She glanced over her shoulder at him. And then her heart about did a back flip. She was tempted to just do that over and over: Turn away. Turn back. Turn away. Turn back. Just to get that fresh, shocking impact of him over and over.
“We all have life stories, Britt. I sure as hell don’t tell mine in all its glorious detail. You can’t even Google for it,” he added dryly.
“Not even that warm, fuzzy story about the TV?”
“Not even that one. I’m lucky half my relatives can hardly read or write, let alone get on a computer, or my Wikipedia page would be a real eye-opener.”
She laughed.
“So where’d you go to college?” he asked.
She was startled. “How do you know I went at all?”
That was equal parts dodge and curiosity. She was beginning to savor how his mind worked. She genuinely wanted to hear how he’d drawn that conclusion.
“You have a different kind of confidence. Small town girls usually have... oh, sass, I guess you’d call it. Like that handful with the guitar at the Misty Cat?”
“Glory Greenleaf?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Sass is sometimes kind of a defense. Sometimes it’s even combative—I’ll get you before you get me, that sort of thing. But you,” he mused, “you’re intelligent and you know it. You don’t have anything to prove. It’s the thing that Truck senses in you, though he’d never be able to put it in so many words. I think he sees it as a judgment of him.”
She was astonished.
And then speechless with admiration.
She met his eyes. His gaze, mild but fearless and amused, dared her to contradict him.
“I watchedAgapé. You’re a very good actor,” she said finally. Faintly. “You’re really gifted.”
It might have seemed like a whomping non sequitur. But she understood at once what made him not just a good actor, but a truly special, powerful one—this power of quiet observation—and she wanted him to know she understood it.
He just gave a courtly nod.
They both knew being good at something was no guarantee of anything.
“I take it you didn’t go to college?” She strolled over and came to lean next to him, and the speed of her heartbeat ratcheted up. The truck’s hood was pleasantly, almost lullingly warm against her bare skin. His warm bare skin was pleasantly close to her arm. She could lean into him. But she didn’t, not yet, simply for the luxury of ramping up the anticipation.
“Nope. I went from Tennessee to the army to Los Angeles into stardom into whatever this is now. Not sure I had a plan. Just sort of reached for what looked like the next rung further up out of the hellhole that was Sorry. I never could have predicted exactly what happened. But my plan was always spectacular success, no matter what.”
“That took a lot of guts.”
“Or pigheadedness. Or desperation. Or imagination. Choose your word. I didn’t know enough to consider it might be well-nigh impossible.”
She completely understood. “I know what you mean. Life seems so much roomier before you learn that word.”
He smiled at that. “‘Roomier.’ Great way to put it. I guess during all those years I always noticed how people who went to college behaved. They held themselves differently. Spoke differently. It was as though knowing just the right word for something, or the history of or thewhyof things... every thing you knew was like you had one more piece of a treasure map. It was like you felt you had more a right to even be in the world, if you went to college. I wanted to be like that. Anyway, I never did go. Read a lot, though.”
“In your downtime,” she teased softly, in return.
“In my downtime,” he confirmed. Amused.
She was willing to bet he’d read a lot more than she ever had, and she’d read alot.
It was impossible to imagine this elemental man, who somehow seemed at home everywhere, not feeling at home in the world. Or ever feeling small.
Or being made to feel small.
“I went to UCLA,” she said suddenly. “I studied art and writing. I was working on my master’s for a while. And I read a lot, too. Everything.” She hadn’t said this to anyone in Hellcat Canyon.