Hot in Hellcat Canyon (16 page)

There was a fraught silence.

“Aw, she don’t mind, right Britt?” Truck didn’t address that to Britt, who was getting ready to dart by him with an empty tray. Truck curled a hand around her arm to stop her.

J. T. saw raw terror flash into her eyes.

It was there and gone, so quickly he might have even imagined it. But it nearly stopped J. T.’s heart.

And this time she didn’t dodge or object or demur. She was frozen.

“Yeah. I’m going to need you to take your hand off her, Truck. Now.”

He knew that was all that was necessary to get that big dumb bomb to go off.

He touched Truck gently on the back.

It was like touching a bank of file cabinets.

Truck whirled on him and brought his pool cue whipping down toward him like a club.

In a series of smooth blink-and-you’ll-miss motions, J. T. blocked it with one hand, snatched it from Truck’s fist with the other, and then snapped it over his knee.

The ensuing silence was so instant and total it was like something had vacuumed sound out of the world. He would have sworn even the neon signs had stopped humming out of shock.

He hung on to the cue. The top half dangled from a single shred of wood, like a man hanging from the gallows.

The silence rang.

And then J. T. became aware of a tiny sound. Like a hungry mosquito had zipped into the silent room.

The sound swelled until it became a gleeful “
oooOOOoooo 
. . .”

The universal sound of glee that accompanied the anticipation of a fight.

He shot a censoring black look at the culprit.

The sound stopped.

“That’s my lucky pool cue, you son of a bitch!” Truck, when he found his voice, sounded perhaps a bit more surprised than furious.

But it was fair to say he was a
lot
of both.

“Damn straight it’s your lucky cue. You’re lucky I didn’t skewer you like chicken satay with it.”

Truck was scarlet. “What the fuck is satay! Quit saying things like satay!”

“You’re lucky I didn’t puncture you like a toothpick in
fondi de carciofi
.”

He’d never before used hors d’oeuvres as weapons. But he was resourceful, and Truck had just handed him a weapon, and as he’d told Britt, he didn’t see the need to fight fair.

He decided to put Truck out of his misery.

“What I mean to say, Truck, is, you’re lucky . . .” J. T. leaned, perhaps inadvisably, forward and said, very, very slowly, with tenderly menacing patience “. . . I didn’t ram it up your
ass
, Truck.”

“It’s broken now. One of those pieces ought to fit on up there,” suggested some wit.

Truck whipped around on him. “You shut your hole!”

“You don’t want to fight me, Truck. You ever been in actual prison? It ain’t the cozy hometown drunk tank I bet you have here. And what I did to that cue? I can do to your neck. And just as fast.”

Ain’t?
Where the hell had that come from?

When in Rome, he supposed. He didn’t like discovering his veneer of civility was tissue thin.

J. T. didn’t like knowing it was a veneer.

Britt had sidled up next to him and gently laid his beer tab down on the table in front of him. Deliberately.

He glanced at it. It read:
Mention his mama.

“You think your mama would be proud, Truck?” he said seamlessly.

Bingo.

Truck froze.

Doubt rippled across his expression. He made a visible effort to collect his temper.

Satay was one thing. His mama was apparently a whole other level of combat.

J. T. sighed a great gusty sigh of exasperation. “The trouble with you, Truck, is you’re boring. I’m willing to bet everything that you circle around and around, doing the same damn things, in the same damn way, blaming the same damn people, throwing the same damn tantrums. Like a damned baby with a dirty diaper. Am I right? Ain’t you
bored
with yourself?”

J. T. seized the chalk used to keep score on the board and dashed out, in huge, sweeping letters:

GOOGLE

SATAY

He slapped the chalk down on the pool table.

“The internet,” he said. “Not just for porn anymore.”

Truck was speechless.

“You follow me now or if you ever again touch Britt here when she doesn’t want to be touched, or say anything untoward to her or anything that so much as raises a blush, I
will
kick your ass in ways so surprising and painful you’ll have to Google your own name to remember who you are.”

He knew an exit line when he uttered it.

He threw the destroyed cue down, snatched his cue up, shot the eight ball in the corner pocket, and flung the cue down again.

And then he headed out the door.

“
Untoward?
” Truck’s voice was frayed with shock. “Who
says
shit like that?”

“
A
ren’t
,” Britt heard J. T. say viciously to himself, once he stood outside. As though he were pressing a reset button.

She’d started after him and paused to give Sherrie an imploring look. Sherrie gave her the “go on, go after him” nudge with her chin.

The street was so peaceful compared to the inside of the Misty Cat, it was like entering another dimension. The hills were purpling now and it would be full dark in minutes, but it was never really dark on a clear night, thanks to all the stars.

He glanced over at her. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. A little shaken. Impressed. But fine.”

He was quiet a moment.

“Wasn’t all that long ago
I
didn’t know what satay was. That was playing even dirtier than I’m normally willing to do.”

“I’m sorry you had to do that.”

“It’s not me I’m concerned about. I have plenty of experience with the Trucks of the world. If I had to guess, he’s a big fish in a small pond that doesn’t have the guts to ever leave. Guys like Truck, when they see something different or new, they either want to own it, be it, or kill it. Metaphorically speaking. Or, if you’ll excuse the vernacular, fuck it. Anything to make him feel like he has some control over it.”

Only someone who was used to feeling like an outsider would know these things.

Her first impression of him had been right: John Tennessee McCord was probably fundamentally lonely.

“You nailed him pretty perfectly,” she told him softly. “Add to all that the fact that he hasn’t worked in over a year. Got laid off. His mama’s on disability.”

J. T. gave a short laugh that tapered into a sigh, and he swept his hair back with his hands. “Now I feel like even more of a jerk.”

“No, Truck had every bit of that coming. He wasn’t going to hurt me, though.”

“Oh, how the hell do you know that?” He sounded more wearily exasperated than anything else and she almost laughed.

“I just do. He’s an equal opportunity asshole. He mostly just blunders about and people put up with it because they know him. Everyone in town seems to have their own role. Seemed like he had something to prove tonight, though.”

He turned and even in the dark his eyes seemed brilliant.

Normally she would have enjoyed an uninterrupted opportunity to stare into his blue eyes.

At the moment they felt like lasers.

“But you didn’t like him touching you, Britt.”

She hesitated. “No.”

“Has he touched you before? Like that? Grabbed you?”

Suddenly she was wary.

This was a man who noticed things.

“Not quite like that. No.” Her voice was fainter now.

“And you’re certainly not scared of
Truck
, necessarily.”

She hesitated again. “No.”

Her voice sounded small over the pounding of her heart in her ears.

He was just a few questions away from cornering the truth about her, the one that no one in Hellcat Canyon knew.

“Because here’s the thing, Britt. You weren’t pissed off when he grabbed your wrist.” He pointed this out, gently but relentlessly. As if he somehow knew she didn’t want to hear it. “Or just annoyed. Or amused. You were terrified. I saw it in your eyes. You were scared to death.”

She was speechless. Her mind blanked.

He held her gaze with a sort of sympathetic remorselessness. He would have made a good actual cop, she thought, because she doubted he’d miss an eyelash twitch.

And she simply couldn’t deny it, because it was true.

She suspected she’d told him quite a bit with her silence.

And he seemed to take it as confirmation.

“I just couldn’t let that stand,” he said gently. “Is that all right?”

Her throat was so tight the words couldn’t emerge. Her mind couldn’t seem to line them up in any proper order anyway.

“I’m sorry you had to . . . but . . . thank you. Yes. That’s all right. ”

He exhaled, as if he’d been waiting for just those words.

“Good,” he said softly.

And suddenly they were quiet. J. T. sought out the moon, a sliver of light over the mountains.

The silence thrummed with intensity. She was grateful he didn’t ask any more questions. Though she had a hunch his thoughts were full of them.

“Just so you know, J. T., I
can
actually take care of myself.”

He turned very, very slowly toward her. He stared at her with unflattering incredulity. “Do you really
believe
that?”

She was shocked. “I’m—”

“Or is it just something you say, a formality, like offering to pick up a check when you know someone else is going to pay for it anyway?” he demanded.

She was speechless. “Maybe,” she admitted faintly, after a moment. “But you sure use a lot of food analogies when you want to make a point.”

He blinked.

And then the tension visibly went out of him. He smiled faintly. “Something new I’m trying.”

“I’m not saying you’re helpless, Britt. I don’t think
that
for a minute. It’s just that
no one
can completely take care of themselves. Not even me, and I have a freaking black belt in karate. It’s not a man versus woman thing. It’s a ‘let somebody care about you thing.’ And sometimes
that
takes more guts and sense than taking on the whole damn world by yourself.”

She was awfully tempted to argue just for the sake of arguing, but it would get her nowhere. He was every bit as stubborn as she was.

And the thing was, he was exactly right. With this little lecture he’d just chipped off another layer of her crusty old defenses. Trust and vulnerability had once led her into danger. Add that to her own native stubbornness, and you had a recipe for a wall.

“Got it,” she said finally, tersely. A concession on her part.

And the perverse man smiled slowly at her. He seemed to actually relish her stubbornness.

She sighed. “It’s funny,” she mused. “You’d be surprised, but plenty of women are into Truck. Kayla Benoit and Casey Carson once got into a fight right there outside the Truth and Beauty over him. It started when Kayla told Truck she could tie a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue, and I’m not quite sure what happened after that, but everyone was torn between selling tickets or getting the fire hose. Even the sheriff hesitated to wade on in there. They both had fresh manicures and those nails can do some damage.”

Bemusement bloomed into unadulterated wicked delight on J. T.’s face. “Who won?”

“Casey pulled out Kayla’s new hair extensions, which upset both of them, since Casey had just put them in and they looked great. That stopped it pretty quickly. They made up right there on the street. So I guess you can say it was a draw. Kayla offered Casey a twenty-percent discount on anything in her store, but she told her she had to come into the store to use it, and she hasn’t yet. And they haven’t really talked since. Which is kind of a shame, since they’ve been friends since grade school.”

He was smiling in earnest now. “Well, I’m a little sorry I missed that.”

“Casey’s pretty talented with hair.”

“All artists are temperamental.” Said the man who ought to know.

She smiled back at him.

His grin faded. “You get a little older, you get to know what or who is worth fighting over.”

The implication, if she wanted to read it that way, was that he considered her worth it. Worth the risk to his reputation, worth the risk to his person, worth lecturing her about unclenching.

And her heart lurched.

The low hum of want that thrummed between them was textured now with the things they weren’t saying, the questions he wasn’t asking, the admission she’d just made that wasn’t really an admission. The admission he’d just made.

“I’ll see you home if you want,” he said finally, easily. “My truck’s right’s over there.”

The silence between his question and her answer nearly rang like a note.

This is it
, she thought. It was her chance. It wasn’t quite the way she’d expected, but she’d better take it.

“All right,” she said finally, softly. “Thank you.”

He released a breath he seemed to be holding and immediately aimed his keys at his truck and beeped the locks open, and he pulled open the door for her. She climbed about two stories, or so it felt like, and slid into cushioned comfort.

He shut the door behind her. “Seat belt,” he murmured.

She smiled and clicked into it as he started the truck up and pulled away from the curb.

J. T. was silent. He was still waiting for the last of the adrenaline to ebb. Running like a deep seam through the pure carnal triumph of finally spiriting away a woman with whom he badly wanted to have sex was the satisfying knowledge that he’d protected her.

It had been a reflex. And he’d known he would do it again, in a heartbeat, career be damned.

In this moment, next to him, Britt Langley was safe. This, for whatever reason, seemed to be the only thing that mattered in the moment.

“I like this,” she said, pointing at the stereo.

“It’s Wilco.” He turned it up a little.

It was loping and jangly and acoustic, lovely and wistful, not country but not
not
country. A song about resting your head on a bed of stars, one he’d heard dozens of times, one of his favorites. It seemed sort of prescient given how he’d ended up here in Hellcat Canyon.