Page 132 of Wicked Beautiful (Wicked Games 1)
He’s quiet for a moment, and then the bitterness is gone from his voice. “She misses you, too.”
I close my eyes. “I can’t see her, not yet. It’s too fresh. And besides, if I go to Laredo, I’ll want to go…I’ll want to see…”
I don’t finish my thought, but he knows who I’m talking about. With a new, infinitely soft tone in his voice, he whispers, “She’s so beautiful. Like her mother.”
My chest tightens. Fresh tears threaten to fall. “You went to the school?”
“Yes. Sat in the parking lot like a creeper, staring through binoculars. Thank goodness your mother was with me, or I’d really have felt like a perv.”
Parker and my mother, staring at Eva through binoculars. Though I’ve done it myself countless times, the thought makes me unbearably sad.
“In a few years she’ll be eighteen, a legal adult,” says Parker softly.
I nod.
“Which means she can make her own decisions…about things like meeting her birth parents.”
My head snaps up. I stare at him unblinking, my pulse a freight train speeding out of control.
He says, “It’s worth a shot.”
“What if she doesn’t know she’s adopted?” I ask breathlessly.
“She talked about it on her Facebook page; she knows. She thinks it’s cool, like she was chosen, not something to be ashamed of. She sounds remarkably well-adjusted. I think her parents did an amazing job raising her.”
“B-but if I meet her, I’ll be exposed…no one can know who I am—”
“You’re Isabel Diaz of Laredo, Texas, daughter of Tómas and Guadalupe,” he says gently. “That’s all anyone ever needs to know. No one in Laredo or anywhere else knows about your connection to Victoria Price, or to Ana Garcia. And besides, it’s the truth. You are Isabel. I think we can both agree that the truth is a much better alternative to lying.”
Possibilities spin madly inside my head. The future is suddenly so much brighter, so much more full, than it was merely a few minutes ago. “But your political career, your run for Congress. The tabloids will go crazy—”
Parker laughs. “That was over before it even began. I abandoned everything else when I started to search for you. I’ve been living in Mexico full-time for the past few months so I could concentrate on finding you.” When he sees my look of distress, he’s quick to add, “Because I finally got my priorities straight. Opening two new restaurants a year, dating a different girl every week, aspiring to political office…that was all driven by emptiness. I was trying to distract myself from loneliness and self-loathing, I know that now. I didn’t give up anything that really mattered, and you didn’t ruin my life by leaving, OK?”
His words are emphatic, and ring with truth. I feel a little relieved, until something else occurs to me. “She’ll want to know why we gave her up for adoption.”
There’s a shrug in his voice. “Because we were teenagers. We wanted her to have a better life than we could give her.”
“But—”
Parker silences me with a kiss. “We’ll figure it out as we go. Nothing’s set in stone. We have a few years to figure out logistics, if that’s even what Eva ultimately decides she wants to do. When the time comes, we can reach out to her through the adoption agency to arrange a meeting and see how she responds. OK?”
Shaking, I lower my head to his chest. “OK.”
We’re quiet forever, listening to the sounds o
f the night, until finally I take a deep breath and whisper, “So what happens now?”
Parker lifts my head. He sweeps his thumbs over my cheeks. He looks at me in silence until, almost imperceptibly, a smile begins to curve his lips.
“Now I think I should produce that ring I promised you.”
I should probably go get my medicine from the bathroom; what’s happening to my heart doesn’t seem quite normal.
I say, “Threatened me with, I think you mean.”
“Yes. Excuse me. And before you say no, I need to tell you that it’s a ten-carat flawless stone, round brilliant cut, with tapered baguette side stones in a platinum setting. It’s quite impressive, even by your standards. It cost more than your Rolls-Royce.”
My laugh is feeble. “Only ten carats? How miniscule. Tiffany?”
