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I smiled and waved goodbye to her. Apparently, part of my giant new salary was going to go toward adding a little yellow to my wardrobe.Luna sat across from me that night with red sauce covering her face and a satisfied, tired look in her eyes. I’d invited Grant over as well as my best friend since high school, Milly.
Milly wore round, Harry Potter style glasses that I always found cute on her petite face and frame. Her brown hair was pulled back in a double braid that fell to her back, and she was dressed like she’d just gotten off the tennis court. Unlike me, Milly’s tennis career hadn’t come to an abrupt halt when she got pregnant. More accurately, Milly hadn’t been careless and irresponsible enough to get pregnant. But that was always a strange thing to think about.
I hated that I was dumb enough to let it happen to me, but if you gave me a time machine and sent me back ten years, I’d agonize over how to make sure everything happened exactly the way it did because I’d lose my mind if Luna never happened. Go figure.
Milly was still clawing and fighting to get high enough in the rankings to earn a decent living, but at least she was out there.
Grant was unusually quiet, so I tossed a piece of the crust of my garlic bread at him. He grinned distractedly.
“Okay. Spit it out,” I said.
On cue, Luna spit a mouthful of chewed up spaghetti onto her plate and grinned like a lunatic. We all let out a collective groan.
“Follow the rules for once,” Luna said cheerily, reminding me of a talk we’d just had yesterday after I spoke with her pre-K teacher.
Grant shifted in his chair, then leaned in on his elbows. “This salary he’s offering you. You’ve really got it in writing? I mean, like when does your first check come?”
“At the end of my second week.”
“So what happens if he fires you before then?”
To tell the truth, I hadn’t considered that. I’d been riding too high on the sudden weight of poverty getting yanked off my shoulders. “Why would I get fired?”
Milly cleared her throat. “Obvious historical complications between you and Lucifer?”
“Who’s Lucifer?” Luna asked.
Milly smirked. “Your mommy is Lucifer when she hasn’t had her coffee.”
I could see the gears in Luna’s little head turning, and knew I was going to get woken up tomorrow morning by my little girl calling me the devil. Thanks, Milly.
“None of that matters,” I said. “I need the money, so I’ll play nice.”
“It doesn’t strike you as odd that he’s offering you such an insane salary to be his personal assistant?” Milly asked.
“It’s a little strange, yeah. But he’s loaded. Maybe he just pulled a number out of his grumpy butt.” Of course, I’d already speculated on his motivations and decided he was trying to screw me, either figuratively or literally. I didn’t feel like admitting that to Milly and my brother, though.
Luna giggled with joy to hear me drop the “B” word. I gave her a little conspiratorial wink.
Milly shook her head. “Rich people are obsessed with money. It makes them even cheaper. I think he is playing some sort of game with you. He offers you an insane amount of money so he can take more pleasure in tormenting you into quitting. The money is just there to buy him time before you get fed up and walk out.”
“There’s literally nothing he could do to make me walk away from three hundred thousand dollars a year. I mean, almost nothing.”
Milly waved her fork toward my brother. “Grant, help me out here.”
He was studying the table. “It’s a lot of money. A lot. You could change a lot of lives with that kind of cash.”
“See?”
Milly let out a dejected sigh. “Fine. You can walk into this whole thing blind and ignorant, but don’t come crying to me when he breaks your heart into a million pieces and you wind up quitting.”
“My heart? Oh, no, no. My heart has nothing to do with this at all. I’ll be leaving that at home, thank you very much.”
“Famous last words.”
I stuck my tongue out. “Roast chicken. There. Now those weren’t my last words.”
“As always,” Milly said. “You’re a beacon of maturity and wisdom.”
I smiled to myself, but my thoughts were wandering. I’d already decided Damon was trying to trap me somehow. But what if it wasn’t just about proving a point?
As much as I might talk a big game about leaving my heart out of the equation, I knew one thing: Damon was Luna’s father. He might be the devil incarnate and I could hate that it had to be him and not the guy of my dreams, but… There would always be a part of me that longed to give Luna her father. I wished I could make that part of her life complete, but the Damon I knew was too heartless to be in her life.
