Hot in Hellcat Canyon (9 page)

Her breath snagged. She realized she was frowning. A casual-enough sentence. Every word in that sentence had its own subtle character, from the faint bitterness of “dad” to the echo of an ache in “used to.”

She could build a whole story around them and it wasn’t a pretty one, and she realized her heart was aching as surely as if he’d told it all to her.

These were the kinds of things that lived between the lines of his Wikipedia entry.

He must have seen something in her expression because he added lightly. “This place makes the place I grew up in look like a palace.”

“And I bet your current house makes this place look like a tool shed.”

“Mmm. It might. Can’t really recall.”

“You can’t recall your house?” She instantly regretted her astonishment. But still.

But he just shrugged. “I travel a lot. I rented a house in the Hollywood Hills and that’s where my most of my clothes and stuff is right now. I travel pretty light these days.”

“Do you miss Tennessee?”

“When I was eighteen it seemed pretty important to get out of there. Not sure it would still feel like home. I do . . .” He turned around to check out that view again, and his voice went kind of drifty. “Turns out I do miss trees and hills.”

She took a deep breath. “You’ll never have to stop looking at trees and hills when you rent this house.”

Good God. The things she did for a paycheck.

He didn’t turn around to look at her. J. T. just shook his head to and fro, slowly and a dimple appeared in his three-quarter profile. He clearly still found her entertaining.

A moment later he did turn around with an air of resolve.

“So how about it, Britt? I’d love to spend the evening in the company of a real-life angel instead of one staring at me from a frame. We’ll go check out some live music, have a few drinks. You drink beer? I bet you drink beer.”

Of all the things she’d thought he’d say, this had to be among the last. As shocked as if she’d fallen through a trapdoor.

She was afraid she was gaping.

“Did you . . . did you really just call me an angel?”

“I think I did.” He was amused. “I don’t know if you’re incredulous or commenting on how cheesy that was.”

“Kind of both, to tell you the truth,” she said quite honestly. Still reeling.

She had to force herself not to take a step backward.

He just grinned again. The man was scrappy, she had to hand it to him. “Excellent news, as to the first. As to the second, I’ll have to work on my patter. I might be a little rusty when it comes to asking women out.”

Hoooolly. Crap.

CHAPTER 5

H
er heart felt like a roulette wheel given a good brisk swipe.

“Oh.” She drew in a long breath. “I . . . um. You were serious about that. Earlier.”

That had emerged a lot more astonished and a lot less gracious than she’d hoped.

“Yeah. I was serious.” It was his turn to be a bit incredulous.

She would probably remember this afternoon later in terms of its silences, each of them with their own character: tense, fraught, horrifying, painfully sexy, awkward.

“Um. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“You . . . can’t?” he repeated. As if she’d just taught him a new word in Turkish.

“I can’t,” she said firmly.

“But thank you,” she added weakly a moment later, into the dead silence.

“Mmm,” was all he said. A moment later.

He turned abruptly then wandered into the second bedroom. Where he was just going to find more of that green carpet.

She remained rooted to the spot.

And this time the silence was horrible because she had no idea whether she’d offended him or hurt his feelings. But the room was practically spinning.

He’d asked her
out
.

He’d asked
her
out.

He’d
asked her out.

Then again, she supposed he needed to do
something
to fill his downtime.

Or someone.

“So . . . is it
all
guys, Britt?” he called casually from the other room. “Asking for a friend.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He emerged from the room. “Or maybe it’s guys with tattoos? Or actors. It’s actors, isn’t it?”

“I’m lost. Why are we suddenly playing Password?”

“Just trying to get a bead on your current objection to me. You know, so I can refine my future approach.”

Her jaw dropped. She gave a short, astounded laugh. The
nerve
of him.

“Is there another guy?” he pressed.

“J. T.—”

“Another girl?”

“Um—”

“Another guy
and
another girl? This is California, after all. People get adventurous here.”

“J. T.!” And now she was laughing.

“You’re into vampires, blindfolds, My Little Pony? I’m pretty open-minded.”

“I’m just—wait. My Little Pony?”

“You live in Los Angeles long enough, you hear
everything
.”

She had the strangest urge to tell him about the mermaid and the fisherman.

“Huh.” She was definitely going to Google My Little Pony.

He detected a softening. “Aw, c’mon, Britt,” he cajoled. “Just one night. Just a few hours. We’ll sing badly, have a few drinks. See where the night takes us. I’m a person, same as you.”

She almost snorted. The “same as you” part wasn’t
remotely
true.

“J. T., it’s just . . .”

She had no idea how to finish that sentence.

“Yeah?”

The moment was as taut as harp strings, suddenly.

“I’m busy.”

His face all but blanked.

He was probably paralyzed by the crushing lameness of this excuse.

“Busy,” he repeated, finally. As though he was tasting milk that had gone ever-so-slightly off.

He sounded more disappointed in her lack of originality than anything else.

She would have laughed if she didn’t have a whomping case of vertigo caused from being asked out by a
movie star
.

One who had slept with Rebecca
freaking
Corday.

It was so wholly unexpected, she was as at a loss, and as breathless and panicky, as if her kayak had tipped over in the Pacific.

J. T. McCord made her feel way too many things all at once. Things she wasn’t ready to feel again. She needed a wading pool before she entered the dating pool, and he was the whole damn ocean.

She wondered if he’d ever in his entire life heard the word
no
from a woman.

At least he’d remember her for that reason.

And as the silence stretched, his incredulity seemed to give way to a sort of curiosity. He was studying her as if he was determined to crack the code.

“Kayla Benoit is single,” she volunteered desperately. “And she’s very pretty.
And
she owns a boutique. It’s right there on the sign over her door. Kayla Benoit.”

His face instantly became a flickering battlefield of emotions.

The one that settled in was pure hilarity.

“Are you seriously trying to distract me with another woman? Like throwing a steak at a rottweiler so you can make your getaway?” His voice was hoarse. “Are you attempting to
console
me in my disappointment with another woman?”

When he put it that way, it
was
pretty funny.

And pretty insulting.

“You sure came up with that rottweiler analogy pretty quickly,” she hedged.

“I was on a cop show. That was in the script more than once.”

That one tugged up one corner of her mouth, and then the other went up, and she was smiling, because that was pretty funny, too.

And that made him smile, too. It was an amused and wholly determined smile.

But a subtle little war was taking place. Something complex and dangerous and exhilarating was sparking between them. They were both pretty damn stubborn and accustomed to getting their own ways. Britt had forgotten just how stubborn she could be, in fact. And how much fun a well-matched sparring partner could be.

Her grin faded. “It’s just . . . J. T., if you’re just looking for, um,
company
during your downtime . . .”

His eyebrows shot up sardonically at how gingerly she delivered that euphemistic word.

“. . . you must have infinite options.”

He went silent again. She wondered if he’d been this astonished so many times in a single afternoon in his entire life.

Then his face got ever so slightly harder. “Spent a little time Googling me last night, eh Britt?”

More ironic than bitter, that statement. Though he had a right to both bitterness and irony, probably.

“Of course,” she said instantly.

He seemed to like that. He smiled. If a little tautly. “Think you know everything about me now?”

“No,” she said immediately, fervently. “Not for an instant do I think that. You can’t know a person that way.”

He blinked. And then she realized she sounded as though she was defending him.

“Okay,” he said carefully, after a moment. “Then do you think that having, as you put it, ‘infinite options’ means discretion doesn’t enter into it? That with me and women, it’s like . . . I’m just reaching my hand into a bowl of peanuts and grabbing a handful and stuffing it into my mouth without inspecting each individual peanut?”

She was utterly arrested by this analogy.

“I’m sorry,” she confessed on something close to a whisper after a moment. “But all that does is make me think of a bowl of lady peanuts.”

His eyes flared in surprise, and then his face went abstracted. “Lady peanuts? Is it like a scene out of an Ethel Merman movie? Are they all wearing little swimsuits?”

“Yeah, they’re all wearing little swimsuits. And performing a synchronized water ballet. All the lady peanuts.”

He was staring at her not as though she was a lunatic, which might have been the logical response, but as though she was like a Russian nesting doll of delights and he kept uncovering new ones.

“Britt,” he just said. Appreciatively. Almost yearningly. Sort of marveling. Apropos of nothing.

She could feel her face heating again.

She drew in a breath. “It’s just, J. T., if the public record is any indication, my guess is you took your sweet time getting around to learning
discretion
, if you ever truly have, and had a lot of fun doing it.”

That
should have pissed him off.

Instead he whistled, long and low, impressed, as if she’d just deployed a tricky wrestling maneuver.

And then the devil actually
grinned
.

And planted his feet ever so slightly apart as if he was settling in for a good debate.

“When my career first took off, I could pretty much go out with any woman I wanted. I could flip through a magazine, call up my publicist, boom. It was practically like ordering something from Amazon. I might have gotten a little carried away.”

“
Amazon?
Now you’re only making my case for me.”

This was actually kind of fun. She’d forgotten how thoroughly she loved to argue with someone who was good at it.

“Hold on. I was young then. Still figuring things out. What did I know? What would
you
do? And
everybody
is good-looking in Hollywood. What I learned is, when everybody’s a four leaf clover, nobody is. Does that make sense?”

She hesitated. “In a Zenlike way, sure. I get it.”

She did. And damn it, she liked it a lot.

J. T. McCord, she was learning, was not only hot. He was smart.

He might possibly even be soulful.

Something was asserting itself through her panic. The
Want
was still present and accounted for. But its gentler cousin, Yearning, had just shown up. Yearning was seductive. She hadn’t felt anything like that in years.

Yearning was really only a few degrees different from pain.

“So I kind of had to learn about myself and women the hard way, Britt. And I did learn. Discretion, as you say.”

She pictured the photographers hunting him through an airport and knew again a surge of outrage, as surely as if his happiness was critical to her own. It was hardly rational. It was just that she so hated injustice. And bullies.

“You ever learn anything the hard way, Britt?” he tried. Softer now.

She hesitated. She swallowed.

“Sure,” she said faintly. Because she was fundamentally honest.

She could have said,
And how.

She didn’t have to. She was pretty sure that was the way he heard it.

He was studying her again.

He was a little too good at this persuasion thing and a little too intuitive.

“Okay. Ever think that maybe I’m hopelessly captivated by your command of the English language? ‘Enigmatic.’ ‘Vuvuzela.’ ‘Lady peanuts.’ ”

She shrugged. “Who could blame you?”

He flashed a grin. “Well?”

“. . . But that’s not really why you’re asking me out.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, of
course
it isn’t,” he said so exasperatedly and unapologetically she laughed. “I might be in Hellcat Canyon for just a few weeks, give or take, but I don’t see a single reason why we can’t kick off a beautiful friendship for the duration based on what you and I see when we look at each other. We were given five senses for a reason. It’s how we connect as a species. It’s part of the natural order. You have to start somewhere and I’m not gonna apologize for liking what I see when I look at you.”

And just in case she missed his meaning, the way he looked at her now erased all thought except for what it might feel like to allow her five senses to run amok over this man like the starved little gluttons they were.

His faint little smile suggested he knew exactly which parts of her body were tingling right now.

“As much as I’m enjoying the nature lecture . . .” Her voice was a little frayed. “. . . and all your adroit rationalization, I’m not really looking for a”—she bobbed her fingers in air quotes—“ ‘beautiful friendship.’ ”

Amazement flickered across his face.