A Beautiful Lie

“Everything I have to give, it’s yours. It’s always been yours,” Parker told him with a sob.



Garrett lifted Parker up into his arms, her hand quickly falling away from his mouth as he captured her lips and sighed once they were connected. The exchange of breaths, the slide of tongues, everything was more enhanced than it had been before. Garrett’s hand went to the back of Parker’s head, holding her in place against his mouth. He turned and walked with her to the bed, climbing onto it and laying her down in the middle, never breaking the kiss.



The towel was pulled away from Parker’s body, and Garrett’s clothes were quickly shed. The words had finally been spoken and now the actions took their place. Garrett kissed his way down Parker’s body, savoring every inch of her, finally accepting she was his. He worshiped every spot that his mouth touched, repeating the words of love after each press of his lips against her. He brought her to release with his mouth and knew he’d never hear anything sweeter than the sound of Parker shouting his name.



She pulled his body up the length of hers, needing him close and his skin touching her everywhere. She traced Garrett’s lips with her fingertips and sighed in contentment when he slowly pushed into her. They moved together, never once breaking eye contact. There was more meaning in the touches and greater significance in the way that they fit together. Everything was heightened and nothing was lost on either one of them. They both knew everything about this moment would change them forever. They both understood there was no going back.



Garrett didn’t know how he ever survived without the knowledge of Parker’s love before. He was overwhelmed with emotion as he rocked against her and pulsed inside of her. He felt like he could finally breathe but at the same time, he felt a clawing tightness in his throat with the need to keep repeating his words of love so she’d never forget.



Parker’s legs wrapped tightly around Garrett’s hips, and her arms held him firmly against her as she flew over the edge of another release, arching her back with the force of pleasure that coursed through her body. Garrett never wanted the moment to end, but she was slick and throbbed around him as he pushed deeper. She craned her neck forward and pressed her mouth against his, pulling away just enough to tell him she loved him again. Her soft words ghosted against his lips, and he came fast and hard, her name echoing into the room as he shouted his pleasure and spilled inside of her.



Parker fell asleep wrapped in Garrett’s arms, exhaustion from the day’s events and admissions finally taking its toll on her. Garrett wanted to know what exactly happened out on the dock. He wanted to know how it was possible she hadn’t been on board when it exploded.



Now more than ever Garrett knew the timing of Parker’s job offer for the CIA, her friend Lacie Butler’s death, Milo’s trip to the Dominican, and the formation of The Target Agency all happening at the same time hadn’t just been a coincidence. There was something more than a little suspicious about all of those facts lining up, and he knew that he and Parker needed to talk about those things immediately.



For now, he pulled her in close and let the woman he loved sleep. He closed his eyes and prayed that nothing would ever ruin the perfection of this night.



Chapter Eighteen



“I did board the boat. I looked around for a few minutes before I realized I left my camera in the car and needed to have it in case I came across something,” Parker explained to Garrett as he drove them back to the resort, early the following morning.



Now that everything was on the table between them, so to speak, Parker had no problem resting her hand on Garrett’s thigh while he drove, and Garrett had no problem lifting her hand to his lips so he could kiss the back of it every time they came to a stop.



After the horror of yesterday, it seemed frivolous to both of them that they had wasted so much time denying their hearts what they really wanted. It took a near-death experience for them to finally realize they needed to take hold of every moment together and cherish it. Professing their love for each other had been so easy. They’d both been so stupid and blind, wasted so much time not talking; all they wanted to do now was tell each other everything.



“I was so jealous when I came back to the resort and saw you with Cole the other night,” Garrett told Parker with a sheepish smile, glancing over at her nervously to gauge her reaction.



He’d been doing that ever since they left the hotel that morning, throwing in little tidbits of his feelings while she explained what happened the previous day. It felt good to finally say those things out loud, but at the same time, it helped ease the ache in his chest while Parker replayed the events for him. Garrett had barely slept the night before. He was afraid if he closed his eyes, he would wake up and realize he lost everything, that he'd open his eyes and find out he never pulled Parker from the water, never heard her tell him that she loved him. Garrett had held her body close and watched her sleep, felt her low, even breaths until the sun shone through the window.



Parker let her head fall back on the head rest and stared at Garrett’s profile as he navigated the streets, taking in his strong jaw line, the slope of his nose, and the way the sunlight streaming in through the front windshield of the car highlighted the dimples in his cheeks.



“You had nothing to be jealous of. Cole is like a big brother to me,” Parker told him softly.



Garrett brought her hand up to his lips once again, this time kissing the inside of her palm. She knew he was trying to keep her calm as she went through the events from the day before, and it made her love him even more. Parker knew he had been scared. When he pulled her from the water his eyes roamed frantically over her checking for injuries and he refused to leave her side or stop touching her in some way the entire night and this morning, as if to reassure himself that she was really okay. She knew it had affected him and forced him to think about losing another person in his life and that had been the catalyst to him pouring his heart out to her, but he would put all of that in the back of his mind to make sure she was okay first. Parker was finally realizing that it was all about her when it came to Garrett; that it always had been. For all these years, he always put her feelings first, always made sure she was taken care of that she was okay. That’s why he never acted on his feelings for her, because he only wanted her to be happy. He saw her happy with Milo and vowed to never do anything to ruin it for her. Parker wanted to crawl across the car and climb onto Garrett’s lap to be as close to him as possible. She wanted to roll down the window and shout her happiness to the world. But all that would have to wait. Right now they needed to concentrate on what happened at the marina.



“I noticed a stack of papers on the table in the lower cabin. They were lists of names. I flipped through them quickly but none of the names were ones I recognized. They were definitely all female though. I knew Brady would have better luck with them and I didn’t want to risk moving them, so I made my way up to the deck and got off of the boat so I could jog back to the car and get my camera, but I never made it there,” Parker explained.



“Did you see any clothing laying around that you recognized? Anything that would implicate that Milo had definitely been on the boat at some point? Just because he owned it doesn’t mean he was the one using it.”



Even though Garrett had come to terms with his best friend hiding a huge secret, it still didn’t mean he was guilty of anything―yet. There was a maid who saw him in a hotel and paperwork showing he owned a boat. Neither proved, without a shadow of a doubt, he was the one responsible for the disappearances and deaths of those girls. The whole purpose of this mission was to find out why he was killed and so far, all they’d done was uncover more questions. They could wager a guess that Milo’s death had something to do with his involvement, innocent or not, with the missing girls, but they still didn’t know for sure.



“I glanced around but the first things that caught my eye were the papers on the table. Nothing else stuck out as being familiar or something that would belong to him,” Parker explained.



Her knee bounced nervously as they sat in silence for a few minutes at an intersection. Garrett squeezed her hand gently and tried, once again, to lighten the situation and calm her nerves.



“I was hard as fucking stone when we were on the plane and you stole my gun out of its holster,” Garrett muttered. He tried to inflict irritation in his voice, but the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth gave him away.



Parker laughed and wished for what seemed like the millionth time that they hadn’t been so stubborn and would have done this a long time ago. She didn’t have to work at being happy with Garrett; it just came naturally as it always had from day one. The way they argued, the way they joked, the way they loved, and the way they took care of one another―it all boiled down to the fact that they were just meant to be together like this.



“I’ll have to remember to make an appointment at the shooting range when we get back home now that I know you have a thing for chicks with guns,” she told him with a smile.



“Not any chick with a gun, just you. And as long as we have the place to ourselves, I have no problem with that,” Garrett replied with a mischievous look on his face.



The thought of Garrett bending her over the waist-high ledge in one of the shooting booths while other patrons fired off shots around them and had no clue what was going on made Parker cross her legs and shift in her seat. She could almost feel Garrett’s breath on the back of her neck as he looked over her shoulder while she aimed at the paper target hanging down from the ceiling. She could picture the noise of firearms discharging all around, masking the sounds of him pounding into her and her echoing cries of pleasure.



Parker cleared her throat and her mind from those thoughts before she lost all of her concentration. She needed to spit this next part out quickly before the memories of it threatened to break her down.



“When I stepped off of the boat, I heard a ticking sound. Almost like someone typing on a computer. I actually laughed a little because I figured I’d been spending too much time with you and Brady lately, listening to the two of you bang away on your keyboards. I walked a few feet down the dock and the ticking sound got a bit louder and then suddenly…it stopped.”



Garrett swallowed roughly and kept his eyes on the road. He knew if he looked over at Parker, he’d have to pull the car over so he could pull her against him again to feel the heat of her skin and the beat of her heart, reminding him that she was safe.



“I did a few weeks of training with the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and they were going through bomb diffusion certification at the time. I don’t know how many videos I watched about making bombs, detonating bombs, wiring bombs…it only took me a second to recognize what that ticking sound was. I took off as fast as I could. I probably only made it a couple of feet before the explosion.”



Parker closed her eyes, took a couple of cleansing breaths, and felt Garrett give her hand another gentle squeeze.



“You know those dreams you have where someone is chasing you and no matter how hard you try or how fast you think you’re going, it’s like you’re running through quicksand or marshmallow? That’s how it felt when I heard the ticking sound. Each click seemed to echo in my ears, and it seemed like it took ten minutes for me to turn my head away from the boat and start to run,” Parker explained, opening her eyes and staring straight ahead. “Everything happened so fast after that. I saw some debris fly past me and a lot of black smoke. As soon as everything went dark from the smoke, a huge gust of wind blew my legs out from under me. Before I knew it, something smacked into the back of my head, and I was crashing into the marina and swallowing a gallon of water.”



Garrett squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles were white, and Parker watched the muscles in his jaw twitch. She pulled her hand out from under his, resting on his thigh, and moved it up to the back of his neck. She kneaded his tense muscles and ran her fingernails through his scalp.



“Do you think it was on a timer or did something you touch set it off? Garrett asked, letting Parker’s fingers calm his nerves as he attempted to clear his mind of visions of Parker being swallowed by fire and smoke.



“I don’t know. Someone had to have known we found the boat. It’s been in and out of that marina for years and all of a sudden, the day we find out about it, it explodes. I doubt it was a timer. Whoever did it wouldn't have had any idea of when or if we’d find the boat. There was no way for them to properly gauge the right time to make it go off,” Parker said. “Fuck! I wish I would have seen something that could have help us. There was something familiar about the cover sheet of that list. It feels like something I’ve seen before. But it was just a fax cover sheet with a picture of a nondescript flag up in the top right-hand corner. I don’t know why when I first looked at it I felt a sense of déjà vu. The papers didn’t even have Milo’s name on them. They were addressed to someone named Roberto.”



Garrett took his eyes off of the road for a moment to look over at Parker.



“Roberto Mils?”



Parker nodded. “Yeah, that was it. Why? Do you recognize it?”



Garrett swore under his breath and then explained who Roberto Mils was and how Brady had stumbled across that name. He told her the truth, how there was no record of Milo ever taking a domestic flight his entire life and his mother had coincidentally applied for visa applications to the Dominican right before she left Milo and his father. He even shared his concerns about everything they uncovered revolving around Parker and when she met Milo. Parker couldn’t help but stare at Garrett in amazement as he rattled off all their findings and admitted his fears. Garrett wasn’t the type of person who shared his feelings easily. The fact that he didn’t even hesitate to share all of this information with her showed her that professionally, he really did view her as an equal and not just someone he needed to protect.