Fast & Loose (7 page)

“Suits me,” Rufus said amiably. “I’ll even buy.”

“Can’t,” Bree said succinctly, this time really turning for the exit. “We have to go. Like I said, no reason to stay.” She lifted her head as if she intended to shake it defiantly at Rufus, but the minute she caught his eye, her dark brows arrowed downward, two bright spots of pink appeared on her cheeks, and she immediately dropped her gaze again, looking embarrassed for saying what she had.

In spite of that, Lulu thought she saw Rufus dip his head forward almost imperceptibly, as if to silently concede the round to Bree. Something about the gesture, though, told her he wasn’t giving up on the battle just yet.

After checking to make sure Cole Early was well and truly out of sight—thankfully, he was—Lulu gave Rufus an
Oh, well
kind of smile, lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “See you later, Rufus,” she said.

“Next time, I’ll collect that dance,” he replied with a smile as she let her friend pull her toward the exit.

But Lulu wasn’t sure if he was talking to her, or to Bree.

COLE ARRIVED BACK AT HIS RENTED HOUSE A LITTLE
after two, fumbling for a good five minutes with his key ring because he’d forgotten to leave on any exterior lights, and because he’d slipped the house key onto his own key ring and couldn’t find it amid the jumble of keys he always carried on his person. Let’s see, that first was the key to his Maserati, the second was the key to the Merc, the third was the key to the SUV…no, that was the fourth key. The third was to the truck he drove at the stables. Then came the key to the big house on the farm, then to the main stable, then to the tack room, then the shed…He counted out a few more and ticked them off mentally as he went.
The penthouse in LA, the condo in Miami, the cabin on Lake Arrowhead, the sailboat, the runabout, the Jet Ski, the snowmobile…
Ah. There it was. The key to his rented house in Louisville.

He sighed with much fatigue as he pushed it into the front door and turned it, fighting with it a little to make it work and telling himself the house was
not
trying to keep him locked out. Again. Man, not only did he have a way-too-overactive imagination—Take
that
, house, he thought as he finally got the key to turn—he had way too many keys. He pushed the door open gently, but only because he didn’t want to break anything, not because he feared pissing off the house. Again.

How had he ended up with so many keys? he wondered as he shoved them back into his pocket. And why did he feel like he needed to keep them with him all the time? He remembered when he was hired for his first job, as a junior in high school in Charlottesville, Virginia, at Buck Trenton’s stables. He’d only had one key, then—the one Buck had given him for the stables he mucked out every day. Eventually, he started filling feed bins, too, and by the time he graduated from high school, Cole was grooming and exercising some of the younger horses.

During his four years at UVA with a double major in animal husbandry and business, Buck had taken Cole under his wing and showed him the finer points of training. Buck had said Cole had a way with horses—and he’d been right. Cole may not have known his father very well—he and Cole’s mother had divorced before Cole even started school and had taken a job in Ocala—but the elder Early had been a fine trainer, too, right up until his death two years ago from cancer. The Earlys had worked with horses in one way or another for generations. It was in their blood. Cole was just the latest branch of the tree to bloom. None of the previous Earlys had seen success like his, though. None had even come close. They sure as hell hadn’t carried around as many keys as he did.

Cole pushed the door closed behind him and leaned back against it, taking a moment to acclimate himself to the little house that was so unlike his own. He’d left a light on in the living room, a stained glass number with an overly decorative base that was, like much of the rest of the house, a little too feminine for his tastes. Funny, though, how welcome it made him feel. The bright color palette, too, which should have seemed too manic and chaotic, soothed him more than the dependable browns and benign beiges of his own décor. His house in Temecula was a sprawling ranch of nearly four thousand square feet with broad windows that looked out on green pastures and running horses no matter what room he occupied. It had state-of-the-art everything, a media room he rarely used, a Hollywood perfect pool he used even less, a gourmet kitchen his cook assured him was perfect in every way, and a master bedroom he didn’t sleep in nearly enough—and never with guests. Those occupied the numerous spare rooms, some of which, he realized now, he couldn’t remember what they looked like.

He closed his eyes as he tried to remember. But the only room that appeared in his head was the tiny bedroom upstairs he kept bumping his head on. And that room, he could see better than he did his own back in Temecula. He opened his eyes again, smiling reluctantly at the living room that was probably a quarter of the size of his back home. Funny, though, how after just a few days, it felt more like home to him than his own house did.

Pushing himself away from the door, he strode to where he’d left his laptop charging earlier, shrugging off his suit jacket as he went. Tired as he was, he was still too wired to sleep, and, having spent much of the day in Shelbyville and the rest of it in meetings at Churchill Downs, he hadn’t checked his e-mail for more than twenty-four hours. He unplugged the laptop to take it upstairs, stopping long enough in the kitchen to pour a couple fingers of cognac into the only thing he was able to find that resembled a snifter—something the house’s owner probably poured her morning OJ into, because it was short and etched with flowers and was in no way suitable for a Napoleon that would probably suffer a major inferiority complex as a result.

He sipped the cognac slowly as he ascended the stairs to the bedroom, bumped his head—again—before remembering to stoop, then set his laptop on the bed and pushed the On button to power it up while he shed his work clothes and donned a pair of navy silk pajama bottoms. But when he seated himself on the bed and opened his computer, all that greeted him was a blank—and dark—screen.

He pushed the On button on the side of the apparatus again. Nothing happened. He pushed it a third time. Nothing. He checked to make sure the battery was snug in place. It was. Another push of the button. The laptop lay there lifeless.

Dammit.

What the hell was the matter with this piece of crap computer? he wondered. Bad enough this house wasn’t equipped with wireless and it had taken Cole fifteen minutes to locate someone in the neighborhood whose service he could pirate. Fat lot of good it did now that the damned machine wasn’t even working. He went back downstairs to retrieve the power cord and bumped his head on the ceiling when he returned. He plugged one end of the cord into the laptop and the other into a wall socket, then pushed the On button
again.

Nothing.

He looked at the big computer on the desk. The one that belonged to the house’s owner. The one with one of the ubiquitous pink Post-it notes affixed to it. He’d read this one his first evening here, but now he strode across the room to read it again.

“
Please don’t feed the Mac,
” it said. “
She must stay on a strict vegetarian diet to maintain her multitasking capabilities. And please don’t ask her for help. She’s very shy. If you need a computer, there are several at the library, and being social creatures, they
adore
visitors!
”

In other words, Cole translated,
Mitts off.

He knew it would be a violation of all that was decent and holy to violate the instructions on that note. It would be the equivalent of opening that drawer in the dresser he was sure housed his hostess’s underwear to fondle it, or rifling through her filing cabinets in search of financial information that was none of his business.

Oh, hell, it would just be for a couple of minutes, he told himself, and she would never know, and there might be some really important e-mail that needed his immediate attention, and
blah, blah, blah,
fill in the blank with whatever lame excuse worked, because he
was
going to fire up her computer. He admitted it—he was an e-mail junkie with an e-monkey on his back the size of e-Kong. He needed his e-mail, dammit. He needed that even more than he wanted to fondle women’s underwear. That probably said something about his manliness he’d find a little troubling if he took the time to consider it, but, thankfully, he was too busy—manfully busy—to make time for that. So he strode manfully back to his laptop and manfully slammed it shut, manfully clutched his cognac in its glass with the little etched flowers, and made his way manfully back to the desk—first bumping his head manfully on the ceiling again—then reached for the computer with a manful hand…

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. Comfort
ing.
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.