“Casey pulled out Kayla’s new hair extensions, which upset both of them, since Casey had just put them in and they looked great. That stopped it pretty quickly. They made up right there on the street. So I guess you can say it was a draw. Kayla offered Casey a twenty-percent discount on anything in her store, but she told her she had to come into the store to use it, and she hasn’t yet. And they haven’t really talked since. Which is kind of a shame, since they’ve been friends since grade school.”
He was smiling in earnest now. “Well, I’m a little sorry I missed that.”
“Casey’s pretty talented with hair.”
“All artists are temperamental.” Said the man who ought to know.
She smiled back at him.
His grin faded. “You get a little older, you get to know what or who is worth fighting over.”
The implication, if she wanted to read it that way, was that he considered her worth it. Worth the risk to his reputation, worth the risk to his person, worth lecturing her about unclenching.
And her heart lurched.
The low hum of want that thrummed between them was textured now with the things they weren’t saying, the questions he wasn’t asking, the admission she’d just made that wasn’t really an admission. The admission he’d just made.
“I’ll see you home if you want,” he said finally, easily. “My truck’s right’s over there.”
The silence between his question and her answer nearly rang like a note.
This is it, she thought. It was her chance. It wasn’t quite the way she’d expected, but she’d better take it.
“All right,” she said finally, softly. “Thank you.”
He released a breath he seemed to be holding and immediately aimed his keys at his truck and beeped the locks open, and he pulled open the door for her. She climbed about two stories, or so it felt like, and slid into cushioned comfort.
He shut the door behind her. “Seat belt,” he murmured.
She smiled and clicked into it as he started the truck up and pulled away from the curb.
J. T. was silent. He was still waiting for the last of the adrenaline to ebb. Running like a deep seam through the pure carnal triumph of finally spiriting away a woman with whom he badly wanted to have sex was the satisfying knowledge that he’d protected her.
It had been a reflex. And he’d known he would do it again, in a heartbeat, career be damned.
In this moment, next to him, Britt Langley was safe. This, for whatever reason, seemed to be the only thing that mattered in the moment.
“I like this,” she said, pointing at the stereo.
“It’s Wilco.” He turned it up a little.
It was loping and jangly and acoustic, lovely and wistful, not country but notnotcountry. A song about resting your head on a bed of stars, one he’d heard dozens of times, one of his favorites. It seemed sort of prescient given how he’d ended up here in Hellcat Canyon.
“This is how I felt when I first saw night in Hellcat Canyon,” she said.
He could have guessed that. He and Britt Langley, he had a hunch, saw much of the world in much the same way.
There was a whole lot of strategy and very little delicacy in most Hollywood relationships. When people were so easily had, it was easy to forget the serrated thrill of uncertainty. The pleasures ofwooing. Of actually earning someone’s regard.
He began to think that inner peace just meant knowing someone needed you. The essential you, whoever you might be when all the other nonsense was stripped away.
“Maybe you should get a dog,” he said, finally, to her. “Or do you have one?”
“I have a cat.”
“I hope bycatyou mean ‘puma.’”
She smiled. “The dog a few houses down from me barks when a squirrel so much as sighs.”
