Hot in Hellcat Canyon

by Julie Anne Long

  And it was like she’d literally kicked the foundations out from under him. Inwardly he was flailing. He felt the blood rush from his face.

  “My life is wherever the hell I want it to be,” he said hoarsely. “And I like it right here, right now.”

  “I think once you get back among your own kind, you’ll probably forget all about that.”

  But her expression was at odds with her tone. She was saying things, for whatever reason, that she didn’t mean.

  And then he slowly straightened. And gave a short, bitter laugh.

  He knew exactly what she was doing. And why.

  “You know . . . it could just as easily be me out there on a billboard, advertising The Rush when it airs. Because that’s my job, too. And I get that my life can be kind of overwhelming, with the paparazzi and the gossip sites and all of that. The thing is, I don’t think that’s your issue here at all, Britt.”

  And now she was nervous. Her own hands were knotting and unknotting in front of her.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her breath was coming swiftly now.

  He delivered the words with slow, deliberate ruthlessness. “Rebecca might be towering over Hellcat Canyon out on the highway. But if you run away now, that means your ex-­husband is still towering over your whole damn life. And how can I compete with a dead man?”

  Her mouth dropped open. She made an arid little sound. And then:

  “How dare . . .”

  She didn’t finish that sentence.

  He couldn’t seem to stop the words. “If you love being afraid more than you like being with me, then fine. Be afraid. Just don’t lie about it. You might as well get it over with and just run, because I know that’s what you’re dying to do right now. Just go.”

  Her face blanked in shock. “You son of a—­”

  She pivoted. She took two steps.

  “Britt—­damn it—­I didn’t—­just—­wait—­”

  But she was running now.

  Her hair was a bright flash through the trees and then she was gone.

  He watched, feeling like his heart was a bomb about to go off in his chest.

  And then he shoved his hands through his hair. “ARRRGH!”

  He stood there, hearing his own pain and frustration multiplied as an echo through the trees.

  CHAPTER 18

  Finally he stalked back to his house. He froze in front of it.

  He’d almost forgotten Rebecca was inside.

  And then he sighed resignedly and climbed his own steps as if he were headed for the gallows.

  Rebecca was standing in front of his open refrigerator, critiquing the contents, no doubt performing her usual complicated calorie calculus in her head: if she ate three peanuts on the plane, she could maybe have one grape and a slice of turkey, but then she would have to spend thirty minutes on the treadmill or eat nothing for dinner. That kind of math was more exhausting than those thirty minutes on the treadmill.

  She didn’t turn around. “You’re really drinking beer these days, John?”

  She made it sound like, You’ve really been drinking anti-­freeze these days, John?

  His long, black silence was such a presence it finally made her turn around. She slowly closed the refrigerator door carefully and pressed her back against it.

  He could only imagine what she saw on his face, because her eyes went wary.

  She studied him, clearly deciding on his approach.

  “Oh, come on, Johnny,” she said softly, cajoling, teasing, placating. “She’s just a waitress. She can’t be the first waitress you’ve had.”

  She made it sound like he’d gone on a trip and forgotten his toothbrush, so he went out and got another one, just for the duration. Everyone was temporary. Rebecca was absolutely certain she would always be the prize.

  This was Rebecca’s way of being sophisticated.

  He stared at her in amazement.

  “Number One on John Tennessee McCord’s Top Ten Things He Doesn’t Miss about Rebecca Corday: hearing her use the word just to describe people.”

  That pissed her off. Her complexion swiftly went a blotchy pink.

  “Where does Underhill think you are right now, Rebecca?”

  She stared at him, probably wondering whether to equivocate.

  But then her face crumpled in earnest.

  “Oh, Johnny. He’s such a . . . Let’s just say he’d never punch a photographer, because it would mess up his manicure. I hardly ever laugh with him. He doesn’t get me. He’s not like . . .”

  She caught herself.

  He knew she was about to say, He’s not like you.

  He heard all this with increasing incredulity.

  “So he got on your nerves and he wasn’t perfect and you just left because you can’t be bothered to work things out? That’s what you do? What the hell is wrong with everyone when they think they can just fucking walk away so easily?”

  His voice escalated and escalated and then he sat down hard on the sofa and before he could help himself wrapped his hands across the back of his head and leaned forward and gulped in deep breaths, as if he’d just experienced an abrupt change of altitude.

  And then leaned back and closed his eyes. And tried to steady his temper and the beating of his heart.

  From the stillness in the room, he figured he’d done what he was certain few men had ever succeeded in doing: he’d shocked Rebecca Corday into silence.

  What the hell had just happened? One moment he was happier than he could remember being. The next he was blown sky high and spiraling through the air, falling and falling and falling, falling with the full consciousness of how sickeningly painful the landing would be.

  He should have said it. He should have said it.

  But Britt had her fears, and he had his. His started with “L.”

  And the irony was that probably the very thing that allowed them to see each other clearly was the thing that doomed them. They could use each other’s wounds to administer killing blows.

  His whole body almost rang with shock, as if he’d finally landed after being blown sky high.

  “I’m sorry if I scared your friend off.”

  He opened one eye and then the other and looked at Rebecca balefully. She was now sitting across from him.

  Rebecca sounded gentle, even contrite. Somewhat. And she did look concerned, though shot through that concern was a peculiar anxiety. The words “your friend” were purely tactical and so very Rebecca. An attempt to diminish. She seemed incapable of being anything other than strategic.

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Rebecca,” he said, and his voice sounded odd in his own ears. Frayed and dull. “She’s not my ‘friend,’ and you didn’t scare her. She scared herself off.”

  Though he had chucked the metaphorical lit match right into that gasoline.

  So he supposed he’d helped scare Britt off, too.

  He closed his eyes briefly again. He wanted to be alone. But he couldn’t just tell her to scram.

  “Let’s read lines,” she suggested softly.

  He opened his eyes. He was a grown-­ass man, and he’d endured misery before, and he knew surefire ways to at least forget it.

  He took a deep breath and looked down at lines he now could have recited in his sleep. But he knew he would automatically deliver them with a subtle difference with an actress of Rebecca’s caliber.

  Acting had always been his escape. And for a little while, via the magic of someone else’s words, he could become someone else.

  Someone who for the duration of a script didn’t have to feel the burning crater in the center of him that felt like a Britt-­ectomy.

  J. T. awoke smiling. He stretched and reflexively reached for Britt.

  He grabbed air, and caught himself just before he toppled from the sofa
onto the floor.

  He went motionless, surprised. And then he groaned and flung an arm over his eyes as memory and awareness sifted in.

  It was the day after a major skirmish and smoke was still rising from the battlefield.

  He kicked off the sheet he’d dragged over his body, then swiftly, sloppily folded it up, and padded into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee. He wanted to get out of here before Rebecca woke up. His body, fit though it was, thought he was nuts to be spending more than one night on his hastily purchased Home Depot sofa, and he stretched and his spine cracked.

  He paused to peek in on her, because she’d left the bedroom door ajar. He knew that was an invitation but he quite simply didn’t care. She was sleeping like she always had, with her long limbs flung out like an invasive kudzu vine, trying to grab all she could even in sleep. She was wearing an eye mask, even though it was black dark at night here in the woods. She’d taken the liberty of stripping off his pillowcase and replacing it with a silk one to protect her famous head of hair, lest a single one of the strands break. She had a shampoo contract now, too.

  J. T. knew aaaaaaall too well the staggering minutiae that went into maintaining Rebecca Corday. He knew a twinge of sympathy. But that was her trip, not his.

  He closed his eyes as if he could make her vanish that way.

  Opened them again and damn it, there she was.

  He backed away and reflexively reached down to pet Phillip. But he wasn’t at Britt’s house, which was where Phillip was.

  And a fresh tide of fury and regret and disbelief washed in. He didn’t want to text Rebecca and run the risk of waking her up. He scrawled a note on the back of the pizza receipt and affixed it to the refrigerator with the bottle-­opener magnet.

  I have a meeting with the location manager for The Rush. Back before noon.

  And he bolted from the house. Getting back to work was what he needed, because he needed to do something he was good at, and relationships clearly weren’t it.

  Two days without sleep combined with righteous indignation and savage hurt paradoxically made Britt feel almost euphoric. It was like anesthesia. Or maybe one of those drugs people took at raves to make themselves really happy and affectionate and carefree.

  Not that she’d ever taken one. She’d only heard. Probably Greta over at the New Age store would know.

  She breezed into work only a few minutes late and seized her order pad, and Sherrie swooped her into a bosomy hug before Britt could back out of it. She squeezed her for a time while Britt endured it stoically.

  Glenn and Giorgio were behind the grill watching this carefully.

  “Oh, honey. You look like you didn’t sleep at all, and not in a good way. How did your conversation with J. T. go?”

  “Oh, that? Him? Yeah, we decided it’s over,” she said brightly.

  A look of alarm ping-­ponged between Sherrie and Glenn.

  There was a cautious pause. “Are you sure you’re fit for work? You look a little . . .”

  She really must look terrible. It was very unlike Sherrie to be diplomatic.

  “I’m fine. I mean, the thing reached its natural conclusion. We talked about it. It was just one of those things.” She gave a great shrug with one shoulder. “We had fun, it’s done. Ha ha! That totally rhymed.”

  Three parallel lines of concern etched themselves deeply into Sherrie’s forehead. “You are a bad liar. Have you looked in a mirror today? Did you sleep at all last night?”

  Britt laughed merrily, and a little too loudly. “I can’t remember, but I’m fine, honestly. I have my health. I have my friends. I really don’t care what he does or who he does it with or where he does it or what he . . . yeah.”

  She’d lost track of her prepositions. And the question. And the sentence.

  She might actually be a little bit tired.

  “Hmm. Where is Rebecca Corday?” Sherrie asked carefully.

  “At his house. And on a billboard out on the highway. She took great pains to tell me that, too. ”

  Sherrie hissed in a long breath as if someone had stepped hard on a sore toe.

  And Britt needed to pivot away from that expression of sympathy lest it cut her in two.

  She accepted two hot plates from Giorgio and frisked over to a customer, and turned a smile on the diner that had them leaning back in shock at its brilliant ferocity.

  Yep, she was fine.

  J. T. returned from his meeting with the location manager in a marginally better mood, because The Rush was going to be exactly the kind of work he loved: gritty, real, intense, nuanced. He’d be proud of it, no matter how many viewers they managed to capture. They’d do some more walking of the Hellcat Canyon and surrounding hills and peaks in the days ahead, planning scenes, and he liked playing a pivotal role in that. He already had more meetings in his calendar. Filming wouldn’t start in earnest for a couple of months, some of it here in Gold Country, some of it in Los Angeles.

  For the first time in weeks he wished he could hurry up time. Clearly he sucked at downtime.

  He pulled up in front of his house just before noon, suddenly wondering whether he was hallucinating from lack of sleep.

  Because a shiny blue Porsche was parked on the side road. In his spot.

  He pulled the truck in behind it and stared, oddly jarred.

  He realized it was the first Porsche he’d seen in all of Hellcat Canyon.

  And then he suddenly knew exactly who it belonged to.

  He got out and slammed the door of his truck, took the steps two at a time and let himself into his house.

  “What the actual fu . . .”

  Franco Francone was sitting on his couch, arms flung over the back of it, beer in his hand, grinning and looking right at home.

  He also looked unforgivably, blackly amused.

  The silence was tense.

  “You gave him one of my beers?” J. T. said to Rebecca, finally.

  This made Franco laugh.

  “Why, Johnny? Are you worried he’s going to be like Per . . . per . . . the woman who went to hell you told me about?” Rebecca asked.

  “Persephone?” he and Franco said at the same time.

  Franco shot him a secret half smile.

  Because Franco naturally got the joke and thought it was funny.

  Franco had gone to Harvard. He was educated up to his eyeballs. Basically the opposite of J. T.

  But both he and J. T. were readers of everything.

  They couldn’t be more opposite on paper, but there had been dozens of reasons the two of them had clicked as friends.

  Franco had been with Rebecca for about four months when Rebecca, in inimitable Rebecca fashion, had decided she wanted J. T., the bigger star, the hotter guy, at least in Hollywood commodity terms, and J. T. had leaped at the chance.

  Franco had never really forgiven J. T. for this. Not all the way, anyway. It was more about the one-­upmanship than the girl, J. T. suspected. Franco couldn’t stand to lose any more than J. T. could.

  Then again, J. T. wasn’t sure if he’d ever really forgiven himself.

  He suspected that, over the years, Franco had figured out that J. T. had done him a favor when it came to “stealing” Rebecca from him. Not that he’d ever admit that.

  “What is it with you two?” Rebecca groused. “Are you sure it’s masculine to know that sort of thing? The Persephone nonsense?”

  She was trying to make it sound like teasing but it emerged as peevish.

  “I bet you every penny I got Sir Anthony Underhill knows who Persephone is, Rebecca. Which should be all the answer you need,” J. T. said.

  Franco laughed at that.

  Rebecca, truthfully, looked more relaxed than she probably should, given the presence of two former lovers, one of whom had slightly bloodied the other over her. Then again, dra
ma was her medium, the way the sea was the medium for saltwater fish.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Franco?” J. T. asked.

  “An old school friend of mine owns a winery about thirty miles up the road and I was heading up this way for Nicasio’s wedding anyway, so I thought I’d come check this area out and surprise you. And who should open the door but Rebecca. You should have seen the look on her face. For that matter, you should see the look on yours right now.”

  “How did you know where I was living?” He was pretty sure he already knew the answer to that.

  “I just asked the nice lady at the Angel’s Nest, where I thought I’d try to get a room, and she just assumed we were ‘blood brothers’ in real life.” He put “blood brothers” in air quotes. “Told me you bought the ‘old Greenleaf place.’ ” He put the “old Greenleaf place” in air quotes, too. “Told me about all the hiking trails and the Eternity Oak. That sounds like one scary damn tree, by the way. She hasn’t watched our show, but she sure Googled it. We had a great chat. She’s a hoot.”

  J. T. sighed. He really wasn’t going to hold it against Rosemary, who couldn’t in a million years fathom the dynamic between the three people in this room. She quite simply wouldn’t have time for it. The people in this town, most of them anyway, were frankly too nice and too decent and too busy to imagine such useless complexity.

  “See anything interesting on the way into town, Franco?” Rebecca asked slyly.

  “Of course,” he indulged. “Saw your billboard out there on the highway, Rebecca,” Franco said, taking a sip of his beer. “Nothing scarier than a twenty-­foot-­tall Rebecca Corday.”

  She laughed, clearly thoroughly pleased.

  “So what’s going on here, kids? Is this the resurrection of Rebeccasee?” Franco looked from one to the other. “Gonna go carve your initials on the Eternity Oak, be bound together forever?”

  J. T. and Rebecca remained silent.

  “Underhill know you’re here, Becks?” Franco tried.

  More silence.

  “Tennessee would just kick Underhill’s ass if he showed up. Isn’t that right, J. T.?” said the guy who got his ass kicked by J. T.