Hot in Hellcat Canyon (24 page)

“It’s funny, but I feel a little out of practice. It’s like switching gears. For a time in my life, paparazzi were everywhere. Like mosquitoes. You kind of just plowed through, maybe swatted a little bit.”

He smiled a little tautly here.

“I read about your swatting.”

“Ah, Wikipedia is so useful.
Really
not proud of that,” he said shortly.

“My impulse would be to swat them away from you.”

She said that before she could think it through.

He smiled. “I knew you were fierce, Britt Langley,” he said approvingly. “I kind of feel obliged to show fans my best self, or a dazzling self, so they don’t feel hurt or slighted. I’m sorry if it’s weird.”

It
was
a little weird.

“I get it. It’s part of your job. It’s not really the same thing, of course, but my dad was in sales. I watched him switch charm on and off. It wasn’t so much a different persona as an amplified one.”

“An amplified persona,” he quoted slowly. “You are one smart cookie, Britt. I’ve never heard it put that way. What did your dad sell?”

“Insurance.”

“In Southern California?”

“Irvine.”

“What about the rest of your family?”

“Well, my sister’s—”

“Mr. McCord . . .” The voice came from behind J. T. and both he and Britt gave a start. A skinny teenage busboy had crept up to the table. His voice was shaking. “I’m so very sorry to interrupt . . . it would mean everything if you would sign . . . I can’t tell you what a huge fan my mother is of . . .”

J. T.’s smile switched on, and the charm enveloped the skinny kid in warmth and ease and he swiftly signed his name on the proffered notepad with the ballpoint.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. McCord! Gosh . . . I hate to ask . . . if could just . . .” He held up his phone.

“Oh, I’m afraid I can’t do photos when I’m dining. Contractually forbidden.”

And he was all melting apology and steely unyielding denial and blue-eyed charm. The kid was helpless in the face of that and promptly took himself off.

There was another moment of taut silence between them. The reality of sitting with someone half the world had seen every week for several years was sinking in.

And she was suddenly as speechless as that kid.

“I’m sorry about that, Britt. That maître d’ pocketed my fifty and didn’t say anything to his staff, or that kid has balls, and I’m betting on the former. It’s just . . .”

“Please. Please don’t apologize. We’ll just roll with whatever happens.”

This was the right thing to say, and that’s why she said it. But she was out of practice, too: with rolling with things, with sudden interruptions, with changes, with hot men who comprised all of those things.

“So you were homecoming queen, huh? I bet you were a cheerleader, too, Britt Langley.”

“
Head
cheerleader.” Her old competitive streak kicked in. She’d fought for that top spot.

“Not surprised. I bet you liked it on top. Of the pyramid.”

“Oh, yeah. The view is much better from up there.”

He grinned slowly at that. “Still have the uniform?”

She laughed. “What
is
it with men and cheerleaders? It’s cliché. Remind me to tell you about the mermaid and the fisherman some time.”

“
What
the . . . you don’t want to tell me about it
now
? You expect me to move on from a statement like that?”

“I don’t know if you’re ready for it. An innocent young movie star like yourself.”

His head went back on a quick laugh. “Okay, you were about to tell me about your family.”

“Ah . . . um . . . well, my sister’s name is Laine. She’s older than I am. She married her high-school sweetheart and they have a little boy, Will.”

“The one who likes Muppets and flatulence.”

“That’s the one! We were a pretty ordinary family I guess. We had a nice little house identical to all the other houses on our street, except I had pink daisies on my wallpaper and my friend Dana down the street had yellow daisies. And she had a glow-in-the dark baton and I had a regular one, and man, I really wanted a glow-in-the-dark one. Oh, and my mom planted petunias and Dana’s mom planted shrubs. Mom could make anything grow, really.”

He visibly relaxed as he listened to this with pleasure and amusement.

“Is that where you got your love affair with plants? Your mama?”

“Yeah, probably. From Dad . . . I guess that’s where I got my competitive streak. And my mom would say that’s where I got my hard head. I got a scholarship, otherwise my parents would never have been able to afford college. They wouldn’t have pushed me to go, though. They’re pretty mellow people, my parents. They love us just because.”

And he was smiling softly at all of this.

With a pang she wondered if anyone had ever loved J. T. just because.

“Your turn, J. T. Where you grew up, siblings . . .”

She said this swiftly so she could cut him off at the pass if he intended to ask about her husband.

His little silence, and that faint shadow between his eyes, told her he wasn’t fooled a bit.

The muscles banding her stomach tensed.

But this was what people did on dates, right? They exchanged information about themselves.

“I have two brothers and a sister. We don’t talk much these days. We kind of scattered like pool balls the minute we could get away from Sorry, Tennessee. You don’t go revisit the site of a train wreck if you can avoid it, right? One brother is kind of a deadbeat, the other’s all right. He’s stubborn and proud and—”

“Mr. McCord.” A waitress had slinked up to their table.

She was a beautiful girl, tall, pale, brunette and willowy, in a short black skirt and a white blouse open two buttons. She was clutching what appeared to be her own head shot, of all things. “I am
such
a fan,” she gushed nervously, but she wasn’t too nervous to lean down a bit in case he might want a little cleavage with his wine. She bent so low, even Britt got a look in there. Admittedly, a decent rack, but Britt thought her own measured up nicely. “Would you please—”

Britt had never seen someone smile another person into silence, but J. T. was doing it now.

His eyes were doing most of the work. They were like steel gates slamming down.

The sheer force of his personal authority and displeasure came off him like steam and his smile was practically a weapon.

The poor girl—Britt could think of her that way now—was frozen in place.

And if that girl was a little nervous before, she was a
lot
nervous now.

“I’m afraid we have an urgent situation,” J. T. said pleasantly to her. “Would you be so kind as to ask your boss to come to our table immediately?”

She was off like a shot.

He turned back to Britt. His expression was thunderous.

She was frankly awestruck by what she’d just witnessed. J. T. McCord possessed the rare ability to be hot and charming and scary all at once, and he knew how to get what he wanted. She’d witnessed a variation on that theme with the snapped pool cue at the Misty Cat.

And he was clearly pissed off.

“Do you get used to it?” she tried.

“You just learn how to deal with it,” he said. “I don’t know that you get used to it. It’s all part of it. Sometimes it’s fun. Maybe a lot of times. Other times . . .”

“Maybe you have to ease back into it. Do sprints.”

He grinned at that. Sprints reminded him of a certain oak table on a house he’d just bought, and that’s exactly what she was intending.

“Don’t worry, Britt. She was leaning pretty far over but I’ve seen breasts before.”

He was a devil.

“Oh, I wasn’t worried,” she said idly. “I have a sense for where mine belong in the rack hierarchy.”

“
Rack hierarchy?
” he repeated slowly. “Sweetheart, I’d put them right on top.”

She laughed.

“You need to go back to work pretty soon, right? Get right back into the thick of all this kind of thing?”

“I have a few weeks before it all hits. I have a meeting with the location manager of
The Rush
and another with the director, and then I’m headed to Napa for Felix Nicasio’s wedding. He was the producer of
Blood Brothers
and I’m supposed to give a toast. I don’t have a single idea what I should say. And then after that I start back to work in earnest.”

And that would be the end of his downtime. He’d be swept right back into the current of his old life, and Britt could remain on the island of Hellcat Canyon with her memories.

She unconsciously pulled her hand way.

“You were telling me about your family?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, a little jarred that she’d taken her hand. “For the most part my family is pretty undistinguished, and that’s putting it really mildly. Unless you count good bone structure and a way with the opposite sex. You like kids, Britt?”

Holy shit.
That
was so sudden it felt like an ambush.

She was so startled she couldn’t speak.

“Love them,” she said faintly.

“Me, too. I always wanted kids.”

They could be interrupted any minute, so maybe this conversational gambit was more out of practical economy than anything else.

She doubted it.

She suspected it was more in the way of trying to startle her into deeper self-revelation. She was aware that it was patently unfair not to give anything of substance to him; then again, she hadn’t signed up for substance.

“Yeah. Me, too,” she said. Her voice was faint. She was unaccountably a little angry.

She’d both answered his question and hadn’t really answered it. And her own deeply ingrained sense of justice niggled her, because she knew she was being unfair to him.

Her hand curled into the tablecloth as if to ward off any more questions in the same general vein. She made herself stop, because he noticed stuff.

And little blip of silence ensued.

She was actually glad to see the maître d’ when he appeared.

“Yes, Monsieur McCord, please tell me how I may help.”

J. T. crooked his finger so that the man would bend closer. “Two members of your staff have approached me for an autograph since we’ve been seated. I’ll be filming in the Gold Country with a number of members of the Hollywood community in the near future and I would be pleased to highly recommend your restaurant to them if we are untroubled for the rest of the night.”

That was some masterful diplomacy. The elegantly implied threat was that if one more person interrupted them, he might even say something decidedly uncomplimentary. Maybe even on television.

He was clearly a master tactician. The “punching his way out of frustration” days were clearly behind him.

Watching him like this was somehow both intimidating and erotic as hell.

“Thank you for apprising me, sir,” the maître d’ said faintly. “You will not be bothered again.”

“Don’t leave,” J. T. ordered the man. “Britt, do you mind if I order for us?”

She shook her head.

She was hardly a complete rube. She could even speak a little French. But J. T.’s worldliness and authority, this earned sophistication, made her feel every bit of what she was, a middle-class California overachiever who had lost nearly everything she’d spent the first half of her life trying to achieve and wound up in Hellcat Canyon, subsisting on the basics, telling herself she was content.

Oddly, something else was revising in her, and it wasn’t just lust.

She
did
like to be on top, frankly.

And it had been ages since she’d needed to rise to any kind of new challenge.

J. T., in his way, was the biggest challenge she’d ever encountered.

J. T. handed the menus back to the maître d’, ordered in rapid-fire French, and the maître d’ bowed and departed.

“You been single since your divorce, Britt?”

Damn. She sucked in a quick breath.

Another quick question, and an entirely reasonable one. If she’d been nearly anybody else.

“Pretty much.” She inhaled. “That is, yes. Do you miss
Blood Brothers . . .
excitement? Hullabaloo?”

His head went up and he fixed her with a stare.

He was making it very clear that he knew she’d dodged that question.

She felt a pressure in her chest, a frisson of panic that he would simply get tired of trying to coax her out.

And then, for God’s sake, she hoped he would give up and then would get back to what they were clearly very good at, which was banging each other into oblivion, and then he would be gone from her life.

But he answered her question.

“I did at first. Miss all the craziness around
Blood Brothers
, that is. But those years were like someone dropped a bag of cash from an airplane and I had to grab as much as possible of everything thrown my way before it all blew away. And that included roles
and
relationships. So during that time I was so busy grabbing, it was hard to know how much of it I really
enjoyed
. It was only after it settled down, if that makes sense.”

“Roles and relationships.” She wondered if that was a reference to Rebecca Corday. Five years was a long time for someone like him to be with one person. And their breakup was fairly recent, in relationship terms.

Then again, breaking up was seldom quick and effortless. It was often a long time in the making.

She ought to know.

And John Tennessee McCord was allegedly allergic to the “L” word.

She supposed that was something Rebecca Corday ought to know.

“It’s hard to get a perspective on events, and even people, when you’re in the thick of them,” she said. “And it’s hard to know which opportunities are right for you, and which ones you just think you should want.”

He quirked a corner of his mouth. “Yeah . . . wanting . . . that’s a killer. Recently, I had a shot at a part I wanted more than . . . literally more than any other part in my entire career. I wanted it so much it was nearly physical pain. A script called
Last Call in Purgatory
. Fantastic writing. Set at the end of World War II, about a washed-up formerly brilliant writer who’s kind of a lush and the woman he’s in love with. I auditioned three times. Anyway, I heard back this week. And . . . I didn’t get it.”