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

both silk, that were the color of Fort Knox gold. His Bulgari sunglasses were tucked into his breast pocket beside another scrap of gold silk, this one perfectly folded with three points showing, just as his tailor had shown him to fold it. His shoes were Gucci, his wristwatch was Movado, his underwear was Parah. Hell, even his grooming products bore a European name whose pronunciation he’d had to look up on the Internet.

Cole really didn’t give a damn about his physical appearance, but having been thrust into the media spotlight two years ago with a sensational win at the Pacific Classic, he’d consciously begun to cultivate an image as a player. It wasn’t an image anymore, though. Cole Early was a player. A major player. And his status was only going to explode in…He glanced at his watch, also gold—real gold—turning it a little to catch a shaft of gilded sunlight. In roughly ten hours and fifty-two minutes.

Any day at the track was a good one, as far as he was concerned. But this day was going to be his best yet. Because this was the day that Silk Purse, the filly Cole had trained from infancy to age three, was going to win the Santa Anita Derby.

He was as certain of that as he was his own name. He didn’t care what the handicappers were saying. The thirty-eight-to-one odds on the horse right now only meant Cole would be that much richer at day’s end after plunking down the cool ten grand on the animal he always slid through the pari-mutuel window, figuratively speaking, whenever he had a horse running. Of course, all his bets were handled by electronic transaction now, so large had they become, something that took a lot of the tradition and fun out of the racing experience. But the end result would still be the same. Three hundred and eighty grand if the odds didn’t change by race time. Not to mention a nice share of the winning purse, worth three-quarters of a million dollars itself.

Even better than the money, however, was the fact that when Silk Purse crossed the finish line ahead of all the other horses, she’d qualify for the Kentucky Derby, four weeks from today. And that race, more than any other right now, was the one Cole wanted to win. Because it was the first jewel in the Triple Crown, a lovely little tiara that was going to sparkle nicely once it was sitting on Silk’s head. That would put the horse in an elite group of only eleven other Thoroughbreds—and put Cole in an even more elite group of only nine other trainers—to win the distinction. And it had been three decades since the last ones, Affirmed and Lazara Berrera, had managed it.

As recently as a week ago, Cole hadn’t been confident of today’s win. But something had happened to the horse over the last six or seven days, and the new kid exercising her had a way with animals that had made Silk Purse seem happier somehow. Cole could just feel victory in his gut, and his gut had never steered him wrong. The filly might not be as experienced as some of the other horses running today, and she faced a gender bias the other entrants didn’t. But she hadn’t lost a race yet. She wasn’t a favorite among the bettors and bookies, but by God, she had more heart than any horse Cole had ever encountered. And he’d met more than a few animals with potential, because he’d been training Thoroughbreds since he was a teenager. Silk Purse was going to go all the way to the Belmont finish line, or his name wasn’t—

“Cole Early!”

He turned at the summons to see Susannah Pennington, Silk’s owner, emerging from the paddock with her hand lifted in the air. She was dressed for Derby Day in a short, clingy red skirt and white frilly blouse, an enormous red straw hat encircling her platinum hair like a halo. It was a mystery how she navigated the damp earth on spike heels, also red, but damned if she didn’t manage it with grace and style, picking her way carefully over the uneven sod.

Cole returned her wave as he watched her approach, appreciating, as he always did, the length of bare leg extending from Susannah’s short skirt. At fifty-two, she was ten years his senior, a dynamo in the field of high finance and a self-made millionaire many times over, just as he was himself. She owned three other horses in addition to Silk Purse, all of them fillies, all of them sharing her initials, and all of them stabled and trained by Cole at Early Farms in Temecula. Silk Purse showed by far the most promise, though a one-year-old, Sinful Pleasures, would perform very nicely when she started racing in another year or two.

“How does our girl look this morning?” Susannah asked as she came to a halt beside Cole and assumed the position: weight shifted to one foot, arms resting on the track rail, fingers loosely clasped, her gaze focused on the gray filly who was now running on the far side of the track.

“Poetry in motion,” Cole told her. “She’s really taken to the new kid exercising her. What’s his name again?”

“Jason.”

Cole nodded. “You should pay him more, make sure you keep him around.”

“Done,” Susannah immediately agreed, just as she always immediately agreed to Cole’s suggestions.

“She and Esteban have clicked extremely well, too,” he added, giving well-deserved props to the horse’s jockey, Esteban Santos. “I like him. He’s been good for her.”

“I thought you said he was too inexperienced,” Susannah reminded him, smiling, since she’d been the one who’d had to convince Cole to give the young jockey a chance. Susannah had a thing for young jockeys, though, and Cole had been afraid she only wanted Esteban to ride Silk Purse because he was her current lover.

“I stand corrected,” he told her. “The kid’s got talent. And heart. Just