A sick, twisted part of him was thrilled at the prospect of doing this, but Garrett knew without a doubt this whole charade was going to cut him in two. Garrett knew it would change his friendship with Parker. He could even lose her forever once this was over.

No matter how much he denied it to himself, this lie they were going to have to perfect would ruin him when he had to go back to his regular life without her. It would tease him and taunt him and remind him of what he never had the courage to take. It would be dangled in front of him for a short while and as soon as he got comfortable, it would be snatched right out of his hands.

They took their seats on the plane and prepared for take-off. Parker was surprised that Garrett sat down next to her. She figured he must have felt the need to torture her with the silent treatment through the flight. Well, she’d show him. Parker was a woman after all. She had perfected the art of the silent treatment.

Everyone buckled their seat-belts while the crew member went through her monotonous list of safety instructions. Parker pulled the dossier out of her bag and began to flip through it to familiarize herself with what exactly she would be pretending to do once she got there.

Obviously “pretending” to be a photographer wasn’t going to take any brains. She could do that in her sleep. She almost did do it in her sleep. Parker hoped Garrett practiced his interviewing skills for this. There was no way in hell she was going to do it for him this time, especially with the way he was treating her.

She had numerous assignments in the Dominican over the years and knew the safety precautions she needed to take when traveling over there, so she was already familiar with that information.

Parker quickly skimmed through that portion of the dossier until something caught her eye: a change to the country’s law since her last visit there four years ago.

“Women traveling to the Dominican for work-related purposes always need to be accompanied by a male chaperone. In order to avoid complications or difficulty, it’s best for a woman to travel with her husband. Dominicans frown upon women traveling to their country with any male that is not her significant other.”

Parker laughed a little at their old-fashioned ways and thanked God that she was an American living on U.S. soil and didn’t normally have to deal with such sexist standards unless traveling for work.

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 good-bye 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.

For two hundred and thirty-three days, her father sat in his recliner, staring at her mother’s picture, telling her how much he loved her, adored her, and couldn’t live without her. Parker would come home from work to find him talking to that picture; she would wake up in the middle of the night to find him whispering words of adoration to an eight by ten glossy.

The night before she finally left for college, she came downstairs at two in the morning after hearing a noise, only to find her father curled up in the fetal position hugging the picture to his chest and sobbing about love and loss and misery. In that moment, standing in the doorway of the living room watching her father, once the strongest man she knew, now broken and out of his mind with misery, Parker vowed to never love like that. She swore she would never let someone take so much of her heart and soul that it would wither away to nothing once they were gone. She gave up on the dream of finding someone to consume her mind, body, and soul. It only ruined you in the end. It only left you broken and unable to live.

When Parker got to college, she worked hard, made friends, and went on dates with boys that held similar interests as her. She never let them get too close, never let them see all of her; she held them at a distance and made sure they always knew where they stood with her. Parker wouldn’t play games with anyone, and she wouldn’t make promises she couldn’t keep. The decisions she made never mattered the first few years. She was content, never worrying that her heart was in danger. No one threatened to make her second-guess her decision or think that she might have been wrong about her choices. The men she had met never made it past a few casual dates and a handful of sleepovers. No one threatened to break down her walls until the day she met a pair of best friends over coffee.

Parker knew she let Milo pursue her because he was safe. She knew he would never get past the façade or question the person she’d become. The Parker in high school would have politely told him no, understanding that the butterflies in her stomach and the ache in her chest when she looked at his friend was nothing to be afraid of. That Parker would have taken a chance on the man who could tear her apart with just one look, see inside her soul with just one touch, and place a crack in her armor with every word he spoke.

Parker was still a typical girl for the most part and therefore still dreamed of marriage and children and a house in the suburbs. Parker built a life with Milo and agreed to marry him because, as far as her heart was concerned, he was harmless. She loved him, she cared for him, and she knew with every part of her that she'd be faithful to him for as long as he’d have her. The guilt over keeping part of herself shut off from him reared its ugly head every once in a while, especially the days when they fought and she sought solace in Garrett. He was the one person that could make her change her mind about everything and it scared her to death. On those days when she’d cry to him about fear, change, and Milo’s latest argument, he’d look at her like he knew her secret. Garrett was her best friend and could read her like a book, most of the time better than her own fiancé. She had longed for him to call her out on her lies and the way she kept her heart safe by never letting it be free just as much as she feared it. Parker knew if she ever gave him the chance, he would break her.

So she had remained content and kept up the walls and no one got hurt. It didn’t matter if she had cried herself to sleep most nights wishing for things she’d long since said goodbye to. Nothing made you reevaluate your life like death did. Parker knew that better than anyone.

These past six months, spending almost every moment with Garrett, she had started to feel the cracks in her foundation. With each passing day, her core was shaken to the bone, and she felt like she needed to hold on to something to keep from toppling over. Parker always knew he had the power to crumble everything around her into a pile of dust and regret. She didn’t have much time to decide what to do about that.

A few bumps of turbulence pulled Parker away from her thoughts. She wondered briefly if maybe the change in altitude had affected her hearing and she hadn’t really just heard Garrett say they would be playing house on this mission.

The look on his face said it all though. He was quite pleased that it was his turn to shock her. Too bad her poker face was much better than his. He may have had a pair, but she had a full house.

Parker quickly took her mind off of Garrett's pair and shrugged. “I don’t mind working on our honeymoon if you don’t, dear.”

Garrett looked at her quizzically, confident that there was no way she would be able to pull this off. This was his dream, his fantasy—to be close to her and touch her and pretend like they were as familiar with one another as a husband and wife should be. Parker wasn’t that good of an actress.

Garrett snorted. “Please, like you’re going to be able to do this. Look someone right in the eye and tell them you’re my wife and that you’re madly in love with me.”

Parker tamped down the butterflies in her stomach when he called her his wife and scolded herself for acting like a teenage girl, giddy with excitement. Those were emotions that had no business in her world.

She turned to face him and leaned in a little closer, letting her shoulder graze against his.

“I’ve passed hundreds of polygraph tests over the years, blatantly lying about information I was given. I think I can handle telling a few people I’m married to you,” she replied.

Garrett couldn’t hide his confusion at her words. He wondered why in the hell she would ever need to take a polygraph test, let alone hundreds of them. There was something different about her in that moment. She held herself with an air of authority all of a sudden, and she didn’t shy away from his stare. Parker appeared confident and strong, sexy and aloof. It reminded him so much of the first time he’d seen her.

Jesus, she was beautiful. Garrett hadn't been paying any attention to the nonsense Milo was complaining about while he put in his coffee order. He had been too busy wondering if it would be wrong to walk across the room and kiss her.

Garrett briefly wondered if there was something wrong with him. Maybe he didn’t get enough sleep last night or something. Since when did he ever want to just walk up to a complete stranger and make out with them?