A Beautiful Lie (Playing with Fire #1)(19)

Then all of a sudden it hit her. Parker was going to have to be someone’s wife during this assignment. How had she missed that tidbit before? Obviously, her brain wasn’t functioning at maximum level with everything that went on since yesterday. She glanced quickly around the plane at Austin, Cole, and Brady and wondered which one she was going to be playing house with while Garrett was busy doing his tech stuff. Her gaze came back around and landed on Garrett. Parker didn’t like the devious smirk that was on his face.

“What?” Parker asked him irritably.

Garrett shrugged. “Just wondering how your reading is coming along.”

The plane started to taxi down the runway, and Parker let the dossier drop into her lap so she could clutch onto the armrests. Parker was a white-knuckled flier. She was fine once they were up in the air but this whole taxi business and the anticipation of wondering if the plane would explode as soon as they got up to full speed made her want to scream. You would have thought as often as she had to fly for her job, the fear would have lessened now, but unfortunately it hadn’t.

Garrett knew how much Parker hated to fly so he figured he might as well do something to take her mind off of her fear.

“My reading is coming along fine. I just find their backwards customs pretty amusing.”

Parker squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath as the plane went full throttle and the nose began tipping up towards the sky. She felt the slight bump as the back wheels came up off of the ground and her ears popped as they rose higher and higher.

“I feel bad for whichever one of the guys has to pretend to be my husband though. I hog the covers and talk in my sleep,” Parker joked.

They were finally airborne so Parker opened her eyes while Garrett remained silent.

The look on his face said it all, and if they weren’t twenty-seven thousand feet above the ground right then, Parker might have seriously considered opening the door and jumping out.

“So sorry you have to work on our honeymoon, Mrs. McCarthy.”





Chapter Five



Parker’s views on marriage were sketchy at best. She knew she wanted to settle down, have a family, and live the American dream—but not at the cost of losing herself so deeply in someone that she’d struggle to breathe, to function, and to remember who she was.

Most people would assume that Parker loved with her whole heart and soul, just like her parents did. They poured their entire beings into each other. Where one ended, the other began. They completed each other’s sentences, thoughts…lives. They slow danced in the kitchen when they thought no one was looking, they cuddled on the couch to watch the evening news, and they never went anywhere without the other.

She grew up watching them, studying them, wishing that someday she would love and be loved like that. Just like any young girl, Parker daydreamed of meeting her prince and living happily ever after with her one true love. She dreamed of falling so deeply in love that books and poetry on the subject would never come close to describing the feelings she held.

But dreams were meant to be broken and wishes turned to smoke, fading away into the sky on a gentle breeze. Parker was seventeen years old when the sky turned dark and the clouds opened up to rain on her dreams. A crucial time in any young girl’s life: that moment when you were no longer a little girl and so close to becoming a woman, when you fell in love for the first time and hoped it lasted forever. Parker had never expected to spend her senior year in high school watching her mother fade away. She had never thought she would miss her senior prom to say one final goodbye to her family, her innocence, and her silly childhood dreams about love and forever.

Parker always looked back on the day she buried her mother and wondered why she didn’t just save everyone a lot of time and energy by burying her father right along with her. He had stopped living the day her heart stopped beating. He loved her so deeply, so all-encompassing that he couldn’t survive in a world without her. What her father never understood or cared about was that Parker’s heart was broken as well. She was a young girl without a mother and knew she'd have to complete the rest of life’s journeys without her advice and guiding hand. She needed her father to comfort her, tell her everything would be okay, and show her that life would go on, that she would one day feel happy again. He was the pillar of their small family, the one she looked up to, the rule-maker, and the strength behind every decision she made.

The day they had buried Parker’s mother was the last day her father really spoke to her with anything other than contempt in his voice. As the mourners walked away from the cemetery, Joe Parker took one long, last look at his daughter, his little girl and said, “I can’t stand to look at you. You remind me too much of her.” She stared at her father’s retreating back and knew it was time for her to grow up and stop believing in fairytales.

For eight more months they had lived under the same roof, never speaking except in anger. Parker had postponed starting college until the winter semester to stay home and try to pull her father out of his depression regardless of his protests and hateful words. He took a leave of absence from the police force and spent each and every day drowning in a bottle of whiskey. He stopped eating, caring, functioning…the more he drank, the more he hated his daughter. The more she tried to help him, the more he screamed and told her he wished it would have been her that died instead of the love of his life.