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

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