Giorgio was still glowering, his spatula clanging and scraping the grill with more fervor than usual. He sounded like a German industrial band. He already had a row of customers lined up on stools in front of him, eggs and muffin halves and sausage sizzling away side by side in a geometry he understood. He never got an order wrong.
Britt had indeed seen the stranger’s ass. “Eight balls” didn’t quite capture it metaphorically, but it was as perfect as anything she’d ever seen. A veritable Fabergé egg of an ass, rare and compelling. She could all too easily imagine sliding her hands down over it, but this had more to do with the entirety of him: the denim, the eyes, that barely noticeable silver streak in his hair, that whiff of sandalwood she’d caught, the leanness.
It had been years since thoughts that wanton had sneakedpast her ramparts. Most men in town were too polite, or maybe too lazy, to continue attempting to scale the slippery wall of her reserve. Mostly that was okay with her.
She’d learned at a young age how dangerous it could be to see men in terms of their component parts. A man showed you who he was inside pretty quickly if you were willing to pay attention, but even then, sometimes it was too late.
“Last we see of him,” Giorgio predicted, gesturing with his chin. Which might be his longest sentence of the day.
God, she hoped so.
God, she hoped not.
“I don’t know. Glenn’s hamburgers really are the best,” Britt said. “He may not be able to help himself.”
Glenn beamed at her, his magnificent brush of a mustache twitching in pride.
She smiled back. She was reminded that making someone else happy was always the quickest, best way to get a little hit of happiness when she needed some.
She exhaled. Simplicity, contentment, love. She liked being near it. It was like a refreshing vast ocean she could dip a toe into, even though she’d grown afraid to wade on in.
CHAPTER2
Not from here.
He could practically hear everyone drawing that conclusion with a single glance. He’d been born in an even smaller town, if you could even call that collection of shacks stuffed full of poor and bitter people a town, and he’d assessed people in just that way, too. He was an island amid the customers eddying around him and filling in all the tables while he devoured his hamburger, which was surprisingly as exceptional as advertised.
He glanced back and his view was butts on stools arrayed before the surly cook, mostly clad in Wranglers. Clearly a popular spot, the Misty Cat. He intercepted a few searching looks—a lingering one from a guy with a badge, to whom he nodded politely, a hard one from a good-looking red-faced blockhead, which he met with utter disinterest—and other kinder, more curious ones. Over the years he’d grown accustomed to every imaginable kind of stare, but no one here seemed to precisely recognize him. These days this was mostly a relief.
He’d learned over the years that some people just needed to classify the whole world as “better than me” or “not as good as me” or “just like me.”
He wasn’t one of them. He’d simply waited for his first opportunity to get the hell out of Sorry, Tennessee, and grabbed it in both hands. He hadn’t looked back.
As it turned out, however, you could never quite take the country out of the boy.
A lot had happened since then. A wedding. The army. Triumphs. Failures. A long stretch during which he’d done nothing much but suffer the whipsaws of his ego, drink, philosophize, read, fight, and seduce. Every last thing that had happened to him had somehow become useful.
And nobody with any sense fucked with him anymore.
While the diner watched him, he watched the waitress. Not overtly. More the way you’d rest tired eyes on something lovely, a bird flitting from tree to tree, maybe.
He left a big but not obnoxiously big tip, writing “This is for saying ‘enigmatic’” on the bill, and slipped out, daydreaming about her eyes. A clear pale green with tawny flecks floating in them, they made him think of panning for gold in Sierra Nevada rivers. He’d liked her delicate nerviness, the fine shoulder blades exposed by skinny straps of her camisole, the tiny tattoo on one of them he couldn’t quite make out because she’d been darting like a hummingbird among the customers. She had streaky gold-brown hair twisted and fastened up off her neck with a filigree barrette and a soft mouth at odds with that hard expression she’d clearly perfected in order to shut down men. He’d wanted to lay a hand on her arm and say,Shhh, honey. It will all be okay, but he didn’t know why, and he suspected she’d deck him if he did. He smiled. Wouldn’t be the first time a woman had decked him.
But there was a sweet jolt when their eyes met. A kind of recognition. He’d known a lot of women, in nearly every sense of that word. The jolt was pretty rare.
Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business” erupted from his phone. It was his agent’s ringtone, though lately he thought the funeral march might be more appropriate.
“And?” was how he answered it.
“They went with someone else for theHouse of Cardsguest spot. It was close, though. They told me to tell you that.”
J. T. went silent. Damn.
He had just turned forty. He knew how to take a “no.”
He was just too much of a fighter to ever like it.
He knew better than to ask the next question, but that had seldom stopped him from doing anything. “Who’d they go with?”
