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course, sir. She had nothing to do with...”
    Marley interrupted, “If Mr. Turnow doesn’t love the footage we got,
I’ll
take full responsibility for it.”
    Prescott looked back and forth between the two of them suspiciously. Archer knew better than most just how smart a man Steve Prescott was. And the guy smelled a rat. He thought Marley Stringer
was
behind the near-crash.
    Thing was, he wasn’t about to talk openly with Steve about the mechanical failure in front of her. For now, his hands were tied. They had to fake out Marley and pretend the flight control failure wasn’t out of the ordinary. That no one was thinking about sabotage.
    “Archer, if you ever pull a crazy stunt like that again, regardless of what your camera operator asks you to do, I’ll fire you so fast your head spins. You got that?”
    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