Hot in Hellcat Canyon by Julie Anne Long Page A

damn ocean.
    She wondered if he’d ever in his entire life heard the word no from a woman.
    At least he’d remember her for that reason.
    And as the silence stretched, his incredulity seemed to give way to a sort of curiosity. He was studying her as if he was determined to crack the code.
    “Kayla Benoit is single,” she volunteered desperately. “And she’s very pretty. And she owns a boutique. It’s right there on the sign over her door. Kayla Benoit.”
    His face instantly became a flickering battlefield of emotions.
    The one that settled in was pure hilarity.
    “Are you seriously trying to distract me with another woman? Like throwing a steak at a rottweiler so you can make your getaway?” His voice was hoarse. “Are you attempting to console me in my disappointment with another woman?”
    When he put it that way, it was pretty funny.
    And pretty insulting.
    “You sure came up with that rottweiler analogy pretty quickly,” she hedged.
    “I was on a cop show. That was in the script more than once.”
    That one tugged up one corner of her mouth, and then the other went up, and she was smiling, because that was pretty funny, too.
    And that made him smile, too. It was an amused and wholly determined smile.
    But a subtle little war was taking place. Something complex and dangerous and exhilarating was sparking between them. They were both pretty damn stubborn and accustomed to getting their own ways. Britt had forgotten just how stubborn she could be, in fact. And how much fun a well-matched sparring partner could be.
    Her grin faded. “It’s just . . . J. T., if you’re just looking for, um, company during your downtime . . .”
    His eyebrows shot up sardonically at how gingerly she delivered that euphemistic word.
    “. . . you must have infinite options.”
    He went silent again. She wondered if he’d been this astonished so many times in a single afternoon in his entire life.
    Then his face got ever so slightly harder. “Spent a little time Googling me last night, eh Britt?”
    More ironic than bitter, that statement. Though he had a right to both bitterness and irony, probably.
    “Of course,” she said instantly.
    He seemed to like that. He smiled. If a little tautly. “Think you know everything about me now?”
    “No,” she said immediately, fervently. “Not for an instant do I think that. You can’t know a person that way.”
    He blinked. And then she realized she sounded as though she was defending him.
    “Okay,” he said carefully, after a moment. “Then do you think that having, as you put it, ‘infinite options’ means discretion doesn’t enter into it? That with me and women, it’s like . . . I’m just reaching my hand into a bowl of peanuts and grabbing a handful and stuffing it into my mouth without inspecting each individual peanut?”
    She was utterly arrested by this analogy.
    “I’m sorry,” she confessed on something close to a whisper after a moment. “But all that does is make me think of a bowl of lady peanuts.”
    His eyes flared in surprise, and then his face went abstracted. “Lady peanuts? Is it like a scene out of an Ethel Merman movie? Are they all wearing little swimsuits?”
    “Yeah, they’re all wearing little swimsuits. And performing a synchronized water ballet. All the lady peanuts.”
    He was staring at her not as though she was a lunatic, which might have been the logical response, but as though she was like a Russian nesting doll of delights and he kept uncovering new ones.
    “Britt,” he just said. Appreciatively. Almost yearningly. Sort of marveling. Apropos of nothing.
    She could feel her face heating again.
    She drew in a breath. “It’s just, J. T., if the public record is any indication, my guess is you took your sweet time getting around to learning discretion , if you ever truly have, and had a lot of fun doing it.”
    That should have pissed him off.
    Instead he whistled, long and low, impressed, as if she’d just deployed a