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“If you’re hungry, this fridge is filled with food,” Sawyer announced, staring into the minibar.
I slammed the door closed, almost taking one of her fingers with it. “You will not, under any circumstances, including starvation or threat of death, eat anything out of the minibar. Am I understood?”
She stared at me. “But there were M&M’s in there.”
“Do you have seventeen dollars for those M&M’s?”
“Seventeen dollars?”
“Yes.”
“Whoa. But aren’t you, like…rich? I mean, doesn’t the temple pay for everything for you?”
I cackled ruefully as I ushered her away from the ticking money-bomb that had been planted in our midst. “Do you know what a per diem is, Tiny Entitled One?”
She shook her head and took a seat on the couch. In the background Stevie Wonder sang to us about superstitions.
“It means I have a very small amount of money the temple provides me every day when I’m on the road. And from that money I now have to feed both myself and you. So no. Seventeen-dollar candy is not in your future.”
A forty-dollar all-you-can-eat was in mine, however.
“I just assumed you guys had bottomless bank accounts.”
“Yeah, that’s why I was at Yvonne’s motel. All my heaps of money.” I sat next to her and kicked my feet up on the coffee table. It felt like I was relaxing for the first time this month. Maybe I was. “A sixty-dollar-a-night room with clean sheets is a pretty nice treat for me. You should see some of the places I’ve stayed. If they have an ice machine and a shower with no cracked tiles, I consider myself lucky.”
She made a face. If she was living with Yvonne, I had to assume she already had her fair share of motel horror stories. Everyone did. There was no way she could think a life of bouncing from one rat heap to the next was anything resembling high class.
“This place is nice though.” She indicated the suite.
“This is my once-a-year splurge. And I’m only allowed to do this because the Convention of the Gods is mandatory for all clerics and liege priests. I have to be here, so they let me pretend I’m fancy for a week a year.”
Sawyer pulled her legs up to her chest, contorting herself into a little bundle. She looked very small and very young. I empathized with her in a lot of ways. She must have felt so lost, and in meeting me she thought she’d glimpsed a lifestyle that seemed exotic and glamorous. I had to bust that bubble as quickly as possible.
There was a light rapping on the door, and I got up, opening it for Leo.
“Hey, I’m going to take Sawyer downstairs to get a bite to eat,” he announced. “We’ll be gone for at least forty minutes.” He didn’t say anything else or wait for me to ask what he was talking about, just held open the door and led the girl into the hall.
I was hungry too, so why didn’t I get to eat?
I stepped out after them, ready to yell at him to bring me back something, when all the words got stuck in my throat.
Cade Melpomene was leaning against the white textured wallpaper, a thin smile curving up the corner of his mouth.
Suddenly my hunger was entirely different, and no food from downstairs was going to satiate what I was feeling.
Chapter Sixteen
“Cade.” His name sounded breathless and impossibly girly coming out of my mouth, like I had suddenly become a Marilyn Monroe impersonator.
He licked his lips, and my whole body tightened.
Up until now, right up to this second, I had told myself this man had no power over me. We’d barely spoken since leaving New Orleans two months earlier, and I had convinced myself I was okay with that.
Like a dumbass, I’d thought I could come here and play it cool, pretend it didn’t bother me that I’d been away from him so long.
I was the stupidest woman alive.
This was the man who had kissed me in a way that made me feel like he was drowning and I was the last breath of air in his lungs.
