High-Stakes Playboy

by Cindy Dees

  She scowled at him and pushed the hood and scarf off her face. A smell of wet wool filled the cab of the truck as her clothes and Archer’s dried in the heat. It took a while, but finally she began to feel warm all the way through. Her fingers and toes thawed and dried out, and she even began to feel sleepy.

  Gradually, as the truck plowed its way down the mountain, the amount of snow lessened, and the vehicle picked up speed. In maybe a half hour, she began to see houses more thickly clustered. And then a gas station, followed by a small strip mall.

  “This good enough for you guys?” the driver asked.

  Archer thanked the man profusely for his assistance and shook his hand warmly.

  They climbed down out of the big truck and Archer led her to a diner next door to the gas station. While she ordered food for them, he made a phone call.

  “Hey, Steve. It’s me... Yeah, I found her. We’ve got a bit of a situation up here. We need a ride back to Serendipity... I can’t get into it over the phone. Our friend from the set struck again, though... Nope. No kidding.”

  The call was very short after that. Archer told Steve where the two of them were, and then he hung up.

  To Marley, he said, “He’ll be here in an hour.”

  They ate their lunch at a leisurely pace and split a piece of apple pie between them before an SUV pulled up in front of the restaurant. A familiar, tall form climbed out of the vehicle.

  “Steve’s here,” she announced.

  Archer jumped up, took her arm and ushered her outside hastily. Apparently, he was as eager as she was to get back to the relative safety of the movie set.

  Steve barely made it to the door of the restaurant before she and Archer met him and hustled him back toward his SUV.

  “What’s going on?” Steve asked sharply as Archer piled her into the backseat of the vehicle and jumped in the front seat quickly.

  “Let’s go. I’ll explain on the road,” Archer replied tersely. Steve nodded briskly and threw the vehicle into gear.

  One thing she had to give these military guys credit for. They knew when it was time to stop and talk and when it was time to move. The little town had disappeared in the rearview mirror and Steve had driven with dispatch down the mountain, below the snow line, before he took his foot off the gas pedal.

  “Okay, Arch. What the hell’s going on? Why couldn’t you drive your own truck back to town?”

  “It blew up this morning.”

  “Come again?” Steve glanced across the front seat at Archer. From her vantage point, she spied the blank shock on his face.

  “It blew up. Someone planted a bomb under it. I used the remote warm-and-defrost feature to start the engine from inside the cabin, and when I did, it blew up. As in kaboom. Big fireball. Engulfed in flames. Parts flying everywhere.”

  Steve swore luridly under his breath. He glanced cautiously at her in the rearview mirror and asked Archer, “Is it our saboteur?”

  Archer took a deep breath. Exhaled hard. “As much as it pains me to admit this, I think you’re right, Steve. I think Marley is, in fact, behind all the accidents on the set. And this is just the latest of the bunch.”

  Chapter 13

  “What?” Marley squawked from the backseat. “How can you say something like that? I would have died right along with you if we’d have gotten in your truck before you started it.” Fury and terrible hurt wrestled for control of her emotions.

  Even Steve’s head snapped toward Archer like the announcement had taken him entirely by surprise. “How’s that?”

  Archer looked back and forth between both of them defensively. “I didn’t say I thought Marley was the saboteur. But I do think she’s the target.”

  Marley fell back against the seat in disbelief. He’d hinted at that once before. But it simply made no sense. She didn’t have any enemies. And she certainly didn’t have any stalkers who were crazy enough to blow up the truck she was about to climb into.

  A sick suspicion that Mina might be crazy enough to blow up a truck passed through her mind. As the rap sheet Steve Prescott had unearthed did demonstrate, her twin had a rebellious and even violent streak. But Marley dismissed out of hand the notion of Mina attempting murder. Particularly murder of her own sister. She loved Mina, and Mina loved her. Mina would never harm her. Right?

  Surely, the explosion had been a result of a mechanical flaw in the truck’s high-tech remote heating and defrosting function.

  “When we get back to the hotel, the two of you are going to sit down and tell me every detail of your weekend at the cabin. Everything you saw, everything you heard.”

  Gulp. Surely Archer wouldn’t tell his boss every detail of the weekend.

  “You got it,” Archer answered jauntily from the front seat.

  She seriously considered crawling under her seat in the SUV and never, ever coming out. Her feet probed beneath her. Not enough space for her to fit, darn it. As soon as they got back to the hotel, she would find a nice big rock to hide under. Forever.

  Unfortunately, Archer helped her out of the SUV and escorted her inside without giving her a chance to find that rock. Steve installed them in the living room of his suite, and she bought time by asking if it was possible to get some food sent up to them. While he ordered room service, she turned to Archer and whispered urgently, “Please promise me you’re going not to tell him about us.”

  “You heard the guy. He wants every detail.”

  She did a double take and saw his eyes twinkling with humor. Oh, thank God. He wasn’t going to humiliate her with his boss.

  “My grandmother taught me that gentlemen don’t kiss and tell,” he murmured under his breath.

  Abject relief flowed through her. But she still swatted his knee for scaring her like that.

  Of course, Steve came back into the room just as she slapped Archer’s leg to find them laughing at each other, probably a bit too companionably. Rolling her eyes at Archer, she scooted farther away from him on the sofa.

  Not that she thought they were fooling Steve Prescott for a second. The man was no dummy. Still, she was going to keep up the charade of being just coworkers until somebody forced her to drop it. The idea of the movie crew at large knowing all the sordid details of her love life made her skin crawl with embarrassment.

  But Archer had her back. He wasn’t going to let anyone humiliate her.

  “All right,” Steve announced. “Start at the beginning...”

  * * *

  Marley woke up slowly, sleepily. She was curled on her side around a pile of pillows, which was odd. She rarely slept with extra pillows in her bed...

  Oh! Archer.

  He’d taken her to his room late last night and installed her in his bed with orders not to leave the room and to get some rest. She and Archer had described the events at the cabin to Steve over and over in excruciating detail—blessedly leaving out all the parts that involved getting naked and having mind-blowing sex.

  She hadn’t been aware that Archer had spotted tracks around the cabin. And her horror factor had gone through the roof when he relayed that the tracks had come right up to the windows and back porch. Who in the world would spy on the two of them like that?

  Steve and Archer had spent hours combing through first Archer’s life, then hers, trying to figure who might have fixated on one of them with such obsession that it led to attempted murder.

  She steadfastly defended Mina through the evening, insisting that her sister was too easy to blame because of her troubled past, and that Mina would never harm her. But she got the impression that Steve and Archer remained unconvinced.

  Frankly, she thought the odds were much better that it was an ex-lover of Archer’s than anyone in her life. She’d been such an introvert, so shy and disconnected from the people around her for her entire adult life t
hat she couldn’t fathom registering strongly enough on anyone’s radar to merit a strong enough fixation to culminate in bombing Archer’s truck.

  Steve argued that she hadn’t seen Mina in years and had no way of knowing what her sister’s mental state was currently.

  She countered by arguing that it was entirely plausible some woman had fallen in love with Archer and that he’d broken the poor girl’s heart. This hypothetical woman could have heard he was back in the United States, snapped emotionally and come after him to get revenge.

  When Steve and Archer measured the size of the footprint Archer had put his hand beside and snapped a picture of, the shoe turned to be only around a man’s size five. And that was far too small for most adult men.

  Which left her sister or an ex-lover of Archer’s as the primary suspects.

  She sat up in Archer’s bed and glanced over at the alarm clock. Almost 8:00 a.m. Wow. She’d slept the whole night through. After she’d had a nice, long soak in a steaming hot bath and let Archer tuck her into bed, she’d crashed hard.

  Where was he, anyway?

  She spotted her rucksack sitting in the corner and rooted around in it for clean clothes. She pulled on jeans and one of her flannel shirts, and on cue her stomach growled loudly. Hmm. The daily breakfast buffet for the film crew would be in full swing at this hour. Should she hop down there and get a bite to eat or not? Archer had been crystal clear that he did not want her to leave the room until he got back. But had he meant that for just last night, or did the order still hold this morning?

  Her cell phone had charged overnight, and she dialed his number. Her call went directly to voice mail. Dang it. She waited in the room, pacing back and forth impatiently as the minutes ticked past and the demands from her stomach grew more insistent.

  Finally, as the end of the buffet loomed near, she gave up on waiting. She was freaking hungry, and she would be perfectly safe with a crowd of cast and crew around her. She would just slip into the dining room, grab a quick plate of food and bring it back to the room to eat. No harm done.

  She headed downstairs to eat and had no sooner set foot inside the door of the big dining room when Tyrone called out at what must be the top of his lungs, “Marley Stringer! Where have you been all weekend? Have you been holding out on me? Who’s your secret lover, girlfriend?”

  That last question, delivered in a stentorian tone that carried to the far corners of the dining room, made every single head turn in her direction. So much for making a quiet entrance, getting a bite to eat and slipping out.

  Swearing under her breath, she pasted on a lame smile, loaded up a plate with an array of fresh food, none of which came out of a tin can, and headed over to Tyrone’s table. If nothing else, she had to keep the man from shouting out the details of her love life to everyone in the damned room.

  “Where have you been all weekend?” Tyrone started in immediately. “I noticed that Flyboy was missing in action, too. You guys finally hook up?”

  “You are way too nosy to have as many friends as you do,” she declared around a bite of pancake smothered in maple syrup.

  “Yes, but I’m too charming to resist. Tell me all the gory details, grasshopper.”

  She scowled and shoveled in another oversize bite of pancake while she frantically tried to figure out how Archer and Steve would want her to handle this. Ultimately, the less said, the better.

  “I had to get out of here. Spending all weekend staring at rain and the walls of my room was going to make me crazy.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where’d you go?”

  “I rented one of those tourist cabins and spent the weekend sleeping and staring at my toes.” And having hot monkey sex with the most gorgeous specimen of a man she’d ever dreamed of landing. The mother of all flings. But no way was she admitting that to Tyrone.

  “Were you alone all weekend?”

  She did her best to look insulted. “What are you insinuating, Tyrone?”

  He threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I was just asking. You look too tired to have spent the whole weekend sleeping.”

  “I overslept this morning. Barely made it down here in time to get some breakfast.” It wasn’t entirely a lie, anyway.

  “I heard you got snowed in with that hot stick jock. Is that true? Deets, girl!”

  Marley squeezed her eyes shut. She so didn’t want to give the guy details.

  Thankfully, Tyrone leaned forward and said in a sincere voice, “Look. Tell me to mind my own damned business if I cross the line with you, sweetie. I’m just not used to being around nice, innocent girls. Not too many like you in Hollywood. You keep right on blushing when someone asks you about that man of yours.”

  “He’s not my man!”

  Tyrone just smiled knowingly.

  Dammit.

  “Look, I gotta go, hon. I’m due on set in a half hour.”

  Thank God. She couldn’t survive too much more of his third degree without revealing the truth.

  “A bunch of us are getting together at happy hour tonight. You have to come,” Tyrone announced. “And if you even think about blowing off me and the other girls, we’ll come up to your room and drag you down here by your adorable blond curls.”

  Reluctantly, she conceded that hiding in her room imagining that a killer was about to jump out of the closet and slit her throat might not be the best strategy on earth. Maybe getting out and being with other people was a better idea.

  Where had Archer gone off to, anyway? And why wasn’t he answering his phone?

  * * *

  Archer stared at the computer monitor in dismay. “And you’re sure the forensic reconstruction of this digital footage is one hundred percent accurate?”

  Steve hovered over his shoulder studying the grainy image, as well. “Yes. Absolutely. Adrian hired the same guy the FBI uses to recover and restore partially destroyed digital data. He’s the best there is. His stuff is considered accurate enough to use in courts of law as evidence.”

  Archer shook his head. “I don’t care how good this guy is supposed to be. I’m telling you, Steve. That’s not her. That’s not Marley.”

  “How can you say that? Even I look at it and recognize her. That’s Marley Stringer rewiring the charges that blew up the set of the fake city. She is a cinematographer and familiar with electronics. She would have no trouble learning how to do this.”

  Archer stared at the crouching figure. Whoever the security camera had caught on film was definitely the person who had sabotaged the set and caused the whole thing to blow up at once. And he conceded that the person did look shockingly like Marley.

  But it simply wasn’t her. It had to be her twin, Mina. Marley was going to be devastated to learn that her own sister had tried to kill her. No way was he mistaken. He knew her too well, knew her mannerisms, her way of moving and carrying herself, and there were subtle differences between this person and the woman he knew and loved.

  Whoa. What? Scratch that. Lusted after, yes. Was infatuated with, yes. But in love with? Absolutely not.

  “Look, Steve. This has to stay between you and me, but Marley and I are more than friends. We didn’t just sit around roasting marshmallows and playing checkers all weekend.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. The electricity between you two is palpable. It’s obvious there’s a hell of a connection between you that isn’t the result of checkers and marshmallows.”

  Archer sighed. “I know this woman. I feel her all the way down to my bones. I know every nuance of her movements, her facial expressions...all the things that make her Marley. And this isn’t her. It has to be her twin sister, Mina.”

  “Jeez, you’ve got it bad, dude.”

  Archer snorted. “Like you don’t feel this way around Olivia? C’mon. I’ve seen the two of you together. Talk about electricity flying�
�you two can barely keep your hands off each other.”

  Steve grinned unrepentantly.

  “Okay. So you watch this footage and you’re positively, no question about it, one thousand percent sure the person in these images is not Marley. Is that correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “You’d swear to it under oath in a court of law?”

  “Without hesitation.”

  Steve frowned deeply. “All right, then. Where is Mina now?”

  Steve picked up the phone and Archer watched as his brother dialed the private investigator who’d been investigating her and asked for an update. Steve put the guy on speaker phone so they could both hear the answer.

  “She’s smart as hell. Has managed to avoid arrest or conviction for any of the more serious crimes she has been suspected of. Only stuff she ever went to jail for was the minor stuff.”

  “What kinds of major crimes has she been implicated in?”

  “Theft. Breaking and entering. Boosting cars. Drug possession and trafficking. Even arson.”

  “Any violent crimes?”

  “No convictions, but a couple people I’ve interviewed who know her have warned me not to cross her. They seemed to think dire consequences would follow.”

  Archer winced. How could Mina have gone so far off the rails when Marley managed to take the same childhood circumstances and turn her life into something so decent and loving and positive?

  “Any idea where Mina’s living now?”

  The PI answered, “I tracked her to LA, but I lost her there.”

  “Los Angeles?” Archer exclaimed. “She’s in California?”

  “Last I heard. She’s accused of stealing a credit card a couple months back, and the last place it was used before it went dead was East Hollywood.”

  He traded grim looks with Steve.

  “How dangerous is this chick?” Steve asked the private investigator.

  “She doesn’t have any firearms convictions, but I think it would be safe to say she’s armed and dangerous. The twin sister, Marley’s, ex-boyfriend accused Mina of trying to kill him when I spoke to him.”