Free A Beautiful Lie by Tara Sivec Page A

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