One Hot Summer

by Melissa Cutler

  Xavier threw up his hand. “Don’t rope me into this. I didn’t know she mattered to you. Last time you and I talked, you still thought she was a major pain in your ass.”

  Micah hadn’t realized until he’d been confronted with her deception how deeply she was starting to matter to him. How he’d unwittingly made plans for the two of them. He’d gotten notions in his head about her, about the possibility that the two of them together might be the start of something big. Stupid, trusting, romantic fool.

  Micah picked up his bag of untouched guns. “I’m outta here, man. Between this whole Remedy thing and Ty Briscoe, I can’t concentrate on hitting paper targets. It’s time for me to get some answers.”

  Xavier touched Micah’s arm. “Hey, maybe you’d be better off waiting until you cool down. Give it some thought instead of confronting her with your guns blazing. No pun intended.”

  Shaking his head, Micah pulled away. “I’m too pissed off to go home and stew. I slept with her and that means something to me, damn it. But she lied about who she was. She lied. And I deserve to know why.”

  Chapter Ten

  At the sound of someone pounding on her front door, Remedy startled and splashed champagne from her glass onto the kitchen counter. It was the good stuff, from one of the cases sent to her with love from her mom along with two dozen chocolate-covered strawberries. Bless her heart, and Remedy meant that sincerely, not in the sarcastic Texas way.

  The pounding had sounded angry, so she picked up the baseball bat she’d stationed by the door as she looked through the peephole.

  Micah was pacing from the front bumper of his truck and back to her door like a caged lion. Remedy had no idea what he could be angry about. The sight of the gun holstered to his hip made her heart race even more than his pissed-off scowl. Would she ever get used to the presence of guns, a variety of weapon she’d been brought up to fear above all others?

  “Hi, Micah. You look upset,” she called through the door.

  “We need to talk.” His voice was tight with barely harnessed emotion.

  She set the bat down and put her hand on the doorknob but couldn’t find the courage to unlock it, even though she knew in her heart that Micah would never harm her. “What’s with the gun?”

  Arms wide, he looked down his body, then shook his head, as though he’d forgotten he had the weapon on him. With a curse, he stormed back to his truck, then returned a moment later, the gun and holster gone. If anything, he looked even more peeved than before.

  “I forgot I was wearing that.”

  She opened the door. “You were at the range this morning with Xavier?”

  He held his phone out, the screen displaying a photograph of her and her mother on the red carpet at the Oscars two years earlier. “Yes, and when I told Xavier that you and I had a date planned tonight he asked me to get your parents’ autographs for him. I had no idea what he was talking about.”

  Her heart sank. So much for being taken at face value without being under the shadow of her parents. It’d been nice while it lasted. “I’m sorry you were put in that position.”

  He stuffed his phone in his pocket. “Remember when I asked you if there was anything about your childhood in Hollywood that was noteworthy? At Hog Heaven. You remember that?”

  Yes, she did, and she remembered the choice she’d made not to divulge her past to him. “At the time, we were still enemies. I barely knew you.” Why was she bothering to explain? He’d already judged her and wasn’t ready to listen to her point of view. He’d come for the express purpose of ripping her a new one.

  “You’ve had plenty of opportunities to enlighten me. If you and I are going to date, if we’re going to sleep together, then I deserve better than lies of omission.”

  Red fireworks burst in her brain. How dare he. “Why is that, Micah? Because you bought me a beer and burger? Does that make me beholden to you? Or was it because I let you under my skirt? Now you own me, is that it?”

  “Around here, sex like that means something. But I shouldn’t have expected a Hollywood princess like you to understand our hick ways.”

  Shit. This fight was going to suck. She was going to need more champagne to handle this one. After opening the door wider in invitation, she returned to the kitchen. He closed the door behind him and followed.

  She took a sip of champagne and let the flute linger at her lips, stalling, stalling.… “I didn’t take sleeping with you lightly, but that still doesn’t mean I owe you full disclosure of the details of my past—details that I had a reason for keeping to myself.”

  “Look at you, sipping French champagne and eating chocolate-covered strawberries. Am I going to open your refrigerator and find caviar?”

  He would because she had a lifelong weakness for the stuff. “Possessing caviar is not a personality defect. Nor is having wealthy parents.”

  “How’d you choke down that beer the other night, huh?”

  She’d called it right. He wasn’t there to listen, just to vent at her. Well, he could go ahead and get it all out of his system. She topped off her champagne flute.

  “Did you call your friends back in Hollywood the next day, tell them about how you went slumming with a local Bubba?” he said with a huff. “It all makes sense now. But you know what? I am a redneck and proud of it. I love this community and everything it stands for. And I have dedicated my life to protecting it from entitled rich folks. And yet here you are.”

  Everything he’d listed about himself was a quality that made him who he was, and she liked who he was. She liked him a lot—except for the assumptions he was making about her and her values based on nothing but conjecture and his own prejudice against wealth.

  “Yes, here I am.”

  His accusations of her were so outlandish that it was easy to divorce herself from emotion and view their fight from a safe distance. His chest was all puffed out and a vein in his forehead was visible. His neck had truly turned red. Anger made him handsome in a dangerous way she found appealing on a very basic level. Not to mention that he smelled as though he’d come from an action movie set. He smelled like a stuntman. She’d always had a thing for stuntmen.

  “You’re probably worth even more money than all the Briscoes combined, aren’t you? You could probably buy that resort out from under them if you got it in your mind to. You could buy this whole town.”

  The whole town? Either of her parents could, but probably not her. She bit her lip and kept her mouth shut.

  He braced his hands on the counter and leaned toward her, piercing her with a furious glare. When he spoke, his voice was low, his tight control returned. “Please don’t tell me you and Ty Briscoe have some sort of backroom deal to exploit our town.”

  Oh, for Pete’s sake. On impulse, she puckered up, stretched across the counter, and kissed him on the lips.

  He reeled back, wiping his mouth. “Why did you do that?”

  She had no good answer for him. “To shut you up.”

  He shook his head, so angry that his lips pulled back to show his teeth. “You had no right.”

  “Probably not,” she said. “But I refuse to defend myself against your baseless accusations and I refuse to feel guilty about who I am. You’re drawing conclusions about me based on nothing but your own prejudices and what you read about me online. Which is really boring, you know that? I would’ve thought you’d have been more original than to make the same assumptions about me that people have been making my whole life.”

  “You’re accusing me of being boring?”

  That’s the part of her rebuttal he latched on to? Fine, then. “You’re being boring and assumptive and bitter. And you know what I’ve learned to say to people like that?” She smacked the counter with her open palm. “I say, bring it on, because I’ve been judged unfairly my whole life. When you grow up under a microscope like I did, you either develop a really thick skin or let it crush you. And I didn’t let it crush me. I’ve lost count of the number of celebrities’ kids I grew up
with who became either addicts or vapid, morally corrupt losers dependent on their famous name to skate through life. That’s not me. I won’t let it be.”

  He threw up his hands. “Are you looking for a blue ribbon for not ending up in rehab? You think that makes you special?”

  “What I think is that I’m not going to let a prejudiced, angry man tell me who I am and what I stand for. I don’t have some shady backroom deal with Ty Briscoe and I’m not here to exploit Dulcet. I’m here for a chance to start over with my life. Where I came from doesn’t define me. What defines me is that I work my ass off and I’m a good person.”

  He sucked in his cheeks. His eyes narrowed as though it was taking the effort of his life to hold back from blowing his top. Without another word, he stormed down the hall and through the front door, slamming it closed.

  Allowing herself a moment of pure, melodramatic venting, she raised her fists to the heavens and growled. Loudly. Then she topped off her flute all the way to the brim of the glass and chugged it down with the speed of a frat boy during pledge week. “That glass alone was probably fifty bucks’ worth of champagne!” she hollered at the door. “How’s that for wasteful and entitled?”

  Then she bit off a whole strawberry from its stem.

  “I’m not going to apologize for who I am!” It wasn’t her fault that her bank account rattled his alpha insecurities. She wasn’t going to make herself appear less than she was for a man’s ego.

  She bit into another strawberry, barely chewing before she swallowed it down and grabbed another one. Nothing wrong with a little indulgence after a fight like that.

  A knock on the door stopped her mid-chew.

  Apprehensively, she walked to the door. Micah again, his hands on his hips and his eyes rolled up to look at the roof eaves.

  She flung the door open. “Back for round two so soon?”

  He stepped forward and took her shoulders in his hands as his mouth descended over hers, hard and demanding. She froze, processing the turn of events, then wrapped her arms around his neck. His fingers plunged into her hair. His tongue caressed hers. She could feel the passion and the frustration pouring out of him as he gave himself over to her, so she poured her passion and frustration right back into him.

  How dare he show up at her door unannounced and ruin her morning with unfair judgments and accusations? How dare he drive her so mad with lust for him?

  He opened his eyes and held her gaze. His eyes were stormy still, but the fury was gone. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Stubbornness prevented her from blindly agreeing to his command. “What makes you think I’d go anywhere with you?”

  He didn’t answer but brushed past her and strode to the kitchen.

  “You don’t have central air, do you? It’s sweltering in here,” he said, nodding at her wall unit. “That thing even on?”

  Remedy bristled. He didn’t get to stomp around like an angry bear, criticizing her and her house, disregarding her wishes. “It’s a bit temperamental, but it works.” Sometimes.

  He grabbed the champagne bottle, then another from the box on the floor, and put them in a plastic grocery bag along with the rest of the strawberries.

  “What’s going on here? Why did you come back? I thought we were done,” she said.

  He swallowed hard. “It’s like you said the other night. Who am I without a little trouble to keep me in business?” He grabbed a lap blanket from the back of her sofa, then another from her reading chair, and handed them to her.

  “That doesn’t explain how you went from being furious at me to wanting to picnic.”

  He held out his hand to her. “Because you’re driving me crazy, that’s how.”

  She only hesitated for a moment before taking it. “You’re driving me crazy, too.”

  * * *

  Micah drove them out of town like a bullet. He needed the balm of dirt roads and empty space to clear his head. Maybe they’d find a little solace out in the sticks, where he could simply be a country boy and she could be the girl he was sweet on. They could shed who they were and enjoy the heat of the day under the shade of a pecan tree along a riverbank.

  As the miles of road faded behind them, his righteous indignation peeled away until he realized that he wasn’t entirely sure why he’d gotten so blasted mad at Remedy. She was right that it was unfair to judge her background the way he had, except that every experience he’d had in life told him that it did matter. Who you were, who your parents were, and the values you grew up with mattered. A lot. But that didn’t make it fair or just. Actually, she’d been right about a lot of points she hurled at him, including him not having a right to an opinion about her life.

  He glanced her way. She’d been as quiet as he was on the drive, for the most part keeping her face turned into the wind from her open window.

  The hell of it was, he wanted a right to an opinion about her life. He wanted her. It was a stupid choice, because he’d known from the day he’d met her that there was no way she was going to stay in Texas. Even if Ty Briscoe didn’t drive her away with his conniving ways, Micah gave her another month, two tops, of lying low before she grew weary of small-town country living and packed her bags, heading back where she belonged.

  His heart gave a squeeze. Would she give him the courtesy of telling him she was going? Was that a risk he was willing to take?

  He stretched his arm across the seat back, and when she didn’t protest he let his fingers brush lightly through her hair. Though he kept his focus on the road ahead, he watched in his peripheral vision as she shifted to study him. He let her look her fill until they’d left the final paved road and bumped their way along the dirt path to his favorite backwoods spot.

  He had so many questions for her, he wasn’t sure where to start. Maybe at the beginning. “What was it like growing up with famous parents?”

  Her sigh seemed to well up from the bottom of her soul. As the silence stretched, he started to doubt she’d answer him.

  “Not as strange as people expect, because I didn’t know any other life,” she said finally. “I traveled a lot with one or both of my parents, going wherever their movies were filming or premiering, wherever their press junkets took them. I always went along. Until they divorced when I was twelve. And then…” She thought for a moment. “Actually, it wasn’t that different after the divorce. They were still off filming and promoting movies on opposite sides of the earth, and I still tagged along with them as much as I could. My mom always said that our home wasn’t a place but each other. I like that.”

  Bitter memory welled up inside him. Home wasn’t a place but your loved ones. It was true, but he hadn’t figured that out until after the fire. After his mother had left the family and disappeared. He and Remedy had both lived displaced lives. He would’ve never thought they’d have that fundamental part of themselves in common. “I learned that, too, from the fire, that what really matters in life is family and faith and community. Nothing brings that into clearer focus than loss. When the fire destroyed our house, we lost everything. Photo albums, clothes, toys, electronics, neighbors, friends, people we thought we could count on who weren’t there for us in our time of need.”

  He swallowed back the resentment that had crept into his tone. At that moment, he understood why Remedy hadn’t disclosed certain details of her past to him. There were some things that you just couldn’t verbalize, some people you didn’t want to waste one more iota of your energy on.

  She turned and hitched her knee up on the seat to regard him. “You’re a good man, Micah.”

  After all the nastiness he’d hurled at her during their fight, for her to come back with a compliment was incredible. She was incredible. He wouldn’t forget that again. “What did you do about schooling since you traveled with your parents so much?”

  “Most years I had private tutors, and sometimes I attended private school in L.A. It was a great life, a great childhood. It really wasn’t until high school that I realized what an oddit
y I was.”

  He pulled the truck to a stop right on the edge of the road where the start of a thin trail cut through the wild grass. “You’re not an oddity.”

  “Yes, I am. And most of the time that was okay with me, because it had to be. I never fit in with my parents’ friends’ kids and I never fit in with normal kids. I mean, I had friends, some really good friends, even, but it’s not the same.”

  He’d heard that same sentiment before, from her and from Xavier. “You sound like Xavier when he talks about growing up, being gay and black in a mostly white town. He had it rough in school. Still makes me spitting mad to think about everything he went through.”

  She touched Micah’s leg. “You’re one of those people who gather misfits around you like moss on a stone because of how stable and solid you are.”

  It’d never felt that way with Xavier. Just the opposite, actually. “Maybe it’s the other way around. Ever think about that? Maybe instead of misfits being drawn to me, I’m drawn to them. I think I must crave a little bit of unconventionality in my life.”

  After a beat of hesitation, she leaned across the seat and kissed his cheek, soft and sweet.

  He covered her hand with his. It was right of him to bring her here, to make this effort to reconcile. “Stay where you are. I’ll come around.”

  Once he’d helped her down, he grabbed the bag with the champagne and piled the blankets in her arms. “Follow me.”

  He led her along the dirt trail through the tall dried grass that was so familiar to him, he could’ve traversed it blindfolded with nary a misstep. Only a few birds were braving the summer heat, but as he and Remedy passed into the thicket of trees that edged the creek they spotted more wildlife. An armadillo nosed through the fallen leaves, jittery lizards were doing push-ups on the rocks, and dragonflies and butterflies and other winged creatures darted all around them.

  The trail led them straight to his special pecan tree at the edge of Barley Creek, the tree with his initials carved in the trunk. As ever, it provided a wide umbrella of shade that made the crisp heat bearable, an oasis for just the two of them in the middle of summer. “We have arrived.”