High-Stakes Playboy Read Online Free PDF

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