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

Six

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