A Beautiful Lie (Playing with Fire #1)(51)

Garrett figured they could spend the night at the palace, stay locked in their room for a few hours, maybe make a few noises so the staff would hear them “discover one another” and then in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, do some snooping around.

Parker knew it wouldn’t be that easy to lurk around the presidential palace in the middle of the night. The CIA had spent six months preparing her and twenty other agents to spend five seconds in the bushes outside of the palace attaching a listening device to a window. They wouldn’t be able to just open their bedroom door and waltz in and out of rooms.

And given Fernandez’s possible connection to the death of a young girl, he might be suspicious of everyone and everything. There could be people sitting outside of Garrett and Parker’s door all night long for all they knew.

"He loved you more than anything," Garrett told her quietly as he sat down beside her.

Regardless of what he felt for Parker, he could never lie to her. She deserved to know that her fiancé really did love her, no matter what his actions said before he left.

"He had a funny way of showing it," Parker replied softly, staring across the lobby at nothing as she leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees, absentmindedly twisting the diamond and sapphire ring around her finger.

She’d removed her diamond engagement ring from that finger months before because it just didn’t seem right to keep wearing it. She always thought she would feel naked without the ring so she wore it around her neck to keep it close to her. When she took the chain and the solitaire diamond off of her neck yesterday before the dinner at the palace, she felt no sense of loss or sadness. Just touching the ring that Garrett had given her and knowing it would only be a matter of time before it was removed from her finger filled her with an incredible sense of sadness.

"He'd get phone calls in the middle of the night, and I'd hear him whispering in the hallway,” Parker continued, pulling her thoughts away from the ring on her finger. “He’d tell me he had to run to the store and then never come home with any purchases. He’d get up out of bed at all hours of the night and just leave, not coming home until the middle of the afternoon, without one word of explanation. I know we both had things we couldn't tell the other, but it was never like this. If one of us took a phone call for work, even if we couldn't discuss it, we could at least say it was work related. He'd pretend like nothing happened and when I'd ask him, he'd blow up in my face. I was convinced he was cheating on me for a while," she said with a humorless laugh.

"He would never cheat on you," Garrett assured her, allowing his instincts to take over as he reached over and pushed her hair behind her shoulder so he could see her face. He let his hand make its way under her hair and to the back of her neck, his fingers kneading away the tension he felt there.

Garrett listened to Milo brag about how often they had sex constantly over the years. After those conversations, Garrett always drowned himself in whiskey and called up a "friend" to occupy his mind. It was unfathomable to him that the same man who boasted about the sex life he had with the woman next to him would go looking elsewhere.

"Well, he had to have been getting it from someone because he sure as hell wasn't getting it from me."

Parker watched her words click into place in Garrett's mind and figured that since she’d gone this far, she might as well lay it all out there.

"In that year, I can count on one hand how many times we had sex, the last time was five months before he left."

Garrett couldn’t keep the shock off of his face if he tried. Everything Parker said to him was the exact opposite of what Milo had told him. It wasn’t a question of who to believe; he would choose Parker every time. But suddenly, everything about Parker's actions the night she showed up at his place and stripped made sense now. He remembered asking Milo a few days later if everything was okay between Parker and him and how over the top Milo’s response was. He had gushed about how happy and in love they were and how they just couldn’t keep their hands off each other, going into explicit detail about every sexual encounter they’d had recently. Garrett had thought it was a bit overkill for Milo to go into so much detail, but at the time he just chalked it up to Milo being happy and suffered through the onslaught information.

Garrett wondered if he knew then what he knew now, if that night would have ended differently when he turned around and saw Parker standing in his living room, wet from the rain that soaked her skin and lace underwear. He wondered if the guilt of wanting to sink himself inside of her would have still eaten him alive like it had every day since then.

He wondered if he had known about the problems Milo and Parker were having at the time if he would have taken what she had offered and what he'd wanted since the day he met her.

Garrett thought back to the private cell phone Milo owned with all of the phone calls back and forth from here to the Dominican Republic. He’d never explained to Parker why he questioned her about Milo owning another phone because he didn’t want to worry her. He honestly believed his friend would never, ever cheat on Parker or do anything to hurt her. But thinking back to the phone and the way Milo had acted with her, Garrett realized that maybe he really didn’t know his friend as well as he thought he did.

Before he could say anything, Parker stood as a sleek, black limo pulled up to the resort. Garrett stood beside her, grabbed their bags, and they made their way to the waiting car.