naively believed that she had understood that their little sleepover was a one-time-only deal. No encores.

Lulled into a false sense of security, Eliot didn't think anything of it one night when they were sitting on his couch, drinking beer, sharing a bowl of popcorn, and watching a documentary about Prohibition. He was in a good mood. They'd completed a job earlier in the day, no one on the crew had gotten hurt, they'd gotten the client their life's work back, put the bad guys in jail, and he'd even gotten to punch a few people.

"We would have made awesome bootleggers," Parker announced, shoving another handful of popcorn into her mouth.

"You think so?" he asked bemused, taking another sip from the bottle he had resting on his knee.

"Oh yeah, with you in charge of the moonshine, and me doing the rum-running," she said surely, "we'd be untouchable."

"Why do you get to do the rum-running?" he asked teasingly. "Maybe I want to do the driving and you can make the booze."

"You don't even let me touch the coffeemaker," she reminded him sardonically. "Would you really let me work a still?" The laugh he responded with was answer enough. "Plus, I don't even know how to make a still."

"What makes you think I do?" he countered, eyes twinkling.

"Don't you?" she responded challengingly. It seemed to her like a skill that the hitter would have in his rather large and eclectic wheelhouse.

"I might have a basic idea how to put one together," he admitted.

"I thought so," she said smugly, reaching across the couch to poke at a bruise on his shoulder, her smirk only deepening when he bat away her hand with a half-hearted glare. "Besides, I think I have more experience running from the cops then you do."

"Somehow I doubt that, darlin'."

"I was eleven when I started working as a getaway driver."

Eliot almost choked on the beer he was drinking. "What?! Really? Eleven?"

Parker nodded, as though it were a totally normal career path for a sixth grader. "That was when I was finally tall enough to reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel at the same time."

Eliot took another sip of beer to hide the grimace on his face at the twisting in his gut that he always got whenever Parker dropped a hint about her dysfunctional childhood. He swore to himself that one of these days he was going to have her write a list, and he was going to start making house calls to all the adults who'd failed her while she was growing up.

"Okay, you can be the driver," he finally said, just to move the conversation along.

He was still stewing as Parker gave jobs to the other members of the hypothetical prohibition-era Leverage crew, so he wasn't really paying much attention when she handed him the bowl of popcorn and stood, heading down the hall. He had assumed she was just going to use the restroom, which was why his head had nearly exploded when she walked back into the living room, dressed once again in one of his flannel shirts, a pillow and blanket tucked under one arm.

"What the hell, Parker!"

"What?" she asked, resituating herself on the couch underneath her newly purloined blanket.

Eliot didn't even know where to start. "Are you wearing my shirt?!" He didn't even want to ask where the clothes she had been wearing had ended up.

"Uh-huh," Parker confirmed nonchalantly, making grabby hands for the popcorn he was still holding.

"Did you seriously just go into my bedroom and go through all the drawers in my dresser right now?!" he growled, even while he unthinkingly pushed the bowl into her waiting hands.

"Of course not," she said, like she had the right to be insulted at the accusation. "I didn't have to. I already knew which drawer they were in."

Eliot's hands twitched like they were itching to hit something. "What?! How did you- " He cut himself off, and when he spoke again it was in that false calm he got when he was trying not to break things. "You know what, no... I don't want to know. What I do want to know is why are you wearing my shirt?"

Parker just shrugged. "It's what you gave me to sleep in last time."

"And who said you could sleep here tonight?" Eliot sputtered.

"I'm getting tired."

"Then go home!" he exclaimed, trying to understand when that had ceased to be the obvious solution.

"But we're watching this," she pointed at the TV. "I don't want to miss the end, and I'll be too sleepy to get home by the time it's over."

"Then I will drive you home when it's over."

Parker was quiet for a moment before she spoke again. "I slept really well here last time," she admitted, carefully digging through the bowl of popcorn as though she was looking for the perfect piece, to avoid looking him in the eye. "I don't usually sleep that well."

Eliot silently counted backwards from ten. When that didn't help, he tried it again in Japanese. Then in Urdu. And again in French.

"So I can stay?" Parker asked hopefully, as she watched Eliot's mood settle from underneath her eyelashes.

"Parker…." Eliot sighed heavily. "Whatever."

Parker beamed at him as she nestled further into the couch, snuggling up in the blanket.

After that first - well, second - night, she didn't even bother asking.

Instead, she started staying the night almost every time she came over for dinner. And even on some nights that she didn't.

The first time he had walked through what should have been his empty living room on his way for his morning coffee, and instead found Parker once again asleep on his couch, wearing a shirt he knew he had put away with the rest of his clean laundry the night before, he'd nearly burst a blood vessel. Not only had she come into his home uninvited, which admittedly he was used to by now, but she had been in his bedroom while he was sleeping! He had to tell himself that it was only because he had gotten so used to having her around, that his subconscious no longer viewed her as a viable threat, and that was why she was able to get in and out of his room without waking him. Because the alternative was that he was losing his edge. And that was unacceptable.

She was curled into a tight ball, which he knew was unusual because every time he'd seen her asleep, she'd been stretched out like she was free-falling, which was what he imagined her best dreams were about. He assumed it was because she was cold in the early morning air, because while she'd thought to steal a shirt, it apparently hadn't occurred to her to grab a blanket. His first instinct was to go grab her the quilt that was at the foot of his bed, but then he scoffed and went to start the coffeemaker. The smell would wake her up soon enough and as far he was concerned, people who break and enter don't get turndown service. Rummaging through his pantry, he bypassed his usual Kona beans, and pulled out the kopi luwak. It was that kind of morning.

She slept through the noise of the coffee grinder just like he expected, but sure enough, as soon he was filling a couple of mugs, Parker came shuffling into the kitchen rubbing at her tired eyes.

"What are you doing here, Parker?" he asked, his irritation only growing as he watched her pour an absurd amount of sugar into her mug, ruining what was probably a seventy-five dollar cup of coffee.

"Caffeinating," was all she said, still not fully awake.

"You can't just let yourself in whenever you want, Parker," he growled. "Especially barging into my bedroom while I'm sleeping! How would you feel if someone did that to you?"

"I was quiet. I didn't wake you up," she said, defending her choices with a pout.

"That's not the point! The point is that that's crossing a line, Parker. Even for you!" Parker actually had the decency to look mildly guilty and vaguely uncomfortable, which was Eliot's first clue that something else was going on. "What were you thinking?"

"I had a nightmare," she explained softly into her mug. "Normally, after one of those I can never fall back asleep. So I was going to go jump off a building or find a vault to break into, to make myself feel better like I normally do, but my feet ended up walking me here instead."

Eliot's anger rushed out of him in an exasperated sigh. Parker had the singular ability to wind him up faster than almost anybody else, and then turn around and completely knock the wind from his sails. She just made it so difficult to stay mad at her sometimes.

"Damnit Parker," he muttered, scrubbing a hand down his face. "What am I going to do with you?"

She just shrugged, as if to say she didn't know what to do with her either.

"You get a lot of bad dreams?" he asked, knowing all too well what it was like for your subconscious to be haunted by your past. There was a reason he was so adept at functioning on only ninety minutes of sleep a night.

Her eyes darted around the room and he knew she was calculating escape routes.

"Sometimes," she confessed.

He sighed again. "Darlin'-" he began, but whatever he was going to say next was cut short when his phone went off in his pocket. "Go get dressed, we gotta get to Nate's. The mark is making his move early and we have to move up the timetable," he said, reading the text from Hardison.

Eliot used the time it took for Parker to get ready for the day to pour the rest of the coffee from the pot into a travel mug to bring with him, not about to waste it just because the mark got jumpy.

Neither of them spoke on the drive to Nate's. Parker was content to stare out the truck's window, watching the world go by, while Eliot gave half his attention to the morning rush hour traffic and devoted the other half to trying to figure out what he was going to do about this new situation with Parker. He just didn't know how to establish, let alone enforce, boundaries with someone who wasn't scared of him. Which, he had to admit, was a novel problem for him to have. Everyone who knew what he was capable of was at least a little scared of him. Even the rest of the team who knew he would never actually hurt them, were wary of and had a healthy respect for the violence that rested just beneath his skin.

But not Parker, who knew exactly who and what he was, who had watched him break men with his bare hands and still literally laughed in the face of his anger when it was directed at her, completely secure in the knowledge he'd never let that anger touch her. Parker, who fearlessly broke into his home on a regular basis, an offense he'd killed men for in the past, and then demanded he make her favorite meals because as she'd once told him; 'Eliot food tastes better than not-Eliot food'. Parker, who took delight in poking at his various injuries and bruises after a fight, grinning when he snapped at her, but who would also use her master sleight-of-hand skills to switch warming cold packs for fresh ones, sometimes without him even realizing she had done it until afterwards. The woman was an enigma and he just didn't know what to do about her.

Part of him wanted to talk to Sophie for advice. The grifter had a way of getting through to their thief that the rest of them did not. But Sophie would ask questions and want explanations. Questions that he didn't have the answers to, and explanations that he was unprepared to give. So he was on his own.

He was parking around the back of Nate's building, deciding that he would at least try to establish some limits before they got all caught up in the con. But as he pulled into a space and set the parking brake, he was distracted by the sight of pieces of Parker's phone suddenly materializing in her hands.

"Uh, what-"

"Hardison gets nosy," she answered his question before he finished asking it. "He finally stopped putting trackers in my shoes after I kept mailing them to other countries in alphabetical order, but I know he still tracks my phone sometimes," she continued as she snapped the battery back into place and turned it on. "But he doesn't always need to know where I am, especially if we're not working, so I take the battery out of my phone when I'm at your place."

Eliot couldn't help but wonder about Parker's specific reasoning behind that. Was it just that as such an independent creature, she didn't want anyone tracking her movements? Was it an extension of their unspoken agreement not to tell the others about the extra time they were spending together outside the team setting? Did she not want Hardison, in particular, to know that she had taken to spending the night at his house? Eliot pushed aside his questions. Despite his curiosity, he was not about to ask.

Instead, he figured that this was a perfect segue into respecting boundaries, but Parker kept talking before he could interject.

"Sophie says he does it because he cares," she said with a shrug. "That he just wants to make sure I'm safe. But there's nowhere I'm safer than when I'm with you, so there's no reason for him to need to track me there," she concluded with a genuine smile.

And there she went, completely cutting his irritation off at the knees for the second time that morning. He just couldn't help it when she looked at him with that earnest and open expression on her normally guarded face.

"I'd never let anything happen to you if I could help it." It wasn't what he had meant to say, but it was what had come out of his mouth.

"I know," she said, as matter-of-factly as if he had told her that the sky was blue. "See you upstairs!"

And then she was gone, out of the car and darting off in the opposite direction of the door. Shaking his head to himself, Eliot watched her disappear around the corner before he climbed out of the truck, locked it up and headed inside. By the time he made it upstairs and let himself into Nate's loft/their headquarters, Parker was sitting on Nate's kitchen counter eating a bowl of the awful sugary cereal that she so enjoyed, chatting with Sophie while the grifter made her tea, looking for all the world as though she'd been there all morning.

"There you are, Sparky," she said, announcing his arrival before the door had even fully shut behind him. "You're the last one here."

"Yeah man, where you been?" Hardison added, jumping on the bandwagon. "The rest of us been waiting on you for ages."

Eliot shot a glare in Parker's direction since it couldn't have been more than three minutes since they'd split up in the parking lot, but she just shot him a faux-innocent grin belied by the puckish glint in her eye, knowing that he couldn't exactly call her out on it.

"That's enough," Nate announced, calling a halt to the habitual bickering between the hacker and the hitter, before Eliot even had a chance to get a word in. "We've got a lot to get through this morning and not a lot of time to do it in."

As they all made their way over to the screens, Eliot got his head in the game for the con ahead. He'd figure out what he was going to do with his little thief later.

xXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

Eliot never did have that conversation with Parker. Which was why, one morning several weeks later when the crew was between jobs, he found himself casually leaning against the living room wall, drinking a cup of coffee, watching her sleep on a couch that had been empty when he'd gone to bed. She was wearing the shirt that he had accidentally forgotten in the clean clothes hamper he'd left on the washing machine. And she was huddled underneath the blanket he'd taken to leaving folded over the back of the couch, but only because it was convenient to have it there in case he got cold while he was watching TV.

Even though she didn't move right away, he still knew the moment she woke up. It was subtle, but easy to spot if you knew what you were looking for. Before opening her eyes, she would systematically tense all her muscles one by one, as if making sure everything was just like she left it when she went to sleep.

"You're ruining my couch," he announced. "It's made to be sat on, not slept on all the time."

Parker's eyes popped open, easily finding and meeting Eliot's gaze from where he stood across the room. She sat up and looked back down at the couch where she had just been sleeping. It looked fine to her.

"Want me to steal you a new one?" she offered.

"How would you steal a couch?" he asked automatically, before remembering who he was talking to, and dismissing the question outright. "No. I don't want you to steal me a new one. I want you to stop sleeping on this one."

An unhappy frown settled on Parker's face. That was the opposite of what she wanted.

"Come here," he said, pushing off the wall and heading down the hallway, not waiting to see if she actually got up to follow.

When he stopped in front of the door to what had always been his storage/catch-all room, he turned to see if she had listened and found that she was barely inches behind him, looking at him with curious eyes. He didn't bother to explain as he pushed open the door and motioned for her to go inside.

"What's this?" she asked curiously, looking around the room which had been completely transformed from the last time she had snooped in here, when she'd found it boring and not worthy of her time.

"It's a room, with a bed in it," he said dryly.

"Why?"

"I've been meaning to set up my guest room for awhile now." It was a lie and they both knew it. Eliot Spencer didn't have guests. Well, except for now. Except for Parker. "So now you can sleep in here and stop ruining my couch."

Eliot watched Parker carefully as she took in her surroundings. There wasn't a whole lot of leftover floor space, since it was the smallest bedroom in the condo. The larger spare bedroom having been converted to his home gym almost as soon as he'd moved in. The lingering smell of paint in the air meant that the buttery yellow walls were fresh. The color complemented the sage green comforter on the queen-sized bed. She crossed the room to run her hand down the solid maple bed frame, which matched the dresser that sat against the opposite wall.

"Green's my favorite color," was all Parker said, turning to look back at him with a smile playing at the corners of her lips.

"Whatever," Eliot said gruffly, turning on his heel and stalking back down the hall towards the kitchen, muttering about the ingredients that he would need to make frittatas for breakfast.

Parker sat down on the edge of the bed to test the mattress and let her hand run over the top of the comforter. When her fingers skirted underneath the pillows and found the sheets beneath them, her smile grew. The sheets Eliot had chosen were made out of flannel.

A/N So there we have it, hope you're enjoying it! Let me know what you think!