Hot in Hellcat Canyon

by Julie Anne Long

  “We haven’t formally met. I’m John Tennessee McCord,” he said, as if there were a possibility she didn’t actually know.

  Given that all of her senses rioted merely by virtue of proximity, his presence was paradoxically calming. He was probably accustomed to mute and staring women. Possibly even accustomed to snappish little women. Once again, she got the sense that nothing could surprise this guy, because he’d seen everything, and he could handle all of it.

  He held out his hand.

  “You’re the talk of the town, Mr. McCord. I’m Britt Langley.” She didn’t take his hand. Yet.

  “Ah, the ‘enigmatic’ Britt Langley. A pleasure to meet you officially. Call me J. T.”

  And then she finally put her hand in his, because she could hardly avoid it. She was a grown woman, after all.

  He held on to it briefly, just a little longer than necessary. As if he knew exactly how squirrelly she was, or how electric he was.

  His hand was warm and a little rough and it engulfed hers. Absurdly, it felt both reassuring and terrifying. As if he were pulling her up a cliff she was about to tumble off.

  One that he’d pushed her over.

  He let it go.

  But not before every cell in her body had risen from some sort of slumber and was zinging like a limb shaken awake after she’d slept all night on it.

  He studied her a moment.

  Oddly, she could have sworn he wasn’t entirely unmoved, either.

  There was a refreshing honesty in this quiet, unabashed appraisal. It was very clear he found her attractive and wasn’t the least bit worried about disguising it. And he knew damn well she found him attractive. He clearly assumed she could cope.

  And then the bastard smiled. Slowly. As if two of them had spoken all of those thoughts aloud.

  BAM, just like that, her breath was gone.

  “So you work for the property management company and at the Misty Cat?” he wondered.

  “Yeah.” That word emerged as a squeak. She cleared her throat. “Yeah. You’re looking for a place in Hellcat Canyon?”

  “Yep. I’ll be here off and on to film on location, and I have a little downtime before my schedule really picks up again. I stayed at the Angel’s Nest last night. A little surprised I wasn’t spontaneously ejected from the place, like Lucifer from heaven.”

  Every surface of Angel’s Nest that could be was scented, frilled, fringed, or embroidered. If it wasn’t purple, it was floral. Cherubs and angels gazed sympathetically from frames and pillows.

  And she realized she was smiling, imagining him irritably ensconced amid all of that.

  “A little hard to picture you there.”

  He did, on closer inspection, have faint shadows under his eyes. As though he hadn’t slept well, or much.

  “Yeah? Where do you picture me, Britt?”

  Underneath me. Over me. Behind me. In me.

  Those dirty little prepositional thoughts surprised her. Maybe it was just his drawl that turned everything into innuendo.

  With some difficulty she reassembled her thoughts. She actually had a job to do. “I can picture you right here in the Michaelson place!” she said brightly.

  Truthfully, she couldn’t picture anyone in the Michaelson place.

  “Is that so?” His expression told her that he knew she was lying through her teeth, but he was prepared to be entertained. “When does the tour start?”

  “How about now?” She literally threw her shoulders back, the way heroines in novels did, an attempt to bolster her nerve, and strode past him to open the door.

  But she betrayed her lack of aplomb by fumbling an inordinate amount of time with the key, as if her hands were newly installed and she was just learning how to use them.

  She finally got it in there and cranked it.

  Stale air whooshed out when she pushed open the door. They both stepped back as if dodging an escaping entity.

  “The owner hasn’t used this place in some time,” she apologized.

  He peered in. He didn’t say a word for a moment.

  “Since . . . 1972?” he hazarded. Sounding bemused, and as hushed as Indiana Jones entering a tomb.

  The carpet was forest green shag, about four inches deep, or so it seemed, and it was everywhere. Like a living thing. It met them at the front door. She wouldn’t be surprised if the carpet one day made it all the way into the bathroom and escaped out into the woods to join the wild foliage outside.

  She led him inside.

  The house comprised two main rooms and two bedrooms. The main room was vast and open with soaring beamed ceilings, bisected only by the long oval Formica counter of the open kitchen. But the whole place was dark, because brown wood paneling covered every inch of the walls, and the single wall of windows was covered in blinds, and the blinds were covered in dust.

  “I feel like I ought to be stalking an antelope.” He said it on a wondering hush, as he tread over the carpet. “I can’t hear my feet.”

  “This kind of carpet keeps the place warm in winter,” she asserted, mindful that her goal was to get the property rented. “It does get cold up here in winter, and we even get snow on occasion, so if you intend to stay that long, it’ll cut down on your heating bills.”

  “Ah, so that’s the purpose of shag carpet,” he said somberly, like an attentive pupil. “I always wondered.”

  “And it might seem dark now, but wait until you see the view,” she gushed, though her voice was still a little shaky. “Those blinds . . . um . . . apparently we need to use a remote to open them. Let’s see . . . it must be around here somewhere . . .”

  “It’s probably in the rug.” He was nudging at the carpet in an exploratory fashion with the toe of his boot, as if hoping to find treasures in it. Or worried something might be lurking.

  In any other circumstance she might have found this hilarious.

  But she was appalled she had to try to rent this place to John Tennessee McCord, of all people. His own home was probably so huge and spotless that every word and footstep echoed.

  As she rummaged through the kitchen drawers for the remote he was watching her as avidly as if he’d bought a ticket to see her.

  “Plenty of spatulas already here,” she said brightly, “so you don’t need to bring your own.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. I hate when I burn my pancakes.”

  He was both enjoying her show and taking the piss out of her.

  “I bet there’s a deck of only about forty-­three cards in there, too,” he added encouragingly. “And maybe one beater from a hand mixer, and one corn on the cob holder.”

  Like he was prompting a comedian who’d forgotten her next line.

  He wasn’t far wrong about the cards, but she didn’t tell him that.

  She pulled open another drawer and found it empty. And then another drawer, and saw that sad, depleted deck of cards and a bottle opener. And then another drawer.

  He finally turned away and tipped his head back and studied the walls. “Just think . . . someone must have said, ‘I know what will make this place even better—­dark paneling everywhere.”

  “It acts as an extra layer of insulation in the summer and winter.”

  She had completely made that up.

  He slowly lowered his head and studied her for a beat of silence.

  “Does it?” He sounded almost intolerably amused and completely disbelieving.

  She cleared her throat.

  “Er, as you can see, um, J. T.,” she narrated like a spokesmodel, as if he hadn’t said anything at all, as she yanked another drawer open, “there’s plenty of storage for utensils and groceries and—­AHA!”

  She whipped out the remote for the blinds triumphantly.

  She stabbed at it, and miraculously, the window blinds slid up.

  He wa
tched, seemingly fascinated. “How lazy do you have to be if you need a remote to . . .”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence.

  Because they were briefly paralyzed by the sunlight roaring through the windows.

  “Christ,” he muttered, impressed.

  After a moment to establish they both still possessed corneas, he braved a step closer and assessed the view.

  She’d seen that view before, so she stood where she was.

  And surreptitiously watched him.

  The gamma ray brilliance of the light delineated faint lines at the corners of his eyes and faint circles beneath them, a little morning stubble, a semicircle of a dimple next to his mouth, visible even when he wasn’t smiling, like a sign saying “here is where you should kiss me.”

  That surge of untenable want roared through her like that first shot of whisky she’d tried when she was eighteen and trying to impress a guy.

  Funny, though.

  She could have sworn there was something almost melancholy in his stillness right now.

  If she had to guess, she would have said he was lonely.

  “Don’t anthropomorphize the movie star,” a little warning voice in her head said. “They aren’t like the rest of us.”

  And yet. She didn’t think she’d ever have assembled the collage of information she’d gleaned about the man last night, from the cavalcade of women to the video of him being hunted at the airport, into the wryly funny, down-­to-­earth, gracious—­you’d have to be gracious to endure a tour like the one she was giving him—­man standing here.

  “And are those little glints across the ridge windows of other houses?” he asked finally.

  Suddenly she knew where he was going with this.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “If they had binoculars, I could do a performance of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window once a night.” He quirked a corner of his mouth.

  She knew that movie was about neighbors spying on neighbors, and she recalled the little black bar photoshopped over J. T.’s penis. Some determinedly, greedily hateful photographer had worked hard for that shot. In a house comprised of glass windows, John Tennessee McCord would be pretty exposed.

  Right now the only scene she could distinctly remember from that movie was the famous one: Grace Kelly swooping in to plant a long, slow kiss on Jimmy Stewart.

  He pivoted abruptly then.

  She couldn’t be sure what expression he’d caught her in the middle of, but it was probably the basic lustful sort. Nothing he hadn’t seen before, doubtless.

  It didn’t save her from feeling mortified.

  “Or you could push the couch over and enact puppet shows from behind it,” she said hurriedly. “My nephew would like that.”

  Wow, Britt, she thought sadly. You are a dork.

  His eyebrows dove in surprise.

  But then he grinned. “I was a guest on Sesame Street once,” he said. “I sang a song with Kermit. “Ev-­ery-­ONE needs a friend, it’s just so FUN to BE a friend . . .”

  He sang with complete and barely tuneful unselfconsciousness. She laughed, utterly disarmed.

  “I put it on my acting resume,” he said. “The singing. Even though I did it exactly once.”

  “Yeah, once was probably enough,” she teased.

  This just made him grin.

  And now he was watching her in the same way he’d perused the view of the canyon a minute ago, only with significantly more pleasure and a degree of purposefulness that shortened her breath.

  The backs of her arms heated to match the temperature of her face.

  He took a little step forward.

  “So, Britt . . .” he mused. “You ever watch any cop shows?”

  She took a step backward.

  “Nope.”

  “Watch any other TV shows?”

  “Not really.”

  “Got any . . . favorite actors?” he said softly, teasingly.

  “Are you still tight with Kermit? I would do just about anything to meet him.”

  It was an attempt to shut down this line of questioning and get the house tour on track.

  She realized belatedly how very much like an innuendo it had sounded, when he went stock-­still.

  He tipped his head and considered her.

  “Oh, sure. I’d introduce you. But Miss Piggy is the jealous type. One look at you . . .” The look he settled upon her here was somehow both soft and molten enough to dissolve steel. “. . . one look at you and she might . . .”

  And with that silence he was like a sentry waiting for her to deliver the password into flirtation land.

  She knew that password. Once upon a time she could have given J. T. a run for his money when it came to flirtation. But she wasn’t going to say it. She wasn’t going to say it.

  “Flail?” she heard herself say faintly, anyway. “Would she flail when she saw me?”

  His eyes gleamed a sort of wicked mischief.

  “She might just angrily flail,” he confirmed solemnly, with feigned regret.

  It might be the first time in history anyone had flirted using the Muppets, but she wouldn’t put anything past the human race.

  They stared at each other in absurd, mute delight.

  It occurred to her that she could probably toss any awkward, clunky observation to this man, and like Rumpelstiltskin, he’d spin it into flirtation gold.

  “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to settle for your autograph,” she said finally, into the crackling silence. “On the lease to this lovely house!”

  He dismissed this with a single sardonic flick of one eyebrow. “How about you, Britt? Do you sing?”

  “Do I sing?” she was astonished. “Let’s put it this way. The first time I met my next-­door neighbor, it was because she’d called the police to tell them someone was being murdered in my house. Turns out I was just singing in my shower.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “Seriously?” He actually sounded hopeful.

  “Seriously.”

  “Wow.” He was thoroughly pleased. “What were you singing?”

  “ ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ Led Zeppelin.”

  He mulled. “There is kind of a lot of wailing in that one,” he conceded.

  “Yeah.”

  “Great song, though.”

  “Heck, yeah.”

  “We should do duet at the Misty Cat on Open Mic Night. You, me, ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ We’d kill it. Or kill the audience,” he said.

  Her heart stopped. Was he . . . was he asking her out?

  She stared at him blankly.

  He stared at her expectantly.

  Her phone dinged a reminder of her next appointment—­a maintenance inspection of a cabin rented by a sweet elderly couple.

  She lunged for it like a thrown life preserver, pivoted abruptly and headed for the kitchen and put the counter between the two of them, her heart thumping like John Bonham’s kick drum.

  She looked up to see him watching her with a puzzled furrow between his brows.

  “Um . . . J. T., as you can see, you have more drawers than you can possibly use for your various cooking implements and . . . Scotch tape and cat toys and . . . er . . . batteries.”

  She had just inadvertently revealed what she kept in her own kitchen drawers.

  “It’s amazing what you can keep in drawers these days.” He humored her. He was frowning ever so faintly.

  And then he turned and wandered out of the room to inspect one of the bedrooms. “Want to guess what’s in here?” he called. “More carpet, that’s what.”

  Britt didn’t follow him in there. Because even though there wasn’t a bed in it currently, which really made it more of just a room than a bedroom, the implication was still there.

  He popped out of the
room. “So how old is your nephew?”

  She was startled. “Er . . . nine. Nine and three-­quarters, he’d tell you immediately.”

  “He likes the Muppets, eh?”

  “The Muppets, Minecraft, computers, and anything butt-­related.”

  His smile grew bigger as she recited this. “Yeah, most guys never really outgrow any of that.”

  “I guess I kind of understand it,” she said, hesitantly. “I mean, the first time you discover your own body and everyone else’s can make a sound like a vuvuzela it’s kind of a cause for celebration.”

  The smile dropped off his face.

  He froze as if she’d pulled a gun on him.

  He stared at her. This time, absolutely thunderstruck.

  Silence ensued, during which Britt marinated in horror and wished she could vacuum the words from the air right back into her mouth.

  She could hear her sister’s voice in her head: What did I tell you about needing to socialize with adults? Now you’ve gone and made a fart joke to John Tennessee McCord.

  She was never, ever going to tell her sister she was right, though.

  “Vuvuzela?” he finally choked out.

  “Yeah. Um . . . stadium horns?” The shame had scorched her voice right down to a thread. She mimed holding one up and blowing into it.

  She was nearly floating up out of her body watching herself mime blowing a freaking stadium horn to John Tennessee McCord.

  This wasn’t just a fart joke. It was a never-­ending fart joke.

  “I know,” he said dazedly. “It’s just . . . that . . . that . . . that might literally be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  He looked awestruck. Almost beyond laughter.

  His face was lit up like a sun.

  He was staring at her as if she were better than Cirque du Soleil.

  Her face, on the other hand, felt hotter than the sun and there was no way she wasn’t tomato red.

  “I guess . . . I guess if they sounded like wind chimes he wouldn’t find them as funny,” she expounded desperately.