Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

“No. You do that well enough yourself.”

Crap.

“This is an intervention, in case you were wondering,” she added, helping her own plate.

“Damn it, Tami! I don’t—”

“Have any jam? Here,” she handed me a dish—silver, of course—with half a dozen little jars in it. “With the hotel closed, they have tons of this stuff just lying around. Room service sent up a few cases, in case we could use it.”

“There’s no orange marmalade,” I pointed out, after pawing through it.

She rolled her eyes. “You’ll live,” and popped the top on a strawberry jam.

I ate jam on toast. And then half a pig’s worth of bacon. And then eggs and the damned hash browns that I no longer had room for, but had to eat now that a big deal had been made about them. Tami had also brought a basket of pastries, including an apple danish that was leaking cinnamon goodness all down one side, but I couldn’t. I honestly couldn’t.

It made me resentful.

“You unplugged my clock,” I accused.

She picked up the danish and deliberately took a big bite. “Uh huh.”

“Why? Now I missed—”

“Nothing. I cancelled all your appointments for the day.”

“What?” I stared at her. “Tami! I have court today—”

“Not anymore.”

“Some of those people waited weeks! You can’t just—”

“Oh, can’t I?”

And, suddenly, she was looking less the supermodel and more the queen, with narrowed eyes, flushed cheeks, and an expression that said I had stepped in it. Big time. Which I didn’t understand since I’d just woken up!

“Do you know what I overheard the other night?” she demanded.

“Uh, no?”

“Two of your acolytes came into the kitchen for a late-night snack. I was in the butler’s pantry trying to find the damned milk, and they didn’t see me. But the door is louvered, so I could hear them.”

“Hear them say . . . what?” I asked, pretty sure that I didn’t want to know.

She savagely ate danish at me. “Two words: time stealing.”

Shit.

“Look,” I began, but she wasn’t having it.

“You know, I wondered why you’d go to bed in one pair of pjs, and then I’d see you at the fridge half an hour later in another. But I thought, hey, maybe she was just hot or something. But no—”

“It’s no big deal. I just—”

“No big deal? Your schedule is so tight that you have to resort to playing games with time, just to satisfy everybody, and yet you still walk around like a zombie ‘cause you haven’t slept in—”

“I did sleep! I just slept—”

“Because I made sure you did! Like I shovel food at you, but you still lose weight ‘cause it’s hard to keep up with regular meal times when you don’t know what day it is, huh? My God, girl, I was starting to think you had cancer or something!”