“Good. Let me get your father for you.”
For a moment Parker thought her mother was gone, but then she said, “And, Parker, remember I love you.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
She waited on the line, trying to psych herself up for another conversation with her father. It wasn’t going to be as easy as her conversation with her mother had been.
Once upon a time, her father had known her every thought, her every dream. He’d hold her on his lap and they’d really talk.
Parker felt a stab of regret that those days were long since gone. Now they barely spoke. And when they did, her father spent his time issuing ultimatums, and she spent her time ignoring every one of them.
“I’m going to put you through to him. Try not to fight.”
“Mom, how can you think we’d fight?”
Again, her mother snorted.
These days, despite any good intentions not to, whenever she and her father spoke, fighting was inevitable.
The situation broke her heart, but she didn’t know what to do to make her father accept that she would never be able to be what he wanted.
To be who he wanted.
Parker just wasn’t princess material, no matter how much her father desired it.
“Marie Anna,” he said in his rich, cultured voice as he came onto the line.
When she’d been little she’d loved to listen to him talk. It didn’t matter what he’d said, she’d just loved the way his voice rumbled in his chest.
“Parker, Papa. I’m Parker now.”
She’d stopped being Princess Marie Anna when she escaped Eliason. She’d come to her mother’s home in the United States looking to leave her royal life behind.
Erie was a small city on the shore of Lake Erie, and there she went to college as Parker.
Just Parker.
At first that name had been a cloak of anonymity, but now it more aptly fit who she really was.
Parker Dillon.
A waitress at Monarch’s.
A normal, everyday sort of woman.
Ordinary.
“You’ll always be my little Marie Anna,” her father assured her. “My princess.”
Parker sighed. Fighting with her father was as if pounding her head into a brick wall. The wall couldn’t give, and she ended up with a headache.
“What did you need, Papa?” she asked.
“I need my daughter to come home.”
Tenacious. Her father was the most tenacious, single-minded man she’d ever met. That ability to set a goal and not lose sight of it made him a great leader. But it sometimes made him a difficult parent because once he had an idea, he couldn’t let it go.
Of course, her mother claimed Parker was just like him in that respect.
She smiled at the thought.
“I love you, Papa,” she said softly before she added, “but I’m not coming home.”
“Your fiancé is waiting for you. He misses you.”
“He doesn’t know me to miss me.”
“Tanner is anxious to start planning your wedding.”
“And if he doesn’t know me enough to miss me, he certainly doesn’t know me well enough to marry me—which is a good thing since I’m not marrying him.”
She hadn’t seen Tanner in years. What she remembered about him was a gap-toothed smiling boy who liked to torment her. Tanner, though he teased her, also made her smile.
A joker.
He’d been a sort of sweet boy.
But he wasn’t a boy any longer. He was a stranger. He was a prince. She wasn’t sure of anything about him any longer except for the fact that he wasn’t her fiancé, no matter what her father decreed.
“Arranged marriages haven’t been in vogue for a century or more, and I don’t think I’m the one to bring them back into style,” she said, trying to joke. Her father didn’t respond, so she added, “I’m sorry, Papa, but I can’t marry him. I’m happy here. I even have a job.”
“It’s beneath your station to work as a waitress.”
“Hey, I’ve worked as a clerk for Cara over in the bookstore. Is that better?”
“No,” her father assured her. “It isn’t better at all. You don’t need to work. You’re needed at home.”
“Yes, I do need to work. Mom had all kinds of jobs when she was in school, before you met her. And I’m a good waitress.” Parker crossed her fingers as she said the words. She was working at being adequate, and that was good enough.
Though she’d better get better…fast. Her father’s cutting off access to her funds meant not only was she broke but the partnership wasn’t as financially solvent as it should be. According to her projections, they should be operating in the black sometime in the next few months, but without an occasional influx of cash, the stores were walking a narrow financial line. Working as a waitress not only gave Parker an income but meant the store didn’t have to pay benefits to a full-time employee, and so it saved them money, as well.
It was a win-win situation in Parker’s eyes.
“As for working,” she continued, “it’s a necessity. You see, someone froze my accounts and canceled my charge cards. I have bills to pay, just like everyone else.”
“I cut off your money so you would come home, not so you would get a job,” he explained.
Parker could hear the exasperation in his voice and felt another stab of sorrow that she was the one putting it there.
“Papa, we’ve been over this a dozen times. Neither of us is going to give an inch, so we might as well drop it. I’m not marrying Tanner. I’m not coming home. And surprisingly, I like working.”
She thought of the tray she’d almost spilled today and the dark-haired man who’d rescued her. She smiled. “Some days I like it better than others, but no matter what, it’s satisfying.”
Her father didn’t say anything.
“Did you want anything new?” she finally asked.
“Tanner will come to America and get you, since you’re being stubborn and won’t come home.”
“No,” Parker insisted. “No. It would be a waste of time. Don’t you send him here, Papa. I’m not marrying him. I can’t believe you thought arranging some archaic betrothal to a virtual stranger would be a way to entice me back.”
“Your grandparents had an arranged marriage. My father used to swear it was love at first sight. That’s how our family falls—hard and fast.”
“You found Mother on your own, and I plan to find my future husband—if I ever marry—on my own, as well. Don’t send Tanner.”
“He’s already on his way. He should arrive tomorrow. He’s on flight 1129, arriving at the airport at eight-thirty in the evening. Make sure you’re on time.”
“On time for what?” Parker asked.
“On time to pick him up, of course.”
“I am not picking him up.”
“Young lady, it would be rude to make your fiancé take a cab from the airport. You might not want to be a princess, but I know that even someone who is not royalty has to have