Hot in Hellcat Canyon (23 page)

“I did say that.” Kayla was trying to look hard and cool but a very poignant bit of hope was creeping into her expression.

These two missed each other a lot, Britt realized.

And then Kayla’s face paled when something ghastly apparently occurred to her.

“Are you . . . are you getting married?” Her voice was faint.

“No. And I’m not pregnant, either,” Casey said hurriedly.

Apparently Casey knew the drill.

Some of the color rushed back into Kayla’s cheeks.

It occurred to Britt then that the whole kerfuffle regarding Truck Donegal
might
not be completely resolved. Which meant things could get potentially a little sticky. If not today, then at some point.

“No, I was wondering . . . can I use my twenty-percent-off discount for Britt?”

Britt’s jaw dropped. That twenty-percent discount was part of Kayla’s peace offering after their fight in the street.

She swiveled toward Casey. “
Casey . . .
that’s so . . . I just . . .”

“We can’t send you off on a date with John Tennessee McCord in any of the stuff you usually wear, Britt,” Casey explained practically. “You’re like an ambassador to Hollywood for Hellcat Canyon.”

“That’s what
I
just told her!” Kayla was delighted. “The first part.”

“I don’t know if Maison Vert is in
my
near future. I make pretty good money at the Truth and Beauty,” she said, rather defiantly. “And besides . . .” Casey faltered. “I just wanted to see . . .”

And then she smiled a watery sort of smile and shrugged with one shoulder.

Kayla very, very carefully removed a tear from the corner of her own eye with her pinky nail, lest it mess up her mascara.

“I missed you, too, Casey,” she said.

And then they practically leaped into each other’s well-dressed, flawlessly made up arms. And now the atmosphere was zinging with delighted relief and rejoicing.

“Casey, Britt wants that white halter dress in the window. With your discount, that brings it down to about thirty-five dollars.”

“I bet she can
totally
do that!”

Britt totally could.

“That dress is perfect for her!”

“I’m going to do an updo for her. And I’ll do her makeup, too. She will look
amazing
.”

For a moment, it was like Britt wasn’t even there. Britt didn’t mind, not really. It was hard to begrudge being forgotten for a moment, because she’d reunited a pair of friends, she’d
gained
a pair of friends, and she’d be getting the man
and
the dress. Not bad for a day’s work.

Her heart felt like a big sun shining in the middle of her chest.

Kayla leaped back from Casey when her phone chimed as a text came in.

She scanned it swiftly. “It’s Edie from the flower shop. She says John Tennessee McCord just came in!”

The whole town was apparently tracking her date like NORAD tracked Santa.

“Flowers are hard core, Britt,” Kayla said with a sort of grave awe.

This was unassailably true. A date was one thing. A date who brought flowers to her was something else. Maybe he brought flowers to all of his dates. He was Southern, after all. He was a sex machine but his manners were lovely.

She didn’t have to think about that right now. Right now, all she had to do was try on that dress and then count the minutes until six thirty.

“
W
ell,” J. T. said on an exhale. “Lucky me.”

He’d arrived on the dot, and he’d spent nearly half a minute speechless, admiring her in the lowering evening sun when she stepped out on her porch. And stood, like a diva on a stage, on her brand-new step.

“I’ll say,” she teased, gently. But her voice was a little threadbare.

Because her heart was pounding. And his expression
was
genuinely awestruck.

“You look very handsome,” she said almost timidly.

Dear God, that was an understatement.

“Yeah?” he said distractedly.

He was wearing a jacket that fit him like a freaking poem over a crisp button-down shirt and, naturally, a pair of jeans and his favorite boots, which seemed to have been polished for the occasion.

She noticed then that he was holding something behind his back.

He followed her curious gaze. Those must be the flowers.

“Well, I was going to bring roses,” he explained, as if she’d asked that question aloud. “Who doesn’t like roses? All women do, right? But then I thought, maybe roses are a cliché. And I’ve brought them to so many women over the years . . .”

And he stopped.

“Sure,” she prompted carefully. “Roses are nice.” She wasn’t necessarily enjoying the reference to “so many women,” but it wasn’t as though she didn’t know this part about him, and he clearly was heading someplace with this little story.

“But then I saw something and it made me think of you, and I thought it might be better.”

He brought it slowly out from behind his back.

It was a wilted, sad, anemic-looking azalea in a little pink-foil-covered pot.

She was speechless.

She could have sworn he was holding his breath.

“Oh!” And she scooped it into her arms as if it were an orphan being abandoned at the fire station.

“The poor little thing. I . . . it’s . . . thank you!
Way
better than roses.”

He laughed. “You are a funny woman, Britt Langley.”

“Yeah,” she agreed happily. “I know. I love it. It’s perfect! Thank you for rescuing it. I will make it grow! I’ll name it after you.”

He laughed, clearly delighted.

She settled it next to her other convalescents on the shelf on her porch. And took a moment to admire it and bask in the luxury of being
known
.

Though he didn’t know everything.

“Allow me.” He strode over to his truck parked at the side of the road, and pulled open the passenger-side door for her. He held out his hand, and she gave hers to him, and he helped her up into it as if she were Cinderella boarding a gilded coach.

“I like your hair up that way,” he said. “It’s pretty.”

She touched it. “Thank you. Casey did it. It’s apparently a bit complicated. Seemed to take quite a bit of finesse.”

She turned her head this way and that so he could admire it.

“How about that. She
is
an artist.”

She smiled at him.

“By the way?” he said, hovering in the truck doorway a moment.

“Yeah?”

“. . . I’m going to enjoy messing it up later.”

And with that incendiary little statement, he shut her door.

She was lucky she was already in the truck, because the look he shot her would have buckled her knees.

CHAPTER 13

T
hey drove there with the windows rolled down, and she kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the dash and let the breeze free a few tendrils of her fancy updo.

“Love this song! Sing with me, Britt,” he commanded, and cranked up the radio.

It was Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man,” one of her favorites. She’d always loved Neil Diamond’s huge, revival-meeting-style choruses. The two of them belted out the song, more concerned with volume and conviction than the key, and any dogs within earshot could not have been blamed for howling. And if this had been the sum total of their date, she would have been perfectly happy.

She went as silent as a canary in a coal mine when they drove past the billboard of Rebecca Corday.

“Boy, they really captured her likeness. Her head is really that big in real life,” he said.

She gave a short laugh.

But it was oddly as sobering as a splash of water in the face.

Passing that billboard was like entering a portal into J. T.’s world.

He’d dated, and slept with, and was photographed with, a woman who was on a freaking
billboard
.

She’d forgotten how much more populated Black Oak was, in general, than Hellcat Canyon. Tourists with lots of money cruised the antiques stores and stopped in at the restaurants as they headed up to their Tahoe condos.

The street was aswarm with Lincoln Navigators and Cadillac Escalades.

And people. Lots and lots of people. Many of them leaving work for the day, but others pouring into restaurants for dinner.

Britt had grown up amid crowds in Southern California, and this hardly compared.

Still, it was a veritable stampede next to Hellcat Canyon.

And J. T. got even quieter.

She sensed he was even a little nonplussed.

She knew why.

One of these people, if not all of them, was bound to recognize him.

They’d spent a few days in the insular, wooded little bubble that was Hellcat Canyon. And she’d known all along he was famous.

She just hadn’t had to
really
experience firsthand what that actually meant in real life. And she had a hunch he’d almost forgotten this, too.

That was what good sex could do to a person: make them lose their mind.

“I made the reservation under a fake name,” he said absently. Almost to himself.

“Maybe we can whip up some kind of disguise.”

He shot her a wry glance. “I used to keep a fake mustache in my glove box.”

“Seriously?”

“No.” He sounded a little tense and distracted.

She wondered, then, if he was concerned about being seen with her, in particular.

Which made her go quiet, too.

“Let’s just have a good time,” she said, because she gauged from his tension that he was worried.

“I can’t imagine having any other kind of time with you, Britt.”

There it was. The charm was back. And that was better.

They found parking practically outside the restaurant, and they were both smiling when he came around to help her out. His hand went possessively to the small of her back.

A genuine maître d’ greeted them at the door of the restaurant.

“
Bon soir, monsieur, madame.
Welcome to . . .”

And then he did a near cartoon double take.

“
Mon dieu 
. . .” he breathed. He clapped a hand over his heart. “
Vous êtes Monsieur
John Tennessee McCord!
” he said with the awestruck gravity usually reserved for popes and presidents.

It occurred to Britt that nearly everybody said J. T.’s name in italics.

“Er . . .” J. T. began.

“
Je suis un grand fan de votre emission!
Daaaaamn!”

“
Oui.
Honored.
Excellent. Merci.
” And then J. T. smiled a smile Britt had never seen before. At least not in person. It was all-expansive, blinding charm—downright rakish. She recognized it instantly as the one he produced on red carpets, the one that showed up in all his photos. It transformed him as sure as if he’d put on a tuxedo.

“
J’ai regardé chacun de vos épisodes au moins trois fois. Je ne peux pas croire que vous êtes dans mon restaurant! Auriez-vous l’amabilité de bien vouloir signer ce menu et puis-je vous prendre en photo?
”

Britt’s high-school French couldn’t quite keep up with that, but she did hear the word
photo
and knew exactly what that meant. And she hadn’t considered
that
, either.

“I’ll be just a moment,” J. T. said to Britt crisply, apologetically. He put a chummy hand on the maître d’s back, steered him aside, and murmured to him in rapid-fire French, “
Je suis en compagnie d’une belle femme . . . Nous souhaitons rester discrets, ni être dérangés, alors je crains de devoir refuser votre demande d’une photo.
”

Hearing J. T., he of the seductive Tennessee drawl, rattle off fluent French, was just one more surreal element to the night.

He returned to her swiftly with the smile she recognized. “Sorry about that. I told him I was having dinner with a beautiful woman and I’d like to be discreet because I’m going to mess her hair up later.”

“You didn’t!”

He grinned. “But I did slip him a fifty, the going rate for discretion from maître d’s, told him we don’t want to be bothered, and he couldn’t take any photos. Though there are never any guarantees when it comes to privacy.”

“Then again, everything’s a little cheaper out here. Maybe you bought twice the discretion,” she tried. She’d never had to buy anyone’s discretion.

“Discretion,” he said somewhat grimly. “Is priceless, and it’s a bit of a gamble. That fifty may be wasted money if he figures out that a gossip site or TMZ might pay him more.”

This was completely outside the realm of her life experience to date.

“If it helps any, I got all tingly hearing you speak French,” she finally said.

He smiled for real again. “I got fluent between movies. In, you know, my downtime. It was useful in Cannes. I can do something French to you later, if you’d like,” he suggested politely. With a wicked glint in his eye.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

They gave a start when the maître d’ materialized next to them.

“Monsieur McCord,” the maître d’ stage-whispered. “Mademoiselle. This way,
s’il vous plaît
.”

They were ushered swiftly by a phalanx of waitstaff through the dark, dreamily lit, white-tableclothed restaurant and installed at a table in the back of a room that was apparently deemed slightly more private. To get there they needed to sweep through the main room, and every single head whipped toward them, craning, both because of the hushed commotion and because one glance at J. T. was all it took to surmise that he was a VIP.

“I was the homecoming queen a thousand years ago, but that was nothing compared to this,” Britt murmured.

“Damn. The homecoming queen? I’ve really come up in the world,” he teased.

And then they were installed at their table, and J. T. ordered a bottle of wine, which was produced for them with lightning speed, and they sipped and were quiet.

J. T. fussed briefly with his napkin.

The easy rhythm of the day stuttered.

And Britt wondered if they would have been better off just keeping their little fling in the safe-ish confines of Hellcat Canyon.