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the briefest of moments. “I like seeing you at work every day.”
    I laughed, but then my face fell again. “Yeah, well, I can’t stay here. I know the Shooting Starr is a great Vegas value and everything, but there’s no way I can afford $sixty-nine dollars a night for much longer.”
    “Well,” he said. “I know the housing market around here a bit. I worked in real estate for a while before it tanked.”
    That made me sit up. “Really?” I asked. “So you know of some cheap apartments, maybe?”
    He leaned his chin in the palm of his hand, running his fingers up over his lips and breathing deeply, which only made me lose focus because…damn. Those lips. Full and soft and looking a lot like they belonged on mine.
    “That’s going to be a problem unless you can sign a long-term lease. Six months, three at least.”
    I jerked back out of my daydream. “Of course. I know that. I have an apartment back at school. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
    The truth was, I wasn’t thinking. I’d been yanked from school and a program I loved for what I thought would be a couple days, and now I was finding out that it could be weeks or months. My emotions careened around my brain, so it was no wonder when tears pooled in my eyes for what felt like the tenth time that day.
    “Hey, hey,” Ryder said, reaching his hand out to touch my arm. “It’s okay. Just let me think for a second.” He pulled a phone out of his back pocket and tapped on it for a few minutes before setting it down. “What I’m thinking is that you don’t only need an apartment, you need furniture and household stuff.”
    Of course I did, but I hadn’t thought much farther than a roof over my head and a place to take a shower. I needed towels, and at least one pot to cook instant noodles in.
    “Yeah,” I said, swallowing the lump back. “I definitely will. I didn’t even think about it. And a job, too.” I sighed so heavily the surface my coffee rippled.
    “It’s okay,” he said, glancing at his phone at exactly the moment it lit up and buzzed across the tabletop. “Ah, okay. Good.” He shoved it back in his pocket before I could read what was on the screen and stood up like he was on a mission. “You sit tight here. I mean, not right here—here at the Starr. Get some sleep, and you’ll hear from me in a few hours. Okay?”
    “Ohhhkay.” I said, turning my head to the side and looking at him with suspicious eyes. “What are you going to do?”
    “I’m going to do what Shooting Starr hosts do best,” he said, already starting to turn. “Take care of our guests.”
    And then he was gone.
    I shook my head. It was entirely possible I’d just imagined all that because seriously? Where in the world do people just offer to help you, tell you to sit tight, and then actually do what they promised? The only person I’d ever known to do that was sitting in a hospital bed right now, and she needed my help—not for me to rely on a very hot guy working at a cheap hotel just off the Vegas Strip.
    So I gathered my purse up and headed to the front desk. The girl behind the counter helped me figure out how to get wireless on my computer, and then it was back to my room. I sat at the desk and tried to block everything else out—the rattling air conditioning unit, the sort-of-smoky-and-sort-of-moldy smell of the carpet, the weird stain on the wall, the loose thread springing up out of the bedspread.
    I opened my laptop and started searching for jobs.

Chapter 6
     
    As an almost-graduate with experience in child life therapy, there wasn’t much I was qualified to actually do in hospitals. The few hospital-based things I could think of—running a support group for families with sick children, admitting people through ER security, and actual child-life work—had no job postings in sight. I emailed the charge nurse at St. Christopher’s in case she knew of any potential openings and beefed it up by reminding her of Mom’s situation and