Fast & Loose by Elizabeth Bevarly (the giving tree read aloud .txt) 📕

clear enough and calm enough that Cole was reasonably certain it was the Caribbean. One of them, he wagered, was his hostess, and he studied each in turn. Four of the five wore swimsuits revealing enough to make him like what he saw. The fifth wore a T-shirt that fell down over her thighs, but it was wet enough to mold some truly luscious curves. All of the women seemed attractive, though the one in the T-shirt was squinting into the sunlight, her face obscured even more than the others’ by the shadow of the baseball cap she wore.

The blonde in the white string bikini, he would wager, was breathtaking. Cole wondered if she was the owner of the house. Then he wondered why he was wondering that. He should be wondering if Silk Purse had been settled at Susannah’s friends’ farm by now.

Collecting his toiletry kit, he made his way back downstairs and unpacked his things in the bathroom. A note affixed to the mirror informed him that the hot water sometimes took time to actually be hot water and that cold was sometimes a relative term. It ended with the philosophical observation that “Patience is a virtue—not to mention very cool.”

Cole smiled as he tugged the Post-it note from the glass and started to wad it up. But he stopped before completing the action and smoothed the scrap of paper out again. Then he stuck it back on the mirror. Hey, he might need to be reminded of the water’s idiosyncrasies later.

It had nothing to do with the idiosyncrasies of the note writer.

HE SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY EXPLORING HIS surroundings, trying to get acclimated to his new digs and figure out where everything was. But as familiar as he became with the house during that foray, he got to know his hostess even better. In her linen closet, he found an assortment of lotions with exotic fragrances like Tahitian Gardenia and Moroccan Mint. There were a half-dozen bottles of nail polish with colors like Basque in the Sun and Days of Wine and Roses. A little basket held what looked like hundreds of eye shadows and lip glosses with glitter and sparkles and God knew what else.

The wine rack in her kitchen held only two bottles of wine—one red, one white—both excellent, inexpensive vintages that told Cole she knew her wine, even if she didn’t drink it much. Her pantry didn’t hold a lot, but what was there told him she didn’t shop at the grocery store, but at boutique delis and health food stores. On one shelf, neatly aligned, was a row of cooking spices like cumin, turmeric, and paprika, the sort of spices used in international cuisine. He knew that, because he liked to eat international cuisine. Her bookcases held a variety of literature, everything from paperback romances to gritty thrillers to historical maritime novels to biographies of world leaders. Her CD collection, too, was varied and extensive, the majority of artists people Cole had never heard of before. As he pulled one CD after another from the shelf, he realized a good many of them were imports from places like India, Algeria, Portugal, and Saudi Arabia.

And then there was the glass.

It was in every room in some form or another. The panes of the window over the kitchen sink were each a different color, each poured by hand complete with tiny bubbles. The big bay window in the living room boasted a wide border of stained glass over each section that was decorated with some kind of fat yellow flower. There were coiled plates, braided bowls, and twisted vases. There were abstract pieces he couldn’t begin to identify. All of it wrought from the richest colors he’d ever seen, colors that seemed to transform, shift, and come alive as the sunlight tumbling through the windows changed and stretched. Clearly the house’s owner was not just an art collector, but someone who liked to enjoy on a daily basis the art she amassed.

Whoever his hostess was, she wasn’t like any other woman Cole knew. The brightly colored clothes and shoes in the closet suggested someone of a Bohemian nature. The cosmetics in the closet were more suited to a girly-girl fashionista. The health foods made him think more of an organic type. The good wine was characteristic of a sophisticate. The world beat music, an aesthete. The literary selections—many of them, anyway—an academic.

Just who was the owner of this house?

He remembered the photograph in the bedroom of the five women on the beach. He’d seen the same five women in other photographs around the house, too, in different poses, clearly still on vacation. One magnetted to the refrigerator had them all sitting on the deck of an open-air bar with a different beach behind them, all of them laughing and wearing sunglasses and/or floppy hats. The white string bikini had been wearing shorts and a different bikini top in that photo, the other women shorts and T-shirts.

The picture on the mantelpiece in the living room showed all five women standing in front of Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue in New York. Each of them wore a rhinestone tiara and long black gloves, and each struck a Holly Golightly pose. It was that photo that Cole looked at now, studying each of the women in turn as he tried again to guess which was the owner of the house. This photograph, too, had been taken from a distance, so it was hard to make out each of the women’s features. The white string bikini he knew right away, because the long blond hair cascaded over one shoulder. He thought he could make out the baggy T-shirt one, as well, because, as in all the other pictures, she looked slightly uncomfortable. Her hair was pulled severely back in this picture, and she was squinting into the camera again, two facts that only added to her appearance of discontent.

There was no way she could be the house’s owner,