Bree shook her head slowly. “This close,” she said, holding up her thumb and index finger about two nano-millimeters apart. “I was this close to finally meeting my meal ticket. I could have been on Millionaire’s Row right beside Cole Early, watching the race with him.”
Not that Bree would have been watching the race, Lulu knew. Or even Cole Early, for that matter. No, Bree would have been too busy waving down the vendor selling those thousand-dollar mint juleps with the ice imported from Antarctica and the sugar flown in from Aruba. And flaunting her Derby hat by Gabriel Amar for Frank Olive, since she did have a soft spot for the designer who donated the proceeds of his hat sales to local charities.
Lulu patted her friend’s shoulder with almost genuine sympathy. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be Pandarus to your Cressida and Cole Early’s Troilus. But, hey, look how that turned out. I mean, Troilus and Cressida lived, but they didn’t get catharsis. What’s up with that?”
Bree brightened, but Lulu doubted it was because she was up for a rousing discussion of the Bard. “Wait a minute,” she said. “If you ran into Cole Early at Eddie’s office, then he must be renting a house from Eddie, right? Eddie can tell me where he’s staying.”
“Well, except for that pesky confidentiality of clients thing that Eddie embraces,” Lulu reminded her. “He won’t even tell me for sure who’s renting my house.”
Bree waved a breezy hand. “A small matter. Eddie will divulge anything for the right price.”
“Which you can’t afford.”
“I’ll figure something out. Maybe I can blackmail him.”
“Gee, Bree, I’m thinkin’ that a man who dances in public dressed as Liza Minnelli probably doesn’t have a lot of dirty little secrets he fears someone might expose.”
Bree looked unconcerned. In fact, Bree looked like she was making plans. Plans that might even include Cole Early in a Speedo. She grinned slyly as she said, “That reporter on TV just now said she was reporting from Fourth Street Live, right?”
Lulu nodded, not sure she liked the look on Bree’s face.
“Could you tell which bar they were in?”
Lulu shook her head. She’d been to Fourth Street Live exactly two times. And both times, she’d been visiting the bookstore, not one of the numerous bars the entertainment complex boasted.
Bree deflated some. “Me, neither.” Then she brightened again. “But how many bars could there be at Fourth Street Live?”
Lulu shrugged. “Just a shot in the dark, but I’d say about twelve hundred.”
Bree waved a negligent hand. “No way. There couldn’t be more than ten or fifteen.”
Which was about ten or fifteen more than Lulu wanted to visit, if she was reading Bree’s expression right—and she was reasonably sure she was.
Bree eyed the last few swallows of her beer, as if trying to decide whether or not it was worth spending the extra couple of minutes necessary to finish it. Then she pushed the glass away and stood.
“C’mon, Lulu,” she said as she grabbed her purse from the barstool beside her. “We’re going downtown. And when we find your good buddy Cole Early, you’re going to introduce us.”
Interfering with her friend’s life quest wouldn’t cost Lulu her friendship with Bree, she knew. But it might cost her a limb. So Lulu swept up her own purse and followed Bree to the exit. She told herself to tell Bree she was going back up to the apartment, that her friend was on her own when it came to hunting down Cole Early, because tycoon trapping expeditions weren’t Lulu’s thing at all. But Bree had a bad habit of biting off more than she could chew when it came to achieving her life’s ambition—never mind the fact that Cole Early was an infinitely tastier morsel than some of the other “bites” Bree had hooked up with for brief spells in the past. Someone had to keep an eye on her and keep her out of trouble.
Which was the only reason Lulu was going along with her now. It had nothing to do with the memory of Cole Early’s smile or the way he called her “sweetheart.” Or the thrill of heat that had shot up her arm when he’d taken her hand at Eddie’s office. Or the stupid, unfounded fear that Bree might just wind up on Cole’s arm at the Derby, leaving Lulu to watch the race on TV alone.
It was because she wanted to make sure Bree stayed out of trouble.
Nevertheless, she had to battle a ripple of apprehension as the door to Deke’s swung closed behind them, and Bree said, “You know, Lulu, this just may be our best Derby yet.”
Five
COLE WAS HAVING TROUBLE REMEMBERING THE name of the nightclub—or was it a restaurant?—into which he had wandered. Even after three full days in Louisville, he hadn’t yet acclimated himself to the Eastern time zone and kept getting ravenous around ten o’clock, which was dinnertime in his part of the world. Tonight was no different, and, finding nothing to eat in his rented house—mostly because he hadn’t bothered to stock it with anything other than essentials like brandy and Scotch—he’d called a cab and asked the driver to take him someplace where he could get a decent meal, a decent drink, and some decent music.
Of course, he’d done that his other nights here, as well, only to have the driver drop him a few blocks from the house and charge him outrageously for the trip. So tonight, Cole had specifically said
