The UN Series Complete Box Set (182 page)

“She is the one with the problem. So what if I arrested her? She was going nuts,” I say defensively.

“Then who cares?” he asks with a shrug.

“She cares. She thinks I was in the wrong for doing my job,” I say, pointing a finger at myself. “Then she made me horny…”

“Parker,” Slade warns. “Do not sleep with her at this wedding.”

“Geez.” That’s like the fifth person to tell me to keep my dick to myself while at this wedding. “Do you all think I’m just gonna fuck the first pair of tits that I can find today?” Hers did seem quite lovely.

“Yes,” he says simply and I sigh.

“Well, I hate to disappoint all of you, but I’m not going to. Not today anyway,” I mumble to myself.

“Good job.” He pats me on the back. “Come on. The wedding’s gonna start without us.”

*****

The actual wedding went pretty well. I could feel the heat of annoyance that ran off Katherine as I walked down the aisle with her, but she sucked it up. And so did I. I don’t know what her problem is. But believe me, I’m going to find out.

Now I sit at the wedding party table and watch the lovely couple smile at one another as they eat their cake. It’s sickening.

I can’t get my mind off the beautiful yet bitchy woman sitting next to me. She is having a much easier time ignoring me. But she did admit earlier that she was a good faker. I try to get up the courage to speak to her by taking another drink of my wine. I don’t need the liquid courage to actual speak to her; I need it to keep me calm and not be a dick, which is what I do so well. I really don’t want her to kick me in the balls like she threatened.

“Would you like to talk about what happened that day?” I ask her politely.

She looks up from her cake and stares at me as if I have two heads. “Not to you.”

“Maybe I can help you,” I offer. “I am a police officer,” I remind her as if I wasn’t the one who threw her down in her front yard and handcuffed her. “Does that type of thing happen often with you and your boyfriend?” Maybe they like to fight. Maybe it’s like their foreplay. Believe me, I have seen some crazy shit.

She places her fork on the white tablecloth and leans over to whisper, “I told you once and I’ll tell you again. Drop it. What happened was none of your business.”

I reach out to softly rub her arm, and I feel it break out in goosebumps. “Does he hurt you?” I ask looking deep into her eyes. I’m being a total ass, and she knows it.

She jerks her arm away from me. “I had just gotten home that morning and was in a bad fucking mood,” she growls.

Just gotten home? It was like seven in the morning. “What in the hell were you doing just getting home?” I demand. “Especially the way you were dressed.” I smile as I let my dickness shine through. “Been out hooking all night? And your man got tired of having to share you?” The memory of her telling me that she wanted to fuck her man’s best friend is still fresh in my mind. And what a thought that is.

I hear Samantha gasp as I watch Katherine’s eyes narrow at me. She reaches over to the table, and the next thing I know, she’s shoving her cake into my face. “Vas te faire encule salaud,” she hisses in my ear before I feel a cold liquid land in my lap. I can literally hear my cock sizzle as if she just put out a fire. Holy fuck, did she cuss at me in French? I think I just came.

I wipe the expensive icing and cream filled cake out of my eyes in time to see her walk briskly across the dance floor followed by Samantha. “Dude. That was awesome,” Slade says sitting next to me. He tries to contain his laughter but fails. “Not the part where you called her a hooker but where she slammed a piece of cake in your face and then she poured her wine in your lap. And what did she say to you? It didn’t even sound like she was speaking English,” he says through laughter.

“She wasn’t.” God, it sounded so fucking sexy. I can only imagine what dirty talk would sound like in bed with her speaking to me in French.

I look over at him with narrowed eyes as he laughs louder. “Can you imagine if you marry her?” He slams his hand over his mouth trying to quiet his laughter. “I mean, come on, I will have some great stories to tell for my best man’s speech.”

“Why in the fuck would you even think that way? Marriage?” Really? Does he even know who he’s talking to? Maybe he’s had too many glasses of wine tonight.

“Parker, man. You’re gonna have to marry a woman like that because that’s the only kind who will be able to put up with your ass.”

“She hates me.” And I wanna fuck her.

He shrugs as his laughter starts to calm. “I hated you when I first met you, too. You’ll grow on her.”

“We were just kids,” I say wondering how he could have hated me back in high school.

“You were still a dick back then.” He laughs as he sits back in his seat and lifts his wine glass to his lips.

I look over the table and see Missy storming toward me with her hands on her hips. Tate isn’t far behind her. I wipe off another piece of cake from my face and suck it off my finger. “Parker Anthony O’Hare,” she growls coming at me like a bull charging the red cape.

“Great cake,” I say smiling. “Do you ever wonder where that saying
you can’t have your cake and eat it too
came from?” I ask, truly curious. “I mean I stack icing on the shit and then add sprinkles before I eat it.” Tate chuckles and Missy turns around to look at him and he shuts his mouth.

“What the hell did you do?” she demands coming to a stop in front of us. She narrows her eyes on Slade when he starts laughing again.

“I’m so sorry…”

“I did nothing,” I say interrupting him. It’s hard to apologize when you’re laughing your ass off.

“Really?” she snaps. “She just threw cake in your face because she felt like it?”

I stand from the table and lean over it. “She threw cake in my face because she’s a fucking bitch.”

“Parker!” Tate warns.

“What?” I bark getting tired of this chick already. “She was the one who didn’t like what I had to say.”

“Then quit running your mouth,” she snaps.

I run a hand over my face. Is this be bitchy to Parker day? I would say more to Missy, but it’s not her fault she has the devil for a friend. “You’re right.” I swallow. “I’m sorry.” I go to sit down, but she stops me.

“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to Katherine.”

I start shaking my head quickly. “Parker. I am not asking you. I’m telling you to swallow whatever pride you have and say you’re fucking sorry,” she growls. I’ve never seen her so mad before. We all know her as the calm and quiet one of the group. I think Tate is corrupting her.

“Fine,” I growl.

Like a light switch flipped on, she puts a big smile on her face and stands up straight. “Thank you.” She looks over at Slade, and he lifts his glass of wine in salute and nods to her with a smart-ass grin on his face. “Let’s go; my father wants to talk to you,” she says, grabbing Tate’s hand, and walks off.

“Thought she was the nice one?” Slade leans over and whispers to me.

I sigh as I sit back into my seat. “Me, too,” I say scraping more cake off my face. “Me, too…” I repeat as I think about Katherine. I can’t get a read on her. What is she thinking? What makes her act like such a fucking bitch? I understand why she hates me so much. I arrested her. But that is my job. What if I hadn’t shown up? She was obviously winning the fight between them, but what if he had really got a hand on her? He could have hurt her. Killed her. I see those kind of events every day of my life.

I stand from my chair and pat Slade on his back. “Slow down on the wine, man,” I say as he takes another drink.

“I haven’t had the taste of alcohol in a while,” he says with a smile. “Making up for lost time.”

“What about Sadey?” I ask about his daughter as I see her bouncing around on the dance floor. She was the cutest little flower girl I had ever seen.

“My parents are taking her for the night.” He lifts his glass over to where his mother and father sit across the ballroom. He smiles. “Gonna get drunk and laid by my sexy wife tonight.”

“Your dick isn’t gonna be able to function if you drink too much,” I inform him with a smirk.

“Oh, it’ll work,” he says with confidence, and I roll my eyes.

I walk away from the table and make my way back to the girls’ dressing room, still trying to get the cake off my face, figuring that’s where Katherine ran off to.

“Is Katherine in here?” I ask placing my head in the room.

“She just had to leave,” Sam says not looking up from her phone.

“What?” Shit, Missy is gonna kill me. The reception isn’t over, and I just made one of her bridesmaids run out of the church.

“She had to go to the hospital.”

“Why?” I step into the room. “What was wrong with her?” I ask truly concerned.

Sam looks up from her phone as if annoyed by my questions. “The hospital called her. Her father had been admitted.”

“What’s wrong with her father?”

She places her hand on her hip and narrows her bright green eyes at me. “Why do you have to be such a prick and then act like you care?”

I run a hand over the back of my neck. “I do care. Stop being a …” She lets out a growl. “Just please tell me what is going on,” I ask nicely, and she drops her hand from her hip.

“It’s not my business to tell. You wanna know? Go and ask her yourself.” And with that, she turns around and goes back to texting on her phone.

“Maybe you should get off your phone and go take care of your drunk-ass husband,” I say, before slamming the door shut.

I make my way back out to my reserved table and sit down. I take a drink of my wine as Josh elbows me in the side. “What?” I growl.

I look over at him and see he has one of his and Courtney’s twin boys on his lap. Drool runs down his chin as he chews on what looks to be a dog toy. Gross.

He leans over and whispers, “That Katherine seems crazy.”

I grunt. “She is. But you know how much my cock likes crazy,” I say with a smile.

He chuckles “You better be careful or it may cost you your dick.”

“Ain’t that the truth!” Slade chimes in.

*****

KATHERINE

“What happened?” I ask in a rush as I enter the hospital. “Where is he?” I ask a nurse sitting at the nursing station.

As soon as she sees me, she jumps up and comes out from behind the desk. She rattles off a room number as she continues to lead me to it. I run after her with my heart pounding, thinking the worse. I should have never left him, but I did. I left him with a nurse. Someone trained to care for him. As soon as I walked away from Parker, my phone rang and it was the hospital letting me know that my father had been admitted. The nurse I hired for the day had brought him in. That’s all I was told over the phone.

We slow down and she pulls back a curtain. I walk in and see him sitting up in a bed. A nurse stands beside his bed trying to put the leads for the heart monitor on him.

“Dad?” I ask, walking over to him. “What happened?”

His dark blue eyes look over at me, and it breaks my heart when I see him frown. He has no idea who I am.

“What happened?” I ask the nurse standing in front of me.

“He fell down outside on the porch,” he informs me.

I look down at him. “What were you doing outside?” Where in the hell was the nurse?

“I wanted to go out and see the garden.” He finally speaks.

“Dad, we don’t have a garden,” I inform him softly. He and my mother always had one. She took care of it. After she had left us, I tried to take care of it but I couldn’t keep anything alive. So, I gave up, and when we moved to the house we live in now fifteen years ago, I didn’t even try to put one in. I was eleven when we moved in, and he was over her, or so I thought.

“Jules,” he says with a smile and my heart breaks. Jules was my mother. The very same woman who left us so many years ago. The one he always sees. She’s the one who he remembers. Guess those were better times. He met her when he was in France while on vacation. She was a beautiful French woman who fell in love with the American. Three months later, they were married. She moved back to the states with him and then a couple of years later they had me. I changed everything. I made their life hard. I guess the love faded. I was six when my mother left us.

I stand by the front door staring at my mother’s suitcases. “Where are we going, Momma?” I ask looking up at her.

She bends down on her knees and pushes my hair back from my face. She hasn’t given me my bath yet today. We never leave the house until I have a bath.

“Never settle, Katherine.”

“What do you mean, Momma?”

She points a finger at my chest. “You are beautiful. You are strong. You don’t need a man. Remember that. You don’t need anyone, Katherine.” She gives me a smile yet tears fall from her eyes. How can she be happy and sad at the same time? “Most importantly, remember to leave before you are left.” She pulls me in for a hug and I hug her tightly. “I love you,” she whispers.