She touched it. “Thank you. Casey did it. It’s apparently a bit complicated. Seemed to take quite a bit of finesse.”
She turned her head this way and that so he could admire it.
“How about that. Sheisan artist.”
She smiled at him.
“By the way?” he said, hovering in the truck doorway a moment.
“Yeah?”
“...I’m going to enjoy messing it up later.”
And with that incendiary little statement, he shut her door.
She was lucky she was already in the truck, because the look he shot her would have buckled her knees.
CHAPTER13
They drove there with the windows rolled down, and she kicked off her shoes and put her feet up on the dash and let the breeze free a few tendrils of her fancy updo.
“Love this song! Sing with me, Britt,” he commanded, and cranked up the radio.
It was Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man,” one of her favorites. She’d always loved Neil Diamond’s huge, revival-meeting-style choruses. The two of them belted out the song, more concerned with volume and conviction than the key, and any dogs within earshot could not have been blamed for howling. And if this had been the sum total of their date, she would have been perfectly happy.
She went as silent as a canary in a coal mine when they drove past the billboard of Rebecca Corday.
“Boy, they really captured her likeness. Her head is really that big in real life,” he said.
She gave a short laugh.
But it was oddly as sobering as a splash of water in the face.
Passing that billboard was like entering a portal into J.T.’s world.
He’d dated, and slept with, and was photographed with, a woman who was on a freakingbillboard.
She’d forgotten how much more populated Black Oak was, in general, than Hellcat Canyon. Tourists with lots of money cruised the antiques stores and stopped in at the restaurants as they headed up to their Tahoe condos.
The street was aswarm with Lincoln Navigators and Cadillac Escalades.
And people. Lots and lots of people. Many of them leaving work for the day, but others pouring into restaurants for dinner.
Britt had grown up amid crowds in Southern California, and this hardly compared.
Still, it was a veritable stampede next to Hellcat Canyon.
And J. T. got even quieter.
She sensed he was even a little nonplussed.
She knew why.
One of these people, if not all of them, was bound to recognize him.
They’d spent a few days in the insular, wooded little bubble that was Hellcat Canyon. And she’d known all along he was famous.
She just hadn’t had toreallyexperience firsthand what that actually meant in real life. And she had a hunch he’d almost forgotten this, too.
