Parker Sawyer was a bomb.
I don't mean a bombshell, though she could fit that bill when she wanted to. No, Parker was a bomb, as inan incendiary device. She fell into my life out of nowhere and exploded, changing everything. My mind, my heart, my life. The goals I thought I had and the dreams I thought I wanted. Nothing was the same after Parker.
And now I'm here, again, Parker Sawyer falling like a bomb into my life once more. This time into my bed. In the moonlight, her skin is incandescent, her hair almost silver, her mysterious gold and green eyes closed in sleep. She reminds me of a fairy, of some mythical creature who lives in moonlight, who'll turn to dust at the first touch of dawn.
But Parker isn't a mythical creature. She's a woman. And now that I've touched her, made love to her, she's mine. I know what I suspected all those years ago. This woman was made for me.
The night I fell in love with her, I let her get away. This time, there's no escape. Parker can run—she'll bolt the first chance she gets—but it won't work.
I have a plan, and this time, when all is said and done, Parker will finally belong to me.
ChapterTwo
NASH
Parker Sawyer blew up my life the day she married Tyler.
She blew it up again the day she finally left him.
Between those two events, five years went by. Five long years in which I saw Parker only a handful of times. Each one was a punch to my gut. The first came at my father's funeral, only months after her marriage.
My father died unexpectedly, as vigorous and sharply intelligent at seventy as he had been in my youth. It turned out his heart was less vigorous than we'd thought. On a night like any other, he'd been sitting beside my mother reading a book before bed. She got up to get him a cup of tea, and when she came back, the steaming mug in her hands, he was gone.
We'd been at odds the last few years before he died. He wanted me to join the company he'd built, always dreaming he'd hand it over to his son. I wasn't interested. To his disgust, I'd fallen in love with code before I was old enough to drive. When I earned a spot at MIT, he'd cut me off, fully believing I'd balk at figuring out how to pay for college and come crawling back, my hand outstretched for a tuition check to the college of his choice.
You'd think he'd have known me better than that. My heart in my throat but determined to make it work, I'd taken on terrifyingly huge student loans and dove into my studies. I once heard someone saywhen you have a choice, always bet on yourself. That's what I did, starting my first company out of my dorm room, then leveraging that into another opportunity, and another. Dorm room startups were all over the place, but only a handful got anywhere. Mine did. My heart might have belonged to code, but my head for business came straight from my father.
Somewhere between the day I'd driven north to Cambridge and the end of my sophomore year, my father and I had mended fences. He called to congratulate me after reading an article about my latest venture. He didn't offer to pay my horrendous student loans, but he did give me something even better. He told me he was proud of me.
After I graduated and moved West to Silicon Valley he threw another tantrum, claiming I'd promised to work for him after college instead of fooling around with these startups. We both knew I hadn't promised any such thing, but that hadn't stopped my father from shouting down the house to get his way. I walked out and another few years went by.
We were like that, hot and cold. I was his favorite son and the son he refused to discuss, depending on his mood and how annoyed he was at Tyler. Eventually, I reached a point where I was able to love him without expecting his approval. In the months after Tyler's marriage, he'd been pressing me to work for him again, maybe finally realizing that Tyler would never fill that role.
I thought we had time to work it out, and I'd ignored him. It never occurred to me that the clock would stop. That one day I'd get a call from my mother, hear the tears in her voice, and learn he was dead. I was in shock. I couldn't get it through my head that he was gone. That we'd never have time to mend what had broken between us.
I came home at my mother's call and took charge. She was lost, and Tyler was sucking up all the attention he could, riding the drama like this was a soap opera and not our lives. I couldn't tell how much he truly cared we'd lost our father. My guess was, not that much.
At the funeral, he flirted with the caterer in plain sight, ignoring his wife completely. Parker appeared not to notice. Parker stayed by my mother's side, holding her hand, often whispering in her ear, quiet and calm, her eyes shadowed, clearly grieving where her husband was not.
I let her take care of my mother and I took over everything else, handling the funeral arrangements, helping my mother with paperwork, and all the financial details that had been my father's domain. Parker never interfered, focused on making sure my mother was eating, helping her choose her clothes for the funeral, doing anything else my mother needed to function in those first awful days.
Watching them together, I realized that my mother hadn't just gotten a daughter-in-law when Parker married Tyler. In Parker, she'd gained a true daughter, one who loved her far more than her youngest son ever could.
Parker and I barely spoke. She tended to my mother and I handled everything else, but every time my eyes met Parker's golden-hazel gaze, hers filled with concern, warming me to the core of my grieving heart. In the months since her wedding, I'd almost convinced myself–again–that she was nothing special. And–again–the second I saw her, I knew that was bullshit. She wasn't just special, she was everything. Everything exceptmine.
Not that I could do anything about it. Even if I'd been inclined to seduce my brother's wife under my mother's roof, I sure as hell wasn't going to do it when my father had just died. Even I wasn't that much of an asshole.
I wish I could say the same for Tyler, who disappeared down a hallway with the caterer halfway through the reception after the service. I glanced around to find Parker at my mother's side, unaware her husband was fucking someone else only feet away. I wouldn't be the one to tell her. Maybe if I hadn't wanted her for myself.
As it was, I couldn't be the one to break them apart. Parker had chosen Tyler, and while my brother might not take his marriage vows seriously, I did. I'd fucked a lot of women in my time, but never the married ones. I wasn't going to start with my sister-in-law.
Tyler reappeared less than fifteen minutes later, his hair a mess, shoulders loose and his mouth twisted in a smirk that said he knew something no one else knew. Parker was too absorbed in my mother to notice and my mother was in no shape to pick up on anything.
Did Parker ever drop the serene shell encasing her? Did she let out that spark inside her with her husband? Did he know how to fan it into flames?
Did Tyler see what I saw in Parker? If she'd been married to any other man I would have sworn he did. How could he miss her secret wildness? The mischief, the adventure. The hunger for more. But Parker was married to Tyler, not any other man, and while I knew he valued her enough to have married her, I'd bet every penny I had that he'd never bothered to look beneath her surface, never seen her depths.
Parker was a woman waiting to become, and when she became whatever she was destined to be, she would be magnificent. I don't know how I knew that. I just did.
