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Contents
My Bluegrass Baby
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: In Which I Sing Praises to the Porcelain Goddess
Chapter 2: In Which I Smile Like a Serial Killer
Chapter 3: In Which I Turn My Workplace into Animal Planet
Chapter 4: In Which I Push a Colleague out of a Metaphorical Lifeboat
Chapter 5: In Which I Am Stranded with Ho Hos
Chapter 6: In Which I Learn New and Disturbing Acronyms
Chapter 7: In Which Josh Is a Tease
Chapter 8: In Which I Lose My Bloomers
Chapter 9: In Which Murdering Kelsey Seems Like a Viable Option
Chapter 10: In Which Our State Fair Is a Great State Fair
Chapter 11: In Which I Touch Potential Employees Inappropriately
Afterword
Try Me On for Size
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
About the Author
True North
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Game On
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
About the Author
Facing the Music
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
About the Author
Thrown
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Epilogue
Love Like the Movies
Dedication
Chapter One: Almost Thirty, Flirty and Thriving
Chapter Two: Ten Minutes’ Notice
Chapter Three: Truth Is Ugly
Chapter Four: Sleepless in Indy
Chapter Five: 27 Reasons
Chapter Six: Knocked Over
Chapter Seven: Pretty Confusing
Chapter Eight: How to Lose Your Mind in Five Days
Chapter Nine: Ghost of Boyfriend Past
Chapter Ten: My Best Friend’s Wedding Advice
Chapter Eleven: Pretty Great
Chapter Twelve: Kenzi Shaw: The Edge of Reason
Chapter Thirteen: Dangerous Dancing
Chapter Fourteen: Confessions of a Rom-com-aholic
Chapter Fifteen: Failure Launched
Chapter Sixteen: While You Were Cheating
Chapter Seventeen: Seven Candles
Chapter Eighteen: Crazy Stupid Bradley
Chapter Nineteen: This Means What
Chapter Twenty: You’ve Got Nerve
Chapter Twenty-One: Say Something
Chapter Twenty-Two: Four-Letter Words and a Shower
Chapter Twenty-Three: Love Finally
Epilogue: When Shane Met Kenzi
Real-Life Shining Stars
From Scratch Excerpt
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
What Pretty Girls Are Made Of Excerpt
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Borrow-A-Bridesmaid Excerpt
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Flirting with Fire Excerpt
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Wanted: Wild Thing Excerpt
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
MY BLUEGRASS BABY
Molly Harper
Pocket Star Books
New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi
Acknowledgments
This book series came about because my agent, Stephany, frequently sends me links to news stories about Kentucky—usually about something bizarre, like a man being treed by a possum or som
eone eating aluminum siding on a dare—asking, “Have you seen this?” with a note of amusement/amazement. In fairness, she also sent me a story in which a possum was trapped in a New York City subway car.
It’s difficult for outsiders to understand what it’s like to grow up in the Bluegrass State. I’ve said before that living in Kentucky is a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. I love my home state. I love my neighbors. But I will admit that we seem to have more quirkiness per capita than any commonwealth has a right to. And somehow, we manage to get through life with humor and bite.
This story is set in a highly fictionalized version of a state tourism office. I’m sure actual state employees would behave much more responsibly than my characters. Some of the festivities described herein reflect real events, while others have been altered because of timing or to protect the innocent. I’d like to thank the Kentucky Department of Travel for the information provided by their offices and Jeffrey Scott Holland, author of Weird Kentucky, for confirming that my state is just as weird and wonderful as I have always believed.
And of course, thanks go to my parents, who moved me to Kentucky in the first place.
In Which I Sing Praises to the Porcelain Goddess
1
If one is going to spend her afternoon singing hymns to the great porcelain goddess, she might as well do it in a really plush ladies’ room.
Stupid fear of public speaking.
I slumped against the expensive inlaid-marble floor of the McBrides’ overdecorated bathroom, careful not to wrinkle my peridot-colored skirt. Margene McBride, grand dame of Louisville society and a heavy hitter in the circles that still respected that sort of thing, had informed me that the ungodly pink marble had been imported from Italy while she and her husband were building the house. Apparently no other flooring perfectly matched the pink-and-gold Barbie princess toilet.
Rich people are weird.
Fabulously decadent or no, the marble hurt my knees just as much as plain old home-improvement-store-brand tile. Groaning, I cupped my face in my hands, careful not to smudge my artfully applied eye makeup. Held nearly a month before the Kentucky Derby, the annual Derby Hat Parade and Auction raised a considerable amount of money for Louisville’s homeless charities and was the unofficial kickoff to the Kentucky Commission on Tourism’s busy season. As the KCT’s assistant director of marketing, it was my job to find new and interesting ways to lure visitors and vacationers to the state’s parks, campgrounds, museums, and strange little roadside attractions.
While I wasn’t the keynote speaker by any means, it was my job to introduce the lieutenant governor’s wife as she opened the runway show. And, more importantly, I would be announcing the commission’s marketing campaign for the Kentucky Derby, which I’d designed from start to finish on the theme of “A Rose by Any Other Name.” The Derby was known as the Run for the Roses, so I’d designed a series of ads and displays discussing odd names of Derby winners past, such as Funny Cide, Mine That Bird, and Genuine Risk. (How do you justify betting on a horse named Genuine Risk?) It was the first project I’d put together entirely on my own, without the input of my mentor, marketing director Ray Brackett. It was undoubtedly my baby. I’d labored for hours, selecting the most interesting horse names and just the right images from the Kentucky Derby Museum’s archives. I’d bugged the absolute hell out of the staff at Churchill Downs, asking for their feedback at various stages of the development. And I was sinfully proud of my work.
The campaign was playful, informative, and intended to bring in longtime horse enthusiasts and first-time infielders alike. And I couldn’t wait to share it with people. I’d beg forgiveness for saying it myself, but it proved that I was ready to step into Ray’s shoes. This was the part I enjoyed about the creative process, watching people get it, that flash of amusement across their faces as a humorous tagline hit its mark. I loved that wow moment when they gleaned some fascinating new factoid about Kentucky from something I’d written.
My Derby campaign was being used as a springboard for the commission’s summer program lineup and my promotion to director of marketing. Ray was retiring after nearly twenty years with the commission and had informed his superiors that I was the only person he trusted to run it after he left. Since the promotion was just a matter of my signing a few papers, Ray had already planned a nice celebration to take place as soon as we got back to our offices in Frankfort. I just had to survive this afternoon.
Dozens of local debutantes waited in the wings just off Margene’s impeccably manicured gardens, eager to model elaborate milliners’ confections of architecturally unlikely bows, feathers, and silk flowers that made the royal family look like headgear amateurs. The hats, contributed by design students from Western Kentucky University, were all up for auction, with the proceeds sponsoring various shelters and food pantries. The headwear models were waiting for me to get it together long enough to step out in front of the crowd.
This always happened before I spoke in front of large crowds. The anxiety, the imagined scenarios involving tripping as I took the podium or realizing my skirt was tucked into the back of my panty hose, always wound me up to the point of nausea. Once I got out there, I would be fine. I would be charming and funny, without a tremor or hitch to my voice. It was just a question of working up the nerve to approach the mic.
“Come on out of there, woman,” an exasperated voice called from the other side of the mahogany bathroom door. Heaving myself up from the floor, I stumbled into the beautifully appointed seating area and plopped onto a mauve silk settee. Cool, slim hands brushed my hair away from my face and pressed a mini-bottle of wintergreen Scope into my palm.
Ray’s assistant, Kelsey Wade, carried these things for me in her giant Mary Poppins purse. Kelsey was one of those “Jack of all trades” people. She had been hired a few years after me, fresh out of college. Though she’d only worked with the team for a little more than a year, she knew a bit about everything and seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to anticipating our needs. The third month we’d worked together, I found a new bottle of Midol in my desk drawer and we had to have a talk about boundaries.
With Ray’s retirement approaching, we’d been transferring her responsibilities to my side of the office more and more over the past few months. She and I were the perfect office team. Though she appeared to be a mess due to occasional clumsiness and atrophied verbal filters, she was actually organized to a fault, whereas I was a classic swan. As calm and poised as I might seem, I was paddling and twitching like mad under the surface. So she made sure I was prepared for meetings, and, in return, I was the first to tell her when she had a Post-it stuck to the back of her skirt.
“I love you, Kels, I really do.” I sighed before swigging the Scope.
Kelsey ignored my toadying. “We’ve discussed the fact that there are therapists or hypnotists who could help you deal with this, right?”
“I’ve tried; doesn’t work,” I grumbled after spitting the mouth rinse into the pink-and-gold sink. “I actually started smoking for a while after the hypnotist appointment, which was counterintuitive. Once I get out there, I’ll be fine. It’s just the anticipation.”
I blew out a long (freshened) breath and surveyed the damage in the beveled glass mirror. I brushed a little blush over my pale cheeks and spread a fresh coat of pink gloss over a wide, slightly pouty mouth. I knew I was pretty. That wasn’t vanity talking. It was just the one area I knew I had covered. I had slim lines, a delicate bone structure, and wide, almond-shaped hazel eyes framed by subtly highlighted chestnut hair. Said hair required a thorough combing, as it had frazzled out of its low French twist while I was “indisposed.”
I was polished and presentable, but Kelsey was built like one of those pinup girls they used to paint on World War II airplanes: abundant dark waves and cornflower-blue eyes fringed by thick lashes, not to mention high, full breasts and a rear that made delivery men volunteer for our route just to ogle. Perhaps this sounds like I’ve given an
unusual amount of attention to a coworker’s body, but we’d discussed her body-image issues many times over one too many glasses of wine during our “woe is me” single-girl chats. She thought no one took her seriously because of her age and what she saw as “extra weight.” I suggested perhaps it had more to do with the fact that she sometimes had fistfights with toner cartridges and had been known to yell Game of Thrones quotes at unruly baristas. She told me I would pay the iron price for my insolence. Which only proved my point.
I ran a nervous hand over my white silk shell and Kelsey helped me slip back into my light green suit jacket. “I also brought extra shoes, just in case—” She peered down and saw that my consignment-store Manolos were splash free. “Nope, we’re good. You’re getting much better at this.”
She handed me an extra-wide light green picture hat, which I pinned carefully over my dark hair. I wondered momentarily whether I’d be able to clear the door without tilting my head. I certainly understood why women wore these things when they were fashionable. In addition to the drama and elegance they practically forced on the wearer, they were even better than lace fans when it came to obscuring pesky emotions or avoiding the gaze of an undesirable. This was not my preferred mode of dress. At home, I wore an assortment of increasingly shabby yoga pants and T-shirts stolen from old boyfriends. For work and official gatherings, however, I had a wardrobe of elegant, boring-as-hell two-piece suits and silky shells. I picked up this pastel rainbow of sophistication at Unique Repeats, a high-end consignment shop owned by Angela Moser, a college classmate. The irony of Angela’s business was that the worse the economic climate, the better her inventory and sales. The Louisville ladies who lunched weren’t about to stop shopping, but dwindling clothes budgets had them discreetly reselling last season’s clothes for quick cash. I did worry I would run into the woman who’d sold the clothes in the first place. My only defense was making the outfits less recognizable through creative scarf use, my grandmother’s old costume jewelry, and the designer shoes Angela scoured from department store remainders and boutique returns.
“One of these days you’re going to get pregnant and combine morning sickness with this pre-speaking phobia stuff. And on that day, I will quit and move to Bolivia,” Kelsey informed me solemnly. “Because there are limits to what I will put up with in the name of a paycheck.”
“You have to have sex to get pregnant,” I retorted as she moved closer to the mirror and pulled out her own makeup bag. “Stop laughing, none of this is funny.”