Latte Trouble - By Cleo Coyle Page 0,16

palette—creams, tans, browns. Look, Rena. See how, as you drink it, the caramel-chocolate swirls in the latte froth…see how it would highlight the weave in your sweater.”

“It would look good on me as a brooch, then,” said Rena, half-jokingly. “Better that than spilled on my sweater. Actually, I haven’t found any jewelry that doesn’t look tacky on me. Everything’s either blah or trying too hard to be faux antique or like some thrift shop rhinestone retro ‘find’ when it obviously isn’t.”

Lottie’s brow was still wrinkled in thought, then she nodded. “You’re right, Rena. It would look good as a brooch…in fact, it would look fabulous!” Lottie instantly grabbed a dozen napkins and borrowed a pen from me. As she began to sketch, a man stepped up to the coffee bar from a nearby table to join their conversation.

Tad Benedict, a thirty-something, self-employed investment banker, was working some personal stock trades on his laptop computer when he’d overheard the women. It was soon fairly clear that Tad was more interested in Rena Garcia than the unique hue of her beverage, but all three were cordial to each other.

“You said you’d been fired?” Tad asked Rena. “But why would they get rid of someone like you? Don’t they need good people over at S and S anymore?”

Rena tossed her dark curls and laughed. “My boss got rid of me because I’m smarter than her,” she replied. “I came up with ideas she took, and when I started making noise about a promotion, a raise, or some sort of recognition, she trumped up complaints about my performance. That uptight vampire bitch of a manager only has a job because she’s bled young assistants dry one after another then tossed them aside when she felt threatened.”

“I’m really sorry,” said Tad, “but you know that’s a very old story in this town…and probably a lot of other ones too, so don’t feel bad.”

Rena sighed and shook her head. “Wish I could say I don’t but I do.”

“You’re better off. Look, you’ve just met me, haven’t you? And I know some guys on Wall Street who might be looking for someone like you.”

Her full lips smiled and she met his gaze. “Like you, maybe?”

As the afternoon wore on, the trio talked while they consumed gallons of coffee and a dozen fresh-baked pastries. As the shadows began to lengthen, Rena looked up in surprise, then glanced at her watch. “I should go,” she announced. “I still have to clean out my office and I don’t want some security guard hovering over me while I do it, which is exactly what will happen if I try to enter the building after five o’clock.”

“Forget about that and take a look at this instead,” said Lottie. She held out the napkin. On it, she’d drawn a brooch. Text and arrows indicated the colors she’d chosen—colors that mimicked the hue of the Blend’s caramel-chocolate latte.

“It’s large, but not garish,” Lottie explained. “The branches here would be made of white gold, the central filigree coffee-brown enamel. With sculpting I could recreate a froth effect using something like a milky white chalcedony—”

“A what?” asked Tad.

“It’s a type of quartz,” explained Lottie. “And here, you see, at the center would sit a semiprecious stone like onyx or even a precious one like opal—something that’s dark and nutty, like a coffee bean. I could even work with organic material, say, use actual roasted coffee beans and experiment with lacquering and setting techniques to create complementary pieces.”

“May I see it?” I asked from behind the coffee bar.

Lottie was only too pleased to share her sketch.

“I’d buy this in a heartbeat,” I told her. “I can’t believe nobody’s done this before. When Joy was a little girl, Matt came back from Guatemala with a coffee-bean necklace for her. Down there, they’ve been making coffee-bean necklaces and bracelets from varnished roasted beans for years.”

“Interesting,” said Lottie. “So it’s a natural for any culture that embraces coffee.”

“Makes sense.” I handed Lottie back the sketch. “Which means you’ve got a worldwide market…and since specialty coffeehouses have been on the rise in America, I’d say this culture has never been more ripe for it.”

Rena Garcia tapped her chin in thought. She reached for the sketch and studied it. “You know, one of the accounts my boss managed was the Vardus line. Their stuff was cheap derivative crap compared to this, but it was my ideas for the campaign that boosted sales twenty-two percent in the first fiscal year. I could market