Fast & Loose (8 page)

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 them 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.

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.

She bet this guy was wearing wingtips of the gods.

He was, after all, sipping a post-dinner snifter of one of the most expensive ports on the menu. And he’d dined on the prime rib. And he’d paid for everything with his platinum American Express Card.

Best of all, he’d done all that
alone
.

What a shame, to be visiting a city like Louisville during Derby, when there was so much going on, and be all by yourself, with no one to enjoy the festivities with. A man in possession of a platinum card ought to be out on the town, having fun with someone, not sitting alone at the bar. Someone like…oh, Bree didn’t know…
her.
She’d spoken with him on and off as she’d worked, had laughed at a joke he told her—even though she’d heard it before—and had responded with just the right amount of interest and perfectly gauged smile to his flirting. She’d made it as clear as she could without donning a hat that said, “
If You Have the Cash, I Have the Inclination.
” All she needed at this point was an invitation. And it didn’t even have to be engraved.

Unfortunately, just as Bree was drying her hands on a linen towel, a woman approached her quarry and perched on a stool beside him. Thanks to his broad smile and the way he settled his hand on her shoulder, it was clear the two knew each other and that he’d been waiting for her. With another sigh of resignation, Bree decided to call it a night. Both with her shift—which had actually ended nearly a half hour ago—and her gold digging.

“She’s a call girl.”

The comment came from behind Bree and, surprisingly, it was in no way surprising. Rufus Detweiler, who had been working behind the bar when Bree started at the Ambassador, was as good at evaluating the customers as she was. But for every step up the social ladder she liked to place someone, Rufus was equally determined to take that person down a peg. She had no idea why he had a chip on his shoulder when it came to the upper class. But that chip was roughly the size of Gibraltar, and it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Bree spun around to face him, thinking, as she always did about Rufus, that it was too bad he wasn’t rich. Then again, a rich guy who looked like Rufus—tall, dark, and handsome didn’t begin to cover it—wouldn’t have to buy the affections of a woman. On the contrary, he could sell himself to the highest bidder, and walk away with even more gold filling his pockets.

“You don’t want to mess with a guy who uses a call girl’s services,” he added. “That’s a one-way ticket to blood work you don’t want to have.”

He’d leaned forward a little as he spoke, so that he could lower his voice. And also send a ripple of warm desire down Bree’s spine. A most unwelcome ripple of warm desire, at that. Rufus was the last guy she should be longing for.

Not that she was longing for Rufus, she hastily reminded herself. Any other woman would respond the same way to a guy who towered over her and had rhapsodic brown eyes and silky dark hair that hung nearly to his shoulders and was swept back from a truly beautiful face by a careless hand. And who had shoulders broad enough to effortlessly hoist a keg, and hands skilled enough to perfectly coil a slender length of lemon peel, and forearms sculpted like an Adonis. And a butt that begged for the cupping of a woman’s hands, and legs long enough to cradle a woman’s hips, and feet big enough to cause serious speculation about the size of his—

Ahem.
Anyway, any other woman would respond the same way to Rufus that Bree did. It had nothing to do with any longings—and, more importantly, any feelings—she might have for the guy. She didn’t have
any
feelings for the guy. Which was why she was able to treat him so cavalierly when she saw him at places like Fourth Street Live and he asked her to dance. Just because she still felt guilty about her behavior that night, it wasn’t because she cared about Rufus or his feelings. It was just because she cared about, um, looking good. Yeah, that was it.

She crossed her arms over her midsection. “How do you know she’s a call girl? Maybe she’s his daughter.”

Rufus looked past Bree, then met her gaze again and smiled. “Not likely. Not unless he’s looking for a visit from social services. Check it out.”

She turned again to see that the couple at the end of the bar were…
Ew
. It didn’t take Emily Post to say that was way too much tongue for public consumption.
Jeez, people, get a room. Even if they do cost seven hundred bucks a night.

“Okay, so she’s not his daughter,” Bree conceded, turning back to Rufus. “It still doesn’t mean she’s a call girl.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Maybe. Maybe not. But as long as he’s got someone to”—Rufus looked down the bar again, flinched a little at whatever he saw, and looked back at Bree—“do
that
for him, it does make your chances of bagging him pretty slim.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah
.

“C’mon,” he said. “Shift’s over. Our relief is here. Tips were substantial for a Tuesday night—gotta love this time of year. Best of all, I invented a new drink.”

She grinned. Rufus was notorious for creating new drinks and naming them after great works of literature. “What’s this one called?” she asked.

“Tequila Mockingbird.”

She chuckled at that. “What’s it like?”

He grinned back. “Sin. Because it’s a sin—”

“Tequila Mockingbird,” she finished with him, paraphrasing a passage from the book.

He listed the ingredients. “A little Cuervo, a little Cointreau, a little passion fruit liqueur. And a little splash of ginger ale to make it sing. Let me whip us up a couple, and we can head for a booth in the back. The band tonight is supposed to be an
ex
cellent jazz combo. Weird name, though. I mean, who’d name a band Smuth?”

She shook her head. “Thanks for the offer,” she said. “But the drink sounds like it has too much mocking and too little bird for me.”

“Then lemme buy you a beer and we can head for a booth in the back.”

She shook her head again. “You’re a good guy, Rufus, and truly, thanks, but I think I’m going to head home. I’m beat. And Lulu’s staying with me for a couple weeks and has been home alone all night. I’m not being a good hostess.”

“Call Lulu and tell her to meet us at Deke’s. You’ll be almost home, Lulu won’t be alone, we’ll still hear some great music, the planet will be swiftly tilting on its axis, and all will be right in the universe.”

Bree sighed, and patted his arm gently. But that only made her realize that his upper arms were as solid and exquisitely formed as his forearms, something that generated another one of those ripples of warm desire. This one, though, shimmied through her entire body and pooled in her midsection like a puddle of steaming need. Immediately, she dropped her hand back to her side. But her fingertips continued to tingle, as if whatever strange thing was arcing between them couldn’t be severed just by physically separating from him.

“Rufus, you’re trying too hard,” she told him, her voice softer than she had meant it to be, making her sound as if she didn’t mean what she was saying. “Like I’ve said a million times, unless you’ve got the cash—”

“I’m not interested,” he finished for her. He squeezed his eyes shut tight and quickly corrected himself, “I mean,
you’re
not interested. Because, me, Bree…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Rufus had made it no secret over the two years they’d been working together that he was
very
interested in Bree, an interest she’d done her best to keep at bay. And not just because Rufus’s net worth on any given day could fit into the tip jar, either. But because there were times when Bree found herself not wanting to keep his interest at bay. And, even worse, not caring what his net worth on any given day might be.

It really was as easy to love a rich man as a poor one, she knew. Provided one met a rich man who was a lot like Rufus.

He held her gaze for a moment, his dark eyes earnest. “Maybe the problem isn’t that I’m trying too hard,” he said quietly. “Maybe it’s that I’m not trying hard enough.”

Bree ignored the shudder of pleasure that wound through her at the frankly offered declaration. “Rufus…” she began, stringing his name out across several time zones. But all she added was, “I gotta go.” She scooped up her purse from where she’d stowed it beneath the bar, started to extend a hand to pat his shoulder again, then remembered what had happened the last time she did that and drew her hand back. “You’re a good guy, Rufus,” she said again. “But I really do have to go.”