Hot in Hellcat Canyon (31 page)

And then, to his amazement, Rebecca laid a soft, persuading hand on his knee.

Or, technically speaking, his upper thigh.

He looked at her hand. He was as surprised as if she’d dropped a scorpion on him rather than a big hint. Her hand, or any other part of her, was absolutely the last thing on his mind at the moment.

And then he slowly looked up at her. His expression must have shown unflattering incredulity.

Her hand flew off immediately.

Her own expression was almost comically amazed.

It was entirely possible no man had ever before turned that expression on Rebecca.

At least he knew now that Rebecca had an agenda within an agenda.

“I’ll take the couch. You can have the bed,” he told her curtly. “I’ll take you as far as San Francisco, but you can find your own way to Napa from there. I am not showing up to that wedding with you. That is final.”

They stared each other down.

“Fine,” she said, sounding surprisingly neutral.

He exhaled. “And I need some sleep. So if you could just . . .”

He wasn’t going to sleep. But he wanted to be alone while he stared at the ceiling. And simmered in confusing feelings.

Another little silence, which was Rebecca deciding whether or not she ought to negotiate.

“Okay then. Good night, Johnny,” she said finally.

And she rose like a queen and took herself off to the bathroom to do whatever things were required to preserve her beauty overnight.

He turned out the light and stretched out on the sofa.

Outside, he could hear the deer trotting past.

One of Britt’s favorite sounds.

“
B
ritt, honey, will you come here a moment?”

Glenn’s voice sounded suspiciously sweet as he beckoned to her from behind the counter about ten minutes after she’d walked in the door of the Misty Cat.

She was only a few minutes late, but she was still rubbing her eyes, which were raw and red and sandy from staring at her ceiling all night instead of sleeping, wired by a sort of unspecific self-righteous fury and that actual physical gut ache that kept her thrashing until she was wound like a burrito in her sheets and Phillip finally stalked off in disgust to sleep elsewhere.

She’d tried to do up her hair in its usual barrette on the way in. From Glenn’s expression, she hadn’t quite got it right.

“You look like hell,” Glenn assessed tactfully.

“You silver-tongued devil. Now I know what Sherrie sees in you.”

He snorted. “Mr. McCord paid for his lunch yesterday but he didn’t eat it. I’d like you to take this to him. Now. Sherrie and me will manage the lunch rush. You can make up the hours some other day.”

He said this briskly and handed a white paper bag to her, fragrant with its load of burger and fries.

She couldn’t have been more shocked if Glenn had said to her, “Britt honey, I’d like you to take this here Christian and feed him to the lions.”

“But . . . but . . .”

Sherrie was hovering in the kitchen, pretending not to listen. The two of them were in cahoots, she was pretty positive.

“You
saw
what happened yesterday,” Britt said. “He walked on out of here the moment he clapped eyes on her and he didn’t come back.”

“We
all
saw what happened yesterday. He call or text you last night?” Glenn asked her shortly.

Britt was cagily silent.

“Thought he would,” Glenn said triumphantly. “He maybe text you more than once?”

She glared sullenly at him.

Glenn was a parent. He could probably not only put up with her evasion all day, he could see right through her.

“What’d he want, Britt?”

“He wanted me to call him or text him back,” she finally, begrudgingly, confessed.

“And did you?”

“Of course not.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I didn’t want to.”

Glenn’s brows dove in a frown. “And is that all he wanted? He apologize for bailing like that?”

Pride and wounded feelings and fury and a whole soup of other things made her want to lie to Glenn.

Another part of her was curious about what he would say. Because she knew, deep down, both Glenn and Sherrie cared about her.

“He wanted to come over,” she confessed. “And yes. He apologized.”

Apparently she wasn’t going to be allowed to savor martyrdom for even a millisecond.

“Thought so. McCord is a stand-up guy. He cares about you. He fixed your
porch
.”

Glenn equated carpentry with character.

“Whose side are you on?” She was pissed now.

“I’m on the side of whatever gets your moping over with fastest, which means you need to talk to him.”

“Who says I’m
moping
?”

Glenn snorted as if that didn’t even warrant an answer. “Go on, get going. I don’t want my food to get cold.”

Britt narrowed her eyes at him.

She finally snatched the bag from his hand. “You taught all your kids to swim by throwing them into the pool, didn’t you?”

“Worked, too,” he said cheerfully. “They all swim like fish.”

“Maybe it’s because they’re all part
mermaid
,” she called slyly over her shoulder as she stalked out of the Misty Cat.

“
Mer
—? Sherrie!” he bellowed.

B
ritt would have trudged, protestingly, all the way to J. T.’s house—it was a fifteen-minute trudge, if she wanted to do it that way—but her conscience got the better of her and there really was no sense in wasting good hot food, so she picked up the pace, and she was just about at that turn in the road when . . .

Fuck.

Her stomach did a swan dive off a cliff.

Rebecca standing out on J. T.’s deck, gazing contemplatively out through the trees, in the manner of a woodland princess. She was clad only in a man’s white dress shirt, open to expose most of her clavicle, and it barely covered her butt. Her long, thin white thighs most decidedly did not touch.

Britt pivoted, prepared to head off in the other direction and concoct a lie for Glenn, but she was a bad liar and apparently she had, much to her dismay, a sense of integrity.

It was too late, anyway. Rebecca gave a start when she saw her.

“Oh! Good morning! You’re that waitress . . . aren’t you?”

She aimed a Klieg light smile at her. All blinding, uniform teeth and sparkly eyes.

Zero actual human friendliness.

Pretty, but a little unnerving. Quite a bit, in fact, like that billboard out on the highway.

And if Rebecca had said nearly
anything
else, Britt might have thrust the white bag at her and bolted in the opposite direction.

But that sentence had the ring of a sword unsheathing. And “that waitress” had been delivered gingerly.

And that’s how Britt knew that Rebecca considered her worthy of competition.

Britt’s competitive reflexes kicked in.

“I suppose I am ‘that waitress.’ My name is Britt.”

Britt smiled back at her. Her teeth might not look like piano keys, but her father had paid for orthodontia and she had dutifully worn her retainer every night for years.

And two could play the “don’t blink” game.

They played it for a few seconds more.

“I’m Rebecca Corday, Britt. You might know me from that billboard out on the highway.” She gave a self-deprecating little laugh and a hand flutter in that general direction.

“Oh yeah. I know that billboard. It sure casts a shadow.”

Britt thought she detected an eyebrow twitch.

But Rebecca wasn’t the highest paid actress in the world for no reason.

“I like your top,” Rebecca said brightly, finally. “That’s a great color on you. Walmart sure is making some cute clothes these days.”

“They sure are,” Britt twinkled back at her.

She expected Rebecca meant this as an insult. But it was really the wrong tack to take with her. She could talk for
hours
about her knack for finding a bargain, and she was proud of it
and
the top.

“Are you here because you’re looking for John?” Rebecca said, her voice sympathetic. “He’s
catnip
to women. They were always tracking him down wherever he lived.”

John?
She called him John? That seemed all wrong. Very mundane. She wondered if that’s why Rebecca did it—an attempt at domesticating him.

“Tennessee” seemed to be so much a part of him that the ‘T’ at the very least seemed necessary.

“I get the internet, too, Miss Corday,” she said evenly. “I’ve read the stories about him. I know him pretty well. And John called me twelve times yesterday.”

This didn’t cause even a ripple over Rebecca Corday’s beautiful features. But she did go rather still.

And then she tilted her head ever so slightly and studied her.

“Is that so? You must not have called him back,” she said. “I can’t blame you. Given his history with me.”

Damn. Rebecca was smart. Smart in a Dr. Evil sort of way. Britt had once seen a cat toying at a wriggling gopher, trying over and over again to find that one place to administer that killing bite. She was reminded of that right now.

“I just came to bring him the food he ordered,” Britt said. Which was technically true.

“Well, he’s still asleep. We were up all night. Just like old times.”

This came with a misty smile and a picturesque tuck of her glorious hair behind her ear. Then she stretched, and the shirt she was wearing edged up ever so slightly. Revealing the tops of ivory hairless thighs and a peek of something lacy and fuchsia.

Britt averted her eyes.

“He’s so
creative
about finding ways to amuse himself when he’s away from Hollywood,” Rebecca added fondly. “He always did know how to fill his downtime.”

“J. T. is pretty resourceful.” Britt said this tightly.

But she was losing her grip on her bravado. Because she was new to whatever this nasty little game was, and she hadn’t slept at all last night, and Rebecca Corday—Rebecca Freaking Corday, of all the people in the world!—was clearly prepared to duel her to the death.

Rebecca smiled sweetly.

“I confess I was a little astonished by the condition of this cabin he bought. But then, he does love to fix . . . broken things.”

WOW.

Bull’s-eye.

Britt froze, as astonished as if she’d literally been shot.

Some distant, minuscule part of her was impressed with how accurate and how ruthless that guess had been.

She knew it was a guess. It had to be. If she knew anything at all about J. T., and she thought she did, she couldn’t imagine he would ever say a word about her to Rebecca.

But then, she couldn’t imagine the J. T. she knew spending five years of his life with this spectacularly beautiful, uniquely horrible woman.

She gawked speechlessly.

Rebecca gave her a slow, sympathetic smile and shrug. The silent implication being,
Sorry kid, but you never had a chance against me.

“Rebecca, who are you talk . . .”

J. T. wandered out onto the deck.

He was fully clothed. He wasn’t buttoning his jeans or mopping his brow or doing anything else that hinted that he might have just been ravished or had ravished Rebecca all night.

That was no definitive proof that he hadn’t, however.

His eyes were shadowed and red-rimmed from lack of sleep and her heart both ached and exulted because it was probably her fault.

When she saw him, the last vestiges of her bravado sifted away like so much dust and her knees nearly gave way. Because instantly, the world was in color again.

She realized, with a shock, that he was her favorite person.

But J. T.’s expression was hard and cold. It wasn’t an expression he’d ever turned on her before.

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

“Your friend came by with some lunch for you,” Rebecca volunteered, sweetly, when it seemed no one would ever speak.

“Delivery. From the Misty Cat.” Britt’s voice was shaking. She held up the bag, feeling like an idiot. “
Glenn
insisted I bring it,” she added pointedly.

“Yeah? Good to know that someone had to force you to come see me, Britt.”

Okay, then. He was definitely seething.

And all that did was make Britt even angrier.

His ex-girlfriend was standing behind him in her
panties
, for God’s sake.

“Could you give us a minute, Rebecca?” J. T. didn’t look at Rebecca at all when he said it.

He addressed this to Britt as if he was afraid she’d dart away if he took his eyes off her.

They stared each other down.

For a moment it looked as though Rebecca intended to stay exactly where she was.

And then she smiled beneficently, pivoted like a model reaching the end of a runway and glided back into the house, the tail of the shirt fluttering just above her microscopic buttocks.

“And put something on your damn bottom half,” he called after her.

If Britt knew Rebecca, and she thought she did, she expected that particular command would be ignored.

Britt handed the white paper bag up to him.

He barely looked at it. He set it aside on the little table.

“Rebecca collects men’s dress shirts like pelts. The one she’s wearing was never mine,” he said shortly.

“Yeah, I knew that. I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a dress
T-
shirt, anyway.”

It was a mild opening shot.

“Why didn’t you call me back, Britt?” He lowered his voice.

“Well, because I didn’t want to, J. T.,” she said tautly.

His stomach tied itself into a trucker’s hitch.

They stared each other down for a moment.

“Let’s go for a walk. Down by the creek,” he said abruptly.

She pivoted and stalked in that direction. He followed her swiftly down the steps and flanked her in a few strides.

He went to reach for her hand, a reflex now. But she kept hers so adamantly close to her sides they might as well have been strapped there with bailing wire, and he felt like an ass.

He holstered his hands in his pockets.