Fast & Loose

by Elizabeth Bevarly

  Only to hesitate when he saw the bright pink Post-it note still affixed to the left of the screen.

  If she was really that concerned about someone using her computer, he thought, then she would have protected it with a password before she left. Hoping that wasn’t the case, he felt around the machine until he found the On button and, with only one more small—but still manful—hesitation, he pushed it.

  Oh, yeah, that did it. He could feel his testosterone surging again, having manfully ignored the conventions of courtesy by completely disregarding the wishes of his hostess.

  He mentally crossed his fingers as the Mac whirred to life, narrowing his eyes at the screen as he waited for some kind of password prompt to appear. Instead, a background popped right up that was a swirl of bright color. It took him a moment to realize her computer wallpaper was a photograph of some kind of elaborate glass. Or, at least, a detail of something made out of elaborate glass. As he seated himself at the desk, he tilted his head first one way, then the other, to get the full effect. He had no idea what it was. But whatever it was, it was beautiful, like all the other glass pieces he’d seen in the house.

  He shook his head to clear it. He had way more important things to do than look at pretty pictures of glass. How did you get the Internet to come up on this thing? He’d never used a Mac before and had no idea what kind of software was on it. The desktop was surprisingly clean, with only a handful of files stacked one atop the other on the far left-hand side. Along the bottom was a row of icons, some of which he recognized by their PC counterparts, the others…not so much.

  Might as well just start clicking…

  One by one, Cole moused over the different images, until something called Safari opened up to what was clearly an Internet site. An Internet site about glass—gee, there was a shocker—that he ignored to type in the URL of his ISP. There were dozens of e-mails awaiting him, but nothing too major, and he was able to plow through them fairly quickly—though all right, it was more than a couple of minutes. She’d still never know. He had closed the Internet and was about to power down when his eye landed on an icon at the very top of the screen he hadn’t noticed before, because it was on the right-hand side and nearly the same color as the bit of glass on the picture behind it. The icon was of a small book. And the words beneath it said, Daily Journal.

  So his hostess was a diary keeper, was she? Somehow, that didn’t surprise him. Considering the belongings he’d found stashed everywhere over the past few days, he knew she was the sort of person who liked to surround herself with things that made her feel good. Things that satisfied her. It made sense that such a person would be introspective enough to want to keep a journal.

  Not sure what made him do it, Cole moved the mouse to the little book icon and let it sit there. He wasn’t going to open her journal. He wasn’t. That would be despicable. Nevertheless, he was intrigued. Intrigued enough, in fact, that he experienced one of those TV moments where he imagined an angel version of himself appearing on one shoulder, and a devil version of himself appearing on the other.

  Don’t do it, said the angel Cole. It would be wrong.

  Go ahead, said the devil Cole. And, being a devil, he threw Cole’s own words back at him. She’ll never know.

  But the angel Cole hung in there. How would you like it if someone did the same thing to you? it asked.

  Oh, come on, the devil replied. Just a peek. You know you want to.

  It’s a violation of her privacy, the angel reminded him.

  Just read a couple of pages, said the devil. Hell, it’s probably all boring stuff, anyway.

  It’s her private thoughts, said the angel. If she wanted you to read them, she would have written them on the bathroom mirror.

  If you met her in a bar, the devil countered, by evening’s end, she’d probably tell you all the stuff she has written down, anyway.

  Devil Cole had a point, he had to admit. In this age of YouTube and SmokingGun, nobody had secrets anymore, and more often than not, they were the ones to reveal them themselves, often with badly digitized video.

  Only the lowest of low and the scummiest of scum would open that journal and read it, angel Cole said. Only the slimiest of slime and the sleaziest of sleaze and the ickiest of ick and the dirtbaggiest of dirtbags and the—

  Okay, okay, I get it, Cole told his angel. Sheesh.

  But his devil cut in again with another She’ll never know, evidently realizing that was a biggie for Cole.

  Back and forth the two aspects of Cole’s conscience went, until finally, the devil went over to his opposite shoulder and just shoved the angel off. Then it leaned against his ear and said all kinds of things Cole knew he shouldn’t listen to. And then, suddenly, his finger twitched involuntarily, really, and it accidentally, really, clicked on the mouse, which inadvertently, really, opened the file marked Daily Journal.

  Fine then. Just call me Dirtbag.

  He would have immediately clicked the mouse again to close the file, really, but his gaze lit on the words so wonderfully erotic, and there was no going back after that.

  The file had opened with a word processing program that automatically went to wherever the writer had left off last, so he scrolled to the top of the latest entry and saw that it was dated two nights before his arrival in Louisville. That would have been a Wednesday. Who found something wonderfully erotic on a Wednesday? Okay, yeah, that was also known as hump day, but Cole had never gotten the impression it was that kind of—

  Anyway, nobody was erotic on a Wednesday. That was the middle of the week. His hostess, however, evidently spent her Wednesdays a lot differently than most people.

  Tonight was incredible, the passage began. He so surprised me tonight. I showed up needy and demanding, certain I knew exactly what I wanted from him. I’d had a rough day, and I wanted it traditional. I wanted it predictable. I wanted it comfortable. Comforting. But the way he looked at me when he came to me, I knew he had something else entirely in mind. No, he told me, I wasn’t going to get predictable and comfortable tonight. Tonight, I was getting something different. Something dangerous. Something exotic. Something spicy and hot. Something he’d discovered in one of the clubs in Bangkok that polite people in the western world never talked about.

  Whoa, this guy got around, Cole thought. Wasn’t Thailand supposed to be one of those countries that, when it came to sexual exploration, turned a blind eye to, oh…everything? Not that Cole knew, of course. He’d seen something about it on the Discovery Channel.

  When he told me what he was going to do, the journal continued, I really didn’t want any part of it. It just didn’t seem…normal. Or safe. I wasn’t even sure if it was legal here.

  Holy crap, what was it? Cole wondered. He read on.

  But then he looked at me the way he does when he wants to change my mind—and knows he can. He touched my shoulder in that way of his, then pressed his fingers to his lips in that way that promised untold pleasure. I shiver whenever he does that, because I know what those fingers can do, and how experienced is that mouth. When he does that, I know I have to turn myself over to him completely. To take whatever he gives me and…mmmmmm…relish it.

  Now they were getting somewhere.

  Oh, my God, it was so wonderfully erotic. When I opened my mouth and he filled me…

  Yeah? Cole thought, Go on…

  The heat of it…The texture…The taste…

  What about them…?

  It was almost more than I could bear at first, there was just so much. But he kept coming with it, and coming with it, until I couldn’t open my mouth fast enough to take it in. I wanted more. And more. And more.

  Oh, God…

  It was the insertion of the cumin, I think, that enraptured me most. Though the way he opened me to the turmeric was spectacular…

  Wait a minute, Cole thought, his fast-rising, ah, interest suddenly cooling. Cumin? Turmeric? Those weren’t sex toys or dirty slang words for body parts. Those were spices. He’d seen th
em in the pantry downstairs. He backtracked to the first paragraph. Something spicy? Something hot? He read over the entire passage again. She wasn’t talking about sex. She was talking about food! She was describing the dinner she had. The he she was writing about wasn’t a lover, it was a chef. Maybe even her waiter.

  Well, hell. He’d gotten all worked up over a Thai dish he couldn’t even enjoy now, because she hadn’t had the decency to name the restaurant where she’d been eating or even what she’d had. Other than a wonderfully erotic time.

  Eating, he thought again. Good God, the woman made eating dinner out sound like forbidden, hedonistic sex. Either she was a woman who had sex a lot, or else she was more desperately in need of getting laid than anyone on the planet.

  Another piece to the puzzle, he thought as he—reluctantly—closed the journal file. And just like the others he’d found, it was a piece that didn’t fit anywhere. Just who was the woman who called this house home?

  His gaze strayed to the left of the computer, where he saw a small carved Buddha sitting among his hostess’s desk accessories. The figure’s hands were lifted high, and he was smiling broadly, clearly enjoying a level of enlightenment that few people knew. Probably, Cole thought, the Buddha never had angels and devils sitting on his shoulders. Probably, the Buddha always knew the right thing to do.

  Then again, the Buddha probably never got to read sexy passages about Thai food, either.

  Okay, that was enough of that. Cole moused around until he found the prompt for turning off the computer—leave it to Mac users to do everything on the left—and powered down the machine. He looked at the Buddha again, this time seeing the coffee mug full of pencils, pens, and whatnot behind him. It had a quote from Gandhi on it that said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” A pen jutting out from it bore the words Rainbow Blossom. When he pulled it completely from the container, he saw that Rainbow Blossom was a “Natural Food Market.” Another pen was from a place called Carmichael’s Bookstore. Others said, “Wild and Woolly Video,” “ear X-tacy” and “Lynn’s Paradise Café.” Cole smiled as he withdrew one pen or pencil after another and found inscriptions for all manner of interesting pastimes. His hostess, it seemed, was a busy woman. But the speed to which she’d increased her life, he bet, was one of which Gandhi would doubtless approve.

  Pushing himself away from the desk, Cole rose. As he headed for the bedroom door, his gaze lit on the photograph that sat atop the dresser, the one of five women standing in ankle-deep water somewhere in the Caribbean. He picked it up and eyed each of the women in turn, wondering again which one was the owner of the house, which one was the journal keeper, the one who had possessions and pastimes that so enriched the soul. Although the picture wasn’t especially clear, each of the women appeared to be attractive, and they all looked like they were having fun. As much as he tried to focus on the one in the white string bikini, however, his attention kept drifting to the right, to the woman on the end wearing the long T-shirt, whose hair and face were obscured by the ball cap pulled low on her head.

  No way, Cole thought. It wasn’t possible for her to be the owner of this house, considering all the evidence he’d found inside. It had to be one of the other women, and his bet was still on the white string bikini.

  If he wanted, he could find out more about her. He could snoop in her drawers and closets, open some of those boxes in the spare room, plunder her computer files. Hell, he could just go back and fire up the Mac and read more of her journal. She’d doubtless locked up anything that might lend itself to identity theft, but there would probably still be things around the house that would at least tell him her name. A reverse directory computer search on her address would give him that. He could even ask one of her neighbors.

  For some reason, though, he didn’t want to know her name. And he didn’t want to learn anything about her that he couldn’t learn by observing the things with which she surrounded herself. He liked the idea of her being a mystery woman, enjoyed the prospect of getting to know her by inhabiting her space. So far, he knew she liked rich, vibrant fabrics, that she created sleek, colorful glass, that she collected fanciful artwork, that she cooked with exotic spices, that her taste in music and literature spanned the globe, that her hangouts all had quirky names, and that she could write really hot passages about dining out. She was fascinating, his mystery woman. And very, very intriguing. And—for now, at least—Cole wanted to keep her that way.

  Seven

  AS HER TUESDAY NIGHT SHIFT DREW TO AN END, Bree was doing what she always did about this time: evaluating the guys sitting alone in the bar and trying to figure out which one was worth the most. The main reason she’d sought a job at the Ambassador Bar was because it belonged to the most expensive hotel in town. Anyone who was staying here any time of year had to be banking some serious net worth. During Derby, when hotel prices all over town went through the roof, there was no question anyone staying here was worth buckets of cash.

  And finding a man with buckets of cash was the reason Bree was here. Why else would a woman with an advanced degree in English spend the last six years performing manual labor?

  Okay, so anyone with an English degree was probably used to doing manual labor. In fact, people with degrees in English were doubtless more employable than anyone else. There were tons of jobs you could get with an English degree, including—it went without saying—bartending. Bree had tried majoring in something that might enable her to make buckets of cash on her own—and meet rich men—but she didn’t have a head for business or finance or any of those moneymaking professions. Numbers were just that to Bree’s brain—numbers. As in, things to make her brain numb. She’d made straight Cs and Ds until she switched to an English major—a degree she’d earned with highest honors. (Not that that meant higher earning potential, alas.) So she’d had no choice but to conclude that her talents lay not in her mental skills, but in her social skills. In her ability to make friends, to chat amiably, to entertain, and to console. They were all qualities of a good bartender.

  They were qualities of a good mistress, too.

  Maybe “kept woman” wasn’t the loftiest of ambitions, nor was it particularly PC, especially for someone who’d grown up in the post–I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar era. The women’s movement sparked by her mother’s generation had been about making sure all future daughters and granddaughters grew up to have choices, right? About giving women the opportunity to be and do whatever they put their minds to being and doing. And what Bree had always wanted to be was well taken care of. What she’d wanted to do was find security. She’d had precious little of those things when she was a child. And now, with her mother going through what she was going through, care and security was even more important. Not just for Bree Calhoun, but for her mother, Rosie, too.

  She pushed the thought away as she collected two martini glasses from the bar, one of which was smudged with dark red lipstick and sticky with the remnants of a Cosmopolitan. The woman drinking from it had left a few minutes ago with the owner of the other glass, a guest of the hotel Bree had spent her last two shifts cultivating for her own. Less than thirty minutes after joining him, the woman had left with him. Two full nights of flirting with the guy, and Bree had bupkus.

  Oh, well, she thought. Easy come, easy go.

  Except that it was never easy to find rich, single guys who were looking for a little arm candy. It was harder still to look like potential arm candy when you were sweating behind a bar in a gin-, Bourbon-and dark-crème-de-cocoa-stained wardrobe of baggy trousers, shirt, and necktie. The men Bree targeted never came, they only went. She was a red-hot mama twenty-six years in the making, and she hadn’t even come close to trapping herself a tycoon. Sure, she’d dated some rich guys in the past, but she’d never been able to sustain a relationship with one for more than a couple of months. Certainly none had yet offered to put her up in a Fifth Avenue penthouse with unlimited credit at Tiffany’s. Or even in a Cherokee Triangle loft with unlimited credit
at Dolfinger’s.

  So that kind of sucked.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to have turned out for her. By now, Bree was supposed to have met at least one of the richest men in the world, preferably two or three, and she was supposed to have dazzled them with her wits, her smile, and her boundless sex appeal. She was supposed to be living in a posh suite and spending her days shopping, brunching, and hobnobbing with other kept women. She was supposed to be like Holly Golightly, running around in opera gloves and tiara, cocktail glass in one hand, cigarette holder in the other, only without the too-pronounced clavicles because she would have actually caught some wealthy benefactor and been eating better. She was supposed to be living a life of leisure and being taken care of by a man who indulged her every whim, not struggling to make ends meet and worrying about what new disaster any given week would bring.

  Grumble. Grumble. Grumble.

  As she washed the lipstick-smudged glass, Bree’s gaze drifted to the man sitting at the far end of the bar. He wasn’t a bad-looking sort—and would look even better when the lights were out—and he didn’t appear to be more than ten or fifteen years her senior, a definite bonus. She’d been reading GQ long enough to recognize his suit as a Brioni, one he had to have forked over four figures for, even if he bought off the rack postseason.

  Not for the first time, she cursed the bar behind which she made her living, but this time, it was because she couldn’t see what the guy had on his feet. Shoes, she had discovered a long time ago, told you everything you needed to know about a person. No matter how well dressed—or how badly dressed, for that matter—a man might be, it was his shoes you really had to pay attention to. Really rich people might scrimp in other areas of their lives, but never on shoes. Really rich men, especially, liked their footwear to be well made, comfortable, and stylish. Forget power suits. Power shoes were what Bree liked to see even more on any prospective Sugar Daddy.