Whitley laughed. "Did you raid a tip jar on the way here?" he asked. "Everyone, our first guest paying in pocket change."
The remark carried across the lobby. A bellman near the elevators stopped moving, two guests at the lounge entrance glanced over, and Hart turned from his conversation with the concierge. Odessa felt the old heat of being publicly measured by her clothing. She had known that heat when she was twenty and working a breakfast shift in a hotel where guests snapped their fingers at her without learning her name.
"Cash is cash," Paige said, her voice low but clear. "I can check her in, Mr. Whitley."
"Stay at your computer, Paige. This isn't a real booking."
"I counted it twice, sir," Odessa said. "It's all there."
Whitley reached across the marble. For one second Odessa thought he intended to examine the money or push it back toward her. Instead, he swept the stack off the counter with the side of his hand, hard enough to scatter the bills beneath the reception stools and across the polished floor. The sudden movement startled Paige backward and sent one note drifting toward the velvet seating area.
"There," he said. "Now it's on the floor. Right where you found it. Go on. Pick it up. The floor suits you better."
Odessa heard somebody draw a sharp breath. Her own hands remained motionless at her sides, not because she felt nothing, but because the indignity was so familiar that for a moment she was young again, standing in a corridor while a manager criticized her for touching a guest's luggage with cleaning gloves. That man had also believed the grandness of a building somehow made his cruelty more respectable. The memory passed, leaving behind a clear and cold understanding of what the Wexley had become under Grant Whitley.
"I won't bow for my own money," she said.
Whitley pointed at the door. "Then it stays down there. Where you belong."
Marcus appeared beside the desk with Hart's empty luggage cart. He had seen enough from the far end of the lobby to understand the immediate problem, though not what had provoked it. When he saw Odessa standing over the scattered money, he set the cart aside and removed his gloves. Paige's eyes followed him, wide with warning.
"Marcus, leave it," Whitley ordered.
"No, sir," Marcus replied. "It belongs to her."
He knelt and collected the bills slowly so none would tear on a sharp brass corner. He found one under a chair and another near the door, checked the total with Odessa watching, and placed the money back into her hands. She counted it herself, as she always did, then tucked it into her purse. Whitley looked from Marcus to Odessa as if they had staged the scene solely to insult his authority.
"Put her out," he said.