Wow. Steve had really mastered that whole quiet, menacingly restrained thing since the last time they’d been together. In his younger days, Steve would have yelled his head off. Archer sincerely hoped Marley was taking note and figuring out that now would be a good time to lie low for a while and cut out the shenanigans.
The ex-Marine growled, “Get out of my office. I’ll take this up with Adrian. He can decide what to do with you two mavericks.”
Marley opened her mouth to say something—whether an apology or more arguments on his behalf, Archer couldn’t tell. But he recognized all too well the tight set of Steve’s jaw. It was time to make like the wind and blow. He gripped Marley by the elbow and hustled her out of Prescott’s office in spite of her protests.
He hauled her all the way out of the hangar and out of their boss’s earshot before turning her loose and demanding, “Why did you leap to my defense and not tell him what really happened? What the hell was that?”
“That was me saving your ass,” she snapped.
“But— Why?” If she was the saboteur, why didn’t she let him take the hit for not finding the flight control problem before they took off? Wouldn’t it hurt the movie more to have a highly experienced pilot like him get fired? If she wasn’t the saboteur, he’d nearly killed her, for God’s sake.
One thing he did know, she’d been legitimately scared to death up there. He might have called her bluff, and she might have called his, but she understood full well just how close they’d both come to dying today.
“Give me just one reason why you covered my ass like that,” he demanded.
“I have no idea why I did it.” She gazed up at him, and she did, in fact, look genuinely perplexed. Almost as perplexed as he was. He shoved a hand through his short hair.
“The footage I shot really is phenomenal,” she offered. “Adrian Turnow’s going to go nuts over it. It’s one of a kind.”
“For good reason. No rational pilot would ever do what we did today.”
“What happened up there?”
Right. Like he was going to talk with her about it. No way was he giving her the satisfaction of watching the aftereffects of her handiwork. He was not going to admit that she’d scared the bejeebers out of him, or that he was now genuinely worried about the future of this movie. Was she a nut ball operating alone? Or was she working for someone who’d hired her to do this? “No clue what happened, babe.”
“Oh.”
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