Hot in Hellcat Canyon (33 page)

“Let’s read lines,” she suggested softly.

He opened his eyes. He was a grown-ass man, and he’d endured misery before, and he knew surefire ways to at least forget it.

He took a deep breath and looked down at lines he now could have recited in his sleep. But he knew he would automatically deliver them with a subtle difference with an actress of Rebecca’s caliber.

Acting had always been his escape. And for a little while, via the magic of someone else’s words, he could become someone else.

Someone who for the duration of a script didn’t have to feel the burning crater in the center of him that felt like a Britt-ectomy.

J
. T. awoke smiling. He stretched and reflexively reached for Britt.

He grabbed air, and caught himself just before he toppled from the sofa onto the floor.

He went motionless, surprised. And then he groaned and flung an arm over his eyes as memory and awareness sifted in.

It was the day after a major skirmish and smoke was still rising from the battlefield.

He kicked off the sheet he’d dragged over his body, then swiftly, sloppily folded it up, and padded into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. He wanted to get out of here before Rebecca woke up. His body, fit though it was, thought he was nuts to be spending more than one night on his hastily purchased Home Depot sofa, and he stretched and his spine cracked.

He paused to peek in on her, because she’d left the bedroom door ajar. He knew that was an invitation but he quite simply didn’t care. She was sleeping like she always had, with her long limbs flung out like an invasive kudzu vine, trying to grab all she could even in sleep. She was wearing an eye mask, even though it was black dark at night here in the woods. She’d taken the liberty of stripping off his pillowcase and replacing it with a silk one to protect her famous head of hair, lest a single one of the strands break. She had a shampoo contract now, too.

J. T. knew aaaaaaall too well the staggering minutiae that went into maintaining Rebecca Corday. He knew a twinge of sympathy. But that was her trip, not his.

He closed his eyes as if he could make her vanish that way.

Opened them again and damn it, there she was.

He backed away and reflexively reached down to pet Phillip. But he wasn’t at Britt’s house, which was where Phillip was.

And a fresh tide of fury and regret and disbelief washed in. He didn’t want to text Rebecca and run the risk of waking her up. He scrawled a note on the back of the pizza receipt and affixed it to the refrigerator with the bottle-opener magnet.

I have a meeting with the location manager for The Rush. Back before noon.

And he bolted from the house. Getting back to work was what he needed, because he needed to do something he was good at, and relationships clearly weren’t it.

T
wo days without sleep combined with righteous indignation and savage hurt paradoxically made Britt feel almost euphoric. It was like anesthesia. Or maybe one of those drugs people took at raves to make themselves really happy and affectionate and carefree.

Not that she’d ever taken one. She’d only heard. Probably Greta over at the New Age store would know.

She breezed into work only a few minutes late and seized her order pad, and Sherrie swooped her into a bosomy hug before Britt could back out of it. She squeezed her for a time while Britt endured it stoically.

Glenn and Giorgio were behind the grill watching this carefully.

“Oh, honey. You look like you didn’t sleep at all, and not in a good way. How did your conversation with J. T. go?”

“Oh, that? Him? Yeah, we decided it’s over,” she said brightly.

A look of alarm ping-ponged between Sherrie and Glenn.

There was a cautious pause. “Are you sure you’re fit for work? You look a little . . .”

She really must look terrible. It was
very
unlike Sherrie to be diplomatic.

“I’m fine. I mean, the thing reached its natural conclusion. We talked about it. It was just one of those things.” She gave a great shrug with one shoulder. “We had fun, it’s done. Ha ha! That
totally
rhymed.”

Three parallel lines of concern etched themselves deeply into Sherrie’s forehead. “You are a
bad
liar. Have you looked in a mirror today? Did you sleep at
all
last night?”

Britt laughed merrily, and a little too loudly. “I can’t remember, but I’m fine, honestly. I have my health. I have my friends. I really don’t care what he does or who he does it with or where he does it or what he . . . yeah.”

She’d lost track of her prepositions. And the question. And the sentence.

She
might
actually be a little bit tired.

“Hmm. Where is Rebecca Corday?” Sherrie asked carefully.

“At his house. And on a billboard out on the highway. She took great pains to tell me that, too. ”

Sherrie hissed in a long breath as if someone had stepped hard on a sore toe.

And Britt needed to pivot away from that expression of sympathy lest it cut her in two.

She accepted two hot plates from Giorgio and frisked over to a customer, and turned a smile on the diner that had them leaning back in shock at its brilliant ferocity.

Yep, she was
fine
.

J
. T. returned from his meeting with the location manager in a marginally better mood, because
The Rush
was going to be exactly the kind of work he loved: gritty, real, intense, nuanced. He’d be proud of it, no matter how many viewers they managed to capture. They’d do some more walking of the Hellcat Canyon and surrounding hills and peaks in the days ahead, planning scenes, and he liked playing a pivotal role in that. He already had more meetings in his calendar. Filming wouldn’t start in earnest for a couple of months, some of it here in Gold Country, some of it in Los Angeles.

For the first time in weeks he wished he could hurry up time. Clearly he sucked at downtime.

He pulled up in front of his house just before noon, suddenly wondering whether he was hallucinating from lack of sleep.

Because a shiny blue Porsche was parked on the side road. In his spot.

He pulled the truck in behind it and stared, oddly jarred.

He realized it was the first Porsche he’d seen in all of Hellcat Canyon.

And then he suddenly knew exactly who it belonged to.

He got out and slammed the door of his truck, took the steps two at a time and let himself into his house.

“What the actual
fu . . .
”

Franco Francone was sitting on his couch, arms flung over the back of it, beer in his hand, grinning and looking right at home.

He also looked unforgivably, blackly amused.

The silence was tense.

“You gave him one of my
beers
?” J. T. said to Rebecca, finally.

This made Franco laugh.

“Why, Johnny? Are you worried he’s going to be like Per . . . per . . . the woman who went to hell you told me about?” Rebecca asked.

“Persephone?” he and Franco said at the same time.

Franco shot him a secret half smile.

Because Franco naturally got the joke and thought it was funny.

Franco had gone to Harvard. He was educated up to his eyeballs. Basically the opposite of J. T.

But both he and J. T. were readers of everything.

They couldn’t be more opposite on paper, but there had been dozens of reasons the two of them had clicked as friends.

Franco had been with Rebecca for about four months when Rebecca, in inimitable Rebecca fashion, had decided she wanted J. T., the bigger star, the hotter guy, at least in Hollywood commodity terms, and J. T. had leaped at the chance.

Franco had never really forgiven J. T. for this. Not all the way, anyway. It was more about the one-upmanship than the girl, J. T. suspected. Franco couldn’t stand to lose any more than J. T. could.

Then again, J. T. wasn’t sure if he’d ever really forgiven himself.

He suspected that, over the years, Franco had figured out that J. T. had done him a favor when it came to “stealing” Rebecca from him. Not that he’d ever admit that.

“What is it with you two?” Rebecca groused. “Are you sure it’s masculine to know that sort of thing? The Persephone nonsense?”

She was trying to make it sound like teasing but it emerged as peevish.

“I bet you every penny I got Sir Anthony Underhill knows who Persephone is, Rebecca. Which should be all the answer you need,” J. T. said.

Franco laughed at that.

Rebecca, truthfully, looked more relaxed than she probably should, given the presence of two former lovers, one of whom had slightly bloodied the other over her. Then again, drama was her medium, the way the sea was the medium for saltwater fish.

“What the hell
are
you doing here, Franco?” J. T. asked.

“An old school friend of mine owns a winery about thirty miles up the road and I was heading up this way for Nicasio’s wedding anyway, so I thought I’d come check this area out and surprise you. And
who
should open the door but Rebecca. You should have
seen
the look on her face. For that matter, you should see the look on yours right now.”

“How did you know where I was living?” He was pretty sure he already knew the answer to that.

“I just asked the nice lady at the Angel’s Nest, where I thought I’d try to get a room, and she just assumed we were ‘blood brothers’ in real life.” He put “blood brothers” in air quotes. “Told me you bought the ‘old Greenleaf place.’ ” He put the “old Greenleaf place” in air quotes, too. “Told me about all the hiking trails and the Eternity Oak. That sounds like one scary damn tree, by the way. She hasn’t watched our show, but she sure Googled it. We had a great chat. She’s a hoot.”

J. T. sighed. He really wasn’t going to hold it against Rosemary, who couldn’t in a million years fathom the dynamic between the three people in this room. She quite simply wouldn’t have time for it. The people in this town, most of them anyway, were frankly too nice and too decent and too busy to imagine such useless complexity.

“See anything interesting on the way into town, Franco?” Rebecca asked slyly.

“Of course,” he indulged. “Saw your billboard out there on the highway, Rebecca,” Franco said, taking a sip of his beer. “Nothing scarier than a twenty-foot-tall Rebecca Corday.”

She laughed, clearly thoroughly pleased.

“So what’s going on here, kids? Is this the resurrection of Rebeccasee?” Franco looked from one to the other. “Gonna go carve your initials on the Eternity Oak, be bound together forever?”

J. T. and Rebecca remained silent.

“Underhill know you’re here, Becks?” Franco tried.

More silence.

“Tennessee would just kick Underhill’s ass if he showed up. Isn’t that right, J. T.?” said the guy who got his ass kicked by J. T.

“Oh, sure,” J. T. said easily. “If he took a swing at me. But I can kick it fancier than ever now. I have a black belt.”

Franco could fight well enough but he was just too damn lazy to go through all that trouble to get a black belt. And that was one of the main differences between them. J. T. had always tried harder. At everything. And he was always willing to be meaner, like a cornered wild animal.

But Franco was slyer.

“Where’s the pretty woman in those TMZ photos, J. T.? You have her stashed here somewhere, too? Was she happy to meet a big star like Rebecca?”

That was some fine slyness right there.

“That woman is none of your business, Francone.”

He’d slapped those words down like a guillotine.

Damn.

Franco was smart and J. T. had been a little too quick on the draw there.

Franco studied him, musingly.

J. T. met his gaze unblinkingly. Staring a threat.

“She’s a waitress at the Misty Cat Cavern in downtown Hellcat Canyon,” Rebecca supplied blithely into the silence, although her voice sounded a little strained. “I met her. But J. T. won’t tell me anything else about her.”

“That . . .” Franco mused, “
is
interesting.”

Franco knew J. T. pretty well.

“Let’s all go down to the Misty Cat and show everyone we’re friends,” Rebecca said suddenly. “I could use a bite to eat.”

By
bite
she literally meant a bite. It was about all she would eat.

Unless she took a bite out of Britt, which was what J. T. was worried about.

And by
everyone
she apparently meant the world. Rebecca assumed the entire world was documenting and interpreting her every move.

She wasn’t far wrong.

“Worst. Idea. Ever,” J. T. said unequivocally. “And I’ve already eaten. Eat something here before you head out, Becks. There’s celery in the bin.”

Franco yawned and stretched. “I’m pretty hungry. While you two are thinking about it, I think I’ll just go down to the Misty Cat and get my own table.”

He stood and grabbed his keys and was out the door in a flash.

Bastard.

“You should open with ‘I have a Porsche,’ Franco,” J. T. shouted after him. “She’ll love that.”

Fuck, fuck
, fuck
. He froze indecisively, staring after Franco.

There was no hope for it. He swiped at the bowl where he usually tossed his truck keys.

It was empty.

“Where the hell are my keys?”

“Right here.” Rebecca dangled them. “Let’s go get some brunch, J. T.”

He nearly groaned. Rebecca was a liability. He could hardly abandon the highest paid actress in the world, both because of the script, and because, like it or not, he had manners.

But J. T.’s reflex was to be wherever Britt was.

He snatched the keys from Rebecca and bolted out the door, and she followed him.

F
ranco walked into the Misty Cat Cavern grinning as though walking into the Misty Cat Cavern was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And paused in the doorway, as if all the bemused diners who paused to stare at him were red-carpet photographers.