One Hot Summer (19 page)

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.”

Xavier threw up his hand. “Don't rope me into this. I didn't know she mattered to you. Last time you and I talked, you still thought she was a major pain in your ass.”

Micah hadn't realized until he'd been confronted with her deception how deeply she was starting to matter to him. How he'd unwittingly made plans for the two of them. He'd gotten notions in his head about her, about the possibility that the two of them together might be the start of something big. Stupid, trusting, romantic fool.

Micah picked up his bag of untouched guns. “I'm outta here, man. Between this whole Remedy thing and Ty Briscoe, I can't concentrate on hitting paper targets. It's time for me to get some answers.”

Xavier touched Micah's arm. “Hey, maybe you'd be better off waiting until you cool down. Give it some thought instead of confronting her with your guns blazing. No pun intended.”

Shaking his head, Micah pulled away. “I'm too pissed off to go home and stew. I slept with her and that means something to me, damn it. But she lied about who she was. She
lied
. And I deserve to know why.”

 

Chapter Ten

At the sound of someone pounding on her front door, Remedy startled and splashed champagne from her glass onto the kitchen counter. It was the good stuff, from one of the cases sent to her with love from her mom along with two dozen chocolate-covered strawberries.
Bless her heart,
and Remedy meant that sincerely, not in the sarcastic Texas way.

The pounding had sounded angry, so she picked up the baseball bat she'd stationed by the door as she looked through the peephole.

Micah was pacing from the front bumper of his truck and back to her door like a caged lion. Remedy had no idea what he could be angry about. The sight of the gun holstered to his hip made her heart race even more than his pissed-off scowl. Would she ever get used to the presence of guns, a variety of weapon she'd been brought up to fear above all others?

“Hi, Micah. You look upset,” she called through the door.

“We need to talk.” His voice was tight with barely harnessed emotion.

She set the bat down and put her hand on the doorknob but couldn't find the courage to unlock it, even though she knew in her heart that Micah would never harm her. “What's with the gun?”

Arms wide, he looked down his body, then shook his head, as though he'd forgotten he had the weapon on him. With a curse, he stormed back to his truck, then returned a moment later, the gun and holster gone. If anything, he looked even more peeved than before.

“I forgot I was wearing that.”

She opened the door. “You were at the range this morning with Xavier?”

He held his phone out, the screen displaying a photograph of her and her mother on the red carpet at the Oscars two years earlier. “Yes, and when I told Xavier that you and I had a date planned tonight he asked me to get your parents' autographs for him. I had no idea what he was talking about.”

Her heart sank. So much for being taken at face value without being under the shadow of her parents. It'd been nice while it lasted. “I'm sorry you were put in that position.”

He stuffed his phone in his pocket. “Remember when I asked you if there was anything about your childhood in Hollywood that was noteworthy? At Hog Heaven. You remember that?”

Yes, she did, and she remembered the choice she'd made not to divulge her past to him. “At the time, we were still enemies. I barely knew you.” Why was she bothering to explain? He'd already judged her and wasn't ready to listen to her point of view. He'd come for the express purpose of ripping her a new one.

“You've had plenty of opportunities to enlighten me. If you and I are going to date, if we're going to sleep together, then I deserve better than lies of omission.”

Red fireworks burst in her brain. How dare he. “Why is that, Micah? Because you bought me a beer and burger? Does that make me beholden to you? Or was it because I let you under my skirt? Now you own me, is that it?”

“Around here, sex like that means something. But I shouldn't have expected a Hollywood princess like you to understand our hick ways.”

Shit.
This fight was going to suck. She was going to need more champagne to handle this one. After opening the door wider in invitation, she returned to the kitchen. He closed the door behind him and followed.

She took a sip of champagne and let the flute linger at her lips, stalling, stalling.… “I didn't take sleeping with you lightly, but that still doesn't mean I owe you full disclosure of the details of my past—details that I had a reason for keeping to myself.”

“Look at you, sipping French champagne and eating chocolate-covered strawberries. Am I going to open your refrigerator and find caviar?”

He would because she had a lifelong weakness for the stuff. “Possessing caviar is not a personality defect. Nor is having wealthy parents.”

“How'd you choke down that beer the other night, huh?”

She'd called it right. He wasn't there to listen, just to vent at her. Well, he could go ahead and get it all out of his system. She topped off her champagne flute.

“Did you call your friends back in Hollywood the next day, tell them about how you went slumming with a local Bubba?” he said with a huff. “It all makes sense now. But you know what? I am a redneck and proud of it. I love this community and everything it stands for. And I have dedicated my life to protecting it from entitled rich folks. And yet here you are.”

Everything he'd listed about himself was a quality that made him who he was, and she
liked
who he was. She liked him a lot—except for the assumptions he was making about her and her values based on nothing but conjecture and his own prejudice against wealth.

“Yes, here I am.”

His accusations of her were so outlandish that it was easy to divorce herself from emotion and view their fight from a safe distance. His chest was all puffed out and a vein in his forehead was visible. His neck had truly turned red. Anger made him handsome in a dangerous way she found appealing on a very basic level. Not to mention that he smelled as though he'd come from an action movie set. He smelled like a stuntman. She'd always had a thing for stuntmen.

“You're probably worth even more money than all the Briscoes combined, aren't you? You could probably buy that resort out from under them if you got it in your mind to. You could buy this whole town.”

The whole town? Either of her parents could, but probably not her. She bit her lip and kept her mouth shut.

He braced his hands on the counter and leaned toward her, piercing her with a furious glare. When he spoke, his voice was low, his tight control returned. “Please don't tell me you and Ty Briscoe have some sort of backroom deal to exploit our town.”

Oh, for Pete's sake.
On impulse, she puckered up, stretched across the counter, and kissed him on the lips.

He reeled back, wiping his mouth. “Why did you do that?”

She had no good answer for him. “To shut you up.”

He shook his head, so angry that his lips pulled back to show his teeth. “You had no right.”

“Probably not,” she said. “But I refuse to defend myself against your baseless accusations and I refuse to feel guilty about who I am. You're drawing conclusions about me based on nothing but your own prejudices and what you read about me online. Which is really boring, you know that? I would've thought you'd have been more original than to make the same assumptions about me that people have been making my whole life.”