Hot in Hellcat Canyon (8 page)

She whipped out the remote for the blinds triumphantly.

She stabbed at it, and miraculously, the window blinds slid up.

He watched, seemingly fascinated. “How lazy do you have to be if you need a remote to . . .”

He couldn’t finish the sentence.

Because they were briefly paralyzed by the sunlight roaring through the windows.

“Christ,” he muttered, impressed.

After a moment to establish they both still possessed corneas, he braved a step closer and assessed the view.

She’d seen that view before, so she stood where she was.

And surreptitiously watched him.

The gamma ray brilliance of the light delineated faint lines at the corners of his eyes and faint circles beneath them, a little morning stubble, a semicircle of a dimple next to his mouth, visible even when he wasn’t smiling, like a sign saying “here is where you should kiss me.”

That surge of untenable want roared through her like that first shot of whisky she’d tried when she was eighteen and trying to impress a guy.

Funny, though.

She could have sworn there was something almost melancholy in his stillness right now.

If she had to guess, she would have said he was lonely.

“Don’t anthropomorphize the movie star,” a little warning voice in her head said. “They aren’t like the rest of us.”

And yet. She didn’t think she’d ever have assembled the collage of information she’d gleaned about the man last night, from the cavalcade of women to the video of him being hunted at the airport, into the wryly funny, down-to-earth, gracious—you’d have to be gracious to endure a tour like the one she was giving him—man standing here.

“And are those little glints across the ridge windows of other houses?” he asked finally.

Suddenly she knew where he was going with this.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“If they had binoculars, I could do a performance of Alfred Hitchcock’s
Rear Window
once a night.” He quirked a corner of his mouth.

She knew that movie was about neighbors spying on neighbors, and she recalled the little black bar photoshopped over J. T.’s penis. Some determinedly, greedily hateful photographer had worked hard for that shot. In a house comprised of glass windows, John Tennessee McCord would be pretty exposed.

Right now the only scene she could distinctly remember from that movie was the famous one: Grace Kelly swooping in to plant a long, slow kiss on Jimmy Stewart.

He pivoted abruptly then.

She couldn’t be sure what expression he’d caught her in the middle of, but it was probably the basic lustful sort. Nothing he hadn’t seen before, doubtless.

It didn’t save her from feeling mortified.

“Or you could push the couch over and enact puppet shows from behind it,” she said hurriedly. “My nephew would like that.”

Wow, Britt
, she thought sadly.
You are a dork.

His eyebrows dove in surprise.

But then he grinned. “I was a guest on
Sesame Street
once,” he said. “I sang a song with Kermit. “Ev-ery-ONE needs a friend, it’s just so FUN to BE a friend . . .”

He sang with complete and barely tuneful unselfconsciousness. She laughed, utterly disarmed.

“I put it on my acting resume,” he said. “The singing. Even though I did it exactly once.”

“Yeah, once was probably enough,” she teased.

This just made him grin.

And now he was watching her in the same way he’d perused the view of the canyon a minute ago, only with significantly more pleasure and a degree of purposefulness that shortened her breath.

The backs of her arms heated to match the temperature of her face.

He took a little step forward.

“So, Britt . . .” he mused. “You ever watch any cop shows?”

She took a step backward.

“Nope.”

“Watch any other TV shows?”

“Not really.”

“Got any . . . favorite actors?” he said softly, teasingly.

“Are you still tight with Kermit? I would do just about anything to meet him.”

It was an attempt to shut down this line of questioning and get the house tour on track.

She realized belatedly how very much like an innuendo it had sounded, when he went stock-still.

He tipped his head and considered her.

“Oh, sure. I’d introduce you. But Miss Piggy is the jealous type. One look at you . . .” The look he settled upon her here was somehow both soft and molten enough to dissolve steel. “. . . one look at you and she might . . .”

And with that silence he was like a sentry waiting for her to deliver the password into flirtation land.

She knew that password. Once upon a time she could have given J. T. a run for his money when it came to flirtation. But she wasn’t going to say it. She wasn’t going to say it.

“Flail?” she heard herself say faintly, anyway. “Would she flail when she saw me?”

His eyes gleamed a sort of wicked mischief.

“She might just angrily flail,” he confirmed solemnly, with feigned regret.

It might be the first time in history anyone had flirted using the Muppets, but she wouldn’t put anything past the human race.

They stared at each other in absurd, mute delight.

It occurred to her that she could probably toss any awkward, clunky observation to this man, and like Rumpelstiltskin, he’d spin it into flirtation gold.

“Well, then, I guess I’ll have to settle for your autograph,” she said finally, into the crackling silence. “On the lease to this lovely house!”

He dismissed this with a single sardonic flick of one eyebrow. “How about you, Britt? Do you sing?”

“Do I sing?” she was astonished. “Let’s put it this way. The first time I met my next-door neighbor, it was because she’d called the police to tell them someone was being murdered in my house. Turns out I was just singing in my shower.”

There was a beat of silence.

“Seriously?” He actually sounded hopeful.

“Seriously.”

“Wow.” He was thoroughly pleased. “What were you singing?”

“ ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ Led Zeppelin.”

He mulled. “There is kind of a lot of wailing in that one,” he conceded.

“Yeah.”

“Great song, though.”

“Heck, yeah.”

“We should do duet at the Misty Cat on Open Mic Night. You, me, ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ We’d kill it. Or kill the audience,” he said.

Her heart stopped. Was he . . . was he asking her out?

She stared at him blankly.

He stared at her expectantly.

Her phone dinged a reminder of her next appointment—a maintenance inspection of a cabin rented by a sweet elderly couple.

She lunged for it like a thrown life preserver, pivoted abruptly and headed for the kitchen and put the counter between the two of them, her heart thumping like John Bonham’s kick drum.

She looked up to see him watching her with a puzzled furrow between his brows.

“Um . . . J. T., as you can see, you have more drawers than you can possibly use for your various cooking implements and . . . Scotch tape and cat toys and . . . er . . . batteries.”

She had just inadvertently revealed what she kept in her own kitchen drawers.

“It’s amazing what you can keep in drawers these days.” He humored her. He was frowning ever so faintly.

And then he turned and wandered out of the room to inspect one of the bedrooms. “Want to guess what’s in here?” he called. “More carpet, that’s what.”

Britt didn’t follow him in there. Because even though there wasn’t a bed in it currently, which really made it more of just a room than a bedroom, the implication was still there.

He popped out of the room. “So how old is your nephew?”

She was startled. “Er . . . nine. Nine and three-quarters, he’d tell you immediately.”

“He likes the Muppets, eh?”

“The Muppets, Minecraft, computers, and anything butt-related.”

His smile grew bigger as she recited this. “Yeah, most guys never really outgrow any of that.”

“I guess I kind of understand it,” she said, hesitantly. “I mean, the first time you discover your own body and everyone else’s can make a sound like a vuvuzela it’s kind of a cause for celebration.”

The smile dropped off his face.

He froze as if she’d pulled a gun on him.

He stared at her. This time, absolutely thunderstruck.

Silence ensued, during which Britt marinated in horror and wished she could vacuum the words from the air right back into her mouth.

She could hear her sister’s voice in her head: What did I tell you about needing to socialize with adults? Now you’ve gone and made a fart joke to John Tennessee McCord.

She was never, ever going to tell her sister she was right, though.

“Vuvuzela?” he finally choked out.

“Yeah. Um . . . stadium horns?” The shame had scorched her voice right down to a thread. She mimed holding one up and blowing into it.

She was nearly floating up out of her body watching herself mime blowing a freaking stadium horn to John Tennessee McCord.

This wasn’t just a fart joke. It was a never-ending fart joke.

“I know,” he said dazedly. “It’s just . . . that . . . that . . . that might literally be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

He looked awestruck. Almost beyond laughter.

His face was lit up like a sun.

He was staring at her as if she were better than Cirque du Soleil.

Her face, on the other hand, felt hotter than the sun and there was no way she wasn’t tomato red.

“I guess . . . I guess if they sounded like wind chimes he wouldn’t find them as funny,” she expounded desperately.

He threw back his head and shouted with laughter. It echoed all around the place and the hideous knot in her stomach unwound and she felt light as a helium balloon.

Damn. Oh, man. She loved his laugh. It was the freest sound she’d ever heard.

And then he sighed happily, finally, and shook his head.

“I bet women might be more tolerant of them if they did. Though I swear a wind chime on the porch of the Angel’s Nest tried to kill me.”

She smiled at him, basking in his delight as if it were the first day of spring. “Yeah, it’s a minefield of wind chimes over there. You have to watch your step, especially if you’re tall. I mean, I can understand why you’d want to move out of there immediately . . . into this place.”

He just gave her a “nice try” eye roll. “It’s not just the wind chimes. It’s all the purple, and the frills, and dear God, the potpourri, and did you know the soap is shaped like angels there, too? I can’t bring myself to rub an angel in my armpits. And it’s noisy. I’m next to the honeymoon suite. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night thanks to Cherisse and Kevin.”

“Oh, you met your neighbors?”

“Not formally. They kept name checking each other. ‘Oh, Cherisse. Oh, Kevin.’ And their headboard. BAM. BAM. BAM. All. Night. Long.”

“Their head . . .”

She trailed off when she realized what he meant.

She froze.

“Can’t remember the last time I did that to a headboard,” he said thoughtfully. Pinning her with his blue gaze.

And her every cell briefly surged with electricity.

And boom, or rather, BAM, like that, her breath was gone again.

She didn’t know if she was wildly aroused or panicked. Both, probably.

They stared at each other.

She did know that was her cue to say, “Neither can I.” Or, “I can offer up a refresher.” Or “I bet this carpet is pretty comfortable. Didn’t they have a lot of orgies in the seventies?” “Or surely you have a lot of opportunities to do it.”

Because she used to have “game,” as Kayla called it. She knew this particular dance from way back in the day, before she’d married Jeff. This exchange was the sort of coded language that men and women laid down to test sexual interest and intent. No one just flung off their clothes and leaped upon another. Well, hardly anyone just leaped upon another.

But she stood there like a deer in the headlights of his fixed gaze.

“Me, neither,” she said finally. It was practically a whisper.

And instead of sexy or clever, it sounded pathetic.

And scared.

His expression subtly shifted. “I always wondered why angels wore dresses,” he mused. “Those long robes? Seems they’d get their feet tangled up in them when they flew. Wouldn’t it be more convenient to fly in a unitard?”

She was both grateful and a little alarmed at how skillfully he’d given her a way out of that flirtation corner.

She exhaled. “Like . . . Superman?”

That made him laugh. “But do angels actually fly?” he wondered. “I mean, do they need to, to get wherever they’re going?”

“Good point. I think they can materialize wherever they please.”

“Then why do they even need wings?”

She considered this. “Because wings are pretty?”

He smiled slowly. “That must be it, Britt Langley. It’s important for things to be pretty.”

He was teasing her. She wondered if she’d ever be able to talk to him without blushing.

She exhaled. “If it helps any . . . Rosemary?—you know, the lady who runs the Angel’s Nest with her husband?—well, she was raised in Coyote Creek and that is one scary place—it’s a settlement, kind of an annex of Hellcat Canyon, up there deep in the hills.” Britt waved an arm up toward where the trees were thickest. “They say most people usually leave there in a cop car or a casket. Her life was pretty austere when she was growing up, and she and her husband really wanted a family but it didn’t happen for them. And then they tried to adopt, but I guess it hasn’t worked out, maybe because they’re getting up in years now and they don’t have a big income. Anyway, I always thought that maybe she went overboard with the fluff and the angels and the pillows and whatnot because of all of that. Wanted it to be soft and pretty so people would feel loved and protected in there in a way she never felt.”

She began to feel like she was babbling.

Because gradually a shadow, almost a frown, appeared between his eyes.

“Funny. That’s why my mama planted blue-eyed Mary’s around our house when we were growing up. My dad used to call her his blue-eyed Mary.” The corner of his mouth quirked. “Haven’t thought about that in . . . oh, years, probably.”