One Hot Summer

by Melissa Cutler

  “Not what I heard, which is the reason for our little chat this morning. Remedy Lane’s connections are going to bring in a steady stream of high-end clientele that’ll do wonders for the city of Dulcet. In fact, with that in mind, the city council just accepted my generous donation for a beautification plan to bring the city up to the same five-star quality as my resort. I’ve devoted a lot of time and money in this project and I won’t have you interfering with my”—he rolled his tongue over his teeth—“let’s call it an investment in Remedy Lane and what she represents.”

  Her connections? “You’re going to have to spell out your threat more clearly, because I’m not following. How do you figure that me making sure your resort guests are safe is, in any way, interfering with your schemes?”

  “What I’m saying is that, from now on, you are going to leave Remedy Lane alone, son. Professionally … and personally. She’s too valuable an asset—to me and to this town—for you to go dicking around with her and send her running back to California in a fit of female histrionics with a broken heart.”

  Briscoe knew. Had Carina told him? Micah hadn’t thought they’d had a close father/daughter relationship. Looked like he’d been wrong. Unless Emily had recanted on her word.

  Forcing a grin to his lips, Micah hooked his thumb on his holster belt and chewed his toothpick. “And if I don’t give a shit what you think?”

  “Then I’ll go before that same county council I just bought with that beautification money to present my vision for making Ravel County safer. It seems they don’t realize that you’re spread as thin as a one-man band, acting as both the fire marshal and the fire chief. It’s time to hand some of those instruments off to others, ease your burden. I’ll propose the appointment of a separate fire marshal position that’ll answer to the county commissioners’ office. Let you focus on fighting fires instead of enforcing minor ordinances and antiquated penal codes.”

  Well, goddamn. Micah’s blood was boiling in an instant. He had to forcibly keep his smile glued on and his teeth from snapping the toothpick in half. He should have seen this coming, long before Remedy waltzed into the picture. Since Micah couldn’t be bought, of course Briscoe would make a play to wrest Micah’s authority from him and assign it to someone more amenable to bribery. Now that Micah was considering it, the only shock he should feel was that it hadn’t happened sooner.

  “I’m sure you’ve got a perfect candidate for fire marshal in your back pocket,” Micah said. “But, just so you know, until that day arrives, expect that the vise grip I’ve had your balls in for the past ten years is gonna get real uncomfortable, real fast.”

  With a bark of a laugh, Briscoe grabbed his crotch. “That’s funny, because my balls are feeling just fine. I’ll tell you what, though; if you ever want to get that good vise grip on them that you’re salivating to do, then you’ll have to buy me dinner first. Maybe at Hog Heaven?”

  “Clever.”

  “What’ll it be, son? Do we have an understanding? You leave my employee alone and I’ll let you continue with business as usual.”

  Micah had underestimated Briscoe’s ruthlessness, but his eyes were wide open now. With all the scheming Briscoe had done to protect his so-called investment in Remedy—bribing the city council, coming here this morning to confront Micah—then it was only a matter of time before he went to Remedy directly and backed her into a corner. If he hadn’t already.

  The thought of that, of the many ways Briscoe could manipulate Remedy, got Micah’s blood boiling all over again.

  Briscoe picked up his gun bag, all but dismissing Micah.

  Micah didn’t think. Channeling his anger, he surged forward and clapped his hand on the back of Briscoe’s neck, gripping it hard as he got in his face. “One more thing, boy. If you threaten her. In any way. Then you will discover the limit of my restraint. You think you’re meaner than me, but that’s only because you’ve never come after my family or friends before.”

  Ty jerked his body back in an attempt to escape Micah’s grip. When that failed, Ty screwed his mouth up and spit tobacco juice on Micah’s boot.

  That nasty son of a bitch. Micah shoved him by the neck against his truck, then wiped his boot on Briscoe’s gun bag. “Good talking with you,” Micah said, picking up his own gun bag. “Enjoy your time at the range this morning.”

  On legs shaky with adrenaline, Micah strode through the range’s lobby and past the check-in desk with a nod to Joe, the weekend manager.

  “I put you and Xavier on Range Four!” Joe called.

  “Don’t put Ty Briscoe anywhere near us or I’ll be tempted to use him for target practice,” Micah said, keeping moving.

  Xavier was seated at the shaded prep table on Range Four, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and fiddling with his beloved Remington .22, one of the last gifts his father had given him before passing away several years ago. He nodded at Micah. “What’s wrong with you? Still pissed about those fires last night? I heard about them on the news.”

  “Yeah, those sucked.”

  “Doesn’t explain why you’re trying to choke the handle of your gun bag to death.”

  Micah set the bag on the table. “I ran into Ty Briscoe in the parking lot just now. He was waiting for me.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Micah paced to the range’s wall, too agitated to sit. “To talk about Remedy Lane.”

  “Word on the street is that you and she are an item.” Xavier waggled his eyebrows and all Micah could think was, Here we go.… God sure had an ironic sense of humor, because Micah had given Xavier hell for complicating all their lives when he’d started dating Briscoe Ranch’s wedding planner and yet here Micah was, doing the same.

  “By word on the street, you mean Alex filled you in on the latest Briscoe Ranch gossip?”

  “You have your pillow talk and we have ours.”

  Micah was still coming down off his adrenaline crash from his confrontation with Ty Briscoe and really needed to bounce the confrontation off Xavier, but that story would make a lot more sense to Xavier if he knew what was going on romantically between Micah and Remedy. “Remedy and I went out to dinner on Friday night.”

  Xavier set his rifle on the table and tipped back in his chair. “I already knew that, and don’t get me started on what a lame idea it was to take a date to Hog Heaven.”

  “It was spontaneous. It wasn’t supposed to be a date.”

  Xavier cupped a hand behind his ear. “Why is that now? Because you have a strict policy against socializing with resort employees?”

  The deadly calm of Xavier’s tone reminded Micah of the way his mama used to act when she picked him up from the principal’s office at school when he got in trouble for fighting. She’d be absolutely stone-cold collected until they got home and she ripped into him. Just as Xavier was probably winding up to do.

  “Not so strict anymore, is it?” Micah scraped a chair back from the table and dropped into it. “All right, let me have it. I can take it.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Xavier said, all sarcastic sweetness.

  “How about you start with, ‘You hypocritical asshole,’” Micah suggested.

  “I’m not going to call you an asshole.”

  “I gave you hell for dating Alex.”

  Xavier frowned. “You gave me even more hell when I told you I was proposing to him.”

  The edge of pain in Xavier’s voice made Micah wince. “Yes, I did. And I’m sorry. I didn’t understand how complicated it can be.”

  “How complicated what can be?”

  Micah wasn’t going to say love, because it was way too soon to even contemplate that profound emotion. He almost said relationships, but that wasn’t accurate, either. Not yet. “Chemistry.”

  “Tell me more about this chemistry between you and Remedy.”

  Micah swabbed a hand over his face, searching for the right words. “It’s like this. That night at Hog Heaven, I knew that I shouldn’t be there with her like that. It went
against everything I stand for. But when I looked at her … when she looked at me … it was—”

  “It was chemistry.”

  “Exactly. One minute I was telling myself to back off because of who she is and who I am and the next minute I was kissing her. And then the next minute after that I was tossing her over my shoulder like a caveman and carrying her to my bed. Afterward, we agreed that we wouldn’t let it affect our jobs. We both get what it means that we’re on opposite sides of an immovable wall. We didn’t make any promises to each other, but that lasted about two minutes. We have a date tonight.”

  Xavier lifted his rifle again and popped open the chamber. “So now you know. Some people are worth breaking the rules for.”

  Now he knew. “I guess I had to learn that for myself. Except now she’s caught in the middle between Ty Briscoe and me. You should’ve heard him threatening me if I interfere with her job at the resort or drive her away to California. I hate that dating her gives that asshole ammo to use against both of us. It’s a big mess already.”

  “But it’s worth it,” Xavier said. “This’ll be fun for me, too. I hope you get to meet her parents.” He loaded a cartridge, then paused, tipping his head. “Is it bad form to ask for their autographs the first time you meet them?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Xavier looked at him like he was nuts. “Remedy’s parents.”

  “Yeah, okay. Why would you want her parents’ autographs?” Xavier’s weird question about autographs reminded him of Briscoe’s mention of Remedy’s connections, but Micah still wasn’t connecting the dots.

  “You mean, you still don’t know who she is?” Xavier loaded a second round into the chamber, then cocked it. “Oh, honey. Bless your heart.”

  Micah smacked Xavier’s shoulder. “Did you just ‘oh, honey’ me while cocking a rifle?”

  Xavier pinned him with a wry gaze. “Being a gay man in Texas is complicated.”

  “So it has always seemed. What makes you such a Remedy Lane expert that you know more about her than I do?”

  “I’m a Remedy Lane expert because I’ve watched her grow up, like everyone in the country—or world, really—who’s clued into celebrity news.”

  Micah was absolutely lost. “Come again?”

  “Remedy Lane is Hollywood royalty. Her parents are Virginia Hartley and Preston Lane. The actors.”

  Micah knew who they were. Everybody knew who they were. Micah’s vision went fuzzy, as did his mind. He pushed out of his chair and started pacing again. Preston Lane’s Indigo Run was one of the first movies Micah’s dad had taken him to see in a theater and Virginia Hartley was one of those award show darlings who could sneeze and win an Oscar for it. “You’re shitting me, right?”

  “You’re the one shitting me that your girlfriend never told you she was famous. Man, didn’t you two talk about your families at all?”

  They’d talked. Some. “She said she grew up in Hollywood, but she didn’t mention something as fundamental as being the daughter of two of the biggest movie stars of all time. I didn’t even know they had a kid together. They’re not married, right?”

  “Not for a long time. Their divorce was a huge deal in the late nineties.”

  “I just—This is some kind of joke, isn’t it? You’re pulling one over on me.”

  “If you don’t believe me, look her up online.”

  Right. Online. Because Remedy was a celebrity. He could probably type her name into a search engine and her image would pop right up alongside a picture of her famous-as-hell parents. With unsteady hands, he pulled out his phone and typed in her name.

  In less than a second, her pretty face filled the screen. He scrolled down to her description. “Remedy Rose Lane, the only daughter of Virginia Hartley and Preston Lane, the stars of over two hundred movies combined.”

  Xavier didn’t bother leaning over to look. “That’s her.”

  Stunned silent and numb as hell, Micah clicked on the images tab of the search engine and scrolled through a veritable photo album of Remedy’s life. Right before his eyes, she evolved from a spunky kid to a willowy teen to the beautiful woman he’d slept with two nights ago. A lot of the shots looked like they’d been snapped by paparazzi, especially those taken around the time of her parents’ divorce, while others boasted the polished glow of a professional photographer. There were shots of her on red carpets of big celebrity events and attending fashion week in Paris, and shots of her jet-setting all over the globe. No wonder that sashaying strut came so naturally to her.

  Ty Briscoe’s words came back to him about her connections bringing a lot of high-end clientele to the resort. No kidding.

  Then he thought of Remedy’s answer to Micah’s question about if there was anything noteworthy about her childhood in Hollywood that she wanted to tell him. Right then and there she could have come clean about who she really was. But she’d made a conscious choice to leave him in the dark. Call it a hang-up, but after what Micah’s mom did to their family he’d lost all tolerance for lies of omission.

  “With a life like that, what is Remedy even doing in Texas?” Micah said, more to himself than anything. That question, and the fact that he didn’t know the answer—that he hadn’t even thought to ask what had brought her to Briscoe Ranch—was a stunning reminder of how little time he and Remedy had spent getting to know each other.

  “I know the answer to that.”

  Of course Xavier did. He was a Remedy Lane expert.

  Xavier tapped the edge of Micah’s phone. “Start a new search. Type in Zannity. Z-a-n-n-i-t-y.”

  “What’s a zannity?” Micah asked as he typed the letters in.

  “Not a what. A who. Two whos, actually. Zannity was the nickname for the celebrity power couple Serenity Lee and Zander Brogue.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  Xavier flashed him a droll frown, unimpressed by Micah’s celebrity ignorance. “Sometimes I wonder if you live under a rock. Their breakup was all over the news.”

  There wasn’t a more boring topic in the world to Micah than celebrity gossip—until now.

  He clicked on the first article listed in the search results and skimmed it. Reading about the woman he’d made love to getting raked over the coals by the news media for the Zannity wedding ending in disaster did odd things to his defensive shields. Made him wish he had Ty Briscoe by the throat again. Made him want to drag her behind his shields and protect her from every last person who’d tried to do her harm.

  “I kind of want to knock some heads together,” Micah said. “That Zannity situation was nothing but a pile of cow dung.”

  “Exactly. When Serenity caught Zander cheating on her on their wedding day with one of Remedy’s assistants and called it off, he and the assistant blamed Remedy for pushing them by causing them undue stress about the wedding due to her incompetence. It was a huge scandal. She resigned from the high-end wedding-planning company she worked for and left Hollywood. Nobody knew where she went. Probably still don’t, or we’d have some bottom-dwelling paparazzi sniffing around the town. Or maybe everyone has just moved on to the next scandal. She’s old news now.”

  That story had gotten more bananas by the second. “That whole mess is inconceivable to me.”

  “Number one, that’s showbiz, baby. Survival of the fittest—and the thinnest, but that’s beside the point. And number two, you can’t use the word inconceivable. It’s been retired.”

  “You can’t retire a word,” Micah said.

  “It’s like in sports, how a great player’s number is retired when they leave the sport. Inconceivable has been retired. It can only be used in one context from here to eternity, so if you’re not quoting The Princess Bride then pick a different word.”

  Micah shook his head. Sometimes Xavier baffled him with all his pop culture jibber-jabber. “How is it that you and I are such good friends?”

  “Alex asks me the same thing when your name comes up.”

  “I’m sure he does.”


  Xavier handed Micah a pair of headphones, then secured his own in place and pressed his eye to the Remington’s sight. “Firing!”

  Micah barely got his headphones in place before Xavier emptied his rifle’s magazine into the target at the far end of the range, his every shot within centimeters of each other right at the heart of the torso silhouette.

  Remedy was rich and famous. She’d spent her life traveling around the world and having her every whim catered to by staffs of dozens. And Micah had plied her with a bacon cheeseburger and beer at a backwoods bar with sawdust on the floor. What was she doing in Nowhere, Texas? Yes, Xavier had answered that already, but Micah couldn’t get the question out of his head. Sure, she’d been the subject of a scandal, but how bad could it have been? New celebrity scandals broke every day and folks in that industry seemed to have short memories of people’s screwups.

  No wonder Ty Briscoe was falling all over himself to protect his investment in her. He was probably already counting his future profits from all the celebrity weddings he expected her to bring in. Was Remedy aware of Ty’s motivation? Was she in on it? Had she already tapped her celebrity contacts for weddings in Dulcet?

  The more questions like those that Micah considered, the more pissed off he got that she hadn’t been honest about herself, pissed off that nobody had told him the truth. Not her, not Xavier or Alex. Nobody. Worse, all those jokes she’d made about people in Texas and Micah being a Bubba and that fake twang she assumed sometimes took on a stench of condescension. How dare a rich princess sashay into his hometown and treat them all like darling little zoo animals?

  His grandparents’ kitchen table flashed through his mind, the place he’d found the note from his mother and realized she’d abandoned them. He shook the image away. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner? About Remedy?”

  “Hey, chill out. You tell me all the time that you don’t like gossip.”

  “It’s not gossip. It’s the truth about a woman I slept with, a truth that she and everybody else kept from me.”