Her grin faded. “It’s just... J. T., if you’re just looking for, um,companyduring 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 learningdiscretion, if you ever truly have, and had a lot of fun doing it.”
Thatshould have pissed him off.
Instead he whistled, long and low, impressed, as if she’d just deployed a tricky wrestling maneuver.
And then the devil actuallygrinned.
And planted his feet ever so slightly apart as if he was settling in for a good debate.
“When my career first took off, I could pretty much go out with any woman I wanted. I could flip through a magazine, call up my publicist, boom. It was practically like ordering something from Amazon. I might have gotten a little carried away.”
“Amazon?Now you’re only making my case for me.”
This was actually kind of fun. She’d forgotten how thoroughly she loved to argue with someone who was good at it.
“Hold on. I was young then. Still figuring things out. What did I know? What wouldyoudo? Andeverybodyis good-looking in Hollywood. What I learned is, when everybody’s a four leaf clover, nobody is. Does that make sense?”
She hesitated. “In a Zenlike way, sure. I get it.”
She did. And damn it, she liked it a lot.
J. T. McCord, she was learning, was not only hot. He was smart.