Hot in Hellcat Canyon (30 page)

He stared at her blackly until her confident smile wavered.

“No, Rebecca,” he explained slowly, as if she were a dull child. “I’m not going to do ‘breezy’ with you. It’s not as cute as you think it is. The last time we spoke was right before you left Cannes with Anthony Underhill. I haven’t seen you since. You never returned any of my calls or texts. And if you need your memory refreshed about
why
you dumped me, there are a few hundred articles about it on the internet. I remember in particular ‘The Top Ten Reasons Rebecca Corday is better off without John Tennessee McCord.’ So color me baffled about your presence here.”

“Oh, God, John. You shouldn’t have read them. I didn’t.” She sounded genuinely pained.

“Bullshit.”

“Well, not all of them.”

She never could resist reading about herself. She counted on fresh internet mentions the way she counted on water gushing out when she turned on the faucet in the morning. She would be just as shocked if either stopped.

“That one was e-mailed to me. By guess who.”

She struggled not to smile. And then she did. That famous smile that could light a theater. “Let me guess. Franco?”

“Who else?”

She laughed. And once upon a time he’d lived to make her laugh, and now it was as charming as the sound of shattering glass.

“Okay, John, as for the rest of why I’m here, I’d rather not talk in the street. Can we go back to your place, wherever that is? It’s pretty hot in the sun right here. I saw your truck over there. Can’t miss it.”

He sighed gustily. “For fuck’s sake. Get in the truck.”

He stalked over to it without waiting for her and he didn’t open the door for her.

She did as ordered, and he peeled away from the curb fast enough to spit gravel behind them.

He was stonily silent.

She watched the scenery. “It’s pretty as a movie set, this little town, and—oh, look! My Macy’s campaign on all the bus benches!” She gave a little delighted bounce in her seat.

He said nothing.

“So you’re going to be like that, Johnny?”

He said nothing.

“I can keep talking even if you don’t.”

He said nothing.

“Nice country here, even if it’s a little hot.”

He said nothing.

And finally she shut up.

He turned up the road to his cabin and cut the engine.

“
This
place? It looks like that house made of straw the first little pig made.”

He said nothing.

She shot him a look. Rebecca’s confidence was ironclad. He never could intimidate her.

He didn’t open her truck door, which was something she wouldn’t fail to notice, because J. T. was a gentleman.

And he didn’t offer to take her bag—a worrisome bag, because he’d seen it dozens of times before.

It was her favorite overnight bag.

He flipped on the ceiling fan and opened the windows and said nothing to her as she took a look around at his simple furnishings.

“You shopped the Bachelor Pad collection at Ikea?” she sounded amused.

He said nothing. “Okay, talk, Rebecca.”

“Well. Are you going to offer me something to drink first, Johnny?”

“I’m afraid if I do you’ll be like Persephone and be obliged to stay here for six months out of the year.”

Her brow furrowed a little. “Who’s Persephone? Is she in the latest Harry Potter movie? It sounds like a phone sex pseudonym, if you ask me.”

He stared at her. He honestly wasn’t certain whether she was joking.

“Persephone. Daughter of Demeter, the Greek goddess of the spring? She was kidnapped by Hades, taken to the underworld, and because she ate six pomegranate seeds she’s obliged to return for six months out of the year, and that’s why we have fall and winter.”

She furrowed her brow as if he were speaking Sanskrit. “So . . . so you’re reading about Persephone for a role?”

He opened his mouth to reply. Then he sighed. To be fair, a really successful acting career didn’t often leave anyone much time for reading, or to become otherwise
interesting
.

And her career was stratospheric.

“Green tea? I can throw it over ice.”

He belatedly wished he’d pretended he’d forgotten about the green tea. It seems he’d lost the art of game playing. Everything had always been strategy with her. They’d always traded the power back and forth, because he’d known he was Rebecca’s weakness.

“Thanks,” she said softly. Touched he’d remembered.

He just snorted. He vanished into the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil.

“Does Underhill know you intended to come here?” He didn’t look back at her.

Underhill. The man she’d dumped him for in Cannes.

Her ensuing little silence felt planned. And that just made him angrier.

“He may or may not still be my boyfriend.”

At one time he would have found this coyness maddeningly irresistible. Because Rebecca was smart the way an animal was smart, and when they’d first met, she’d seen underneath his cocky, effortless charm and magical bone structure to his deep-buried seam of doubt: that because he was a backwoods Tennessee boy and he would never be good enough for her, that he would always have to
earn
her, that he’d won the lottery when she’d thrown her lot in with him.

And boy, did she work that seam skillfully.

Except that he wasn’t that guy anymore.

He’d once felt lucky to be with her. He now knew, thanks to Britt, that “happy” and “lucky” weren’t synonymous.

Shit! Britt! He scrambled for his phone and called her immediately as the kettle boiled.

She shot him straight to voice mail.

He swore softly.

He turned around suddenly. Rebecca was watching him.

And she didn’t disguise her expression fast enough.

And that expression made it very clear that
he’d
always been Rebecca’s weakness.

He could think of nothing else that would have brought her all the way here.

Suddenly every muscle in his body felt pulled tight. He turned around again. As he grabbed a cup down from the shelf he rummaged around in his soul for a vestige of that old delicious pain Rebecca’s circumspection usually caused. He came up empty. Too much had happened in a year.

He was, quite simply, too old for that crap.

He just wanted to be with one particular woman.

Who had just stabbed his call to voice mail. And he could hardly blame her, given how he’d exited the place. He’d just been so
shocked
.

He sighed. “Yes or no, Rebecca. Does Underhill know you’re here?”

He sensed his tone surprised her.

“Not specifically. He knows I’m away on business, but he doesn’t know I’m here, and he doesn’t know I came to see you.”

His temper was going to get the better of him in a minute. Ironically, the kettle was boiling already. As if in sympathy.

“I’m not going to ask it again. How the hell did you know where I was and why are you here?”

She finally stopped playing, fished her phone out of her big butter-soft leather bag and turned it around to show him a text.

“Looks like J. T. is having a good time in Hellcat Canyon.”

With a link.

To TMZ.

And the photos of him and Britt.

Fucking Franco Francone.

“He sure knows how to play you,” he said grimly.

Rebecca shrugged.

“So that’s the ‘how,’ ” Rebecca said with mock blitheness instead, then reached into her thousand dollar leather bag and plopped what was quite obviously a script on the table.

“This is the ‘why.’ ”

He stared at it.

It was the script for
Last Call in Purgatory
.

He stood motionless amid a great backwash of role lust and yearning and anger and regret.

For a moment he couldn’t speak.

“How did you know about this?” he said quietly.

“I heard they turned you down. And all I know is you’re perfect for it.”

No matter what she’d said and done, she’d always been his champion.

“I am,” he agreed cautiously.

“Well, now they want me for it. They want me so much that they’ll give me nearly anything I want, including a say in the casting. And what I want . . . is you.”

CHAPTER 17

T
exts had been chiming in at fairly steady intervals since Britt got home from work.

Britt please we need to talk.

Britt, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bail just like that. I had to get her out of there. Please text me back.

Tell the mountain lion I said hi.

Tell the azalea I said hi.

Britt . . . please don’t shut me out . . .

Where had he found an image of a beseeching man?

That one
almost
made her smile.

“J. T. says hi,” she told Phillip. Who stretched and yawned, showing the entire pink inside of his mouth, then walked over and flopped into her lap as if he’d been walking hundreds of miles to get to her. She buried her hand in his fur.

It was darkening in the house. And yet she couldn’t find the will to get up and turn on a light.

She hadn’t moved from the couch since she arrived home from work. She literally felt as though she had the flu. Or like something essential had been scooped out of her, leaving her hollow and uncertain how to walk now.

How had she not been prepared for this feeling?

She finally listened to the voice mails.

“Britt, I swear on everything I hold sacred I didn’t know she was coming or how she even knew I was here. Call me back. I’m sorry I left like that. I just . . . my reflex was to get her out of there as fast as possible. Rebecca sews mayhem.”

She punched it over to the next message.

“Britt, I don’t blame you if you’re mad. I fucked up. I can see that now. Let me at least explain. Please call me back.”

She couldn’t move. He certainly
sounded
sincere. He sounded, in fact, as though he were in actual physical pain.

He was an actor, of course.

So was the world-famous beautiful woman with whom he’d disappeared with this afternoon. Whose giant head and giant sparkly lips were out on the highway.

Britt looked around. Her house, formerly her sanctuary, seemed irrevocably changed now, because she saw J. T. everywhere in it: nude, his lovely little pale butt as he reached up for cups in the cupboard. The new porch railing. In her bedroom, where she had watched him sleep for a little while, his back dappled by the shadowed pattern of leaves and where they had all but set the sheets on fire.

And every inch of her body, of course.

She closed her eyes, but whoop! He was there, too.

In all likelihood he would be in her dreams, too.

She had only herself to blame, of course.

There must be some sort of romance law, like those rules you used to solve geometry proofs. It would read:
the devastation is precisely equivalent to the bliss
.

The joke was on her, she guessed. She’d outsmarted herself. She’d wanted to get back on the horse with J. T. and she’d been wearing lust blinders. She’d reasoned herself into a fling and she hadn’t expected to feel much more than sated and triumphant when it was over.

And now . . . now she couldn’t isolate one dominant emotion from the great knot of them pulsing in the center of her.

Pain radiated through her whole body.

Her phone was finally quiet.

She didn’t know whether to be sorry or grateful he’d given up.

Maybe she could dodge forever the “It was fun while it lasted conversation” until he was gone.

One more text rang in. She lunged for it.

Britt, I’m coming over

She texted back:

DON’T.

It was a brutally satisfying word to type.

D
on’t.

The air went out of J. T. as surely as if Britt had jammed a pool cue between his ribs.

He couldn’t have moved if the roof was caving in.

He sat frozen, feeling half dead. The remnants of a delivered pizza, half veggie, barely eaten, sat on his coffee table next to the script.

He was an actor. Surely he had the skills to keep it together right now. Because Rebecca was watching him and she was the last person in the world he wanted watching him if he was going to fall apart.

Rebecca had once made him feel a lot of things, but devastated was never one of them. And that seemed somehow absolutely significant right now.

“Pizza didn’t agree with you?” she asked softly.

He must look like hell if she was concerned. Or felt the need to feign concern.

“Yeah,” he said abruptly.

He was savagely hurt in a way he could never quite recall feeling. He had no experience with accommodating this kind of pain. It reverberated through him, and he was as stunned, as if he’d crashed headlong into a wall.

And then the anger began to singe and curl all the other emotions up at the edges.

If he meant
anything
at all to Britt, she should have the common decency to just talk to him.

She was a grown damn woman.

He realized Rebecca was still watching him.

“Why are you still here, Becks?” he said wearily. “Aren’t you heading up to Napa?”

“My app tells me there’s no room at the only B and B here in town right now. The Angel’s Nest? There’s only one motel within ten miles of here, and my reconnaissance tells me they sell meth in the parking lot the way crafters sell handmade soap on Venice Beach. I figured we could ride up to Napa together. It’s only a couple of hours. You going to kick me out?”

He stared at her.

This was Rebecca. She was always either about presumption or strategy or some combination thereof.

His fault. He should have asked her what her plans were sooner.

And he would have, if he hadn’t been worried about Britt calling him back.

Women
.

For God’s sake. Possessing a penis was nothing but a burden sometimes.