Page 15 of Jason
“I’m on a road!”she shouted.
“Text me when you get here.”
“That’s what I’m saying.I think I’m—”
“Wow, the reception is really bad, Mallory.You’re all garbled.TEXT ME WHEN YOU GET HERE,” he shouted, and clicked off.
“Wait!”She hurried down the road trying to get a better signal, but it was too late—he’d hung up.“Damn it, Jason,” she muttered.That was so like him, rushing from one thing to another, couldn’t give it ten seconds to see if she could get to a better signal.
She walked on, annoyed now, watching the inn or whatever it was get larger and larger until she was standing right outside another, smaller gate in a white picket fence.The fence surrounded a garden.Attached to the garden was a Cape Cod cottage with dormer windows and a porch that faced the sea.It was so picturesque.
She noticed a small woman with a head full of white hair, dressed in red sneakers and clam diggers, wandering through the garden.Mallory hadn’t seen an actual pair of clam diggers since she was a girl.
The garden the woman was wandering was bursting with color.She seemed to be focused on the peonies and rhododendrons, clipping off dead leaves, filling a bucket with the blooms.There were hollyhocks that stood as tall as her, and patches of larkspur and foxglove so thick that Mallory worried she’d get lost in them.Mallory would bet that old lady knew everything there was to know about the rhododendrons she was bent over.
She parked her suitcase, adjusted her backpack onto her shoulder, and began to walk toward the woman on the gravel path.“Hello!”she called.
The woman turned around and stared at Mallory.Her clear blue eyes were filled with curiosity, as if she thought she might know Mallory from somewhere.Or maybe didn’t know her at all.
Mallory smiled to put her at ease.“Do you work here?”she asked as she drew closer.She looked around the garden.“It’s so pretty.”
“Do Iworkhere?”the woman asked incredulously.“I most certainly do not.”
Mallory blanched.“I’m sorry.I just thought that you…you were working on the rhododendrons and I…”Okay, back it up.“I was looking for Jason Blackthorne.I think he’s staying here?”
“Well of course he is.It’s his home.”
Mallory tried gamely to compute that statement.Jason’s family lived in an inn?Were they maybe innkeepers?She looked over her shoulder and studied the structure.That wasn’t an inn for the rich and famous, it was ahousefor the rich and famous.It wasn’t as if Mallory hadn’t seen giant houses—she lived in L.A.after all.But this was so huge and so charming, with so many nooks and crannies and angles and windows and doors.And the widow walk!It looked like an expensive inn.The kind that had been converted to a treatment facility where celebrities were sent to recover from “exhaustion.”
Mallory had heard Jason was whisky rich, which, okay, Mallory didn’t really know what that meant.He had a respectable house in Hollywood Hills—she’d had to deliver scripts to him once.But this house was a whole other level, and never in a million years would she guess whisky was this kind of rich.
“You better go let him know you’re here,” the woman said, waving toward the house.“You don’t want to get caught in a storm.”
Mallory looked up at the spring sky.Wavy puffs of white clouds were bunching together over the ocean.
“That’s a mackerel sky,” the woman pointed out, apparently sensing Mallory’s skepticism.She leaned down and picked up a bucketful of rhododendrons and peonies.“Go knock on the door.He’ll come if he’s home.I’m Fiona, by the way.”
“Hi,” Mallory said, and extended her hand.“I’m Mallory.”
Fiona gripped her hand with surprising strength.“Go on, now.”With her bucket, she went out the gate and up the steps of the cottage, disappearing inside.
Mallory went back to fetch her suitcase and dragged it over the gravel.But the gravel kept locking the wheels, and the case knocked into her knee.So she hoisted it in her hand and walked out of the garden and to the stairs leading up to the porch.
If the house had a grand entrance, she wasn’t seeing it.There was a single door behind a screen.Mallory dragged her suitcase up the steps and rolled it in front of her to the door.She dragged her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tame it as she studied the door before her.Frankly, it looked like a servant’s entrance.She was tempted to dig out her phone and text Inez a picture of this house and that door.But Inez was on set today, and Mallory didn’t want to explain that she’d jetted out to Maine on Jason’s demand.She could already hear theI told you sos.
Mallory looked around for a doorbell, and finding nothing obvious, she knocked.
She waited.
She leaned to her right to peer in through a sidelight window, but could see nothing but hardwood floors covered in thick rugs, a console table against one of the hall walls with a vase full of peonies.She knocked again, only louder this time.
Still, no one came.“Damnit, Jason,” she muttered beneath her breath.“Why is everything about you so hard?”She fully intended to add this trip through the Maine countryside to the long list of things she had to say to Jason about this whole ordeal.Which included,do you know everyone talks about how insane you are?AndIf you summon me to Maine, could you at least be somewhere IN Maine?
She turned to go.To where, she had no idea, and she was beyond furious as she pondered how difficult it would be to get a cab here—her guess was very—when the door suddenly swung open and Jason was standing before her in gym shorts.
And nothing else.
He was shirtless.He was not wearing a shirt.Whatever Mallory had been thinking was gone from her head and, for the record, Jason Blackthorne without a shirt was…inspiring.She tried to avert her gaze from his impressive form, but she couldn’t seem to make herself do it.It was like she had cartoon googly eyes glued to his chest.Heretofore, Mallory had not seen Jason shirtless.She had guessed at his abs, of course, because he wore his clothes very tight and it was impossible not to notice.She had certainly noticed the night she’d crawled on his lap how firm and broad his chest and shoulders looked in his blue shirt that seemed to lack the capacity to contain his arms.But to see him so blatantly bare, so chiseled and hard and completely within reach was enough to make her take a step back.To see the shadow of hair on his chest, and the other, tantalizing line of furry down that disappeared into the elastic of his shorts, was enough to leave her speechless.Mallory stared at him.
