He gave a short laugh. But there wasn’t much humor in it.
“I thought we were safe swimming there, otherwise I might have been more vigilant. I bet that first photographer followed us here, or was somehow tipped off about the swimming hole. How, I don’t know. They’re like wasps tracking the scent of meat. They just kind of know.”
“Yeah, I don’t think anyone in town can afford a telephoto lens. And they see enough of me as it is, in the Misty Cat.”
She was trying for a joke.
He smiled tautly.
And the silence was just as taut as that smile.
He drew in a breath. “Britt, I don’t want you to have to be part of that zoo. The photographers and sycophants and all that. That stuff is my job. It doesn’t have to be part of your world.”
“It’s okay,” she said. After a moment.
She said it automatically, because she hadn’t fully thought it through yet. Her impulse was to reassure him. But if she’d said instead, “I don’t mind,” for instance, it would have implied that she considered herself a part of it already, or that she thought he was inviting her to be a part of it.
And it occurred to her that what he might be saying now is that he never really intended for her to be part of that world in the first place. That she was, indeed, what he was doing in his downtime. She could picture a magazine cover article now: “French, karate, blondes: what John Tennessee McCord does in his downtime.”
“Maybe it’s just a couple of photos,” she suggested. “Maybe it won’t turn into any kind of a zoo. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“Maybe,” he said.
Neither of them believed it.
“I have to get to work,” she said finally. Quietly.
“I’m going to do some work on the roof over at my house today. See you tonight?”
That “see you tonight” had been implied for weeks now.
The fact that he was saying it injected that first note of caution and uncertainty in their little idyll.
“Sure.”
She took a step away toward the door, suddenly eager to run off some of this emotion.
And suddenly he curled her back into his chest and held on to her a moment.
She could feel his heartbeat against her cheek. She clung to him for a moment, too. God, he smelled amazing.
He kissed her temple.
“Tonight,” she said into the delicious wall of his chest.
But J. T. was pretty intuitive. He could probably tell she was ruffling her flight feathers, and not just to get out the door to the Misty Cat this morning.
J. T. watched her dart out the door to work and realized he was smiling, which was a reflex when it came to watching Britt.
But then his smile faded, and gave way to the pitch black of his mood and he wasn’t quite able to parse out a single reason for it.
He’d been getting texts all morning from friends who were, frankly, simply glad to see him and to find out where he was and wanted to know if they’d see him in about a week at the Nicasio wedding.
From Linda Goldstein (with a flurry of emojis: a thumbs-up, a blonde girl, a heart, and a bikini):
She’s pretty, John Tennessee! I hope you’re happy!
And then his phone chimed in with another text.
