“Didn’t it ever feel like they were trying to suffocate you?”
“With what? Love? No. I knew I was lucky to have them. Hell, I still know it. What about you? Aren’t you close to your parents?”
Parker winced and flipped open the planning binder, clearly wanting to dodge the question. “Oh, come on!” Jade gripped. “I just gave you some personal details about my life. It’s only fair that you join in on the sharing.”
Parker continued to flip through the binder as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world, but Jade didn’t believe for two seconds that her planning skills were that good. Nope, the man was completely sealed off.
“You know, Parker, being a resident of Half Moon Key means that I am very good at uncovering mysteries. It’s all the training that comes from living in one hell of a small town.”
He laughed. “If you lot were so good at uncovering mysteries, don’t you think that you would have been able to discover why the electricity in your town is so weird?”
Jade shrugged. “It doesn’t bug us half as much as it bugs people who visit and people who are looking to settle down in Half Moon Key.”
He gaped at her. “Are you telling me that you people are so crafty that you actually don’t get that shit fixed because it thins the herd of people who could possibly and eventually settle down in Half Moon Key?”
Jade giggled and dared to look across the car at him. She had to keep her eyes on the winding road that led them out of the mountains and away from Half Moon Key and to the big city about two hours away. Jade knew it was one of the big cities that people all over the country knew about, but she didn’t like thinking about its name. It took some of the mystery out of her hometown, and if there was something Jade appreciated about Half Moon Key, it was that she could safeguard the mysterious place.
“Maybe we like keeping to ourselves, and letting strangers come into our town is always dangerous.”
“Because they bring trouble,” Parker ventured.
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, come on. We are in the middle of the wooded mountains with a nice little lake. It’s basically the textbook description of a place where troublemakers go to hide from whatever bullshit problem they have created. If we make life a little harder, then the chances that they stick around are slim to none.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you wanna get rid of me?” he asked with a low chuckle.
“Yep!” she lied.
Of course, there was no way in hell she was going to admit to Parker Dawson that he was the hottest man that had ever set foot in Half Moon Key and that she would have been devastated to let him leave without at least …
She stopped the thought short. She didn’t want to finishthatidea. Not only would it make her mother squeal with delight, but it was also super dangerous to think that she could fall for a man she knew so little about. A man like Parker wasn’t just your usual man.
There was clearly something special about him.
“Well, well, well, I shall keep that in mind,” Parker commented with another chuckle.
“Maybe if you were to tell me a bit about you, I would tell you when the internet goes down.”
“Oh, really?” he asked, his voice with a hint of curiosity in it. “You got it. What do you want to know?”
“Well,” she said, playing for time as she tried to figure out what she wanted to know. “For starters, are you an only child?”
“That can’t be what you are longing to know!”
“Answer the question, Parker.” She raised her chin, resolved.
“Fine, fine. No. I’m not an only child. I have two older siblings, a sister and a brother. Hannah and Stafford.”
“How was that? Having two older siblings?”
“What? Having siblings or sharing with you?”
She giggled. “Either. Both. Take your pick.”
“I thought I was supposed to use this time to get familiar with the planning binder,” he pointed out.
“Nope. You are not wiggling out of this conversation now that you've started. Tell me what it was like growing up the youngest of three.”
He heaved a deep and heavy sigh. “Well, fine. Hannah is the eldest, and she was always a little bit intense, even by my family’s standards. She and Stafford only had a year in between them, so they were always closer. My arrival wasn’t planned. My parents thought they were done having children, then seven years after Stafford was born, boom. There I was.”