A Beautiful Lie (Playing with Fire, #1)

by Tara Sivec

  Her father was the one thing Milo and Garrett had ever fought over.

  Parker had been out of town for work so Garrett and Milo got together for pizza and beer at his and Parker’s place. Milo had set the open pizza box down on the coffee table in front of them and plopped down on the couch next to Garrett.

  “So, Parker told me to write up a guest list for the wedding while she was gone,” Milo said as he took a slice out of the box and took a bite.

  “Sound like loads of fun. Don’t even ask me to help you with that shit,” Garrett replied around a mouthful of pizza.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, bro. I’m almost done anyway. I think I’m going to invite her dad as a surprise,” Milo said nonchalantly.

  Garrett tossed what was left of his slice back into the box and looked at Milo like he was insane.

  “You’re kidding right?” he asked him.

  “What?” Milo asked obliviously. “She hasn’t spoken to him in like...forever. I think our wedding would be a great time to mend fences.”

  Garrett leaned against the back of the couch and shook his head.

  “You cannot be that fucking stupid, Milo.”

  “Fuck you!” Milo yelled angrily.

  Garrett felt bad that he was pissing Milo off but he couldn’t help it. He had to see how bad of an idea that was.

  “Dude, you can’t just ‘mend fences’ with someone who wishes you were dead. It’s not that simple, and it definitely shouldn’t be attempted on what’s supposed to be the happiest day of Parker’s life,” Garrett reasoned with him.

  “Oh cut the bullshit,” Milo fumed. “Don’t pretend like you knowmyfiancée better than I do.”

  “I’m not. I’m just trying to help you out. If you do this, it’s going to blow up in your face. How many times has she said she wants nothing to do with that man? You can’t just drop this bomb on her at your wedding.”

  Milo had stood up, kicked the coffee table out of his way, and stormed down the hall. The next sound Garrett had heard was the slamming of Milo and Parker’s bedroom door.

  The subject was never brought up again between Milo and Garrett, but a week later when he met Parker for lunch she had told him about a huge fight she’d had the night before with Milo when he mentioned inviting her father to the wedding.

  As they drove back to the resort in silence, Garrett wondered if he’d thrown things like that in Milo’s face just to prove hedidknow Parker better than Milo did. At the time, he thought the advice he’d given Milo frequently was to help him.

  Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  <> ~ <>

  When Garrett and Parker got back to the resort, a message was waiting for them stating that a palace car would pick them up at five o’clock. That meant they had an hour to pack and decide how they were going to do this.

  “You’re not nervous about this, are you?” Garrett asked her as he threw a pair of pants into his bag.

  “Nope. You?”

  Garrett shook his head while he glanced at Parker as she stuck her bag of toiletries into her duffel.

  “If it makes it easier, just pretend I’m Milo and that you are blissfully happy on your romantic little honeymoon,” Garrett told her with a smile.

  He immediately regretted the words as soon as they came out of his mouth and wished he could take them back. He sounded like a jealous ass.

  “Blissfully happy. Yeah, right,” Parker said sarcastically as she zipped her bag closed.

  She quickly turned away, hoping Garrett didn’t think much of her comment. She walked over to the door and dropped her bag by it, keeping her back to him.

  “What, you don’t think you two would have been pawing each other for a week and smiling so much you’d make everyone around you puke?” Garrett joked.

  Each word he said was like a knife to the chest since it forced him to imagine Milo and Parker having sex all over God’s green earth, but he kept a smile in place for Parker’s sake.

  “Hardly,” Parker said quietly as she finally turned around to face him.

  Garrett didn’t like the sadness in her face. He felt like an idiot for bringing Milo up minutes before they were supposed to pretend to be newlyweds on their honeymoon.

  “I shouldn’t have brought him up, I’m sorry,” Garrett told her.

  Parker sighed, hating the way Garrett always took the blame for everything. There was so much he didn’t know about his best friend. Things she and obviously Milo had kept from him. She had no idea why Milo had never confided in Garrett about the problems they’d had. Maybe he was embarrassed. Parker never told Garrett because she never wanted to be that woman who came between two best friends. When Milo was alive, there were some things she felt like she had to keep to herself so Milo wouldn’t feel like she’d betrayed him. Now that he was gone, maybe it was time to shed some light for Garrett.

  “Don’t apologize. I don’t mind you bringing him up. He was your friend too. It’s just…things weren’t as wonderful and perfect between us that last year, especially the six months leading up to when he left.”

  “What do you mean they weren’t that great? You guys were happy, in love, and getting married. What’s not great about that?”

  Parker cocked her head and looked at Garrett. Her first thought was that she didn’t want him to accuse her of lying and making things up now that Milo was dead. But she immediately admonished herself for that notion. Garrett would never do that to her.

  Parker had felt a shift in her relationship with Garrett ever since the moment they woke up in bed curled around each other. The air practically crackled every time they were in the same room, and each time she looked at Garrett, she found him staring right back at her. Even if he wouldn’t admit it and she was too scared to say anything to him, she could feel things changing between them. Now that she’d felt his touch on her bare skin, she ached for it again. Now that she’d felt his lips on hers, she knew she’d never be the same until she felt them again. Sometimes she saw something in his eyes that said he felt the same way, but then just as quickly, it would disappear. Parker knew it was hard for him to think of her as anything other than his friend’s fiancé. She didn’t want him going day in and day out under the impression that everything was fine between her and Milo. If guilt was making him keep his walls up around her, she would do whatever she could to ease his feelings of remorse.

  “We weren’t so happy, Garrett. Not for a long time,” Parker admitted.

  To say Garrett was surprised was putting it mildly. Milo never made any indication that anything was wrong between the two of them.

  "What happened?" Garrett asked.

  Parker threw up her hands in exasperation.

  “Honestly, I have no idea. Something changed with Milo. It was like one day he came home from work and he was a different man. At first I figured it was stress at work, but when he denied anything was wrong, I used some of my connections and found out he'd been doing great there, no problems. As the months wore on with him getting increasingly worse, whenever I tried to get him to talk, he'd yell and argue and go into a fit about me getting into his business."

  Garrett knew about Milo’s quick temper, but he'd always kept it in check around Parker.

  "You should have told me," Garrett stated.

  "I wanted to. God, I wanted to tell you so many times,” Parker admitted, taking a few steps towards the bed where Garrett stood. “But we even fought about that. He'd yell at me for running to you with all my problems."

  During those arguments, Parker always felt like she was drowning in guilt. She knew what Milo accused her of was the absolute truth. She had always gone to Garrett with every problem or question. Garrett and Parker were opposites in almost every way possible, and yet she trusted him implicitly to always tell her the truth and be honest with her when she needed his help. He told her when she was being an idiot, and he encouraged her when she was struggling.

  Parker knew she should be sharing all of this with Milo, but more often than not, he wasn’t
around when she needed him the most. Garrett always was.

  A knock on the door interrupted their discussion as a staff member from the resort came to collect their bags and escort them to the lobby to wait for the car.

  <> ~ <>

  At ten till five, Parker sat in a chair in the lobby staring out of the front entryway, tapping her foot nervously on the marble floor. She still had no idea how she was going to pull off a fake honeymoon at the home of a man, that may or may not be involved in illegal activity that got her fiancé killed, where she was supposed to have pretend sex with her pretend husband when all she wanted to do was have real sex with the real Garrett. It made her head hurt just to think about it.

  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.

  Once they were seated and the driver stowed their bags in the trunk, Garrett raised the privacy window as they began pulling out of the resort.

  After driving for several minutes in silence, Garrett turned towards Parker. She was staring out of her window, but the running lights in the back of the vehicle made it possible for Garrett to see her reflection in the glass. She was lost in thought, and he knew it was his own damn fault for bringing Milo up in the first place. Parker was right, Milo was his friend as well, and he knew he should feel comfortable enough to talk about him, but not at the expense of her happiness.

  With Parker’s hands resting in her lap, Garrett reached one of his hands over and touched the inside of her wrist with the tips of his fingers, sliding them up through her palm until they pushed in between hers and their fingers were interlaced.

  At the heat of his touch, Parker turned her face toward Garrett. He squeezed her hand once, letting her know without words that everything would be okay while he softly rubbed his thumb back and forth over the knuckle of her thumb.

  Garrett and Parker stared at each other silently as the limo drove them towards the palace, each of them wondering if they'd be able to pull off the ruse of husband and wife tonight with all of the thoughts and memories threatening to drown them.

  Chapter Twelve

  Garrett and Parker were able to avoid all the security checkpoints their second time entering the palace since they weren’t in their own vehicle. When they were ushered past the security guard with the metal detector wand, Garrett cursed himself for not bringing his gun. After the information they found earlier, he had a really bad feeling about all of this.

  Parker wondered what was going through Garrett’s mind after the admission about her relationship with Milo. Garrett hadn’t said a word after she confessed they hadn’t slept together in ages. She probably made him uncomfortable speak
ing about his friend that way, but she’d kept things bottled up for too long. It felt good to confide in Garrett―something she probably should have done a long time ago.

  Parker closed her mind from those thoughts for the time being. They had a job to do and wouldn’t be able to talk freely anytime soon. The subject of her relationship with Milo was definitely closed for discussion while they were there.

  Parker’s hand clutched the inside of Garrett’s elbow and her shoes clicked against the marble floor as they followed a palace staff member down the longest hallway they’d ever seen. The staff member continued on ahead of them in silence as Parker and Garrett perused the many styles of artwork that hung on the walls on either side of them. The hallway widened after a while, and it looked as though they were entering another lobby of sorts. Parker glanced up at the cathedral ceiling as they walked into the second room and she couldn’t help but admire the intricate painted scene of angels locked in a battle between good and evil. The irony of having that scene floating above their heads while they prepared to go to war with the man who lived here was not lost on Parker. This room afforded them a beautiful view of the open hallways to the second and third floors. Arched columns and white marble railings lined the floors, and the staff member paused at the base of a grand staircase at the end of the room and indicated with his arm that they should make their way up to the second floor.

  Once at the top, they walked down the open hallway, glancing below where they had just been, while the staff member began to prattle on about the palace’s history.

  Finally, they came to a set of white and gold double doors. They were unlocked and opened with a flourish. Garrett and Parker took a step inside and both gasped in awe.