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

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.

Seven

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