She reached for the doorknob. Holding her breath, she slowly turned it, surprised when the door opened. The last thing she needed was to be accused of breaking and entering. But since the door was unlocked, she couldn’t be accused of breaking in, and if she stayed on the front step, she wouldn’t be entering.
“Hello?” The interior was dark, the only light coming from the remains of a fire in the hearth. “Dex? Are you here?”
If he was going to be this stubborn, then maybe she’d need to be a bit more aggressive. Besides, he wouldn’t call the police, would he? “I’m not breaking and entering, I just have a few more things I want to say.”
She switched on a lamp and then walked slowly through the cottage. But Dex was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d gone out for a walk.
It was cold and rainy outside. He’d have to come home sooner or later. She’d wait in the car until she saw the lights come on, and then she’d knock again.
Marlie walked back out to her car and crawled inside, pulling her jacket around her to ward off the chill. He couldn’t stay out that long in weather like this...unless a friend had picked him up and they’d gone out. She groaned. He could be gone until the pubs closed.
Her cell phone rang and she pulled it out of her pocket. “Hello?”
“Miss Jenner, this is Ian Stephens.”
Marlie suppressed another groan. What else was going to go wrong? With her luck, Aileen Quinn was probably having second thoughts, too. “Hello. How are you?”
“I’m fine. I hope I’m not ringing too late, but I wanted to let you know that I got all of Miss Quinn’s photos on a disk. You can pick them up tomorrow or I can drop them at your hotel.”
“If you could drop them off, that would be great,” Marlie said. “I’m a little busy with other matters.”
“And Miss Quinn has asked if we could move the first interview forward one day. She had a conflict come up. And I think she’s excited to get started.”
“Yes,” Marlie said. “That would be fine. So we’ll be there Friday instead of Saturday.”
“That will do. Have a pleasant evening and I’ll see you soon.”
Marlie hung up and slipped the phone into her pocket. She leaned back and closed her eyes. She had to make this work. She’d already told her bosses at Back Bay she could get Dex Kennedy to sign on to the project, and they’d already begun making plans based on her overly optimistic claim.
How could she go back to them and tell them she’d failed? They’d lose all faith in her. They already had their doubts. There was only one choice—she’d have to convince him, no matter what it took.
* * *
THE DAMP WIND stung his cheeks and Dex shoved his hands farther into his pockets. He was chilled to the bone but he didn’t feel the cold. All he wanted was the numbness that it brought.
The moon had come out from behind the clouds, illuminating the wet road in front of him. He knew this route so well in the dark, navigating from cottage to cottage by the light spilling out of the windows.
The weather matched his mood—foul and dark. He’d paced the cottage for a full ten minutes, regretting his decision to send Marlie Jenner away. Then the walls had begun to close in and he had to escape.
If he walked long enough and fast enough, he’d exhaust himself and maybe get a little sleep. His encounter with Marlie certainly hadn’t done anything to relax him. After her reaction to his invitation for a drink, he realized the mistake he’d made. He’d assumed the attraction was mutual, but she’d obviously only been flirting with him in the hopes it might help her cause. He’d misread her interest.
He’d been so long without a woman that he couldn’t even read the signs anymore. In eight months, he hadn’t even considered indulging in the pleasure of a woman’s company. And now, suddenly, he was desperate for another chance to touch her, to lose himself in the taste of her mouth or the scent of her hair.
Because in that single moment when their lips had met, he’d felt as if a door had been thrown open and the sun had shone through with blinding white light that had warmed his soul. He’d sensed his life might finally get back on track, if he could just spend a little time standing in that light.
What was it about her that he found so alluring? She was pretty, that much was evident. He couldn’t take his eyes off her face. But there was something else that drew him to her. She had an innocence, a naïveté, that he usually didn’t find in the women he dated.
How easy would it be to fall into a relationship with her, and for all the wrong reasons? She was just like that bottle of sleeping pills, a drug that made all his problems disappear, a drug he’d soon come to crave, knowing all the while that he was just medicating the problem, not solving it.
Then there was the matter of professional ethics. He’d never mixed his personal life with his professional life. It was a strict rule that he and Matt had made for themselves and it was part of the reason they had been so successful. When they were immersed in a project, there were never any distractions.
And if that wasn’t reason enough, Dex couldn’t drag her into his messy life. No one, not even someone as tempting as her, deserved that. He’d done the right thing in sending her away. He needed more time to heal.
But how much more? Dex wondered. When would he start to feel this darkness lift? There were days when he could barely crawl out of bed.
And yet the moment he’d set eyes on Marlie, all of that had been forgotten. So maybe he just needed a woman, any woman, to distract him for a bit. Any woman except Marlie Jenner.
As he neared the cottage, Dex noticed a car parked on the road just outside the garden gate. He squinted in the darkness, trying to make out who it might be. Had Claire decided to drive out and keep him company? The moon emerged again and he made out the silhouette of Marlie’s Fiat.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. As he approached the car, he wondered if she’d decided to wait inside. But the cottage was dark, just as he’d left it.
He peered into the window and saw Marlie, curled up in the front seat, her eyes closed. Dex rapped softly on the window and she jerked, startled by the sound. As she looked out at him, he circled his finger, silently asking her to roll the window down.
“What are you doing out here?” he demanded.
“Waiting for you,” Marlie said, rubbing her eyes and sending him a weak smile.
“I thought we’d settled everything earlier.”
“You didn’t let me make my presentation,” she snapped. “I’m not going to let you say no until you’ve listened to what I have to say.”
Dex circled around the car, but instead of going back inside the cottage, he waited for her to unlock the passenger-side door. When she did, he got inside, settling himself into the seat.
He rubbed his hands together to warm them. “It’s not that I wouldn’t like to work with you,” Dex murmured. “I just don’t think I’d be any good to anyone right now. I’ve sort of lost my focus and I’m not sure I’m going to get it back.”
“You won’t know unless you try,” Marlie said.
“I know that I just spent three hours in the rain trying to get you out of my head.”
She drew a sharp breath and glanced away, rattled by his declaration. “Maybe you’re feeling guilty that you didn’t give me a chance?”
Dex chuckled. “What I’m feeling has nothing to do with guilt.” He twisted around in the small seat and faced her. “Tell me, why are you so determined to make this film? Beyond fame and fortune, which I can promise you, you won’t find making documentary films. So there must be a reason. Why this film? Why Aileen Quinn?”