In Which I Push a Colleague out of a Metaphorical Lifeboat
Ray was not pleased with us.
I refused to relay the details of our meeting, even to Kelsey, but I will say that phrases like “squabbling children” and “unprofessional, shrieking fishwife” were used. But he was looking at Vaughn when he said “fishwife,” so I can’t actually be sure whether he was referring to me. I think at one point he threatened to ground us.
According to Ray, we were ridiculously lucky that the commissioner was not in the building during our blowup and if we ever did anything like it again, being named director of marketing would be the least of our worries. We were told to shake hands and behave civilly, which we managed to do without squeezing each other’s fingers too hard, and then we slunk back to neutral corners.
Through the miracle of e-mail, we came up with an idea for the Columbus-Belmont summer boot camp without actually speaking to each other. While he conceded that a fun, musical video would be appropriate for students, Vaughn suggested we also use era-appropriate military imagery aimed at adults. So Dorie Ann, our graphic designer, drew what looked like a circa-1860s recruiting poster, encouraging people to enlist in “basic training.” I changed the tagline to “Step into the past, make memories for the future.” We were only waiting for approval from the state park staff.
In the meantime, Kelsey and I introduced Vaughn to the wonders of our annual Kentucky Derby party. The tourism commission helped organize several events over the course of Derby weekend, including a party at the track for high-ranking state employees, politicians, and members of the press. We tried to lure the horse owners in, but while the locals usually made a polite appearance, the rest tended to shy away from our domestic booze and room-temperature cheese. The main goal was to remind all parties involved how important tourist dollars were to the overall health of the state’s economy and how the track played into that. And to remind the politicians that we were perfectly nice people who deserved our jobs, and they might keep that in mind when they were passing the next budget.
That year, the first Saturday in May dawned bright and clear and cool. I put on my trim yellow suit with a creamy linen picture hat from Macy’s. The hat cost more than the shoes and the suit combined. But Derby regulars could spot a cheap hat from miles away, and it was better not to subject inferior headwear to their scrutiny.
There was always a buzz on the morning of Derby Day, an anticipatory excitement, which made no sense, really. Few people in the stands had actually ridden a horse, much less owned one. And unlike in NASCAR, the chances of one of the horses spinning into the infield were pretty low. There was a strange sense of urgency to the race. The horses had been training for this since they were born. They only got one shot at this particular race before they aged out of the running group.
We got caught up in the pageantry, the traditions, and the foods that we enjoyed simply because it was tradition. What St. Patrick’s Day is to the Irish, Derby Day is to any self-respecting Kentuckian.
Kelsey and I had arrived ungodly early at Churchill Downs in order to beat the traffic and to give ourselves time to negotiate the veritable maze that was the racetrack complex. Spectators were already milling into the infield entrance, leading inside the track itself, where tens of thousands of rowdy race fans would turn the small expanse of grass into an enormous, raucous, muddy party.
We placed our bets as soon as the windows opened. The favorite—and potential Triple Crown contender—was a large chestnut from New York called Rock of Ages. I put my traditional five-dollar bet on a pretty coal-black entry from Lexington named Instant Karma, who I only picked because I liked the color of her silks (turquoise and teal). Kelsey, on the other hand, placed twenty dollars on Lemon Cakes, a Virginia long-shot scientifically selected as a potential winner through some algorithm provided by her nerd posse.
We chanced a look at both, sneaking through the paddock garden, which was as close as security would let us. Like all girls, I’d gone through a horse phase as an adolescent. Of course, the few times I’d ridden a horse, I’d either knocked my head on a low-hanging branch or led the horse right through a yellow-jacket nest, which was fun for neither of us. But visiting Churchill Downs always stoked those old pony-crush feelings. The horses’ freshly washed coats gleamed iridescent and seal-sleek in the morning sun. Their steps seemed mincing on their impossibly delicate ankles as the trainers led them back and forth to the warm-up track.
“Makes you want to stamp cute little hearts on their butts and braid their manes, doesn’t it?” Kelsey sighed.
“I think the owners would probably object to your turning their million-dollar horses into life-size My Little Ponies.”
I was not at my most comfortable at the track. Before starting with the commission, I’d attended exactly one horse race, but that involved a pony getting away from a petting zoo at my grandparents’ church’s fall festival. Little Sammi Teeter and Dusty, her brave steed, “raced” all the way to the end of the road before anyone caught up with them. Now I was expected to know a little bit of everything about the history of the track, the meaning of the various colored silks, and why the race is limited to three-year-old horses. Because occasionally, the press asked random questions of people wearing official-looking name tags, and they really didn’t appreciate it when you said, “I’m not sure.”
Everything was running smoothly in the hours before the official post time, when our guests had been invited to mill through the respectable suite we’d reserved in the Jockey Club and watch the preliminary races on the wall-mounted flat-screen TVs. It was impressive, but not so opulent that people started to question where their tax dollars were going. Knowing that Ray and any number of potential hirers and firers were watching us, Mr. Vaughn and I were actually cooperating and speaking civilly to each other.
Snowy white peonies mixed with the traditional red Derby roses decorated the tables in low globe vases. The windows framed a sunny view of the Louisville skyline. Spring’s arrival was celebrated in the traditional way, with purchases of spiffy new suits and dresses in soft Easter tones. They reflected against the polished wood floors like fallen blooms, giving the room an impressionist Water Lilies look.
The juleps were ice cold, the table linens crisp, and the canapés circulating at just the right pace. I was chagrined to see that Josh was meeting all the movers and shakers, but comforted myself with the fact that I already knew most of those people, and I was pretty sure they liked me better than someone they’d met only briefly while mildly intoxicated. Everything was going well.
I should have known something was about to go terribly wrong.
Just as I ended a rather pleasant conversation with the director of the Kentucky Horse Park, I felt a finger trailing down my arm. I shivered, feeling a clammy cold sensation, like someone was standing over my grave making dick jokes. I turned and groaned at the sight of the walking phallus in question.
I hated it when people I disliked snuck up on me. Where was the Darth Vader theme music when you needed it?
Tall and gym built, C.J. Rowley was handsome enough. His thick blond hair and lantern jaw would have made him gorgeous if not for the cruel slant to his mouth. Of course, he was dressed impeccably in a black suit and a tie with little horses on it. My hands itched to reach for it, but strangling a man with a novelty tie in a room full of witnesses could not be a good career move.
Rowley had succeeded in making my life very difficult, recommending the job to Josh. He liked to think he had a lot of influence, and he had a vendetta against me for the whole blackballing thing. He would love to think he got at me through the system. And arranging for an impressive candidate to interview for the job I wanted was definitely getting at me. He’d probably shown up at the Derby party to gloat. Asshole.
But I wouldn’t give him any hint of how well his “referral” was working out, because that would make him happy. And I was willing to devote a lot of time and energy to not making Rowley happy.
I thought I’d managed to keep him at a distance so far. How had he managed to sneak into this party? Had Josh invited him as thanks for getting him the job interview? Had he snuck in from a gathering on some other level of the complex? Security was supposed to be checking the lists before letting people through the doors. Kelsey probably would have flying-tackled him if she’d seen him. Maybe some other disillusioned, well-meaning guest had vouched for him?
“Mr. Rowley,” I said, just barely separating my teeth to speak. “So nice of you to join us, have you seen the door? It’s right over there.”
And by “nice,” I meant, There could be an army of zombie jockeys breaking down the doors to devour us. By comparison, this situation is nice.
“Well, even though my invitation seems to have been lost in the mail, you’ll find that I’m still welcome in most circles,” he said, his tone biting.
“I’ll keep that in mind before leaving my drink unattended,” I said sweetly.
“Now, that’s a silly thing to say,” he said, his mouth pressed into a bitter, cold line. “I wouldn’t go around making ‘jokes’ like that. You know, I am really going to enjoy watching you make a fool out of yourself. I heard about the hoops you’re going to jump through to get your promotion. I am going to savor watching you hop through each and every one.”
“ ‘Savor’ is a pretty fancy verb, Rowley. Did you read it on your word-of-the-day calendar?”
He sneered, leaning even closer so that he towered over me. “You know, Sadie, if you’d been the least bit nice to me, I could have made your life a lot easier. I could have made your career for you. I could have made you marketing director with just one phone call. But you had to be a bitch, so I made a different kind of phone call. How do you like working with Josh?”
“He’s an absolute darling,” I lied smoothly. “We get along famously. So well, in fact, that we’re thinking about stacking our desks like bunk beds so we can share an office.”
I heard a throat clear behind me. “Well, that’s news to me.”
I turned to find Vaughn staring at the pair of us, the expression on his face inscrutable. “C.J., how are you?” he asked.
Rowley gave him that “manly men together” greeting of the secret handshake and a hearty slap on the shoulder. To be honest, I had some sort of auditory rage blackout, seeing two of my least favorite people in one place, and had no idea what was said over the next few minutes. Rowley was smirking and nodding toward me, his hand slipping down my arm to wrap around my wrist. Vaughn seemed confused and unhappy to see the two of us basically holding hands. I wasn’t thrilled with it, either. But the skin-to-skin contact brought me out of my state and my ears seemed able to tune in again.
“Oh, Sadie and I go way back,” Rowley was saying with this implied intimacy that I did not find amusing in the least. “I hope you’re enjoying her.”
I tried to shrug off the fingers clamped around my wrist, but his grip tightened almost enough to bruise. “Behave yourself, Rowley.”
He leaned entirely too close and used a shockingly pleasant tone to tell me, “You don’t tell me how to do anything. You’re a low-level nobody and you’ll never get any further than that. I’ll make sure of it. You have no idea who you’re messing with.”
Staring at the way Rowley was handling my wrist, Vaughn moved forward, seemingly intent on breaking his hold. With his frat bro distracted, I grabbed hold of Rowley’s pinkie and twisted up. He gave a short barking yelp, allowing me to break free.
“I know exactly who I’m messing with,” I told Rowley. “Someone in dire need of manners and an Altoid. You have three minutes to get out before I tip off the security guards that a man fitting your description is actually a militant animal rights operative, here to free the horses.”
Vaughn’s jaw dropped and he moved closer to me, his arm hovering just below the small of my back. Whether it was to protect me from Rowley or vice versa, I had no idea. But Rowley merely chuckled. “This is why I brought Josh in, Sadie. At least he behaves like a professional.”
I smiled frostily. “You’re down to two minutes and thirty-seven seconds.”
“Bitch,” he muttered under his breath as he walked away.
“Creep,” I shot back quietly, sipping my iced tea.
“Is that how you speak to party guests?” Vaughn asked, though I noticed he didn’t move his arm from my back.
“It’s how I speak to uninvited guests with a tendency to say inappropriate things to my staff, and who make almost every woman I know uncomfortable.”
“I barely know him,” he said solemnly.
“He got you this job. I didn’t think it was possible that he had that sort of power.”
“He got me a business card,” Vaughn countered. “I got myself the job. I had no idea he—I mean, he was kind of aggressive with girls at school, but I thought he’d grow out of it. Most guys do when they get out into the real world.”
“Well, you could have asked.”
Vaughn rolled his eyes. “I could have called the office where I was applying for a job and asked whether the person who told me about that job was a creep?”
“I know it’s illogical,” I grumbled, making Josh chuckle.
When I saw Rowley cross the threshold, I breathed a sigh of relief and wished for something stronger than iced tea. But at this rate, I needed all of my brain cells functioning. At least Rowley was up-front about his hostilities. My issues with Josh Vaughn were as murky as the Ohio River. He had moments when he wasn’t entirely awful. But I didn’t know what he was capable of, or how much of his energy would be devoted to sinking my personal ship. I had a feeling that if he ever figured out I’d been present for the creative editing of his “pubic” PowerPoint slides, that energy would go nuclear.
“I’ll be fine.” I sighed.
“Oh, I’m sure.” Vaughn snorted. “But it might help if you relaxed that line between your eyebrows. Angry furrows don’t exactly give off a ‘fun party’ vibe.”
I took a deep breath and tried to pull my facial muscles into a less menacing alignment.
“Have you ever tried to force yourself to relax while someone’s watching you?” I griped, working my face around into various hopefully more pleasant expressions.
“There you go. So, even aside from my esteemed fraternity brother crashing the party, I’ve noticed you’re not your normal perky, cheerful self today. I take it an event like this is too staid for you?” he asked. “Not enough oversize fiberglass animals and re-created pioneer dwellings?”
“First, you rarely find fiberglass animals and pioneer cabins in the same attraction,” I told him primly, making him chuckle. “And second, no. I don’t mind coming to this; it’s as much a part of our culture as basketball, country music, and well, tobacco used to be. I just always get nervous at these things. The chance of my saying something stupid seems to increase proportionately with the average income of the people in the room.”
Why I’d just revealed that to someone I was competing against, I had no idea. But it was just so pleasant, not sniping at each other for once. Vaughn had such a nice laugh, and it was great to hear it and know that I caused it—in a nice, nonmocking way. It was going a long way toward settling my Rowley-jangled nerves. And the fact that I could see Ray from the corner of my eye, watching us, made having a friendly conversation that much easier.
“Rich people aren’t that different from the rest of us,” Vaughn mused. “Really, they only pay attention to you long enough to assure themselves that you’re one of them, and then they move on to watching someone else. So, really, you just have to be convincing for five or six minutes.”
I laughed, taking the julep cup he procured from a passing tray. I wouldn’t drink it, but it made a handy prop. An unspoken truth among Kentuckians is that a very small percentage of the population actually enjoys mint juleps. They are served only on Derby Day and only because they’re traditional. I doubt anyone has ever actually bellied up to a bar and said, “You know what sounds good? A big glass of sugary, watered-down bourbon with crushed mint.”
Then again, I have mojito issues.
“And how is one convincing?” I asked him.
“Well, the clothes, for one, which you seem to have a pretty artful hand with. You’re current, but not so current that the ladies who lunch would consider you avant-garde.”
“Heaven forbid.”
He looped his arm through mine as we traversed the room. “The second thing is education. You can leave them guessing as to who your people are, because if your accent’s right and you can claim the right fraternity at the right school, they’ll just assume it’s some acceptable family they’ve got some acquaintance with.”
“I don’t know what’s scarier, the fact that you’ve devoted so much thought to this, or that you’re probably right,” I said with a sigh.
“Still, I got a little smile out of you. And look at it this way, you don’t have to speak today, so Kelsey and her emergency kit aren’t needed.”
“She told you about that?” I gasped, feeling more than a little betrayed.
“No, I found the kit under the registration table. She brought it with her today, just in case. And considering your pregaming at the hat auction, I put two and two together. It’s kind of sweet, really. You’re good with people, but you panic when you realize they’re looking at you. And really, who could blame them for looking at you? You’re creating a personal paradox.”
I stared at him for a beat, then cowered and looked skyward, holding the edges of my hat as if it would protect me from the frogs and locusts bound to pour forth from the sky.
“What are you doing?” he asked, exasperated.
“You paid me a compliment,” I whispered, my voice mock-quivering with fear. “I am waiting for the arrival of biblical plagues.”
He chuckled and was about to respond when—
“Josh!” A surprised feminine voice sounded behind him.
An exquisitely pretty blonde in a violet suit-dress stood stock-still, staring at Vaughn as if he were the very last person she expected to run into in a good and decent world. For his part, Vaughn looked like he’d been smacked across the face with a shovel. He was frozen, his fingers digging into my arm so hard I had to tap my heel against his toes to get his attention. The most fleeting impression of a frown bent his mouth before he released my arm.
“Lydia?” he asked, his face returning slowly from its pasty gray color. His cheeks were flushing now, an angry, bruised red. “What are you doing here?”
It was like watching a social train wreck. I couldn’t look away. Was this the ex-girlfriend? The pod person who had hatched Vaughn fully formed in his perfectly pressed suits?
“Dawn invited me. She said I just had to come up and see the race in person. She thought it would be a good distraction for me. As you can imagine, I haven’t been my usual cheerful self lately.” Lydia gestured over her shoulder to a pretty redhead standing near the bar with a worried expression on her face. I noticed that neither she nor Lydia was wearing the appropriate name tags, meaning they weren’t invited guests. “You remember Dawn, don’t you? She would have been one of my bridesmaids.”
My jaw dropped before I could snap it up with a definitive click of my teeth. Dawn would have been one of her bridesmaids? Meaning there was a canceled wedding? Was this Vaughn’s former fiancée? Had he ditched her at the altar? Should I leave now and let him handle this discreetly? Could I leave? Because at the moment, my feet felt like they were welded to the floor.
“What are you doing here?” The strange tension in Lydia’s voice made it sound like a loaded question, as if he didn’t have the right to be standing here in a nice room with good food when he was supposed to be broke, toothless, and naked in a ditch somewhere.
“Working for the state tourism commission,” he said, his hands flexing open and closed as if he were strangling imaginary nemeses. “Our department helped put all this together.”
It seemed sort of petty to mention that “our department” was me, and he didn’t have anything to do with the planning.
Lydia’s lip curled back at that, but she managed to twist the expression into a bland smile. “Well, you did want to move back here. Not quite the same as working at a private firm, I would imagine. And who’s this?” she asked, eyeing my shoes instead of my face. Sure, they were last spring’s Jimmy Choo kitten heels, but they were also fabulous. So there.
Vaughn cleared his throat and cast me a furtive look. In that moment, I could have left him flapping in the uncomfortable wind. I could have walked away with a spring in my step and let him deal with this deliciously awkward moment with a woman who made him so uncomfortable and angry. If the (fabulous) shoe were on the other foot, I was sure Vaughn would leave me hanging without a second thought. But I was a nicer person than Vaughn. And I had a decided interest in him feeling like he owed me one.
Vaughn cleared his throat again. “This is my . . . my . . .”
“I’m his Sadie,” I said, stretching my hand out for hers.
She shot a very obvious glance toward my ring finger and seemed to relax a bit when she saw that it was bare. “Oh, how nice. How long have you two been together?”
“Just a few weeks,” Vaughn offered. “We met through work.”
“But it feels like so much more time than that,” I told her. “Every day with Josh is like its own eternity.”
Vaughn pulled a face as I smiled blithely. “Aw, honey,” he ground out. “You’re so silly.”
“Silly for you, lamb chop,” I cooed, snuggling against his arm. He pinched my side lightly and I nudged him in the ribs.
The fantastic thing about socialite types is that when their masks slip and those pesky feelings show through, they are intense and very difficult to pass off as facial tics. For a split second, Lydia looked well and truly pissed. I didn’t get the impression that she wanted him back. She just wanted him to suffer.
I wondered if I’d pushed the whole impostor girlfriend thing too far. Vaughn seemed just as unhappy with me as he was with Lydia’s presence. And the way he was gripping my arm didn’t exactly communicate gratitude.
“Well, I’ll just let you get back to work.” Lydia said the word “work” as if it were mildly distasteful.
“Tell your lawyer I said hello,” Josh replied, but there wasn’t any heat in it.
Lydia walked away, her butt swaying with every step. Pretend girlfriend or not, that saunter seemed insulting. I turned to voice my objections to Vaughn, who had flushed an unpleasant shade of eggplant.
“Okay, Vaughn, I realize I may have overstepped back there, but let’s not overreact,” I said, holding my hands up in a defensive position.
“Naw.” He pulled at his tie as if it were trying to strangle him. “It’s okay. I appreciate it. I froze. I never freeze. She just pisses me off something awful. Damn it.”
I was caught off guard by Vaughn’s use of “naw.” His real accent seemed to slip through when he was upset. Normally, he spoke with a clipped midwestern staccato you only heard on news broadcasts. But that “naw” was pure tobacco fields and back roads. I went to high school with guys sporting homemade Dale Earnhardt tattoos whose accents weren’t that pronounced.
I scanned the crowd surrounding us to make sure Josh wasn’t drawing attention. I seriously considered urging him toward the men’s room to hide until the race was over. But he just looked so pale and lost. As indifferent as I was to his overall well-being, I just couldn’t leave him like this.
“Come on,” I said, sighing. I pulled him into an alcove where a giant potted palm shielded us from the rest of the room. Josh braced his hands against his knees and took deep breaths. Sensing turbulence, Kelsey stuck her head into our little oasis, emergency kit in hand. I shook my head and shooed her away before Josh noticed.
He straightened, tugging at his tie and popping the top button of his collar. “That was my ex-girlfriend.”
“So I gathered.” Did he really respond like this every time he ran into an ex-girlfriend? I didn’t get this upset when I ran into “Felony Phil,” who stole my identity on our third date and applied for a mortgage on a chinchilla farm outside Trenton, New Jersey.
Josh seemed to pick up on my disbelief and sighed. “We met through some friends at work. She seemed like such a nice normal girl, even though she came from money. Her family owns a shipping company based in Atlanta, has since the days of horse-drawn buggies. I loved her. And I’d never loved anyone before.
“I had the job, the girl, the nice apartment. It all looked like it was going to work out like some sort of upper-middle-class fairy tale. Lydia was getting ready to graduate from law school and I wanted to plan something special for her. We’d already talked about marriage and she had our wedding planned down to the last corsage, wedding party and all. I just wanted my part of it to be a surprise, you know? I was going to take her out to dinner. We’d show up at the restaurant and all of her friends would be there to surprise her and I would propose right there in front of everybody. I started e-mailing her best friend, Shanna, to ask for advice. You know, where to take her for dinner, who to invite, where to shop for a ring. I was being secretive and I was so excited about what I was doing, I didn’t think about how it might look to someone who didn’t know what was going on.
“Lydia found all of these e-mails and texts I sent to Shanna with references to ‘keeping it quiet’ and ‘making sure Lydia doesn’t find out.’ And she assumed I was sleeping with her best friend. She didn’t scream or cry. She didn’t even talk to me about it. Instead, she wrote this awful letter about what I had supposedly done behind her back. She hired an Internet company, And One Last Thing . . . , to put it in a fancy e-mail format with a skull and crossbones. And then she sent it to all of my contacts from work, my family, my friends, and her family and friends.”
Josh seemed to have forgotten I was there. Or maybe he’d forgotten the identity of the female-shaped person standing next to him. Why else would he be spilling so much information? I could get a lot of mileage from this stuff. And throughout this unburdening his accent became more pronounced, as if the leash he kept it on were loosening with every word.
“It was so humiliating. Lydia’s daddy threatened to hunt me down like a dog. My mother called me, crying hysterically because she just didn’t raise me to be a cheater. Poor Shanna’s fiancé actually broke it off with her before we managed to convince him that Lydia was wrong. I lost some clients, who didn’t appreciate receiving e-mails with ‘My fiancé, Josh Vaughn, is screwing my best friend’ as a subject line. I was lucky I didn’t lose my job. My boss seemed to be caught between being embarrassed for me and being pissed that I let my personal life splash all over the office server. Oh, and Lydia took my credit cards and did a little shopping, to the tune of sixty thousand dollars. I bought her a whole new post-breakup wardrobe, including some crazy expensive lingerie, which I find both offensive and upsetting. That outfit she’s wearing, I probably paid for it. I even paid for the company that formatted and sent the e-mail for her.”
“Good Lord, did you file criminal charges against her?”
He shrugged. “She was an authorized user on the card and technically, it was legal. I took her to civil court, but she could afford a much better lawyer than I could. My credit was completely ruined. I couldn’t make the minimum payments and everything just snowballed. I came back to Kentucky to try to get some control over my life again.”
“Did she apologize when she realized she was wrong?”
Vaughn made an indignant snorting noise. “Oh, hell no. As you can see, she still seems to think she has the right to be angry with me over this. She told me I shouldn’t have gone behind her back in the first place, that if I’d just come up with a proposal on my own instead of asking Shanna for help, there wouldn’t have been a problem. I thought at first that I was okay, you know? I’d dodged a bullet, not marrying into all that crazy. But then I started thinking about our relationship and the life I thought we were going to have and how wrong I’d been about her.” He groaned, tipping his head back against the wall. “It’s not that bad. I’m okay.”
“I hate to be the one to point this out, Vaughn, but she’s reduced you to hiding behind potted greenery.”
“Good point,” he grumbled. “And, considering you’re watching me hyperventilate, do you think you could call me by my first name?”
I nodded. Vaughn—Josh—took a few more deep breaths and I led him out from behind the plant. I stole a glance at Lydia, who was watching us as she sipped a glass of champagne and chatted with the state attorney general. I gave Josh a clearly adoring smile and leaned close to him to say, “Look, you’ve got a few minutes before the main race starts. Why don’t you go outside and get some air? I’ll keep an eye on things in here.”
He nodded, breathing deeply and giving me a shaky smile. And, looking over my shoulder at Lydia one last time, he pressed the barest of kisses against my skin. I felt the strange prickle of flushed cheeks as his lips brushed over my skin.
“Thanks,” he said softly, and he stepped out into the hall.
I stared after him for a long time. While it was a little dramatic, I was impressed with Josh for spilling his guts like that. I wasn’t silly enough to think it meant we were now girlfriends. But at least I got to scrape past the polished exterior and see that he was human after all. I wouldn’t shove him out of a lifeboat, which, considering our brief history, was saying something.
“Are you playing Fashion Police in your head? Because I know I am,” Kelsey murmured behind me. I turned to find that she was taking a break from the welcome table. Kelsey was too busty to get away with the traditional suit. She always ended up looking like a teenager who’d borrowed her mother’s church clothes. Today, she had opted for a dramatic cobalt blue dress instead, the sort of thing a nice girl might have worn to church in the 1940s. Short puffed sleeves, a knee-length paneled skirt, and a cute little bow tied under the gathered bustline. Of course, being Kelsey, she didn’t fasten the top two tiny pearl buttons meant to keep it modest.
“Some of the women in here should learn not to trust salesclerks,” she marveled.
I brushed her thick dark hair over her shoulder. “Meanwhile, I love you dearly, but if you keep bending over to find the participants’ name badges, a certain state senator is going to fall face-first into your cleavage.”
“Well, we work with what we have. Everything okay with Josh?” she asked.
“Yeah, I actually think I’m making some progress with him. He ran into an ex just now and I managed to talk him off the proverbial ledge,” I said, casting a look toward the doors where Josh had just exited. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be super close, but we may be on our way to understanding each other a little better— What the hell?”
Through the double-wide doors, I saw Josh talking to Gina, who wore a robin’s-egg-blue dress that brought out the sun-kissed glow of her skin and her freakishly huge blue eyes. He was laughing, with his head thrown back like he was in a damn pirate movie. His fingers were wrapped around her hand while she stared up at him through her lashes. He looked considerably more relaxed than when he’d stood before me, all pale and panicked and sad. And he seemed to have recovered remarkably quickly.
My jaw dropped and Kelsey quickly turned me so my back was to the rest of the room. Nobody needed to see that expression.
“You took him off your internal ‘people you’d shove out of the lifeboat’ list, didn’t you?” she asked sadly, gently patting my arm.
It took some effort to keep the irritated frown from marring my “party face.” Had he faked that whole thing? His shock and hurt had seemed a bit over the top, but it felt so genuine. For just a moment, I felt like we’d connected like two ordinary people rather than gladiatorial opponents. But he’d miraculously recovered from his mini-breakdown just in time to flirt with Gina? Was this some sort of trick to make me feel sorry for him so I’d lay off the pressure at work and give him a better shot at the promotion? Had he arranged for Rowley to show up too, so I’d be knocked off-balance at one of the biggest events of our year?
Well, this certainly proved that Josh Vaughn was everything I suspected and more. Besides being a great big jackass, he was a very convincing actor. For a minute I’d been fooled into thinking he was a flawed, approachable human being. I vaguely registered bells ringing and an excited hum fluttering through the crowd around me. The guests surged forward, toward the observation deck overlooking the track. The race was starting. And I couldn’t bring myself to even turn toward the track.
I’d felt sorry for him. The . . . jackass.
Behind us, the finish bell rang and screams and hollers echoed triumphantly from the track. Two of the most important minutes of the Kentucky calendar had just gone by and I’d missed them. I didn’t see my horse run. I felt like such an idiot. I was in a neck-and-neck race with my rival for the same job and I thought he would let me see him hyperventilating like a heartbroken sixth-grade girl at her first dance? Really? And honestly, what were the odds that his girlfriend would show up at his very first Derby Day? She was probably a cousin or something.
Josh Vaughn was not to be trusted. I would not fall for his baby blues, the puppy-dog eyes, or any other ophthalmological ploys on his part to make me feel anything but professional contempt. Or at least, I would stop lying to former girlfriends for him.
Kelsey jostled my arm gently. “Sadie, you got that look in your eye.”
“He is back on the list,” I muttered.
Instant Karma, indeed.