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

even more, something she found confusing in light of his next question. “You know absolutely nothing about Thoroughbred racing, do you?”

“Um, no. Not really. I love to watch the Derby every year—I keep the TV tuned to local coverage all day, in fact. I like to see the hats and find out which celebrities are in town. And I go to a lot of the Festival events the two weeks before the race. But no, I guess I’m not what you’d call a race fan. I don’t really follow the horse statistics or anything like that.”

She would have thought that fact would have put him off, but he seemed almost delighted that she had no interest in what had to be more than just a job to him.

He opened his mouth to ask her something else, but a woman suddenly appeared behind him, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked if she could have his autograph. With an apologetic look for Lulu, he turned and greeted the woman, then dashed his name across the cocktail napkin she thrust at him. She tried to engage him in conversation, but he excused himself, politely pointing out to her that he was already having a conversation with someone else. The woman looked past him at Lulu, clearly seeing her for the first time, and frowned. Then she looked puzzled, obviously surprised to find someone of Cole’s caliber mingling with someone of Lulu’s mediocrity. Lulu lifted a hand and wiggled her fingers in greeting, and somehow refrained from saying, Nanny-nanny-boo-boo.

Cole turned back to her with another apologetic smile, reached for the beer he had set on the bar, and opened his mouth to say something…only to be prevented by a different woman who suddenly appeared behind him, asking for his autograph again. The look he gave Lulu this time was one of irritation, though the feeling was clearly not meant for her. Again, he spoke warmly to the woman as he scrawled his name on what appeared to be a bank deposit slip, fielded another attempt to compromise his time, and turned to Lulu again. Unfortunately, the two autograph requests triggered a half-dozen more, and for the next five minutes, Lulu watched while Cole interacted with his fan base.

It was a fascinating thing to observe. Lulu had never had a brush with celebrity before. The closest she’d come was having a classmate in third grade named Ronald McDonald. She knew Louisville was overrun by famous people this time of year—at least, when it got closer to Derby Day—but she’d never met any. Friends of hers who worked with the public or who lived close enough to the Barnstable Brown house to ogle the guests at their annual Derby Eve party had caught several glimpses of—or had even talked to—movie stars, athletes, politicians, and such. Bree herself, working at the Ambassador, had waited on dozens of famous people in her day. But Lulu had only heard about such encounters secondhand. She’d never seen the cult of celebrity in action. And now that she did…

Well, actually, it looked kind of annoying. It was like all the people coming up to Cole felt perfectly comfortable interrupting a man’s evening out just to get him to write something illegible on a piece of paper they’d probably go home and put in a drawer and forget about. Not one of the people who approached him acknowledged Lulu in any way, even though they’d all had to interrupt his attempt at conversation with her and clearly knew he was talking to someone, otherwise they wouldn’t have had to preface their demand on his time with “Excuse me, but…” When she was halfway finished with her beer, he’d barely had two sips of his. No sooner did he turn around to say something to her than did someone else come up to him and want something.

She was suddenly grateful for the anonymity that art brought with it. Certainly a lot of artists were famous, and many of them actively cultivated their fame. But there were far more—like Lulu—who enjoyed working in their studios, away from the masses, sending their art out for the world to enjoy without having a recognizable face attached to it. Lulu didn’t even put her photograph on her website alongside her very brief bio, because she wanted the art, not the artist, to grab the attention.

Yep, there was no chance Pufferfish Girl would ever appear again as long as Lulu performed the job that she performed. And she fully intended to keep it that way.

Cole was still signing autographs—and still hadn’t had more than a few sips of his beer—when Bree joined them fifteen minutes later. While Cole was still preoccupied with a particularly insistent young woman, Lulu leaned close and told her friend about the phony name she’d given him, both of them giggling when Bree warned that Aunt Hortense better not get wind of it. Lulu outlined the rest of her plan, too—to make herself look as undesirable as possible in an effort to boost Bree’s already abundant charms—so that by the time Cole finally, finally had a long enough break in his renown to catch a breath, the two women were gazing at him innocently, as if neither had been blinded by the sheer wattage of his fame.

He exhaled a long, exhausted sigh, smiled weakly at the two women, then reached for his beer and took a long, leisurely quaff. Then he grimaced. “God, it’s warm. I hate warm beer.”

“Let me buy you another one,” Bree offered magnanimously. Then added, “Somewhere else.”

Cole glanced first at Bree, then back at Lulu. And then he grinned. “I have a better idea, Hort…ah, Hortense and Bree,” he said, only stumbling over her phony name a little bit this time. “Why don’t you let me buy you ladies a drink somewhere else. And then you local girls can tell me all the things I should do while I’m visiting your hometown.”