“Hortense,” she said anyway.
Cole’s eyebrows shot up at that. “Hort…ah, Horten…uh, Hortense?”
“Hortense,” Lulu repeated. “It’s an old family name.” She bit back a smile. He was trying so hard to be polite about the fact that he thought her name was hideous. That was actually kind of adorable.
No! Not adorable! she told herself. Rude. How rude to not cover that immediately. Miss Manners would be appalled.
“Hortense Waddy,” she said further.
He looked flummoxed for a moment, then stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Hort…ah…tense Wad…dy. I’m Cole Early.”
Lulu took his hand, thinking she’d give it a good, hard, unladylike shake. Instead, she melted a little at the way his fingers closed so confidently over hers and held them. Not shaking. Not moving at all. Just holding. And feeling really good.
No, not good! Intrusive. Yeah, that was it.
“It’s nice to meet you, too…ah…” Strangely, Lulu realized she was having trouble saying his name aloud, too. Which was weird. Hey, it wasn’t like he had a name like Hortense Waddy or something.
“Cole,” he said, helping her.
“Cole,” she finally managed to get out.
“Can I get you something to drink?” he asked.
Before Lulu could think about it, she said, “A beer. They have Bass on draft here.”
Cole lifted a hand to signal…Oh, God, Bree, who looked at Lulu like she’d just betrayed the most sacred trust in the BFF Handbook. In spite of that, she returned to their end of the bar. “A Bass Ale for the lady,” he said. “And for me…” He hesitated for a moment, then smiled. “I’ll have a Bass, too,” he finally told Bree.
Lulu did her best to convey through her expression that she was standing at the bar drinking with Cole Early for Bree’s benefit. Her friend must have gotten the message, because she smiled in relief and said, “Coming right up, Mr. Early,” and turned to pull a couple of drafts. When they were sitting on the bar, tall and frosty, Cole told her to start a tab and then handed one to Lulu.
“What should we drink to?” he asked.
Lulu started to say, To panties and silver platters, but stopped herself in time. Instead, she said, “To your horse winning the Derby.”
He smiled in response, and she thought it was because he liked the toast. Then he asked, “Do you know the name of the horse I’m running in the Derby?”
Lulu opened her mouth to tell him what it was, then realized she couldn’t remember. “Um, no,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t.” But that was good, right? she asked herself. The fact that she had no idea who his entry in the race was would just make her look like an idiot, something that would only serve to make Bree look better, since Bree had learned everything she could about Cole since his arrival and would surely make that clear once her shift ended and she joined them.
“Do you know anything about me at all?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not really. I mean, I’ve seen you on the news and everything, but, uh…” Might as well be honest, she told herself. “I haven’t really paid attention.”
Oh, right. Like that was honest. She’d heard every word he uttered when she’d seen him on the late news nearly every night since his arrival. But only because Bree turned the volume up so loud. And after the news went off, Lulu had replayed every moment of their encounter at Eddie’s office. And then she’d been offended all over again by his behavior.
Really. She had. She had.
Instead of being put off by her admission, Cole smiled even more broadly. “Silk Purse,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes in confusion. “I’m sorry?”
“That’s the name of the horse I have running in the Derby. Silk Purse.”
“Oooooh,” she said. “Gotcha. Well, I promise to bet on him.”
“Her.”
“What?”
“Her,” he repeated. “Silk Purse is a filly.”
“Oh, well, I’ll definitely bet on her,” Lulu said. “I always root for the women.”
Although she wouldn’t have thought it possible, his smile grew 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.”
Nine
IF SHE LIVED TO BE A HUNDRED AND FIFTY, LULU would never be able to figure out how she came to be sitting at a table not far from the jellyfish in Felt with her best friend since childhood and the Bad Boy of the Thoroughbred Set.
Just how did one get to be the Bad Boy of the Thoroughbred Set, anyway? she wondered as she reached for the club soda she’d begun drinking when Bree and Cole ordered round number four. Probably, she thought further, she didn’t want to know. Because even if she didn’t know how a man came by such a distinction, she’d witnessed what it meant to assume it, not the least of which was signing lots of autographs for lots of women, some of whom seemed to lose control of both their spines and their clothing whenever they came within autograph distance of the Bad Boy of the Thoroughbred Set. Lulu knew that because a couple of them had come up to their table at Felt to ask for autographs, and each of them had had to lean forward waaaaaay more than was actually necessary when she handed Cole pen and paper, and her dress somehow slipped right off her shoulders. And even though Lulu had never earned less than a B minus in science, she couldn’t think of a single law of physics that would explain a phenomenon like that.
“Let’s see,” Bree was saying now, in response to Cole’s question about the must-see Derby events happening while he was in town, “there’s the balloon race, the steamboat race, the bed race, the rat race, the wine race—”
“Bed race?” Cole repeated. “Rat race? Wine race?”
Bree nodded. “The Run for the Rosé. I’m doing that one myself. All the local restaurants enter someone from their waitstaff to race with glasses of wine. I’ll be representing the Ambassador Bar. The rat race is the Run for the Rodents, and the prize is a loving cup full of Froot Loops. With the Great Bed Race—which used to be called Bedlam in the Streets and was actually in the street, but now they’re at the fairgrounds—you have teams from local businesses that decorate beds and race them.” Bree slung an arm around Lulu’s shoulder. “Back in the day, Hortense and I were on the winning team for the copy shop where we worked when we were in high school.”
Cole smiled, and just like that, Lulu was ready to skim off her panties and do the whole silver platter thing again.
“And then there’s the parties,” Bree added. “You’ve got everything from the Barnstable Brown affair to the Derby Bash, which is great fun and raises money for the Fairness Campaign. Hortense and I go every year. You can come with us.” Before he had a chance to decline, she hurried on, “Of course, I’m betting you already have an invite to the Barnstable Brown affair.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I do, actually. But I wasn’t planning on attending.”
“Oh, God, yes, you have to attend,” Bree exclaimed. “It’s the party to be seen at. Everyone wants to go to that, but even if you can afford the tickets—and even before the scalpers get a hold of them, they’re hundreds of dollars—they’re impossible to get. You need a date?” she inserted with what sounded like almost genuine carelessness.
“Wait a minute. I have to pay to go to a party I’m invited to?”
“All the big Derby parties are fundraisers,” Lulu told him.
Bree nodded. “The Barnstable Brown party raises money for diabetes research. The Mint Jubilee raises money for cancer research. The Grand Gala raises money for a bunch of different stuff. It ain’t cheap to be a party animal during Derby,” she concluded, “but at least you know you’re getting shaken down for a good cause.”
Cole smiled at that. “Well, that’s good to know.”
“The Run for the Rosé is Tuesday down on the Belvedere,” Bree said. “You should come.”
Instead of replying to Bree, Cole looked at Lulu. “Will you be there?” he asked. Then, as if he were fearful the question might be too intrusive, he quickly added, “To cheer your friend on?”
Lulu looked at Bree, who was studying her warily. “I…” she began. “I usually do go to cheer Bree on,” she said. Somehow, though, she was thinking maybe Bree didn’t want her to this year.
“Depends on what’s going on at the track that day,” Cole said. “But I’ll do my best to be there. So I know Bree tends bar, but what do you do, Hort…ense?”
Wow, Lulu thought. He almost didn’t stumble over her phony name at all that time. Of course, she’d also noticed he’d been going out of his way all night to avoid using it at all. Then she remembered he’d asked her a question about her job that needed an answer. And since most people found the idea of making glass for a living interesting enough to ask a lot of questions about it, she told herself to come up with a fake occupation that wouldn’t interest him so that the conversation would stay focused on Bree or, better yet, would be repellent enough to discourage any further conversation about Lulu at all.
Briefly, she thought about saying she styled dead people’s hair, but she didn’t want to end the conversation that completely. So she told him, “I work on the assembly line for a manufacturer of kitchen appliances.”
Cole’s expression didn’t change, so she wasn’t sure if he wasn’t interested in her alleged job or if she’d already put him to sleep.
So she added, “I’m the one who attaches the little utensil basket to dishwashers.”
He nodded at that. “Fascinating.” But, like his expression, the word was completely bland, telling her nothing of what he might actually be feeling.
Nevertheless, she managed a smile and tried to warm to the subject. “It is, actually. Not many people realize how much thought and planning goes into where you put the utensil basket on a dishwasher.”
“Well, I know I sure don’t,” Bree said. She punctuated the comment by kicking Lulu under the table, a not-so-subtle reminder to ixnay on the ishwasherday anufacturingmay.
Ightray. Lulu had orgottenfay. This was all about Eebray.
“Anyway,” she said, “that’s what I ooday. Ah, do. For a living.”
She still couldn’t tell what Cole was thinking, but at least he wasn’t looking at her like she was a few brushstrokes short of a paint-by-numbers horse head.
“Bree’s job is much more interesting than mine,” she said halfheartedly.
“But your job is the most interesting of all,” Bree told Cole enthusiastically. “What’s it like, living a lifestyle of the rich and famous?”
His expression darkened almost imperceptibly, but Lulu noticed the change and realized this wasn’t a line of conversation he wanted to follow. This time she was the one to kick Bree under the table in an effort to warn her away from the champagne wishes and caviar dreams thin
g.
But Bree either didn’t get the hint or chose not to take it, because she leaned in closer to Cole and said, “I mean, I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to have everything you ever wanted. Dream job. Oodles of money. California real estate. Oodles of money. Racehorses. Oodles of money. Not to mention good looks and fashion sense.” She smiled. “And did I mention oodles of money?”
Lulu winced at her friend’s forwardness. Bree was pouring it on even more than usual. Normally, she was a little more tactful. Normally, she only mentioned oodles of money twice.
She waited for Cole to say something snappish, like that it was none of Bree’s business. Or maybe he’d be polite and just pretend he hadn’t heard her. Or maybe he was just going to stall for a while, she thought further when he only lifted his beer to sip it, and set down the glass without a word. When he finally looked up with an apparent intention to reply, he dragged the tip of his middle finger around the rim of his glass, slowly, carefully, and with great attention. And when he opened his mouth to speak, it was to look not at Bree, but at Lulu.
Then, very softly, he said, “Well, I wouldn’t say I have everything I’ve ever wanted.”
And suddenly, it was as if the finger making its way leisurely around the rim of the glass was making its way leisurely up her spine instead. Something in his curiously green eyes spoke of barely banked embers and smoldering coals that might burst into flame again any minute if given the slightest little poke. Lulu felt like she was sitting in front of the torch in her studio, the one she had to burn at about eight million degrees to melt the glass to the consistency she wanted before molding it. It was a heat unlike any other in the world, one that surrounded and smothered and entered every pore, settling deep under the skin, scorching down to the bone. A heat that should have been uncomfortable, even unbearable, but was instead oddly pleasurable, because it lent to the creation of something wondrous and beautiful. A heat that would be destructive under other circumstances, but in glassmaking generated something lovely and unique, and fragile enough to need constant care.
Fast & Loose Page 11
