My Bluegrass Baby (7 page)

“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.”