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It’s a cool sixty degrees and looking suspicious for rain, but my palms are sweating, and the papers I’m holding tremble with each step I take up the door.
Seventy-two hours of practically no sleep, an unfathomable amount of coffee, and an endless surge of adrenaline bring my feet to halt at the front stoop.
I raise an unsteady hand to the lit doorbell and press it once, releasing a humming melody from the other side of the stained oak door. My pulse is out of control, making me nauseous and dizzy to the point that I’m questioning every move I’ve made to get here.
“No doubts,” I whisper, just as Kate said, but my heart full-stops when Marcus answers the door in nothing but a pair of low-hanging sweatpants.
He leans against the frame with his elbow, stretching his obliques and abs—and everything I’d been about to say, every word I’ve practiced, becomes one big lump at the base of my throat while his gaze utterly devours me.
“My, my, aren’t you a pretty thing?”
I slow-blink. Then I blink again. “Excuse me?”
“Wait a minute.” He carefully lowers his arm. “I know you.”
Now that the initial shock of seeing him has waned, I notice all the things that aren’t quite right about my Marcus. Things no one else would notice unless they were as intimate as the two of us had been.
“Morton,”I grit.
Marcus’s twin’s nose is a bit crooked, his lips aren’t as full, and his ears are slightly bigger. He has a leanness to him that makes a stark difference from not only his brother, but the actor I’ve seen on the show. As if he never quite healed from his accident and is just now on the upside of recovering.
Unfortunately, none of these things make the jerk any less attractive.
He takes a couple of curious steps forward, and I loathe the way he leers at me.
“You’re that—”
“Media roach?” I finish for him, recalling our interview.
Unlike when I first saw Marcus in Augustine, there’s a heavy amount of recognition in Mortie’s hardening gaze. “Close, but more like the journalist who’s trying to ruin my career while fucking my brother over to do it.”
He’s livid, it’s clear in the hard set of his jaw and foreboding stare—and that’s great. I’mgladhe’s angry, because knowing what he’s put Marcus through, that makes two of us.
My shoulders are bunched so tight that the tension zipping up my neck induces the start of a pounding headache. God, how good it would feel to scream at this man. To spit at his feet for his carelessness and for using Marcus the way he has with no remorse.
But the longer I look at this broken man, the less substance my anger has. I’ve lived through the motions of despising him, had come to terms with them in a sense, and I’m exhausted from hating him for both me and the way he’s used Marcus. I’m exhausted from my disdain for his recklessness when all I truly want is to be happy with the man I came here for.
And Mortie’s opinion of me means nothing compared to that.
“Are you just going to stand there, or would you like a police escort back to wherever you came from?” he asks arrogantly.
Trying to keep my cool, I level my gaze with his. “I’m here to talk to Marcus.”
He crosses his arms. “You’re out of your fucking mind, woman.”
“Look, I don’t know what you’re doing here, and frankly, I don’t care. I’ve slept a total of ten hours in the last three days. I haven’t eaten more than a single bagel this morning and a piece of gum my cab driver offered me on the way over here. The last thing I’m going to do is sit here and listen toyou,of all people, tell me that I can’t see him.”
Mortie’s head tilts and I’m thrown by how similar the action is to Marcus.
It starts to sprinkle, each drop on my shoulders colder than the last.
“Here.” I thrust my hand out to him in a moment of desperation.
He cautiously takes the damp pages, flipping through them with a healthy amount of confusion. “What is this?”
“The story I wrote.” It’s starting to rain more steadily, but I stand on the edge of the stoop, enduring every freezing drop. “Just a version that left you both out of it.”
His troubled eyes find mine. “Why?”
