One month later …
The knock on the door roused Marcus from his intent contemplation of the last half-inch of whiskey left in the bottle.
“Go away,” he growled, pulling the bottle closer. He wasn’t sure where his glass was, but it didn’t matter. He could drink straight from the bottle. He was alone.
As usual.
He settled deeper into the tattered, secondhand armchair that had come with the apartment over the bar when he bought it. The chair was uglier than sin, splotched with giant pink flowers on a mustard-yellow background, but it was comfortable and it reclined. He could sleep in it. Better than he slept in his bed, these days.
Marcus was just thinking about ditching the last of the whiskey in favor of shutting his eyes for a minute or two when the knock came again. Swearing violently, he swung to his feet and immediately rammed his bare heel into the heavy leg of the side table.
He kicked the offending table aside with a screech of wooden furniture on hardwood floor, and stormed over to wrench open the door.
“What?” he barked, and then he saw who it was.
Quinn Harper stood in his doorway with a backpack over her shoulder and a deeply unimpressed expression on her lovely face.
She looked good. He’d managed to successfully avoid her for weeks by throwing himself into his renovations. What with one thing and another, the way this island had sucked him in and distracted him with new friends and old ladies in jeopardy and whatnot, the opening of the Buttercup Inn was behind schedule.
In the last few weeks, he’d made real progress on his bar. His new life’s ambition to become a hermit wasn’t going as well, but it was a work in progress, too.
In a blur, Marcus realized what he probably looked like to Quinn. A sad, old man drinking alone in his darkened apartment, too out of it to bother with shoes or a shirt. Her gaze drifted down and Marcus became intensely aware of how low his unbuttoned jeans hung on his hips.
Meanwhile, she looked as fresh and wholesome as a glass of milk. Quinn hadn’t spent the last few weeks drinking herself to sleep every night. She’d spent some of that time in the sun, if her new freckles were any indication. Marcus wanted to map them with his tongue, to see if her gold-tinted skin tasted any different than the creamy paleness he’d had his mouth on a month ago.
Quinn raised her brows and Marcus resisted the urge to button up, or to retreat inside for a shirt. Instead, he leaned his arm on the doorjamb above his head and regarded her with a defiant sneer to cover the way his body was suddenly working feverishly to metabolize the alcohol in his system.
“Couldn’t stay away?”
Something flared in her blue-green eyes, like sunset glinting off the bottom of a pool. For the first time since they met, the open book of Quinn’s expressive face was closed to Marcus.
“My parents came home this afternoon,” she said briskly. “So now I need a place to stay and I happen to know the studio next door to you is available. I’d like to rent it, please.”
Marcus snorted. “Right. I’m not one of your gullible little college boyfriends, sweetheart. Find someplace else.”
He started to close the door in her face, but Quinn stuck her sneaker-clad foot in the crack and said, “You think I’d be here if there were anyplace else on this entire island available for rent? It’s the high season. There’s nothing. Give me the keys. I’m moving in next door, and you know my rent will be paid on time because I took the job at Windy Corner.”
That was something, at least. Marcus tried to believe that result was worth the way he’d broken up with her. “Good. I’m glad.”
She rolled her eyes at his reluctant semicongratulations. “I don’t give a crap if you’re glad. I didn’t do it to make you happy.”
This time, Marcus held back the snort of amusement. He knew damn well she didn’t care about making him happy. If she did, she wouldn’t be here right now trying to emotionally blackmail him into renting her an apartment. But he couldn’t say any of that without admitting the truth.
He was weak, where Quinn Harper was concerned.
Apparently, he’d stood there silent long enough for her patience to run dry. She pressed her lips together, her jaw tight. “Please,” she ground out. “I can’t stay in my parents’ house. My mother and I get along better when we don’t share a roof, I need my own place, and this is it.”
Weak. He was weak.
Without a word, Marcus reached into the bowl on the table by the door and grabbed the keys Johnny had dropped off a few weeks ago. He tossed them to her and she caught them one-handed.
The smile she gave him didn’t reach her eyes, but that was for the best. A real smile might’ve forced him to reconsider this incredibly stupid, self-hating move.
“Thank you. I’ll be the perfect tenant,” she promised, already backing across the hall to her own—God, what had he done?—her own apartment. “You’ll never even know I’m there.”
“Good,” he said, and slammed his door closed. With a deep sigh, Marcus leaned his forehead against the smooth, cold wood. Very cool. Very mature.
From outside his door, he heard the distinctive sounds of the key jiggling around in the studio apartment’s tricky lock. Quinn cursed softly under her breath, but before Marcus could talk himself into going out there and helping her, she got it.
The door across the hall opened and closed, leaving silence behind. But it wasn’t the same empty silence that had messed with Marcus’s head for the past four weeks.
No, this silence was full of Quinn, seething and jumping with all the things they still hadn’t said to each other, all the things he still wanted to do to her. Abruptly, Marcus missed that hollow, crushing silence from before. It had hurt, like having a car flipped over to crush his chest, but it had been bearable.
This? The knowledge that Quinn Harper was in the apartment right across the hall? This was going to be a nightmare.
And if anyone knew about nightmares, it was Marcus Beckett.