Page 11 of Parker

“Yep. About an hour ago.”

“Everything arrived okay?”

“Yep. Good job.”

Reeve was in charge of packing and shipping all of our conference and marketing materials to Las Vegas last week.

“You have enough of everything?”

“They’re expecting twenty-five thousand attendees over the next few days, so there’sneverenough…but I’ll be fine. I can always tell them to scan the QR code on the banner or business cards.”

“You’ll make it work,” says Reeve. “You always do.”

“What areyouup to this week, babycakes?” I ask her.

“Tackling my annual reading list,” she says. “Paw-Paw’s been making me a fire every morning in the lodge. I snuggle up and read all day.”

“Lucky duck,” I tell her. “Sounds like heaven.”

“So…” she says, “have you run into anyone you know? Anyone especially annoying?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I saw Quinn in Juneau. We sat together on the plane.”

“On purpose?”

“He changed seats with someone else just to bug me.”

“Classic Quinn. He’s such a jerk.”

“He is…”

“Huh.”

“Huh…what?”

“You’re usually like, ‘Yeah, he is! He’s the biggest asshole who ever lived!’”

“Well, he is, of course,” I tell her. “But…okay, so, earlier, we were in this VIP Lounge sitting at two separate tables, right? And these two rich bitches come into the lounge, and they were giving him a hard time. They were making fun of him for drinking beer and not, like, scotch-on-the-rocks or something. It was…I don’t know…”

“Oh, no! Someone gave Quinn Morgan a hard time?” she asks, all sassy. “Good. He got a little taste of his own medicine. He deserves it.”

“Fromus, he deserves it.”

“What do you mean?”

I plop back down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. I recognize the feeling I’m having about the situation between Quinn and those girls, but it surprises me a little bit.

“Parker?” prompts Reeve.

I sigh. “Okay. So, you know how we can say whatever we want to Hunter, Tanner, and Sawyer? Like, we can call them jerks or assholes or call them out on their bullshit?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“But how would you feel if some other girl—who wasn’t you, me, or Harper—did that?”

“Pissed. Ready to throw down.”

“Right. Like, those boys are our family, we can say whatever we want. But if someone outside of our circle treated them like shit, it’d be unacceptable, right?”

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