“. . . But that’s not really why you’re asking me out.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, of course it isn’t,” he said so exasperatedly and unapologetically she laughed. “I might be in Hellcat Canyon for just a few weeks, give or take, but I don’t see a single reason why we can’t kick off a beautiful friendship for the duration based on what you and I see when we look at each other. We were given five senses for a reason. It’s how we connect as a species. It’s part of the natural order. You have to start somewhere and I’m not gonna apologize for liking what I see when I look at you.”
And just in case she missed his meaning, the way he looked at her now erased all thought except for what it might feel like to allow her five senses to run amok over this man like the starved little gluttons they were.
His faint little smile suggested he knew exactly which parts of her body were tingling right now.
“As much as I’m enjoying the nature lecture . . .” Her voice was a little frayed. “. . . and all your adroit rationalization, I’m not really looking for a”—she bobbed her fingers in air quotes—“ ‘beautiful friendship.’ ”
Amazement flickered across his face.
“ ‘Adroit . . . rationalization’?” He repeated slowly. His expression was frustration and amazement all shot through with delight.
They stood in a peculiar stalemate.
It was just that there was no way on God’s green earth she was going to say to him, “My last relationship pretty much shattered me and I’m still collecting all the pieces and trying to figure out where they go, and most of those pieces are still jagged and raw. You are too much in every way and I have no business dipping my toe into those kinds of waters.”
She didn’t want to see the expression on his face if she said that.
“I don’t believe for a moment that you don’t like me, Britt Langley,” he said suddenly.
Yikes.
His voice had gotten low . . . and . . . slow. It was absolutely knee-buckling. Erotic karate, she’d call it.
Her next words emerged a little low and hoarse. “Yeah? What makes you so sure of that?”
“Because I’m fully aware that I’m being a little obnoxious right now but you’re still having fun. I think, in fact, we’d have a great time no matter what we did together. Because I’m more and more convinced, Britt, that you can give as good as you get. In any situation.”
That last sentence was an innuendo par excellence.
They let that statement ring there, with all of its implications, and her silence was as good as a confirmation.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” he demanded softly.
She, quite frankly, didn’t know how any woman said no to him. Or why she would.
And she was really, really good in the sack.
The air was dense and crackling with suspense. This was a man who liked to win as much as she did.
“You’re not wrong,” she said faintly.
Triumph began to glimmer in his eyes. “And . . .” he prompted.
J. T. McCord might be kryptonite, but he was no match for Fear. Fear always won when it was part of the mix these days. It was just so much easier to say no than to say yes, and to keep her life small and safe. If she was a Russian nesting doll, she preferred to remain packed.
“And . . .” She inhaled deeply, exhaled. “. . . I’m sorry.”
He went still again. Pressed his lips together thoughtfully.
He wouldn’t quite free his gaze, however.
And she met it head on, because she might be damaged and squirrelly, but she wasn’t stupid enough to forgo a single moment of staring into those blue eyes.
She took another long, deep breath, and it was a little shuddery.
“I have . . . I have another appointment right after this so I have to keep things moving. Want to see outside?” she offered finally, into the silence.
He hesitated a beat.
“Sure,” he said shortly.
She wondered if she’d hurt his feelings. She was pretty sure J. T. McCord actually had feelings, rather than just an ego.
Then again, she suspected that whatever had gone on in his life between the lines on his Wikipedia page had toughened his hide.
She doubted he’d be nursing any wounds very long.
She managed to unlock the sliding doors, though once again her hands were a little awkward, and it seemed to take an inordinate amount of time.
He waited in absolute silence, which didn’t help her nerves in the least.
She slid the doors open onto fresh, already hot mountain air.
He beelined for the tarp-covered hot tub with a guy’s instinct for gadgets, and she darted to the other side of the deck to collect her wits.
She’d just turned down a date with John Tennessee McCord.
She was certifiable.
Because she was both relieved and miserable.
The deck offered a panoramic view of the tops of the trees climbing the steep sides of the canyon. It was a flawlessly blue-skied California day. She’d seen the view of the canyon at this time of day dozens of times before. She’d never seen J. T. McCord in this light, though, so she peered at him out of the corner of her eye.
Her heartbeat hadn’t quite slowed to pre-J. T. rhythms yet. Every part of her was lit up, from her brain to her nipples.
She heard a text chime into his phone. He lunged for it like a gunfighter being drawn upon.
He glanced hungrily at the text.
The tension went out of him.
He was clearly waiting for some kind of news.
And then she saw the ficus in the corner of the deck. Barely alive, left to crisp in the sun.
“Oh no!” She dove over to it and knelt next to it to investigate, lifting up one wilting leaf in her hand as if taking its pulse.
She was conscious of his feet thundering across the deck. When she looked up seconds later, it was straight into his blue eyes.
“Wow. Are you The Flash?” She was amused.
“I thought you were falling off the deck. You scared the shit out of me.”
He did look scared.
“I’m so sorry,” she said hurriedly, wildly flattered that he was going to try to rescue her. “It’s just . . . the plant . . .”
“The plant was about to fall off the deck?”
“No! I’m sorry!” She wasn’t sure how to explain. “It’s just this poor plant was left out here and our landscape guy clearly forgot to water it . . . and that sort of thing makes me furious. I mean, it relies on us to stay alive, doesn’t it? And we can’t just let it down. It’s a living thing.”
He was watching her, apparently processing this in some inscrutable way.
“Sure,” he said carefully.
If he thought she was a lunatic, so be it.
That might, in fact, be all for the best.
“I’m going to see if I can save it. Will you help me get it into my car, Mr. McCord? I have to get back to work. I’ll give you a lift back to wherever you need to go.”
Another brief hesitation, and then his eyes flashed a sort of wry resignation. “Sure.”
Silently, like a pair of medics on a battlefield, they ferried the failing ficus down the stairs and installed it in her car. The plant got shotgun. J. T. buckled it in.
It reclined like a carefree tourist on holiday.
He was no stranger to manual labor, but honestly couldn’t remember the last time he’d been conscripted into it. But then there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for a beautiful woman who turned pleading green eyes on him.
Even if she had just resoundingly rejected him.
And that was still puzzling. He was puzzled less about the rejection, which was rare enough in his life to be at least a little interesting, but about the why of it. Some women found the whol
e actor/movie star/fame thing a little overwhelming, but he didn’t think that was what was at play here. This woman was both smart and thoughtful and she could hold her own in any kind of debate. She would draw her own conclusions about a person. Lady peanuts or no lady peanuts.
Britt’s car was a blue Ford Contour circa 1990 and one of the rear doors seemed to be tied shut with a rope. He chose the other door and squeezed himself into the backseat and buckled himself in. His knees were practically under his chin.
“Sorry you’re a little squished back there,” she said as she shoved it into reverse and backed away from the cabin. Not sounding terribly sorry.
“Don’t worry about me. I always ride with my knees right under my ears.”
She smiled at that, apparently utterly untroubled that she’d origami’d an Emmy winner into her car.
“Sorry the air-conditioning isn’t the best,” was the next thing she said, about three minutes later. Which was her way for apologizing for the rolled-down windows and the hot air blowing through the car. J. T. was pretty sure he saw a few insects, a dragonfly, and a skeeter hawk pass through the window on one side on their way out the other, like it was some sort of new and convenient insect bypass.
“These are some wheels,” he said.
She grinned at him in the rearview mirror. “Thanks. So your truck is broken, eh?”
“Yep. They’re diagnosing it right now.”
“You’re pretty attached to that truck, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t you have one of those . . . what do you call it . . . fleets? A whole barn full of Bentleys and Porsches and BMWs? Don’t they issue you a fleet when you become a movie star?”
She was teasing him now. A little more comfortable, apparently, now that she had him strapped in and she was in control of the car. Perhaps throwing him a bone in the wake of the rejection.
“Oh, sure, any guy can have a fleet. But a genuine 1995 Dodge Ram with an odometer that’s turned over twice? Just try and find one of those on Craigslist.”
He couldn’t quite see her whole face from his vantage point in the backseat, just a really lovely three-quarter view, but in the rearview mirror he could see that her eyes were scrunched in a smile. “I’ll just bet they’re rare.”
“That truck was one of the first things I bought when it started to look like I could buy pretty much anything I wanted, which was kind of a strange adjustment. Like going from zero to a hundred, just like that. My life was kind of a kaleidoscope for a while—seems like it changed every day. And I just got kind of attached to having a constant. Something that needed me to take care of it. If that makes sense. Kept me sane.”
“Sure,” she said softly, almost reluctantly. “I get it. Like . . . finding a fixed point in a sandstorm. It’s how you navigate through.”
So she did get it. That was a damned poetic way to put it, too.
And she didn’t want to like him, but she did.
She didn’t want to want him, but she did. He knew she did.
Puzzling. But he could work with this.
“Great way to put it,” he said shortly. “Know anything about sandstorms, Britt?”
She didn’t answer for so long, he thought maybe she wasn’t going to.
“Maybe,” she said. A careful, neutral word. Issued after a hesitation.
In a way that didn’t encourage further questioning.
He was determined, but he wasn’t a brute. He was happy to let her be quiet if that was what she needed right now.
She handled the old car ably on the windy roads, because she’d likely driven them dozens of times.
He couldn’t put his finger on it. It wasn’t one thing about her. It was probably more a combination of externals and intangibles, like the beautiful eyes and a lacerating wit; a small curvy body and the way she moved; the sound of her voice; her soft, full mouth. All he knew was that she made him restless and almost ornery in a very fundamental way for a very fundamental reason from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. There was really only one way to scratch that itch.
She wasn’t wearing a ring. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a guy in the picture.
The notion bothered him a lot.
The notion that the notion bothered him a lot also bothered him.
And really, what was so hard about saying, You know, there’s a guy in the picture?
He’d been pretty forthright with her because that was who he was. Rebecca had pretty much exhausted whatever lingering tolerance he’d had for games and strategy.
“So, Britt, what’s your excuse for driving a beater like . . .”
“Margaret?” she completed.
It had definitely been a trap, if a whimsical one. “Now, how did I know you’d named your car, Britt Langley?”
Pink flooded into her cheeks, and he was completely charmed. “I usually do a sort of financial triage on my, um, priorities. So as long as the car door shuts at all, I wait until I can afford to fix her. But I make sure she gets her fluids and so forth.”
“You ever think about what might happen if Margaret here quits on you in the deep dark woods?”
“Gosh, no, J. T., it never occurred to me to wonder about that,” she said with such withering faux astonishment he blinked.
“Wow. Sorry.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said easily, after a moment, somewhat conciliatory. “I can take care of myself.”
Sure you can, sweetheart.
As much as he’d enjoyed arguing with her, saying that out loud would have been chucking a match into a gasoline puddle, he was pretty sure.
“I guess I just don’t like to give up on things,” she said after a moment. “Whether or not it always makes sense.”
He wondered if she was talking about some other guy.
“Yeah,” he said. “Neither do I.”
He knew she’d see his smile in her rearview mirror.
She knew damn well he was talking about her.
He saw her dimple appear again. She cranked the wheel and steered the car into another sharp turn that sent his seat belt digging into his collarbone. Which he preferred to think of as a coincidence.
“So, Britt, will I see you under a car at the garage, too? Bagging groceries at the store? Running a vacuum in the hall at the Angel’s Nest? Directing traffic at the stoplight?”
She smiled. “Nah, I just have the two jobs. Covers my mortgage and the basics. And my mortgage is barely anything, especially by California standards.”
She pulled up in front of Ernie’s Garage as she said that.
He managed to shoulder open the door, unfold his body with a modicum of grace and get out of her car.
He leaned into the driver’s side window.
“Well, thanks for showing me that place. You gonna be able to get that plant out on your own?”
“Oh, yeah. I can just slide it onto a rolling chair and push it up to my front porch.”
He stared at her, bemused. She said this as if she did it all the time.
“So I can tell my boss you’ll move right into that house?” She gave him a bright, winsome smile.
He snorted. “You can tell him I’m a complete, hopeless diva. Or whatever the male equivalent of that is. You know how actors are, after all.”
That was pure sarcasm, but this only made her grin, which only made him like her more, because he was perverse.
“I honestly can’t blame you about the house,” she sympathized.
He could tell it was true. Her sympathy was balm.
“So, Britt, you’re clearly a compassionate woman. Have pity. Are you really going to consign me to the purgatory of the Angel’s Nest? Those angels are judging me.”
“If you behave yourself, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Darlin’, I’m still hoping you’ll gi
ve me a reason to misbehave.”
She tilted her head. “Boy, it’s like a faucet, isn’t it, J. T.? The charm?”
“It’s like a faucet, isn’t it, Britt? The prickly rejoinders?”
She paused.
“ ‘Prickly . . . rejoinders’?” she quoted.
With great, slow, wondering, savoring pleasure.
Amusement lit up her whole face.
Damn, but he liked this woman. She was maddening.
“I know a lot of other words you might be interested in, Britt Langley. I’d be happy to whisper them to you right now.”
“I know a two-letter word you ought to look up, J. T.”
She didn’t sound or even look angry. She was smiling, and she’d swatted that back to him like a tennis pro. There was an accomplished flirt in there somewhere underneath all the thorns.
She did, however, sound firm.
He’d never had so much fun being thoroughly blown off.
“I have to get going,” she said. “Gary will get in touch with you if something opens up.”
J. T. sighed deeply and with great resignation.
She laughed at his suffering and drove away with a wave.
CHAPTER 6
He walked into the garage, smiling in a way no man who’d just been resoundingly rejected ought to smile, and inhaled with pleasure the good, masculine motor-oil-and-gasoline perfume of the garage.
A big gray-haired guy sporting a really high quality mustache and a significant belly was waiting for his own truck, which was getting its oil changed. The two of them gazed up at their vehicles on the rack as if in moral support.
He turned and saw J. T. “You must be that Hollywood fella.”
“So I am. You’re that Misty Cat fella.”
“So I am. Glenn Harwood. Me and my wife, Sherrie, we own the place.”
“J. T. McCord.” J. T. shook Glenn’s outthrust hand.
“This your truck?” Glenn gestured upward at J. T.’s old Dodge Ram.
“Yep.”
“Had her for some time, eh?” Glenn diagnosed.
“Since she was born, you might say. She breaks, I fix her.”
Glenn chuckled. “A truck’s a commitment. Not just a commodity.”
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