Hot in Hellcat Canyon (27 page)

“The worst part was . . .” she whispered. Then she cleared her throat. “I always felt like there must be something fundamentally wrong with me, something soul-deep wrong, if I chose a man like Jeff. I thought only a damaged person would choose another damaged person. I’ve done my fair share of self-help reading. But I never could shake that feeling.”

It was the bone-deep shame that had dogged her for years.

“Well . . .” he said easily. “What kind of man am I?”

She propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him for some time, studying him like a map.

“Racking up the superlatives?” he guessed dryly.

“You’re a good one,” she said softly. Definitively.

“And what part of you tells you that?”

She paused again.

“Every part of me.”

He smiled a slow smile. “There you go, then,” he murmured. “And I haven’t known a single part of you to lie yet.”

She sighed contentedly and sank back down on her pillow next to him, and stared up at the ceiling of her beloved little cottage. It suddenly seemed brand-new.

He yawned and stretched and slid his arm gently out from beneath her. “I’ll go make coffee. Or do you want tea?”

“Coffee today, I think. It’s in the freezer. I ground up the beans. You’ll see it. French press is on the counter.”

He slid out of bed and utterly unselfconsciously and nudely strode toward the kitchen.

And as she drowsily listened to the homey sounds of him clinking around in the kitchen, she thought about what he’d said about lenses.

She was beginning to understand that J. T. was more like her than she ever dreamed: that his early life may have toughened him up, but it had also sort of shaved a fine layer away from whatever protective coating humans usually wore out into the world. So that he saw everything a little more acutely. Felt things that much more strongly.

This, too, was part of why he was a brilliant actor.

And she was now someone who saw beauty and poignance in beat-up chairs and dying plants. Who
physically
suffered when she witnessed someone being hurt and bullied. After Jeff, all the painful poignant things were going to hurt a little bit more from now on. Because she’d been extra tenderized. But the good things, the beautiful things, would feel that much better, too.

She had the kind of lens that allowed her to see J. T. as a person—a real person, with hurts and flaws and vulnerabilities—and not just a series of Google results, right from the beginning.

Maybe that’s why she’d been so squirrelly to begin with.

Maybe she’d sensed he’d be able to see her clearly.

When she hadn’t yet been really ready to look at herself. She wasn’t sure how ready she was now.

“I think your mountain lion wants something to eat,” he called.

“His food is in the little cans in the cupboard next to the fridge. His dishes are up next to it.”

She listened, lulled, to cupboard doors opening and closing, then heard the little “pop” of a tin being opened.

“Oh, wow, buddy, this stuff is rank,” he said frankly to her cat. “You really going to eat that?”

She smiled.

And then she luxuriously stretched all of her limbs at once, as if testing to see whether the sides of her box had really been kicked down.

T
hey had toast and coffee and each other for breakfast, all in the kitchen. Britt had never done it in a chair before, but J. T. couldn’t resist untying her robe the same way he’d untied her halter top a few days ago, and he was pleased with the naked woman he found inside, and one thing led to another, and she did get to be on top. Like a cowgirl. Scandalous and thoroughly satisfying.

“Let’s go swimming. I know a place,” J. T. murmured suddenly. Against her sweaty neck.

“You seem to know a
lot
of places.”

He laughed. “Sweetheart, we’ve only just begun. But this one kind of came with my new house.”

So she got into her bikini, a faded red-and-white Hawaiian print number, and they chucked her Kindle and towels and a thermos of iced tea into a big tote, and then he drove them to his new house.

They were quiet on the way. They listened to Wilco on the stereo instead of talking.

He wasn’t quite sure why he’d asked for the truth about her husband, one that he’d already pretty much guessed. Only that he’d somehow known she’d needed to be divested of that secret before she could allow herself to be fully known.

And he wanted to know her. With the same sense of restless hunger and promise he’d felt when he’d looked up at the hills of Hellcat Canyon. The sensation felt oddly like . . . freedom, maybe? When in his experience women had been anything but.

He knew what it was to have your world shattered. It happened when he was eight, when his mom left and at ten, when she died. And he got used to living out various trials and embarrassments in the public eye. It gave a person a sense of perspective. Acting was how he’d escaped or soothed himself from all of that. Becoming a different person for a time was pretty liberating.

Britt was indomitable, he was pretty sure. But she was just beginning to reassemble her life and its new form wasn’t entirely ready for the light of day, like her drawings.

He parked his truck in front of his house, dashed inside to collect his things, and rejoined her.

“OK, the trail down can be pretty precarious, but I’m a great navigator. Trust me.”

She hesitated. She opened her mouth, about to say, “I can do it on my own,” he was pretty sure. Then she clapped it closed. And she finally gave him her hand, and he accepted it like she’d just handed him an Emmy.

He smiled and gripped it fast.

And she allowed him to be her rudder as he led her down the crooked path that traced the river and opened up into the swimming hole a hundred or so yards down.

The pool was bound by a few huge granite rocks, and a nice, big flat one near the narrow beach.

“Ta-da!” he said.

She was gratifyingly impressed. “What a find, J. T.! I’ve never seen this pool before.”

“Found it first day I was here. Followed the sound of the water. Pretty sure I’m hardly Ponce de Leon, but I bet it’s ours at least just for today.”

They whipped out their towels and flapped them down over the big flat granite rocks that flanked the pool, deposited their tote, then splashed on in.

The chill sucked the air out of him at first. But then it was exhilarating, and they got used to it. And then they frolicked like otters.

“Race you to that rock.” He pointed to a big granite boulder jutting out from the beach.

She beat him handily.

“Ha!” She exulted, albeit breathing like a bellows.

“Wench!” he laughed. Both pleased and nonplussed. And high-fived her.

“I’ll give you a head start next time, J. T.”

He kissed her.

For a long time.

“I almost forgot how much I love to win,” she mused when they came up for air.

“I’m sure it’ll all come back to you,” he teased. “We’ve established that you like the view from up top.”

She laughed and shot away from him like a mermaid.

A half hour later they waded dripping out of the water and stretched out on the rock to get warm. They fished out their e-readers. They read and passed the thermos full of iced tea back and forth, swigging at it like a couple of bums under an overpass. Britt on her stomach with her bikini top untied so the sun could erase any tan lines, J. T. on his back.

J. T. felt as happy to be himself as that rock or that boulder or those trees were to be what they were. Present and purely content and right where he should be.

She chuckled.

He turned to her and smiled. “What are you reading?”

“It’s a Susan Elizabeth Phillips book. It’s pretty funny. What are you reading?”

“Malcolm Gladwell.
Outliers
. It’s good, but I guess I’m not really in the mood for it today.”

“Wanna swap? I’ve read this one before. I like Gladwell and I haven’t read that one.”

They swapped e-readers and read in companionable quiet for a time, instinctively, almost unconsciously, shifting every now and then to make sure their legs, their hips, some part of them was always touching.

Until the inevitable time came when they wanted all of their parts to be nudely touching.

They hurried back to his house to break in the bed he’d bought at Home Depot.

And not only broke it in, but nearly broke it.

CHAPTER 15

“
J
ohn Tennessee McCord, are you living in sin with Britt?”

Britt froze over the sink, a dish in one hand, the scrubber in the other, letting the water profligately run. She realized she was holding her breath.

She was washing up the dinner dishes and J. T. was over on Mrs. Morrison’s porch, sharing a drink and a chat, which he did pretty much nightly now. And Britt could hear every word.

J. T. didn’t answer right away. She heard him take a stalling sip. The ice cubes tinkled.

It was a good question, though, Britt had to admit. What
were
they doing? They talked a lot about nearly everything, they laughed more than she’d laughed in ages, they swam, they watched television with J. T.’s arm slung around her, they read, they hiked, they had lots and lots of sex. There didn’t seem to be any point in stopping or discussing the fact that their date of about three weeks ago had never really ended, in the way there really isn’t any point in thinking too hard about what your lungs were doing at any given moment. It had just happened. It was that easy.

They didn’t go back to Maison Vert, though. By some tacit agreement they’d decided not to let J. T.’s reality intrude.

“Well?” Mrs. Morrison pressed him.

“Well, I’m just thinking my answer over, in light of your shotgun sitting right there.”

“I’m old, and I don’t have time for equivocating. Seems to me like a yes or a no would get the question answered.”

Good God, to be quite that bold and fearless, Britt thought. When the sands in your proverbial hourglass were running out before your eyes, maybe it was easier to cut to the chase.

She almost hoped he didn’t answer.

All she knew was that life with J. T. here made her previous life, by contrast, feel like that chair out there on the porch with the frayed cane back. Like something that was functional and homely and a little broken but could potentially be a work of art. The whole world had paradoxically gotten roomier and brighter by virtue of the addition of a large man crammed into her little house. A large man who, she’d learned, sometimes liked to eat peanut butter straight from the jar with a spoon.

A large man who had never cohabited with Rebecca Corday.

“I think we’re just thoroughly enjoying each other’s company at the moment in all the ways available to men and women,” J. T. finally said.

Wow.
Nice save, J. T.
, she thought dryly.

Mrs. Morrison chuckled and gave her knee a slap. “John Tennessee McCord, you should have been a politician.”

“Don’t rule it out. In my next career, maybe. If the acting thing goes kaput.”

Britt carefully dried the dish and inserted it in the rack so she could hear the next thing they said.

“That was a clever answer, and I like you, John Tennessee McCord, but don’t you hurt Britt Langley, J. T.”

Britt froze.

How in God’s name would a man respond to
that
? By running in the opposite direction, and Britt would hardly blame him if he did. In dreams, the moment you noticed you were dreaming was the moment you woke up, usually.

“You should worry more about me!” J. T. said, after what was likely a nonplussed silence. “See this here bruise on my neck? She’s enthusiastic, our Britt.”

Britt’s jaw dropped.

“
John Tennessee McCord!
” Mrs. Morrison was thoroughly, delightedly scandalized.

She heard something that sounded like a smack—that would be Mrs. Morrison giving him the swat he deserved. J. T. was laughing wickedly.

Britt was scandalized, too, and she realized she was blushing.

But she was also grinning.

He really could charm the birds from the trees, and he could get away with saying things no ordinary human could get away with saying. In part because one of the loveliest things about J. T. was that he generally liked people, and they knew it.

She turned the water off. She drew in a long breath.

He hadn’t answered the question. She was actually a little glad.

His phone was on the table. And she would never look at it, but every time an e-mail or a text rolled in, it chimed, and it chimed a lot.

It chimed now.

Speaking of sands in an hourglass, that’s what every little chime felt like. She knew he was preparing for things when she was away at work, struggling to write a wedding toast, setting up meetings for
The Rush
, answering e-mails about a big, fancy celebrity wedding that he’d RSVP’d to ages ago and that had nothing at all to do with her. She’d never expected to be included in that. Nor had he suggested she be included in that.

And then his downtime would come to an end.

He’d left the peanut butter out on her counter. She smiled when she looked at it. But its presence was worrisome. He now had
his own peanut butter
at her house. And she’d bought it for him. Because it made him happy, and making him happy seemed to be what made
her
happy.

It might be peaceful enough between them now, but in Britt’s experience, inherent in every peace was a sort of tension. The sort of tension presented by the smooth unbroken surface of a new jar of peanut butter.

The whole
point
of that surface was to shatter it. Which sometimes felt like the fate of any kind of peace.

A
couple of days later Britt slipped out of bed around seven a.m. to get ready for work and tiptoed into the living room, leaving J. T. sleeping. He didn’t snore, thankfully. But he occasionally murmured, which was funny. “Damn straight,” he muttered once.