That was what good sex could do to a person: make them lose their mind.
“I made the reservation under a fake name,” he said absently. Almost to himself.
“Maybe we can whip up some kind of disguise.”
He shot her a wry glance. “I used to keep a fake mustache in my glove box.”
“Seriously?”
“No.” He sounded a little tense and distracted.
She wondered, then, if he was concerned about being seen with her, in particular.
Which made her go quiet, too.
“Let’s just have a good time,” she said, because she gauged from his tension that he was worried.
“I can’t imagine having any other kind of time with you, Britt.”
There it was. The charm was back. And that was better.
They found parking practically outside the restaurant, and they were both smiling when he came around to help her out. His hand went possessively to the small of her back.
A genuine maître d’ greeted them at the door of the restaurant.
“Bon soir, monsieur, madame.Welcome to...”
And then he did a near cartoon double take.
“Mon dieu...” he breathed. He clapped a hand over his heart. “Vous êtes MonsieurJohn Tennessee McCord!” he said with the awestruck gravity usually reserved for popes and presidents.
It occurred to Britt that nearly everybody said J. T.’s name in italics.
“Er...” J. T. began.
“Je suis un grand fan de votre emission!Daaaaamn!”
“Oui.Honored.Excellent. Merci.” And then J. T. smiled a smile Britt had never seen before. At least not in person. It was all-expansive, blinding charm—downright rakish. She recognized it instantly as the one he produced on red carpets, the one that showed up in all his photos. It transformed him as sure as if he’d put on a tuxedo.
“J’ai regardé chacun de vos épisodes au moins trois fois. Je ne peux pas croire que vous êtes dans mon restaurant! Auriez-vous l’amabilité de bien vouloir signer ce menu et puis-je vous prendre en photo?”
Britt’s high-school French couldn’t quite keep up with that, but she did hear the wordphotoand knew exactly what that meant. And she hadn’t consideredthat, either.
“I’ll be just a moment,” J. T. said to Britt crisply, apologetically. He put a chummy hand on the maître d’s back, steered him aside, and murmured to him in rapid-fire French, “Je suis en compagnie d’une belle femme... Nous souhaitons rester discrets, ni être dérangés, alors je crains de devoir refuser votre demande d’une photo.”
Hearing J. T., he of the seductive Tennessee drawl, rattle off fluent French, was just one more surreal element to the night.
He returned to her swiftly with the smile she recognized. “Sorry about that. I told him I was having dinner with a beautiful woman and I’d like to be discreet because I’m going to mess her hair up later.”
“You didn’t!”
He grinned. “But I did slip him a fifty, the going rate for discretion from maître d’s, told him we don’t want to be bothered, and he couldn’t take any photos. Though there are never any guarantees when it comes to privacy.”
“Then again, everything’s a little cheaper out here. Maybe you bought twice the discretion,” she tried. She’d never had to buy anyone’s discretion.
“Discretion,” he said somewhat grimly. “Is priceless, and it’s a bit of a gamble. That fifty may be wasted money if he figures out that a gossip site or TMZ might pay him more.”
This was completely outside the realm of her life experience to date.