Page 2 of Seize the Night

“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.

“Didn’t you break up with him?”

“Yeah, but he still calls all the time. Maybe if he thinks I’m on a weeklong exotic locale sex 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. She saw her own Arden Farms’ jockey, Mike Alvarez, in his red and white silks, throw 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.

“My private life is on a need-to-know basis and you do not need to know.”

“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 way about your sex life,” 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 Brian, 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 deadly serious moods. 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 to her. They harassed and insulted each other, but at the heart of their working relationship was a solid core of respect and loyalty. And amused 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, 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 refused to see him or speak to him. Breaking up with him and his ensuing profanity-laden tantrum had shown her why her instincts to dump him had been so 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.”

“Well, you areeasilythe 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. But one would have thought it was 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?

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