Goddess of Light (Goddess Summoning #3)(3)

He hadn't just adored her. He had wanted to consume her. Duane Edwards had appeared on the surface to be a successful, handsome, slightly macho, charismatic man. But under that surface, where the real Duane lived, lurked a needy, controlling, passive-aggressive boy/man.

Pamela rolled her shoulders to release the tension caused by thinking of Duane. On second thought, she was glad she hadn't run into him at the airport. She hadn't cut her hair to "show him"! She'd cut it because that's what she wanted. It fit with the woman she was becoming. She rested her head against the seat back. Her lips curved up.

She liked the woman she was turning into. Satisfied, Pamela thought. She hadn't been so satisfied with herself in years. She didn't even care that she was mushed into the window seat of the Southwest Airlines jet next to a woman whose bony elbow kept poking her while she struggled to work the cigarette-scented crossword page of the New York Times.

Why would anyone obsessively work crossword puzzles? Did the woman have nothing better to do with her mind? Ms. Bony Elbows cackled and filled in another blank. Pamela guessed she didn't.

No! No negative thoughts. Self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful. Negative thoughts cause negative energy. Now she sounded like her mother, God help her. She sighed and pressed her forehead against the airplane window.

Okay, she'd mentally start over. She wouldn't let the lady sitting beside her bug her, because that was a pointless waste of time, as was dwelling on negatives in general. Hell, who was she to judge? She glanced down at the book in her lap. It had been open to the same page for the entire flight. What had she been doing with her mind? Instead of reading Gena Showalter's scrumptious The Stone Prince, she'd been wasting her time thinking about her horrid ex. She was better than that - she'd worked hard to make it so.

Purposefully, Pamela shifted her attention to the view outside her window. The desert was a bizarre mixture of harshness and beauty, and she was surprised to realize that she found it attractive - at least from several thousand feet in the air. It was so different from the lush green of her Colorado home, yet strangely compelling. Turning, the plane dipped its wing down, and Pamela's breath caught at her first glimpse of Las Vegas. There, smack in the middle of desert and sand, red dirt and canyons, was a city of glass and light and snaking highways, which she could tell even from the air were choked with rushing cars.

"It's like something out of a dream," she murmured to herself.

"Damn right! Ain't it grand," Ms. Bony Elbows rasped through a throat that had sucked down too many Virginia Slim Menthol extra-longs.

Pamela stifled her irritation. "It is unusual. Of course I knew Vegas had been built in the middle of the desert, but - "

"This your first time in Sin City?" She interrupted.

"Yes."

"Oh, girlie! You are in for the time of your life." She leaned in and lowered her gruff voice. "Remember, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."

"Oh, well, I'm not here for pleasure. I'm here on business."

"A pretty young thing like you can sure find time to mix the two." She waggled her penciled-in brows knowingly.

Pamela felt her jaw setting. She really hated it when people patronized her because she just happened to be attractive. She worked her ass off to be successful. And thirty wasn't young!

"Perhaps I could if I didn't own my own business, and I didn't care if my client recommended my work to others, but I do. So I'm here for professional reasons, not to play."

Her seatmate's surprised look took in Pamela's diamond stud earrings - one carat each - and her well-tailored eggshell Fendi slack suit, the classic color of which was nicely set off by a melon and tangerine silk scarf and shell.

Pamela read the look in her eye, and she wanted to scream, No, I did not have some damned man buy me this outfit!

"Just what is it you do, honey?"

"I own Ruby Slipper, an interior design business."

The woman's crinkled face softened into a smile, and with a start Pamela realized that she must have once been very pretty.

"Ruby Slipper... I like that. Sounds real nice. I'll bet you're good at it, too. Just lookin' at you I can tell you got class. But it don't look like Vegas class. What are you doing here?"

"My newest client is an author who is building a vacation home in Vegas. I've been hired to decorate it."

"An author..." She fluttered long red fingernails at Pamela. "That's big stuff. Who is it? Maybe I heard of him."

"E. D. Faust. He writes fantasy." Pamela only knew that because she'd looked him up hastily on Amazon during their first phone call. The man had proclaimed himself, "E. D. Faust, best-selling author." She'd had no idea who he was, but when she typed his name into Amazon's search box, her screen had blazed with page after page of titles like Pillars of the Sword, Temple of Warriors, Naked Winds, Faith of the Damned... and on and on. At that moment he'd instantly had her undivided attention, even though Pamela didn't particularly care for male science-fiction and fantasy authors. She read a little of everything, so she'd tried a few of the giants of the genre, but it seemed they were all too much alike. Swords, magic, spaceships, blood, testosterone... blah... blah... yawn. But she wasn't stupid. Far from it, and one of her primary rules was never, ever say negative things about a client. So she put on a bright smile and nodded in response to her travel partner's blank look like she thought E. D. Faust was Nora Roberts.