“Gross,” Mallory said.

  “Told you,” Jason said, poking her in the side.

  “But it’s perfect. How can you and Cass not think this is perfect?”

  Jason looked at her sidelong. “Just curious—do you think this is perfect because Cass doesn’t think it’s perfect?”

  “My opinion has nothing to do with Cass,” she said primly. Then shrugged. “Not 100 percent, anyway. Hey, look at this!” she said, and walked into the middle of the space. She held up her hands, forming a frame. “See that shaft of light coming in from the window? It’s dark and creepy, and that light gives us just enough to see. So imagine the camera pans over this gross place, and the viewer thinks it is empty, but then you see something, like a foot or a hand, in the narrow shaft of light—and the camera shows us three women huddled together in the corner looking terrified.” She dropped her hands. “This place is perfect.”

  Jason looked at the shaft of light.

  Mallory walked back to where he stood and made a frame with her hands again, just in front of him. She slowly moved them around to the corner.

  Jason had to admit, it was pretty good. It was creepy. And it wasn’t a big pit, which, he had to agree, would be a filming nightmare. He’d said as much to Cass, and Cass said Jason had no balls. Sometimes he suspected that Cass didn’t respect him, that he threw things at him to see how he would handle them. He suspected the pit was one of those things.

  Mallory dropped her hands and turned to look at him with a hopeful expression. “So you know the scene when the killer comes in,” she said, and began walking through it, talking through every step of the scene, pointing out the camera angles. Jason was impressed—she’d definitely done her homework. She had a clear vision. As she talked, he thought of all the times she’d suggested things and he’d essentially patted her on the head and sent her on her way because he was too busy to hear them. Jason could really be a moron sometimes.

  She was looking at him with so much hope and eagerness that he couldn’t look away from her. He knew how that felt. How important it was to find someone who heard your ideas and liked them. But he also had Cass to consider, a world-class director with a short temper, legally contracted to him to direct these episodes. The location really was his call.

  “Well?” Mallory asked.

  “I will ask Cass to reconsider,” he offered. “That’s all I can do.”

  “Yes!” Mallory cried, and pumped both fists into the air.

  Jason had a strong urge to kiss her right now. But he didn’t want her to think he was offering to speak to Cass because he was attracted to her. “It’s his call, Mallory. I can’t make any promises.”

  “I know, I know, and I would never expect you to,” she interjected eagerly. “Just that you’re willing to ask him, it means…well, it means a lot, Jason.” She beamed a smile at him.

  Damn, but that smile could inspire a guy to do all kinds of things that were probably not advised. He wanted to make her happy, he did, but he knew without asking that Cass would say no. Cass never bowed to the opinions of others. He was very much a my-way-or-the-highway sort of man. He wanted to tell her that Cass probably wouldn’t consider it, but she looked so excited he couldn’t do it. So he held out his hand to her. “Let’s go. There is a cove I want to check out.”

  Mallory was still grinning as she slipped her hand into his.

  The cove Jason had in mind was a good thirty minutes outside of King Harbor on a strip of coastline that was too rocky and steep in places for most tourists and beach walkers. As they drove along the coast, Mallory chatted how she would direct that scene in the warehouse if it were her. How she thought she could wring more emotion out of the actors than the script portrayed. Listening to her, Jason was a somewhat astounded that she knew so much about the details of the shoot. When he looked at her, he saw an assistant. Someone to find his phone and get his coffee. He hadn’t considered her own ambitions, and how she had thought so much about how the show was being guided and shot.

  They reached a small inlet on the edge of a promontory. Just around that point was the cove. At the entrance to the inlet was a weathered wooden cabin painted blue. The words Dead Man’s Cove was painted in faded white letters over the door. On the outside walls hung a line of boat fenders, fishing nets and lobster pots, and a plastic shark.

  “This looks ocean-y,” Mallory said. “What are we doing here?”

  “I’m going to hire a boat,” Jason said. “Then we’re going around that promontory,” he said, pointing, “and take a look at Dead Man’s Cove.”

  “Great,” she said, sounding less than enthused.

  They walked up to the porch of the building. A sign proclaimed the sea shop was open from ten until four. When Jason opened the door a little bell tingled overhead. He and Mallory stepped inside the crowded room and waited for someone to appear. A few minutes later, a man who looked to be in his fifties with a scraggly gray beard, wearing a thick, cable-knit sweater, stepped up behind the counter.

  “How can I help you folks?”

  “We’d like to hire a boat to go and have a look at the cove,” Jason said, and glanced at Mallory. “They say bootleggers used to run out of the cove.”

  “Or into the cove, depending on what you hear,” the man said.

  “I’m sorry?” Jason asked.

  “Just saying,” the man said. “My grandpa always said old man Blackthorne didn’t take kindly to bootleggers hustling his part of the ocean. Shot and killed a man off one boat who was trying to get to the cove.”

  Jason snorted at that absurdity. “Old man Blackthorne had his own operation.”

  “Sure he did. Bigger and faster boats, too. He told his men to shoot first and ask questions later.”

  Jason shook his head at what he hoped was an absurd rumor. “I never heard this story, and I’m a Blackthorne.”

  That declaration did not faze the old man. He handed Jason a ledger to sign, waiving any liability. “Course you didn’t hear it. You know better than me how the Blackthornes keep their secrets.”

  Something clicked in Jason’s chest. He knew that very well—nothing should ever besmirch the Blackthorne name. “When was this, exactly?” he asked curiously.

  “Prohibition, a’course,” the man said. He stood up and took a key from one of several hanging from a pegboard. “Blue boat, slot two. If you see any skeletons in the cove, you’ll know why.” He chuckled at his joke, revealing a few missing teeth.

  “Thanks,” Jason said, and picked up the key.

  “That was strange,” Mallory said as she and Jason stepped outside. “Do you think that could be true?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Jason said. He was thinking about the night Aunt Claire disappeared. She’d said to Uncle Graham she’d kept his secret, and he and his cousins had tried to guess what the secret could be. Could this have been the secret? That their great-grandfather had killed a man?

  “What’s the matter?” Mallory asked.

  Jason shook his head. “It’s a long story. My aunt and uncle are having…well, marital problems, I guess. They split up recently and when she left, she told him she’d kept his secret, or something to that affect. My cousins and brothers and I have been trying to figure out what that meant. I’m just wondering if it was a murderous relative.” He smiled at her. “Trust me, Blackthorne Enterprises wouldn’t want that floating around.”

  The blue boat they’d rented was hardly bigger than a tub, with a small outboard motor attached to it.

  Mallory immediately asked for a life vest.

  Jason handed her one. “It’s just around the bend up here,” he said, pointing.

  “Are you really going to try and ferry actors and crew and equipment in these boats?” she asked as she strapped tightly into the life vest.

  “We’d obviously use bigger boats,” he said. “My cousin Devlin can hook us up.” She looked very wary as she inspected the boat, and alarmingly cute in her blue pantsuit and life vest. The prosecutor, out for a swim.

  Jason helped her into the boat and tried hard not to laugh at the way she held her arms out in an attempt to provide ballast. “It’s not funny!” she shouted at him.

  He was still grinning as he jumped in after her and pushed the boat away from the dock, then throttled slowly away from the shore. While Mallory gripped the sides of the boat, he opened up the motor and cleared the buoys, then moved around the promontory.

  When he was a teen, Dead Man’s Cove was the destination of the more adventurous kids. He hadn’t been out here in years, and the cove was much smaller than what he remembered, nothing but a strip of white sand beach and rocky walls that formed a small cliff. Fitting a film crew in here would be tight. He had not brought Cass here yet—Cass was determined to film the boat scenes in King Harbor. But Jason had wanted to see this again. He motored the boat in as close as he could get, then leapt out and dragged it onto the sand.

  Mallory was still gripping the sides of the boat. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “You haven’t even seen the cave. Come on, Mal—give it a chance.”

  She pressed her lips together. She gave him a curt nod, kicked off her impractical shoes—“I just got these,” she said, miffed about them—and rolled up her pant legs. She inched toward the front of the boat and refused to let go of it with one hand as she reached for Jason with the other.

  “Have you never been on a boat before?”

  “No! We were not boat people. Help me,” she begged.

  He was laughing when he reached into the boat, put his hands on her waist, and lifted her out. She slid down his body until her feet touched the sand. He smiled.

  She glared at him. “What are you doing?”

  “Helping. Like you asked.”

  One corner of her mouth quirked up and she gave him a push away from her. “Stop smiling at me like that. And stop making me do things like ride in little wooden tubs out into the ocean.”

  “For the record, it is a bona fide boat, and I can’t stop smiling at you like that. You are adorable, and I keep thinking about last night.”

  She sort of laughed and gasped at the same time. “You can’t say I’m adorable and you can’t think about last night, Jason! We’re technically at work, so it’s super inappropriate. Don’t you know anything?”

  “You can’t tell me you never think of super inappropriate things at work. Because we both know you do.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said, laughing it off, and began to carefully pick her way through the sand toward the cave.

  Jason followed her, and when they reached the cave, he went in first, climbing up onto a rock and then helping Mallory up. This, too, was smaller and less sinister than he remembered. It was really hardly a cave it all, very shallow in breadth and in depth. It was hard to believe anyone had ever run any sort of operation out of here.

  “Could the killer reasonably stash his boat here or in the cove?” Mallory asked, peering around him to see into the cave. “It doesn’t need to be a secret place. Just some place no one would suspect. Any marina would do.”

  “If this place was good enough for bootleggers, I’d say it’s good enough for our guy.”

  Mallory didn’t seem convinced. She tried to lean around him to look again, but when she did, her foot slipped and she almost tumbled into the water. Jason caught her before that could happen, and when he did, he felt something catch in his back.

  He pulled her into his arms, twisting her around so that her back was to the wall of the cave.

  “Oh my God!” she said breathlessly. “I almost fell in!”

  “I’ve got you,” Jason said. She was clinging to his arms, her eyes wide with the fright that near fall had given her. “Mallory…do you know how to swim?”

  “No! Do you see how dangerous this is? We can’t film in here!”

  “If we had another boat for the camera and some scaffolding for the lights,” he said, looking up, “we’d be fine. This water isn’t very deep. Maybe up to your waist at low tide.”

  Her eyes widened. “It would take our entire budget to set this up. What is wrong with you and Cass? Do you have any idea how much these things—”

  Jason silenced her with a kiss. Yes, he knew how much these things cost. Yes, he could see it was impractical. He would argue with her in a minute, but she looked so lush that he couldn’t help himself, and neither could Mallory, because the moment he put his lips to hers, she softened, sinking into him, like she’d been waiting for that kiss all day.

  He nibbled at her bottom lip, then slipped his tongue into her mouth. Mallory’s hands went up around his neck, her fingers sliding into his hair. Jason shifted her backward, so that she was leaning against the rock wall.

  “Now what are you doing?” she murmured against his mouth.

  “Kissing you, obviously. And just so we’re clear, you’re kissing me back, right?”

  “I am. But it’s still inappropriate.”

  He didn’t care. He moved to her neck.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” she said through a soft moan. “This is hardly the place for a grand make-out session. We are barely able to stand on this rock as it is.”

  “We are standing just fine. Where’s your sense of adventure?” he asked, and slipped his hand into the waistband of her pants.

  Mallory gasped with surprise; her eyes fluttered open and she looked at him as he undid the button of her pants with his thumb. “You are the devil,” she whispered.

  “Thank you,” he whispered back, and slid his hand deeper into her pants.

  Mallory’s gaze did not move from his, challenging him. “This is insane,” she insisted, and slid her hand to the front of his shorts, feeling his hardness.

  “And exciting. Admit it.” He began to stroke her through the thin fabric of her panties. “Looks like forbidden fruit turns us both on, doesn’t it?” It was a rhetorical question—it definitely turned her on. She was damp, already slick with just a bit of kissing. “Doesn’t it?” he insisted.

  “A little,” she murmured, and closed her eyes.

  Jason smiled into her hair and rubbed her, slipping his fingers under the fabric of her panties. “You know what else turns me on?” he asked, and lightly bit her neck.

  “What?” she managed.

  “Making you come,” he muttered, and with two fingers, quickened the pace. She began to move against his hand, and it seemed to Jason that the water was lapping the rock in time with their rhythm. He stroked her until she made a soft cry and dropped her forehead to his shoulder, shuddering with her release.

  He kissed her neck, her ear, her cheek. That had been hugely arousing.

  She took gulps of air until her breathing had returned to normal and he’d removed his hand. She sighed and stared up at him with eyes glassy with contentment. “Happy now?”

  Jason grinned. “Exceedingly.” He kissed her mouth. “Lets get out of here. We still have one more place to see.”

  Mallory buttoned her pants. “This is so crazy, Jason. What are we doing?”

  She didn’t mean the question to be answered, he took it, but he was wondering the same thing. His thoughts were confused. Between Darien, and the crazy tension between him and Mallory, and the problems with Cass, and the crisis of having to move this series ahead without a star, he wondered why he chose now to start this with Mallory. It was a question that needed answering, and was going to answer her. When the time was right.

  “We’re definitely crossing this cove off the list, right?” she asked. She clung to his arm as she stepped off the rock and made a little leap onto the sand just beyond.

  “Probably.”

  “Definitely,” she countered. “It’s too expensive.”

  “Then where do you suggest the killer hide his boat?”

  “What about the pier? It’s not exactly on the beaten path.”

  They continued their discussion of the killer’s need to move relatively unseen as Mallory strapped into her life vest and carefully climbed back on the boat.

  In the car, Mallory had a message on her phone from the head writer. She put her on speaker and the three of them talked about alternatives to cutting the forest scene and still shaving seven minutes.

  They carried on as if nothing had happened last night or in the cove. They carried on like they always did, as if the crazy tension between them didn’t exist, except when it was unbearable, and Jason guessed they would carry on like that until it erupted again.

  It was a full day by the time they were done. Jason dropped Mallory at the Bickmore and drove out to the estate to get his things. He stopped by Nana’s cottage to tell her he’d be working in town for a few days.

  He found his grandmother on her porch in a rocking chair enjoying her standard cocktail—whisky, straight up.

  “Hey, Nana,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her cheek.

  “There you are. I wondered if you’d gone back to Los Angeles.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

  “You know where I keep the good stuff,” she said, and nodded to the door of her cottage.

  Jason went inside to her kitchen and poured a little of the Blackthorne whisky, then joined his grandmother on the porch. He filled her in on what had been happening with the show and the scandal of Darien as they watched sailboats heading back to the harbor.

  When he finished his drink, Jason got up to go. “Got some work to do, Nana. There’s still plenty of L.A. hours left in the workday.”

  “All right,” she said.

  Jason started for the porch stairs, but he paused and glanced back at his grandmother. “By the way…an old guy over at Dead Man’s Cove told me an interesting story today.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He said that Great-grandpop killed a bootlegger for working out of his part of the ocean.”

  Nana stared at him. “Alistair?”

  Jason nodded. “I told him I’d never heard that, and he said Blackthornes liked to keep their secrets. And, you know, Aunt Claire said she’d been keeping Uncle Graham’s secret. Was that it, Nana? That sounds like something Uncle Graham would not want floating around out there. Do you think—”