Page 60 of Ungodly Rich

Preston. Julia didn’t like the notion that he still held any sway over her. “I don’t know.”

Abby winced. “Hang on, Ireallyhave to pee, and then we can discuss it all in more detail. Grab another round while I’m gone?”

Julia glanced about for their waitress, but after hovering awkwardly nearby for far too long, she seemed to have vanished. She pulled her phone from her handbag—a new one, another lavish gift from Harry’s family, which she would have returned except that the leather felt so deliciously buttery in her hands.

Where are you?Tara had texted. And then,The florist is here, can you come meet with him?

Julia left the messages unanswered and dropped her phone in her bag. She didn’t want to meet with the florist. She wanted to stay here with her best friend, far from the tentacles of Harry and his family.

For just one night, she wanted to forget all about the Ellenes.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Aphrodite

“And now you want to take your clothes off,” Aphrodite purred.

Really, it was a shame saying those words under such circumstances, but she needed to get back before Julia suspected her friend’s absence.

Eyes glazed from the spell Aphrodite held her in, Abby obediently unbuttoned her pants and stepped out. The two women were in the restroom of the Four Seasons bar, which was thankfully an individual bathroom, with its own marble sink, pressed linen hand towels, and a candle in the corner. Not an Amour candle, Aphrodite was peeved to note, but an ordinary one from Nest.

As Abby undressed, Aphrodite began to do the same. For a moment, she stood in the bathroom wearing nothing but her underwear, a sight that so many would have killed for. But Abby was too entranced to notice.

“Now you want to trade clothes with me,” Aphrodite murmured, and handed Abby the dress she’d been wearing.

She took another long look at the mortal woman, considering her features, the slope of her eyebrows, the freckles on her forearms. And then she concentrated. Hard.

When Aphrodite pulled on Abby’s pants, she no longer looked like herself. She was a perfect clone of Abby, down to the little wisps of hair that wouldn’t stay tucked behind her ears.

None of the other gods had the ability to shape-shift. Aphrodite could do so thanks to her girdle, an enchanted object that allowed her to adopt the form of any woman, mortal or divine. Lately, she wore the girdle as a thin gold necklace, though it had taken other forms: a brooch, a cuff, and even once a pair of spangled Manolo heels. It felt like such a small thing compared to the other gods’ objects of power—Hades’s Helm of Darkness, Poseidon’s trident, Zeus’s thunderbolt. But shape-shifting could be quite useful, if you were clever about it.

“Now you want to give me your earrings. And your purse,” she commanded. Once Abby handed over the items, Aphrodite fished the woman’s keys from her bag and gave them back. She would return everything else before Abby awoke the next morning.

“A car is waiting for you at the hotel’s valet stand. All you want right now is to get in that car, give the driver your address, and go home to sleep. You want to forget everything that happened after you left the table.”

Aphrodite started to drop her own phone in the purse next to Abby’s, only to notice that the screen had illuminated with a new message. She hesitated before opening it.

Wish you were here,Hephaestus had written, with a photo of the Eiffel Tower.

A strange pang shot through Aphrodite’s chest, and she tucked the phone away without composing a reply. She couldn’t afford regrets or second-guessing now. She’d been working on this plan ever since the Curator’s Circle event, when it became clear that Julia wasn’t just a source of annoyance but a real threat.

Clearly, she hadn’t succeeded in breaking up Julia and Ares. It was time for another approach.

Aphrodite had known that Julia was planning to see her best friend in London; Julia couldn’t shut up about it. So Aphrodite had come to the Four Seasons, too. She’d enchanted their waitress, giving her a desperate need to go out back and smoke, then shifted into the woman’s mirror image and began waiting on Julia’s table. She had lingered near the duo, listening intently.

When things sounded juicy, she’d given Abby an insistent urge to run to the bathroom, so that she could thenbecomeAbby.

“Goodbye,” she singsonged as the real Abby left the bathroom and stumbled in a daze down the hall.

It was always a bit thrilling, becoming someone else. Sometimes Aphrodite thought that she, not Melpomene, should have been the goddess of actors and drama. She thrived on this—the sensation of stepping out of her own life and into someone else’s, of occupying a different-shaped space in the world. Of pretending.

“You okay?” Julia asked when Aphrodite-as-Abby slid into the opposite chair. “You were gone a while.”

“Oh, thanks for getting us more drinks!” Aphrodite reached for the cocktail before her. Really, couldn’t these women have ordered a vodka martini, or at least a nice Sancerre? Did it have to be a ginger margarita? Well, she would choke it down, if only to encourage Julia to keep drinking.

“Sorry. Before I left, we were talking about…” Aphrodite trailed off, and to her relief, Julia filled in the rest of the sentence.

“We don’t need to talk about Preston,” Julia said swiftly.