“Me, too. I always wanted kids.”
They could be interrupted any minute, so maybe this conversational gambit was more out of practical economy than anything else.
She doubted it.
She suspected it was more in the way of trying to startle her into deeper self-revelation. She was aware that it was patently unfair not to give anything of substance to him; then again, she hadn’t signed up for substance.
“Yeah. Me, too,” she said. Her voice was faint. She was unaccountably a little angry.
She’d both answered his question and hadn’t really answered it. And her own deeply ingrained sense of justice niggled her, because she knew she was being unfair to him.
Her hand curled into the tablecloth as if to ward off any more questions in the same general vein. She made herself stop, because he noticed stuff.
And little blip of silence ensued.
She was actually glad to see the maître d’ when he appeared.
“Yes, Monsieur McCord, please tell me how I may help.”
J. T. crooked his finger so that the man would bend closer. “Two members of your staff have approached me for an autograph since we’ve been seated. I’ll be filming in the Gold Country with a number of members of the Hollywood community in the near future and I would be pleased to highly recommend your restaurant to them if we are untroubled for the rest of the night.”
That was some masterful diplomacy. The elegantly implied threat was that if one more person interrupted them, he might even say something decidedly uncomplimentary. Maybe even on television.
He was clearly a master tactician. The “punching his way out of frustration” days were clearly behind him.
Watching him like this was somehow both intimidating and erotic as hell.
“Thank you for apprising me, sir,” the maître d’ said faintly. “You will not be bothered again.”
“Don’t leave,” J. T. ordered the man. “Britt, do you mind if I order for us?”
She shook her head.
She was hardly a complete rube. She could even speak a little French. But J. T.’s worldliness and authority, this earned sophistication, made her feel every bit of what she was, a middle-class California overachiever who had lost nearly everything she’d spent the first half of her life trying to achieve and wound up in Hellcat Canyon, subsisting on the basics, telling herself she was content.
Oddly, something else was revising in her, and it wasn’t just lust.
Shedidlike to be on top, frankly.
And it had been ages since she’d needed to rise to any kind of new challenge.
J. T., in his way, was the biggest challenge she’d ever encountered.
J. T. handed the menus back to the maître d’, ordered in rapid-fire French, and the maître d’ bowed and departed.
“You been single since your divorce, Britt?”
Damn. She sucked in a quick breath.
Another quick question, and an entirely reasonable one. If she’d been nearly anybody else.
“Pretty much.” She inhaled. “That is, yes. Do you missBlood Brothers...excitement? Hullabaloo?”
His head went up and he fixed her with a stare.
He was making it very clear that he knew she’d dodged that question.
She felt a pressure in her chest, a frisson of panic that he would simply get tired of trying to coax her out.
