My smile was strained.“Sounds good.”
When he returned to stretching, my smile faded, and I rubbed my forehead. My excitement had turned to ash in my mouth. I should have known better.
I was alone in this. Liam and Nathan felt a duty to help someone who’d gotten a rotten start. That was all. They were free to come and go as they pleased. It’d be best not to forget that or form attachments that wouldn’t last.
CHAPTERONE
A bag full of donut holes, five giant chocolate bars, and three cases of Diet Coke were going to be the death of me. Not literally—we vampires were a little more difficult to kill than that—but emotionally? Financially? Definitely.
I looked up from the assortment in front of me to the customer radiating impatience.
“The sign said free snacks with purchase,” the woman explained again.
My gaze shifted from her to the sign—the bane of my current existence. I don’t know how it got out of the storage room—again—but I was going to take a pair of very sharp scissors to it as soon as I got rid of this woman.
It did indeed say,‘free snacks with purchase’, but it wasn’t meant to be used the way the customer intended. The deal only applied to one free item, not eight. My only saving grace was the date tacked on the bottom.
“Ma’am, that deal expired at midnight.” My cheeks hurt from the polite smile I kept pinned on my face. It had been stuck there, becoming increasingly strained, for the last five minutes as we went over the same argument again and again.
The sign’s promise expired two hours ago, which was whenI’d moved it to the storage room, thankful to be done with it. It had caused nothing but trouble sinceI’d come on shift. Whoever wrote the stupid thing made it needlessly vague. All nightI’d had to explain its true meaning so customers didn’t succeed in clearing out the store of all valuable merchandise.
I was done with the whole issue. Done. And one annoying woman who didn’t know when to quit wasn’t going to force me to surrender.
“Then why is the sign still out?” she argued.“That’s false advertising.”
I kept my frustrated sigh internal, the polite smile turning even more strained.“I’m so sorry for the confusion, ma’am. We haven’t had time to take it down.”
That was a lie.I’d already taken the stupid thing down. Twice. Each time it somehow found its way back into the front of the store. At this point, I knew there was someone or something messing with me. As soon as I got rid of this customer, I planned to hunt them down and show them exactly why irritated vampires should be left alone.
The woman’s mouth pursed in a frown as she looked around the empty gas station as if to call me on the lie, her expression clearly stating she thought laziness had more to do with my predicament than anything else.
“Whether you had time or not, the fact remains that you have a sign promising me these things for free. I expect you to live up to that promise.” Her expression soured and she lifted one perfectly groomed eyebrow as if daring me to argue.
Unfortunately for her, I could outstubborn even the most persistent of customers. My sire would be only too happy to inform her of the depths to which I could sink.
The woman was a few inches shorter than me. Her youth was far behind her and the years had softened her middle and face. She compensated for that with hair styled into a sleek bob, not a strand out of place, and a perfectly made-up face, complete with foundation and blush, despite the sweats she wore.
She was a study in contradictions, not the least of which was her passion to get twenty dollars’ worth of junk food for free. It baffled me. You would think it was a supersaver deal worth hundreds of dollars, given the amount of grief she’d heaped on my head since walking into the gas station ten minutes ago.
It might have been different if I thought she couldn’t afford it, butI’d seen the car she’d driven up in—a tricked out MDX, not an inexpensive car. There was no way she couldn’t afford twenty dollars, not when she was riding in a car that could have been a down payment on a house.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t give you the reduced price. The system won’t let me,” I said, my smile stretching my cheeks. I tried to infuse it with some sympathy, a token of empathy—hard to do when I made minimum wage and didn’t have twenty dollars of my own to waste.
It was quickly becoming clear this job was not for me. When I lost my position with Hermes Courier Service,I’d known it would be difficult.I’d known things would be tight. I just hadn’t known how difficult and tight they would be.
Working at a gas station hadn’t been part of my five-year plan. It wasn’t the worst jobI’d ever had, but it was definitely not where I thoughtI’d be at this stage of my life. It had quickly reinforced the knowledge that I wasn’t cut out for customer service. I needed a place where I could be my grumpy, antisocial self, not somewhere I had to smile on command and pretend I didn’t want to whack people on the back of the head sometimes.
Hermes had given me a certain autonomy that I very much missed. Employees were left to do a job unsupervised as long as pickups and deliveries were accomplished. Not quite the case at my current place of employment.
Despite that, I was lucky to have anything. Jobs that let you work only at night were few and far between, and since most of the spook world wouldn’t touch me with a five-foot pole given my status as a clanless vampire who’d been fired by Hermes, it meant my options limited.
I reminded myself that I needed this job. Rent was due in a week, and I was down to the last of my nest egg. If I wanted to keep a roof over my head, I couldn’t afford to alienate customers and risk getting fired.
“I want to talk to your manager,” the woman proclaimed in a ringing voice.
That’s what I was afraid of.
“Unfortunately,I’m the only one here right now,” I said in as polite a voice as I could muster.
