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 wasfine.
J. T. returned from his meeting with the location manager in a marginally better mood, becauseThe Rushwas 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 actualfu...”
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 mybeers?” 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.