Yeah. Oh. “Hey, I’ve got to put Minerva to bed. After I’m done buttoning her up, though, do you want to get a beer or something? I could meet you back at the motel in a few hours.”
He could already see it coming now. Steve’s next assignment for him was going to be to get close to Marley. Win her trust. Hell, maybe even to convince her he was hot for her. Not that something like that would be too much of a stretch for him. She really was an attractive woman. But he couldn’t take her to bed for a little out-of-school pillow talk. Even he had his limits. He would have to find another way to make her talk.
He was startled out of his grim thoughts by her unsure answer to his invitation. “A beer? Um. I guess so. Yeah. Sure.”
She was cute when she got flustered. “Great,” he replied, a little startled to realize he really meant it. She was about as far from his usual type as a girl could get. And yet, there was something about her...
* * *
Marley watched Archer stride away. She figured she’d earned the right to admire the hot ass she’d just saved. Truth be told, she wasn’t that worried about the director’s reaction to their unscheduled filming. Turnow was going to love the footage she’d shot, or she wasn’t half the photographer she thought she was, and he wasn’t half the visionary everyone said he was.
“That man has one fine caboose.”
She looked up sharply at the tall, lean, African-American man who’d stopped beside her to ogle Archer. “Hi. I’m Marley. Camerawoman.”
“Tyrone. Makeup. Damn, girl, you got good taste. Everyone on the crew’s talking about the new, hot-stick helicopter pilot. Did I hear him invite you out for drinks?”
“It’s just a beer. A guy like him would never be really interested in a girl like me.”
The makeup artist threw her a withering glare. “Why the hell not?”
“Look at me. I’m as plain as mud and he’s...he’s...godlike.”
Tyrone studied her critically. Reached out to grasp her chin and turn her face side to side. “Good bones. Great skin. Best features are your sweet eyes and those divine lips. With a little Tyrone magic, you’d be pretty smokin’ hot, yourself. You’ve got a Marilyn Monroe quality to you.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh aloud or snort in disbelief. She settled for asking, “Are you high?”
“Did you just diss my artistic mojo?”
She wrinkled her nose. “C’mon. A guy like him would go for one of the lead actresses. Or a high-fashion model. Someone sexy and spectacular.”
“You ain’t never gonna be tall enough for the runway, sweetie. But you could definitely give any model a run for her money in the sexy-thang department. My room—number 208. Six o’clock. Be there.” With a snap of his fingers, the makeup artist turned and strode away.
Was Tyrone right? Did she maybe have a shot at Archer, after all? But then reality slammed back into her. She was a cat-lady-in-training. She wore baggy sweatpants and played computer games in her free time. Every guy she knew thought of her as a little-sister surrogate. She had no social life, heck, no social skills. She watched life through her cameras, she didn’t actually live it.
Mina was the adventurous sister. The one who grabbed life by the horns and wrestled it into submission—for better or worse. As for her, she was the...other...sister, as quiet as Mina was loud, as shy as Mina was brash.
A psychologist would probably have a field day analyzing her and Mina. He would probably say she was compensating for her out-of-control sibling.
Marley shrugged. After all her bad luck with guys, she was seriously starting to wonder if she was the sister with something wrong going on.
Six o’clock came and went, and she sat on the bed in her motel room, morosely munching on chocolate-covered raisins. The crew would be gathering at the buffet downstairs to eat dinner—the production company had rented out the entire motel for the next two months—and then most of them would adjourn to the motel’s sports bar. It was the only drinking hole in this godforsaken corner of nowhere. Only the folks with early showtimes or those handling explosives would skip what had become the daily happy-hour routine.
No way did she need Archer buying her a beer in front of the whole crew. They would rib her about it forever, and there was no need to embarrass him, either. With her luck, he’d keel over dead from an aneurism as soon as she got near him.
No, she would just stay in her room. Some hot actress would move in on him this evening, and by tomorrow he’d have forgotten his offer. It was for the best this way.
Angry pounding exploded against her door and she leaped about a foot straight up in the air. “Girl, you in there? Open up, you scrawny little white-meat chicken!”
Tyrone. Crap.
* * *
“Tell me again why you think this girl is your saboteur?” Archer asked Steve skeptically.
“Our security guys have gone over the footage from the security cameras. Every single time there’s an accident, she was seen immediately before the accident in the exact place the sabotage occurs. What are the odds that it’s a coincidence six—no, seven times now, if you count your helicopter today?”
Archer frowned. It just didn’t feel right. She was pleasant, struck him as a little naive, if anything, and didn’t seem to be the type to be hiding a thing. Either he was right, or she was one hell of an actress.
“What about someone high up in the movie’s production? If this film shuts down, the insurance company would have to make a hefty payout to the producers. Isn’t Adrian Turnow the executive producer on this project?”
Steve frowned. “He doesn’t strike me as the type.”
“What? And this girl strikes you as a vicious saboteur? Have you done a background check on Turnow? Or Marley for that matter? Found anything that would explain why either of them would do all this stuff?”
“She’s got a juvie record,” Steve replied.
“What did she do?”
“No idea. It’s sealed.”
Archer shrugged. “I’ve got a sealed juvie record. After Mom died, I had a pretty wild stretch there for a few months.”
Steve pulled a face. “Yeah, I remember, little brother. I did everything I could to straighten you out.”
“Is that what you called pounding on me like your own personal punching bag?”
“We all had anger issues to work out.”
“You just figured out yours faster than the rest of us.”
His brother snorted. “Nah. I was just told by a justice of the peace to join the Marines or go to jail sooner than the rest of you.”
“Yeah, well, Shyanne and Lyra turned out okay.”
