Betting Hearts (6 page)

Cass had to shake her head. Someday, people might realize she wasn’t hung up on Luke Hansen the way they all seemed to think. If she pulled this off, that day might be sooner than anyone could have expected. “I hope it does, I truly do. But don’t worry, May, I don’t want Luke back. I’m thinking of this thing as finally washing that man out of my life.”

“If that’s how you feel, free this afternoon?” May pulled her ordering pad from her apron and started scribbling a list. Cass watched a flurry of words form under the pencil.

“I guess I could—”

“Good. I want you to meet me in an hour at Lola’s.”

Lola Velasquez was Rancho Del Cielo’s sole beauty parlor owner. She had three girls there to do manicures, pedicures and styling, but most people went to see her. She was fifty or sixty—no one knew for sure—but nothing stopped her from wearing three-inch heels, perfect make-up or revolving shades of hair color. Her chair was also rumored to have the sanctity of a confessional, which caused droves of women to schedule for romantic advice alone. Cass never needed Lola’s talents in either situation.

Until now.

“Lola’s, an hour.”

“And honey?”

Cass looked up from the plate she was sliding toward herself.

May Belle gestured to it. “No more of those.”

Cass stared down in surprise. The sesame-bunned, double-pattied, half-pound burger weeping tomato juice and guacamole onto her fingers stared back. With longing. “Why?”

“First rule of being a woman is dieting.”

“But I don’t need a diet!” Hell, she had to eat all the time as it was just to keep up with what she burned on the job.

“Neither do most other women. From now on it’s salads and water. No more eating like a man.”

That stung. “I
work
like a man.”

“Second rule of being a woman: work harder than men so you can be even with them, and do it with less than them.”

Starve and work harder. That didn’t sound like femininity. It sounded like torture. “How many of these so-called rules are there?”

May Belle slid out of the booth and headed back toward the bar. “You better buy a notebook. See you in an hour!”

“That was just mean!”

“It was wax,
chulita
, and trust me, it’s better.”

“It hurt like hell!”

“Beauty hurts.” It had to be the tenth time Lola got to say that and smile. Cass was ready to rip out Lola’s dark burgundy hair and she’d only been there for two hours. So far, her eyebrows were waxed, her hands soaked for her manicure as were her feet. Unfortunately, they were long done with those pleasantries. Lola pulled off only one of the long, wax-covered strips from Cass’s left leg. There were plenty left to yank. Not to mention a whole other leg.

“You scream a lot for someone everybody calls tough.”

Cass said something singeing.

Lola laughed…and tore another strip.

For fifty minutes, the pattern repeated until Cass was allowed to stumble out of the waxing room and over to the styling chair. Her only consolation was that she’d been able to talk Lola out of a bikini wax. Once she’d discovered what it was.

“Now, we do your hair. What color do you want? Blonde, like May Belle said? Men go crazy for
la rubias.
I know, I was one once.” Her raspy little giggle had enough dirty in it to make Cass smile despite the stinging skin. Lola pushed Cass’s chair into to a prone position.

May Belle must have talked a lot in the hour before Cass arrived. Lola had emptied her entire day, armed with a suggestion from the former beauty queen on every single topic. May Belle herself was gone only God knew where, leaving Cass at the mercy of the Hispanic whirlwind with a whisking brush.

Warm water sprayed onto her scalp and Lola’s hands began massaging. Cass closed her eyes in heavenly bliss. This was the first thing that felt good. But as she closed her eyes and tried to envision herself as a cool blonde, all she could see was Sally. Tiny, perfect Sally. Whatever enjoyment she had soured.

“No. Luke would expect me to try copying his cute little Pomeranian. No, no blonde.”

Lola was quiet for a while, scrubbing, massaging and rinsing. “
Mira,
you have a lot of red in here.
Ay, por qué no pensé antes?
Let’s make it all red. It’ll look good with your coloring, no? Those eyes,
tambien.
I’ll trim it, you’ll look exactly like Rita Hayworth.”

Cass seriously doubted it, but since she didn’t have a clue who Rita Hayworth
was
she kept her thoughts to herself. Lola rambled on about bone structure and eye color and a whole bunch of things that didn’t make much sense.

“You look like your mother,” She interjected out of nowhere, humming as she sudsed. “She had the prettiest hair.”

Cass stared up at her, shocked. “You knew my mother?”

Lola nodded, not looking away from her work. “
Claro
. She was one of my best friends, but everyone felt that way about her. When she died, the whole town came for her funeral. Everyone wanted to be like her and your daddy. He never saw anyone but her. He still doesn’t.” Lola’s expression flickered with disappointment before she pasted a blinding smile on her face.
“Y por qué no
? She was beautiful. Kind. Everybody loved Lora.”

Cass knew all that. She was too young when Lora’s lung cancer took hold, so all her impressions of her mother came from photographs and her father’s occasional remarks. She had a hard time believing Eddie was ever the life of any party, but according to the older folks, he and Lora were once the fairy tale of the town. Lora’s death remained its greatest tragedy. Had Lola been trying to get Eddie’s attention or something? Poor woman, nuclear weapons couldn’t get Eddie’s attention these days.

“You don’t remember her, do you?” Lola asked, something soothing in her quiet tone.

Cass shook her head. ”Just her pictures. And her smile.” Her memories were almost entirely sensory, more what she thought of instead of actual events. A scent of lilac and sunshine, a soft hand in hers…a smile. Something about Lora’s cheeky grin made Cass think her mother had a wild streak a mile wide. Thinking of that smile gave her comfort whenever she got in trouble for misbehaving. It would be nice to think she got more than red hair from her mother.

“Hmm,
qué lastima
. You would have liked her,
chulita
. She grew the most beautiful roses. She could make any plant grow, just the way she touched it. She had that way. Like you.” Lola abruptly pushed the seat into an upright position.

Cass grabbed the armrests to stay on. “My father says the same thing.”
When he talks.

“How is your daddy?”

Cass squinted an eye at the mirror.
She
is
interested!

Lola was hardly flustered, but the towel she was using to dry Cass’s hair was moving a little more vigorously than before. “Back when I first moved here from Chula Vista with my husband, he and your mama made sure everyone knew about my shop. It wasn’t so easy for a Mexican to run her own business in those days. They helped a lot. My Danny used to drive trucks. When he was gone, Lora asked your daddy to come check on us, make sure everything was okay until Danny came back. We thought it was sweet how he opened the nursery for Lora. Romantic.”

Cass laughed. She’d never thought of the nursery as particularly romantic, but since they still sold Lora’s breed of roses, she had to admit Lola was probably on to something.

“I never see Eddie any more. Not since my Danny passed away.” She paused in her brush selection to bless herself with the sign of the cross.

“He doesn’t get out much these days.”
Understatement of the decade.

“Well, you tell him I asked about him.”

Cass raised an eyebrow in the mirror.

Lola winked back. “
Pero
, we’re here for you, today. What do you say, we go red, no?”

Cass ignored the shiver of excitement and terror coursing through her. The time had come. Everything she’d done so far had been simple and mostly unnoticeable. Shoot, most of it would grow out in a few days. This would be the first drastic change, the first step to bigger and better things. It was perfectly fine to be nervous. She shuddered a breath, closed her eyes and took the plunge. “We go red.”

Burke walked into Shaky Jakes with a sense of dread. It wouldn’t go away. All day it hung on like a bad smell. Something in the world had gone horribly, terribly wrong. He just didn’t know what.

He’d tried to track CB, to make sure she hadn’t gone and broken something vital, but hadn’t been able to reach her anywhere. Hayne complained about her taking the afternoon off, making his unease stronger. Figuring she was here for dinner, Burke wandered into the crowd.

The number of people wasn’t disconcerting. There was always a crowd at Shaky Jakes. Several of them even looked familiar, former A-crowd cronies from high school. He hadn’t liked them then and usually groaned when he had to deal with them now. But there were a number of faces there he didn’t know. In a town the size of Rancho Del Cielo, it was another cause for alarm. A fast scan of the place didn’t silence the bells ringing in his head. The only woman by herself was a redhead at the bar with Ben Friedly, of all people. Burke gave her a passing glance, though the rippling auburn hair did stop him for a second. So did the soft cotton dress hugging her body. She had a 40’s flashback look to her, especially with those seamed stockings leading to sturdy black heels on the bar rail. Great legs, but not CB.

Ten minutes later, he’d checked every booth and was back at the front door without sign of her. The party was getting rowdy and Burke noticed a number of men were pointing at the redhead. Despite being about to leave, he decided to give her another look over. The men didn’t appear all that complimentary.

He couldn’t figure out why. She had her back to him, but her curves all seemed to be in the right place. The hair was a real bonus, the kind of rich color that made him ache to touch it. The dress was one of those short sleeve numbers, leaving long lengths of browned arms showing. Odd, a redhead browning so nicely. His eyes combed over her slim ribcage, down the length of her spine to a pair of sweetly curving hips and—

If a man felt his heart stop and his breath still, wasn’t he was dead?

The entire bar rattled to a stop for some reason. All heads turned his way, all except for the redhead. But, she wouldn’t, of course; the hiding, sneaking, disguised little brat.

Burke finally realized why everyone was staring at him. He’d bellowed her name with all the rising frustration in him. Unfortunately for her, there was more on the way.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll turn around, CB.”

Her head shook violently.

“Goddamn it, don’t make me come over there!”

“Go away!”

It was her all right. She sounded like she had a cold or something. There was some snickering from the crowd of men, all of which made Burke tone it down a degree. No point dragging the whole town into it, even if it was a bit late. He stomped over to her stool and tugged on her shoulder to spin her stool around. It didn’t do much good. CB had her face buried in a towel full of ice.

“What the hell happened to you?” He tried to pull on the pack, but she was determined to keep it there. Aside from decking her, there was no way to loosen her grip. He turned to Ben on the corner stool.

The old man shook his head at him, his rheumy, drooping eyes filled with disdain. “Boy, you have all the sensitivity of a bull moose.”

From the top of his spiky white hair, past his sun-darkened leathery skin and sloping shoulders to his gnarled, arthritic hands, Ben Friedly was about as sensitive as the Boogie Man. “Coming from you, that could be a compliment.”

“Could be, but it ain’t. She was fine not ten minutes ago, but…she…uh, got some red things on her face.”

“Red things?”

“Yeah, red things. Welts or something. May said she was prob’ly allergic to the foundation, but don’t ask me. I ain’t never seen her get sick from the foundation in this place before.” Ben shrugged and reached for a bowl of pretzels. “Before that, those guys were over here knocking each other out trying to get her to dance with them. But when those blister things started showing up…Well, outsiders never did have any class.” Ben patted CB’s knee paternally. “May went to get something for her, but she’s been gone forever.”

Burke had an unsettling feeling in his stomach. It felt like guilt, but he wasn’t in a rush to name it. Instead, he tapped on the icepack. “Cassie? Honey, let me see. Maybe I can help.”

“No, you can’t. You know less about make-up than me.”

“Paint’s paint, Cassie.”

She said something very CB.

Burke smiled. If she could call him names, she couldn’t be that bad. “Come on, let me take a look.”

“You say one mean thing to me, Burke Halifax, and I swear you’ll never have children.”

“Yeah, yeah, put down the towel.” He waited for another few seconds until she dropped her hands. “Ugh!”

The ice popped back up and she was calling him worse names than usual. There was a roar of laughter from the men in the crowd at the other side of the bar.