“I’m not sleeping with you. I’m your employer. You are my assistant.”
“Until I see you naked I won’t know if you’re actually a man or a woman. It’s like Schrödinger’s Pussy.”
“You just used quantum physics to hit on me. I’m almost impressed.”
“Impressed enough to sleep with me?” Merrick asked.
“No.”
Merrick shrugged. He seemed philosophical about her refusal and not the least disappointed. For all his quantum flirting, Merrick’s interest in her was merely mechanical. And she had no interest in him at all. She was twenty-six and he was thirty-six. To her Merrick was like an older brother. An older brother she paid to do whatever she told him to do. The best sort of older brother. The type she could fire.
Remi’s cell phone buzzed in her bag. She dug it out and looked at the name. Now she remembered why she’d hired Merrick.
“Ugh. Help. It’s Brian Roseland.” Remi handed the phone to Merrick.
“You want me to do the thing?” he asked.
“Please and thank you.”
“Yell-o?” Merrick said, taking the call for her. “No, Remi’s not here right now. She’s on a date.”
Remi covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. Her? On a date on a Thursday afternoon? Good thing Merrick was a better liar than she was.
“She’s been gone all week, Mr. Roseland,” Merrick said. “It’s that kind of date. One with traveling and exotic locations and them sticking body parts into each other.”
Remi grabbed for the phone. Merrick jerked it away.
“But I’ll tell her you called once she gets back from her weeklong exotic-locale sex date.” Merrick tugged her ponytail to annoy her. It worked.
Then he ended the call and handed her the phone.
“I told Roseland you were on an exotic-locale weeklong sex date,” Merrick said.
“Yes, I heard that part. Did you have to go into that much detail?” she demanded.
“Look, Boss,” Merrick said, “either learn how to lie to people or leave me alone when you make me do your lying for you.”
“Fine. Thank you for getting rid of him. Third time he’s called me this week,” she said. “Maybe if he thinks I’m on a date he’ll finally get the hint that it’s completely over.”
Remi dropped her phone back in her bag just as the post parade began. The outriders trotted alongside the jockeys astride their racehorses. Her own Arden Farms jockey, Mike Alvarez, in his red-and-white silks, threw a smile at the crowd as he and their three-year-old filly Shenanigans passed the grandstand.
“Boss, are you ever going to tell me why you dumped Roseland?” Merrick asked, as she made a note in her journal.
“Never.”
“Please? I’ll whimper. Don’t make me whimper.” He whimpered.
“Do you really care?” she asked. “Or is this just perverse curiosity about my sex life?”
“I care desperately in a perversely curious-about-your-sex-life way,” Merrick said. “You never tell me anything about your personal life. You don’t hit on me. You ignore me when I hit on you. You keep our work relationship professional no matter how hard I try to make it unprofessional. It’s like you have integrity or something, and quite frankly, I’m sick of it.”
Remi closed her journal.
“If I tell you, will you shut up for two whole minutes during the race?”
“Two minutes? I can do that. Talk,” Merrick ordered.
“When I started dating the handsome Mr. Roseland, I thought he was a really nice guy,” she began.
“No wonder you dumped him,” Merrick said. She glowered at him. He whimpered in response.
“I happen to like nice guys,” she said, and a face from her past flashed in front of her eyes. A young, handsome, smiling face—near-black eyes, dark red hair, a smile both sweet and striking. She kicked the memory out of her mind—a futile gesture. She knew it would only gallop back in her brain. “In fact, I love nice guys. It just turned out Brian wasn’t a nice guy.”
Merrick pushed his sunglasses up on top of his head and stared at her.
“If he hurt you, you tell me right now, Remi,” he said. He only called her Remi in his rare moods of deadly seriousness. He’d probably called her by her first name all of twice in two years. The rest of the time she was just “Boss.” “If he got rough with you I will get rough with him. That prick can watch the horses race from his boxed seats in Hell.”
She shook her head.
“No, he didn’t hurt me,” she said, touched by Merrick’s devotion. They harassed and insulted each other, but at the heart of their working relationship was a solid core of respect and loyalty. And near-constant exasperation on her part. “I promise. I’d kick his ass if he tried. It was just that... So three months ago, Brian and I were...you know...”
“Twerking?”
“Fucking. And the condom broke. I’m on birth control, but I still panicked. Abject white-knuckle panic.”
“Is Roseland a heroin addict?”
“Clean as a whistle and so am I. But even the thought of having a baby with Brian terrified me. I couldn’t imagine spending Christmas with him, much less marrying him and having kids. It was a horrible thought. So we broke up.”
She spoke matter-of-factly, but the break-up had been anything but matter-of-fact. Brian had been furious and accusatory, demanding to know if she was cheating on him. He’d been so bitterly angry he’d scared her, and from that moment on, she had refused to see him or speak to him. His ensuing profanity-laden tantrum had proven that her instincts to dump him had been dead-on.
“That’s the whole story?” Merrick asked, sounding skeptical.
“That’s it. I broke up with him. He threw a hissy fit about it. The end.”
“Well, you are easily the second or third most beautiful woman in north-central Kentucky.”
“Thank you for that regionally specific compliment,” she said. “Now shut up. It’s post time.”
Merrick went silent as all six horses were slotted into the starting gate. Any second now the bell would ring and the horses would burst from the gates. It was just an ordinary race on a Thursday afternoon at Verona Downs. Not even a stakes race. And yet it looked like the Kentucky Derby for all the press there and the grandstand packed with fans. At least fifty people had brought homemade signs that bore the words, I Call Shenanigans! Did these people not realize that horses, unlike football or baseball players, could not read?
Remi held her breath.
The bell rang, and the horses exploded down the track in a furor of pounding hooves and streaming colors. The crowd around them cheered and clapped and roared. She and Merrick watched the race in silence.
After two minutes and a mile and a half had passed, Shenanigans of Arden Farms was declared the unofficial winner. Remi should have been happy that their champion filly had won the race. A nice purse, a sweet victory, another trophy in the trophy room...
“You don’t look happy, Bubbalah,” Merrick said and put two fingers on either side of her face, forcing her lips into a smile. She gave him the most glaring of death glares. “Your little pony won her race. Smile like you mean it.”
The outrider led Mike and Shenanigans on a victory lap.
“Let’s