question anyone staying here was worth buckets of cash.
And finding a man with buckets of cash was the reason Bree was here. Why else would a woman with an advanced degree in English spend the last six years performing manual labor?
Okay, so anyone with an English degree was probably used to doing manual labor. In fact, people with degrees in English were doubtless more employable than anyone else. There were tons of jobs you could get with an English degree, including—it went without saying—bartending. Bree had tried majoring in something that might enable her to make buckets of cash on her own—and meet rich men—but she didn’t have a head for business or finance or any of those moneymaking professions. Numbers were just that to Bree’s brain—numbers. As in, things to make her brain numb. She’d made straight Cs and Ds until she switched to an English major—a degree she’d earned with highest honors. (Not that that meant higher earning potential, alas.) So she’d had no choice but to conclude that her talents lay not in her mental skills, but in her social skills. In her ability to make friends, to chat amiably, to entertain, and to console. They were all qualities of a good bartender.
They were qualities of a good mistress, too.
Maybe “kept woman” wasn’t the loftiest of ambitions, nor was it particularly PC, especially for someone who’d grown up in the post–I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar era. The women’s movement sparked by her mother’s generation had been about making sure all future daughters and granddaughters grew up to have choices, right? About giving women the opportunity to be and do whatever they put their minds to being and doing. And what Bree had always wanted to be was well taken care of. What she’d wanted to do was find security. She’d had precious little of those things when she was a child. And now, with her mother going through what she was going through, care and security was even more important. Not just for Bree Calhoun, but for her mother, Rosie, too.
She pushed the thought away as she collected two martini glasses from the bar, one of which was smudged with dark red lipstick and sticky with the remnants of a Cosmopolitan. The woman drinking from it had left a few minutes ago with the owner of the other glass, a guest of the hotel Bree had spent her last two shifts cultivating for her own. Less than thirty minutes after joining him, the woman had left with him. Two full nights of flirting with the guy, and Bree had bupkus.
Oh, well, she thought. Easy come, easy go.
Except that it was never easy to find rich, single guys who were looking for a little arm candy. It was harder still to look like potential arm candy when you were sweating behind a bar in a gin-, Bourbon-and dark-crème-de-cocoa-stained wardrobe of baggy trousers, shirt, and necktie. The men Bree targeted never came, they only went. She was a red-hot mama twenty-six years in the making, and she hadn’t even come close to trapping herself a tycoon. Sure, she’d dated some rich guys in the past, but she’d never been able to sustain a relationship with one for more than a couple of months. Certainly none had yet offered to put her up in a Fifth Avenue penthouse with unlimited credit at Tiffany’s. Or even in a Cherokee Triangle loft with unlimited credit at Dolfinger’s.
So that kind of sucked.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to have turned out for her. By now, Bree was supposed to have met at least one of the richest men in the world, preferably two or three, and she was supposed to have dazzled them with her wits, her smile, and her boundless sex appeal. She was supposed to be living in a posh suite and spending her days shopping, brunching, and hobnobbing with other kept women. She was supposed to be like Holly Golightly, running around in opera gloves and tiara, cocktail glass in one hand, cigarette holder in the other, only without the too-pronounced clavicles because she would have actually
And finding a man with buckets of cash was the reason Bree was here. Why else would a woman with an advanced degree in English spend the last six years performing manual labor?
Okay, so anyone with an English degree was probably used to doing manual labor. In fact, people with degrees in English were doubtless more employable than anyone else. There were tons of jobs you could get with an English degree, including—it went without saying—bartending. Bree had tried majoring in something that might enable her to make buckets of cash on her own—and meet rich men—but she didn’t have a head for business or finance or any of those moneymaking professions. Numbers were just that to Bree’s brain—numbers. As in, things to make her brain numb. She’d made straight Cs and Ds until she switched to an English major—a degree she’d earned with highest honors. (Not that that meant higher earning potential, alas.) So she’d had no choice but to conclude that her talents lay not in her mental skills, but in her social skills. In her ability to make friends, to chat amiably, to entertain, and to console. They were all qualities of a good bartender.
They were qualities of a good mistress, too.
Maybe “kept woman” wasn’t the loftiest of ambitions, nor was it particularly PC, especially for someone who’d grown up in the post–I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar era. The women’s movement sparked by her mother’s generation had been about making sure all future daughters and granddaughters grew up to have choices, right? About giving women the opportunity to be and do whatever they put their minds to being and doing. And what Bree had always wanted to be was well taken care of. What she’d wanted to do was find security. She’d had precious little of those things when she was a child. And now, with her mother going through what she was going through, care and security was even more important. Not just for Bree Calhoun, but for her mother, Rosie, too.
She pushed the thought away as she collected two martini glasses from the bar, one of which was smudged with dark red lipstick and sticky with the remnants of a Cosmopolitan. The woman drinking from it had left a few minutes ago with the owner of the other glass, a guest of the hotel Bree had spent her last two shifts cultivating for her own. Less than thirty minutes after joining him, the woman had left with him. Two full nights of flirting with the guy, and Bree had bupkus.
Oh, well, she thought. Easy come, easy go.
Except that it was never easy to find rich, single guys who were looking for a little arm candy. It was harder still to look like potential arm candy when you were sweating behind a bar in a gin-, Bourbon-and dark-crème-de-cocoa-stained wardrobe of baggy trousers, shirt, and necktie. The men Bree targeted never came, they only went. She was a red-hot mama twenty-six years in the making, and she hadn’t even come close to trapping herself a tycoon. Sure, she’d dated some rich guys in the past, but she’d never been able to sustain a relationship with one for more than a couple of months. Certainly none had yet offered to put her up in a Fifth Avenue penthouse with unlimited credit at Tiffany’s. Or even in a Cherokee Triangle loft with unlimited credit at Dolfinger’s.
So that kind of sucked.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to have turned out for her. By now, Bree was supposed to have met at least one of the richest men in the world, preferably two or three, and she was supposed to have dazzled them with her wits, her smile, and her boundless sex appeal. She was supposed to be living in a posh suite and spending her days shopping, brunching, and hobnobbing with other kept women. She was supposed to be like Holly Golightly, running around in opera gloves and tiara, cocktail glass in one hand, cigarette holder in the other, only without the too-pronounced clavicles because she would have actually
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